No more bad news in the rose garden, please.
The UK's poorest children are disproportionately bearing the brunt of our dire economic situation. Will Labour really be true to their promise of Change?
Starmer did his key-note speech in a rose garden. And by now I think we’ve all had enough of the fawning over his symbolic choice: Oh, his scandalous Tory predecessors! Oh, he only went and mentioned the wine! Oh …but is he any better!?
More mundanely, the garden was used because the conference room’s being redecorated. Surely that could also be symbolic, of the English-refurb we’re hoping for under a Labour government?
There were certainly hopeful moments of Starmer’s speech, as he talked of ‘revers[ing] a decade of decline’, ‘fix[ing] the foundations’. But it’s hard to stay optimistic when a speech nods to the ‘pain’ people will have to suffer to get those building works started. Because it’s not as simple as ‘short term pain for long term good’. The result of a *certain* Cameron policy has meant that fourteen years of cuts have already been acutely felt. At this point, Britain is experiencing levels of pain more akin to a chronic illness. Not that you could confirm this with a NHS professional unless you waited for 14.3 weeks. Sorry if that’s…austere.
For the British children surveyed in the recent Good Childhood report, austerity is all that they’ve known. The report charts children’s life satisfaction across 27 European countries. In the UK, suffering’s been endured, and it hasn’t been equally shared: we have the largest disparity in happiness between the most and least disadvantaged children. Over one in three children in financial strain are ‘often’ or ‘always’ worried about their family’s income. Thirty percent of British children live in poverty. Compare that to 22% of the general population. These children are more than twice as likely to die than their well-off peers. They are more prone to ill health now and in later life, less likely to reach university and consequently, face worse job prospects. Unless you’re as confused as Rishi Sunak - who oversaw record rises of child poverty then claimed to have reduced it - that doesn’t equate to ‘short term pain for long term good’. It’s all long term, and it’s all dire.
But maybe our PM is as confused. Because squeezing the population till its children are disproportionately bare boned evidently hasn’t worked. Our national debt lies at 101.3% of GDP, and the relentless line is that there will be no splashing of cash let alone a spending spree. Now I’m not an economist. But a quick look in the history books shows that the post WWII British government had a hefty debt equivalent to 270% of their GDP. What followed? Basic social security cover, free secondary school education and the founding of the NHS. Tax raises, yes, but the long-term economic benefit was also enough to justify spending. In the words of John Maynard Keynes, ‘anything we can actually do we can afford’.
Child poverty costs the UK £39.5bn a year. The £3.6bn it would cost to lift the two-child cap (the repeatedly proven way to ease child poverty) would save the government £35.9bn by next year. Poor mental health cost England £300bn in 2022. That is double the whole 2022 budget for the NHS and the same estimated impact of Covid in 2020. For every pound spent on the NHS, the corresponding benefit is £4. This is a lot of napkin mathematics, I’ll admit. I just hope that Rachel Reeves is as familiar with this expert economic strategy as I am.
Starmer himself admitted we are in a country where ‘nothing seems to work any more’. The Good Childhood Report is just another confirmation that the UK’s poorest children are bearing the black-hole sized brunt of this damage. Labour are keen for a second term: public investment now will benefit them later. Let’s see what the October budget reveals. But I’d like no more bad news in the rose garden, please.