The new issue of The Tribune was released today — it’s well worth subscribing — and one highlight is Dawn Foster’s passionate call for an urgent focus on eliminating child poverty: “Child poverty should be ended not because children are particularly innocent and therefore incapable of changing their circumstances: that presupposes that some poverty is deserved, and that adults on low incomes are not also subject to economic structural violence, but simply not trying hard enough to lift themselves out of poverty. No poverty should exist, but child poverty is most often at the root of all poverty — few who grow up in it escape it in later life. … Children can’t wait years for policies to be developed that offer limited sticking plasters for the misery they experience: every skipped meal or cold night is, step by step, depriving a child of the life they deserve. Fulfilling human potential means battling for children’s happiness and for human rights to be taken seriously: work has to pay more, but the state must also provide economically and materially.” (The magazine also launched its companion podcast, Tribune Radio; the first episode is an interview with Foster.)
1 May 2019