GORDON BROWN: ‘Reform will drive youngsters again to poverty – mother and father now have a selection’
Ex-Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown writes for The Mirror after Nigel Farage’s Reform UK said they would reintroduce the two-child benefit limit in full if they win power
Former Labour PM Gordon Brown (Image: PA)
When voters go to the polls in Gorton and Denton on Thursday, the fate of more than 6,000 thousand local children is in their hands.
These are the boys and girls who will benefit on April 1st from the abolition of the hated two child rule. Some low-income families will receive nearly an extra £70 a week as a result.
Child poverty is still blighting the lives of nearly half of all children – 48% – across the constituency. In Longsight a staggering 3 in 4 children – 73% – are growing up poor.
Come April, with the Labour government’s child-friendly changes coming online, these figures will fall dramatically, and hope will begin to be restored. Children will be better equipped to do well at school.
With more breakfast clubs and free school meals available to more school pupils and more Sure Start centres on the way, the government’s anti-poverty campaign is taking shape, lifting children out of poverty and into a world of new opportunities.
READ MORE: Gordon Brown’s chilling warning on Reform in major intervention
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A few weeks ago, the Reform party said they too wanted to abolish the two-child rule. Indeed, in the House of Commons Robert Jenrick, now their shadow chancellor, even voted for the abolition. Now he says his party will restore the rule and force children back into poverty.
Reform propagandists claim the beneficiaries of the policies are feckless workless parents. They are wrong. Six out of ten children, who have suffered for nearly ten years from this hated policy, have at least one parent in work.
Another 3 out of 10 are children too young too sick or too disabled for their mothers to go out to work or have a parent who themselves has a disability.
So, with more than nine out of ten children in families doing their best to strive, the right-wing propaganda about workshy, feckless parents is wrong and completely reprehensible.
This by-election offers a choice. To help children continue to escape poverty with Labour’s brilliant local candidate Angeliki Stogia or go back to the Tory poverty years.
