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The scenes at Plymouth magistrates’ court last week when people spat at the nursery school-worker Vanessa George as she was charged with sexual assault on a child confirmed my feeling that, in the world of child abuse, almost everyone is corrupted. The brutish crowd hurling missiles and insults did not look as if they were kind to children and good at bringing them up, but as if they simply enjoyed hating people. Everyone agrees that it is a good thing that child abuse is no longer concealed by institutions these days. But the openness about these matters creates a sort of secondary pornography, by which millions can read all about it, and then conceal their feelings of unhealthy interest in the cloak of self-righteous anger.
Like an army that expects defeat, the government is now leaving political mines as it retreats. This is the purpose of the coming legislation on child poverty, promoted last week by Yvette Cooper, who has just arrived at the Department for Work and Pensions. Labour is committed to ‘eradicating’ child poverty by 2020, but now the figures for children in poverty are rising again because of the recession, and so its plan to ‘halve’ child poverty by 2010 will fail. The new law will impose a statutory obligation on governments to hit the existing target for 2020. The idea is simply a political one: if a Conservative government does not hit the target — as, inevitably, it will not — it will either have to repeal the law, thus ‘condemning millions of children to poverty’, or be punished for breaking it. The law has no bearing at all on the actual fate of actual children, but it is something to talk about in a general election campaign.
In fact, you cannot eradicate child (or adult) poverty if you choose to define it in the way the government does. Last week, Professor Peter Townsend died. He was the guru of the idea of ‘relative poverty’. In some ways, this notion accords with human experience. In the 1950s, you did not feel poor if you could not afford a television: today you do. But if poverty comes to be defined relatively for all purposes of public policy — households with less than 60 per cent of the median income, says the government — then poverty and inequality become the same thing. So socialism then wins every argument about how poverty should be alleviated. Since it is unimaginable in a free society that incomes could be equal, Prof. Townsend and now Ms Cooper have promoted a way of ensuring that Jesus was right when he said ‘the poor you have always with you’.
Walking past the Church House bookshop in Westminster this week, I noticed an entire window display devoted to one book. It was called Lay Presidency at the Eucharist? An Anglican Approach. What a perfectly undumbed-down title — not the faintest attempt to vulgarise, or, indeed, to interest anyone in any way. Right down to the question mark and the offer of ‘an’ approach rather than ‘the’ approach, it had a wonderful Anglican tentativeness about it. I felt it would be crassly against the spirit of such a publication to march in and buy it.
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