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The Owen Jones Podcast

Starmer Drives Kids Into Poverty

The Owen Jones Podcast

Owen Jones

Government, News, News & Politics, Politics

4.41.4K Ratings

🗓️ 30 July 2024

⏱️ 11 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Keir Starmer is driving children into poverty by choice. These are the facts.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

What is the Labour Party for if it does not make lifting children out of poverty a priority?

0:07.2

Well let's be clear the position of Kirstam and his government is that lifting children out of poverty is not a priority and they are

0:14.9

choosing consciously to drive kids into poverty and deeper into hardship and squaller. That's what today's King's speech which sets out the

0:25.1

government's legislative agenda confirms. Now I get I get it quite the

0:30.4

allegation to make particularly given I'm censoring this critique on the two-child benefit cap,

0:35.9

which is a conservative policy introduced by the former Chancellor George Osborne,

0:40.7

who in my view has done more to wreck this country in the last

0:44.4

14 years than almost any other politician. What does what it does this policy?

0:49.8

This disgusting policy frankly and I'll set that out why

0:54.3

is bang universal credit or child tax credit for third child or more

0:58.2

that is social security entitlements to help with the cost of raising a child. It was introduced by George Osborne

1:05.3

because he thought it would cause political problems for the Labour Party and to help fuel

1:10.0

the toxic Victorian era caricature of the undeserving poor to justify rolling back the

1:15.6

frontiers of the welfare stay. At present, 450,000 households are affected by it. Each year more and more households have been affected.

1:26.4

It drives around a quarter of a million children below the poverty line.

1:31.6

It drives another 800,000 children further into hardship. In total,

1:37.0

it's estimated to affect financially 1.5 million children. 57% of those kids affected have at least one parent in work.

1:48.3

The research suggests that if the policy actually has official aims other than cruelty, then it has failed on those terms.

1:54.7

If it's about pushing families into work, then it has failed. Again, it mostly affects working households

2:00.1

and research by the London School of Economics shows it has not impacted employment levels of those affected.

2:06.0

Indeed, as the co-author of that research finds, that is Kitty Stewart, the Associate Professor of Social Policy

2:11.5

at the London School of Economics, we found that rather

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