On the huge con of the Relative Poverty measure used by left wing think tanks, disgusting communist rags like the Guardian, and the government.

The claim that millions of children are living in poverty in the UK is a complete con.

It was used to justify increasing social security spending last week when the Chancellor Rachel Reeves removed the two child limit for sending additional money to people with large families who are on income support. This will hit the budget with an additional bill of £3Bn a year at a time when government debt is ballooning and taxes have never been higher at any time when we were not at war.

The bill will be three billion of your money sent to people who have the largest families when they can't afford to keep them. I don't suppose that many of us had children we could not afford to pay for, but 4% of the 560,000 families who will benefit have six or more children. That means that 22,000 of the families benefiting have six or more children!!!

So why do I claim the child poverty figures are a con. Simple. The figures are based on a measure that defines anyone or any family which has less than 60% of the national median income as being in relative poverty. It means that no matter how well the economy is doing, no matter how much wages rise, by definition, we will always have people defined as living in poverty, unless all wage differences are eliminated, or unless everyone else is made poorer.

The excellent economist, Evan Davies from the BBC discusses the measure here on Youtube with Sarah Montague. Well worth a watch.

If we lived in a very wealthy society in which the median income was £100,000 a year, any person who had an income of £59,999 would be defined as living in poverty, using the current relative measure. By definition, the measure always fakes poverty numbers just so left wing idiots can whinge on about poverty and inequality.

Are there poor people? Yes. We should define a basic income level at which we think the line exists between the poor and the rest of us. It should be a measure of 'absolute poverty', a defined level - not a relative measure, and we should assist people who are genuinely poor. People with mobile phones and the stuff of modern life are not poor, even though they may have less than the rest of us who go out to work and save for our old age.