This text references rape.
As a baby, Terri White skilled the crushing affect of poverty. Following the daybreak of a brand new Labour authorities, she writes for GLAMOUR about how the two-child profit cap – a coverage that prohibits mother and father from claiming advantages for a 3rd baby – stigmatises moms and pushes households additional into poverty.
The 2-child profit cap, she argues, may be very a lot a feminist challenge. Learn on right here…
Final week, in the course of the King’s Speech, I noticed the sunshine. King Charles, robed in ermine and velvet, was asserting the 40 payments making up the coverage and legislative agenda of our new authorities. I used to be momentarily blinded; the sunshine refracted via 2,868 diamonds, 17 sapphires, 11 emeralds, and 4 large rubies set into the Imperial State Crown he wore (estimated worth: £3-5 billion).
That document variety of payments didn’t embrace the abolition of the welfare state’s most sadistic coverage, the two-child restrict (or its cousin in cruelty, the profit cap – each severing the hyperlink between the scale of a household’s want and state assist, resulting in the often-misused time period ‘two-child profit cap’), and because the billion-pound-bling despatched my retinas bananas, I heard Keir Starmer’s voice in my head confirming (again in Might) that “we are not going to be able to afford to scrap it”.
Not simply the one largest driver of kid poverty, however probably the most cost-effective means out of it – in line with the Little one Poverty Motion Group, abolishing the two-child restrict would value £1.7billion. Or, because it struck me in that second as I squinted: simply half, maybe even 1 / 4, of King Charles’ crown.
The 2-child restrict was launched in 2017 to disclaim third kids (and past) state assist of as much as £3,455 a 12 months. The coverage’s architect, Iain Duncan Smith, insisted that poor households needed to be taught to “cut their cloth” and that the welfare state inspired “dysfunctional behaviour” (like, er, having children) and promoted the idea that work was “a mug’s game”. Which is bizarre, provided that 71% of children in poverty dwell in working households.
And whereas it’s now thought-about by many to be merciless, I’d go additional: it’s inhumane (a phrase that Deputy PM Angela Rayner used to explain it 4 years in the past). And never simply classist, however racist and misogynistic – harming our poorest, but additionally ladies disproportionately, single moms, and Black and brown ladies and kids.
If Keir Starmer had axed the two-child restrict – like the federal government was lobbied to – he would have lifted 300,000 children out of poverty completely and an extra 700,000 out of the deepest poverty in a single day. One million children helped, saved, at the price of one half of 1 crown in a single man’s huge jewelry assortment.
After the crown returned to the Tower of London, Keir Starmer was within the Commons, dealing with a direct problem from his personal benches. Sarah Owen, MP for Luton North, a constituency with a forty five% baby poverty price (baby poverty numbers are 4.3 million nationally), requested, “What reassurance can he give us that he’s taking it seriously?”
