Children of alcoholics are more likely to be addicts themselves when they grow up a report claims.
About 3.6 million people in Britain bear emotional and behavioural scars from being raised by drinkers.
They are up to four times more likely to become alcoholics or marry heavy boozers,says the study by the Priory group,which treats addicts including many celebrities.
And 70 per cent show compulsive behaviour problems with drugs food,gambling and spending.
The Priory’s Dr Michael Bristow said:Alcoholism affects the entire family, particularly the children.

Daily Mirror
4th September 2006

“Extend child benefit to pregnant women”

“this proposal was rejected rather forcefully by the abortion lobby. Lack of focus on the big picture, if you ask me.”

Maybe extend it to pregnant women in the third trimester?

I think the minimum wage does need to keep increasing, but we can’t just assume either that employers will be able to pay it easily or that any jobs lost as a result will be ones that should never have been viable anyway.

Maybe it would be worth thinking about raising the threshold for employer national insurance payments, to balance this out a bit for them - and you could do the same for employee contributions. This would cost money, of course, but you could get some back by raising the NI upper earnings limit.

Then on child poverty. Just so long as we are clear what this means - ie if child poverty is the priority then pensioner poverty isn’t. I’m not saying we should cut pensions to make poor children better off, but we could do(!) More seriously we could stop the relative growth in pensioners’ incomes - because either child poverty is the overwhelming priority or it is not.

More generally there are other things the left might need to look at if we are serious. Sweden is quite a low wage economy. The difference is that benefit levels/redistribution is very high. It is difficult to imagine, say Unison, arguing for a low pay settlement in local government or health to ensure that single men and women see their share of national income fall (but that *is* what we are talking about).

The 1974 Labour government closed the gap much more rapidly than this one mainly because the economy was in such poor shape. It’s extremely politcially difficult to do this when the economy is strong (Sweden’s social democrats came to power in a country where famines were regular occurances…)

I don’t think that’s usually the choice. The kinds of small businesses that you’re talking about are things like small shops hiring teenagers at minimum wage to stand behind a till so that the owner can do something else. If the owner is required by law to pay a “living wage” in such a circumstance, he will probably decide that he’d rather just fire the shop assistant and work longer hours himself.

Whilst I’m sure that there are some businesses that wouldn’t be viable if they had to pay a “living wage”, I suspect that in the majority of cases it’s individual jobs within a business that won’t be viable.

To put things simply, if you work for me, your presence in my company had better earn me enough to pay your wages, overhead plus a premium to cover the risk of employing you. If you don’t bring that much benefit to me, you won’t have a job. The higher you make a minimum wage, the more use you have to be before it’s worth employing you.

One of the benefits of a citizen’s basic income is that it eliminates the market distortions introduced by a minimum wage, whilst having the same effect of ensuring that the lowest paid worker has enough to subsist on.

Since a quarter of all low paid jobs are in the public sector, one way we could start with a living wage for all public sector jobs.

More than half the people living on Rose Hill estate aren’t living in poverty, so it is no great surprise that some homes have satellite and nice cars. Measures like vouchers to help with particular costs would certainly be welcome (free transport for schoolchildren in London is extremely popular, for example), but I do think that as a general principle it is a better idea to try to make sure that people living in poverty have more money, and let them choose how best to spend it, rather than setting up lots of bureaucracy to get the government to decide how they spend their money.

Perhaps extending it to all workers would be a really good way to end child poverty.