THE former Prime Minister Gordon Brown has urged the Government to fund a “war against child poverty” by taxing the gambling industry. His intervention has been supported by religious leaders, including the previous Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Williams.
In The Guardian, Mr Brown writes: “In the Seventies, facing an oil shock and rising deficits, Labour introduced child profit for 7 million families. By 2010, despite a world financial crisis, the federal government had raised tax credits from zero in 1997 to £30bn, taking tens of millions of pensioners and kids out of poverty.”
He commends the Prime Minister and the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, for organising a review geared toward reducing child poverty through the current Parliament. “Now, for a fraction of that £30bn spent in 2010, they will resume Labour’s historic role and immediately take the primary 50,000 children out of poverty without dropping manifesto commitments.”
The first step, Mr Brown writes, must be “raising billions by taxing the extraordinarily profitable gambling and betting industry, without affecting lotteries or bingo”.
The must act to combat child poverty is “urgent”, he writes. “I even have not seen such deep poverty since I grew up in a mining and textiles town where unemployment was beginning to bite hard. Now, each night, 1 million children within the UK attempt to sleep with no bed of their very own. Two million households live without cookers, fridges or washing machines, and without toothpaste, soap or shampoo. It is heartbreaking that 3 million children skip meals because their families run out of food.
“The decisions of previous Tory governments have pushed 4.5 million children into poverty. This is a national scandal and a stain on our country’s soul. Britain is now enduring the worst levels of kid poverty since modern records began, even worse than within the Thatcher-Major years, and much worse than in most European countries.
“Yet without motion to enhance family incomes, the numbers will, on the federal government’s own definition of poverty, rise to an entirely unacceptable 4.8 million children by 2029 and a shocking five tens of millions by the early 2030s.”
Measures similar to more free school lunches, breakfast clubs, and better-paid jobs will help, Mr Brown argues, but they are going to not prevent a seamless rise in child poverty.
Mr Brown’s intervention was supported by Lord Williams in an article published within the Financial Times. “If a toddler shouldn’t be made to hold the implications of choices they’ve not made, what does this say about economic policies whose effect is to treat the impoverishment of youngsters as mere collateral damage?” he writes.
Regarding Mr Brown’s gambling-tax proposal, Lord Williams writes: “It is an absurdity that high-risk and socially corrosive behaviour should escape demands to contribute to the care of probably the most vulnerable.
“There are other suggestions within the air, including increased incentives each for constructive investment and personal charitable giving. But the message is evident: there may be nothing crucial or automatic about child poverty, even at a time of acute financial pressure. And if this is so, failing to act represents a alternative that results in a more fundamental bankruptcy, a bankruptcy of vision and morality.”
In an article to be published within the Church Times this week, the Revd Helen Cameron, President of the Methodist Conference 2024-25, also supports Mr Brown’s intervention: “Child poverty has not gone away; slightly, it’s on the rise.
“Sir Keir Starmer has said that lifting the two-child limit on advantages can’t be afforded ‘at present’; but a good levy on the unacceptably high profits from gambling would release considerable resources.”
James Macintyre, writer of Gordon Brown: Power with purpose, which is as a consequence of be published by Bloomsbury in February, said this week: “Tackling child poverty is, alongside international development, the predominant explanation for Gordon Brown’s life.
“As Chancellor for ten years from 1997, after which Prime Minister for 3, he almost halved child poverty — partly through the use of tax credits — reducing it from three million in 1998 to 1.6 million in 2010, in keeping with the Resolution Foundation.
“Very lively today as he approaches 75, Brown continues to be campaigning for way more to be done, and he enjoys considerable support from friends and allies in faith leader positions.”
The Office of Gordon and Sarah Brown recently published a report, The Child Poverty Emergency.
