Mick Hartley

Who’s to blame for those appalling Unicef findings about British children? Step forward Oliver James:

For ten years I have been advising various elements of new Labour on how to improve the care of small children.

Mind you, as this Times editorial points out, it’s all nonsense:

Children’s charities, which are becoming dangerously political, have seized on these conclusions as evidence of a long-hidden crisis. The truth is that from its key premises to its sources and methodology this report is flawed, biased and a blatant abuse of the trust that many readers misguidedly place in documents published under the Unicef banner.

There is no new research in the report. Much of its data is drawn from a seven-year-old survey by the OECD programme for international student assessment and a six-year-old World Health Organisation study of “health behaviour in school-age children”. None of it relates to pre-school-age children. And it places heavy emphasis on relative as opposed to absolute child poverty on the ground that “the cutting edge of poverty is the contrast . . . between the lives of the poor and the lives of those around them”.

What unalloyed, ideological nonsense. Let’s punish rich and successful countries whose working classes, by global standards, are unimaginably wealthy. “Not having the right trainers”, as one of the report’s researchers put it yesterday, is apparently worse for a child’s wellbeing than having none at all. The report acknowledges that “relative poverty” means an average family income of $24,000 or less in the US (21st out of 21 in this ranking) but just $7,000 or less in Hungary (13th). Yet it takes scant account of this in its conclusions. It also ignores data showing a 50 per cent cut in the number of British children in absolute poverty since 1998, all lifted out of misery, ultimately, by the market economy that charities’ staff rely on for generosity but abhor as a matter of self-serving personal principle. […]

Peter Adamson, the writer of this report, co-founded the staunchly left-wing New Internationalist in the 1970s. He has now invited ridicule by caricaturing the world’s most dynamic economies as Dickensian child-abusers. This report hides the truth about children’s wellbeing behind an outdated ideology that has condemned hundreds of millions of children to cruel poverty.