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British life is still riven by class - and the gulf is growing wider. But politicians seem bent on denying it
It was a piece of breathtaking cheek and bare-faced larceny when David Cameron pledged to "Make British poverty history" this week, stealing Gordon Brown's slogan and Labour's policy stronghold. Cameron snatched the starting day of a month of action on child poverty, run by the End Child Poverty campaign, an umbrella group of 90 children's charities originally assembled by Gordon Brown himself, as a counterweight against other spending demands. This year it plainly didn't work: poor children got 48p a week, while the well-off middle-aged got a £1.4bn inheritance windfall. Symbolically, that suggested the fight against growing inequality was politically lost.So it was a good time for Cameron to pounce, as ever astute at firing unexpected mortars into weak spots in the heart of the Brown camp. Most of Cameron's speech was a litany of gross distortions, fantasy accounting, ominous threats on US-style welfare reforms with no road map for eradicating poverty, but it was a clever piece of politics. His centrepiece £3bn (unfunded) plan to pay extra tax credits only to couples came unstuck yesterday. The Institute for Fiscal Studies calculated that if his £3bn were instead to be spent on credits for poor children it would lift 700,000 children out of poverty, more than twice as many as his plan would. That would almost reach the government's 2010 children poverty goal, so Cameron's plan is an expensively wasteful gesture.However, floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee, David Cameron manages to say things Labour never dares: "Poverty is not acceptable ... not when we have people who earn more in a lunchtime than millions earn in a lifetime." It was only a neat phrase, backed by no policy, teasing Labour, which never dares say anything like it.
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