If the government loathes benefits claimants so much, perhaps it should stop creating them

For the Tory mind, poverty is something which working class people simply choose on their eighteenth birthday

Amid the Conservatives’ self ordained mission to rid the country of poor people, it’s striking how seldom they bother to consider where social inequality and poverty originate. For them, there is no genealogy to poverty, no roots in adolescence or childhood. Rather, for the Tory mind, poverty is something which working class people simply choose on their eighteenth birthday.

One of the most striking and paradoxical flaws of Conservative ideology is that they denounce poverty and state dependency on the one hand, and create it on the other. They deprive children of opportunities and resources, then decry the same people for failing to ‘make it in the world’ once they become adults. This ideological blindspot has been exposed again today with a damning report on child poverty in the UK under the government’s austerity programme.

The Government’s child poverty watchdog has warned that David Cameron is not fulfilling his post-election pledge of creating ‘One Nation’ but is instead presiding over a country divided; North and South, rich and poor, investment and neglect.

Alan Milburn of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission said of the commission’s report: “The gap between rhetoric and reality has to be closed if the One Nation objective is to be realised. Current signs of progress do not go nearly far or fast enough to be the One Nation Britain we aspire to become... At every level Britain is a small nation charactised by a large divide.”

According to the commission, current rates of progress mean that it would take a minimum of 30 years to halve the so called “attainment gap” between children from disadvantaged backgrounds and wealthier children. It predicts that it will take more than 50 years to close the inequality gap in higher education; which sees children from private schools and wealthy families dominate the intake at elite universities.

It also found that a million children in Britain are from a family which is “persistently poor”, not due “as it is often assumed [to] parental addiction or broken relationships” but ill health within the family or low skills.

The report makes for grim reading and its findings encapsulate the fundamental flaws of the Conservative ideology. Under their austerity programmes, this government is failing to invest in children, families and young people. It is depriving them of a fair chance in attaining and developing skills essential for education and employment.

Yet, at the same time, the government hounds and punishes adults from low socio-economic backgrounds who are dependent on state support due to their lack of employable skills and local opportunities; with its cruel cuts to unemployment benefits, disability living support and university bursaries.

On the one hand, the Conservatives denounce adults who are forced to be dependent on the state for support; distributing smears about benefits scroungers and layabouts. On the other, they are creating a new generation of people who will struggle to have the skills necessary for employment and education and who may therefore have no choice but to rely on state financial support.

It’s a toxic, nonsensical conveyer belt system whereby the Conservatives enforce the conditions of poverty and low skills amongst children, then attack these same citizens as soon as they turn eighteen for not ‘trying harder’ as if they had any other choice.

It’s time the government stopped feigning ignorance about how poverty originates and started supporting and investing in low socio-economic families if they sincerely wish to create an equal country. Everyone has a right to a fair chance in life yet the Conservatives’ blinkered mindset is so focused on punishing those who they deem ‘unsuccessful’ citizens that they refuse to even look at how they actively close off vulnerable peoples’ routes to success in the first place.