YP Letters: Good work on child poverty, but still far more to be done

From: Roger Backhouse, Upper Poppleton, York.
Child poverty is on the increase (image posed by an actress).Child poverty is on the increase (image posed by an actress).
Child poverty is on the increase (image posed by an actress).

Child poverty is a criminal waste of human potential (Business Tuesday – The Yorkshire Post, November 15).

I didn’t expect to see an article about child poverty in this section of The Yorkshire Post, but I was pleasantly surprised.

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May I congratulate Greg Wright on his comment column. He did a good job of showing how child poverty impacts on us all and I heartily endorse his final comment that child poverty remains the biggest challenge of our times.

Clearly many factors are involved but it is interesting to see that countries with a greater equality of income are generally those with greater social mobility. Taxation policies have often been regressive, hitting those on the lowest incomes worst.

Gordon Brown had many failures as chancellor and prime minister but he put through many measures reducing child poverty. Yet the Labour Government seemed curiously shy of taking credit for them and progress has now been reversed.

So congratulations to the businesses involved in various initiatives such as Make the Grade, but there is far more to be done.

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Poverty is not something we should ignore, no matter what personal wealth or abilities we have.

From: Don Webb, Rothwell.

What little hope I had for humanity vanished with the result of your poll on child poverty. Surely one child living in poverty in this country is one child too many.

My only hope is that the majority of those involved in the poll are not from Yorkshire and belong to the group of professional letter and poll voters whose names appear in every paper in the land and have never bought a copy of The Yorkshire Post in their lives.

Nobody picks the country they are born in, or the circumstances they are born into. In fact 99.9 per cent of what you achieve in life is predetermined. It’s funny that all around the world people form their own kind of religion.

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I suppose they have to blame someone for making us the way we are. I was brought up a Roman Catholic but after seeing the child abuse on a world wide scale I lost my faith along with many others not because abuse happened but because they knew it was happening and all they did was move the perpetrators from parish to parish to continue their evil deeds. They seemed more interested in the so called good name of the church than the pain of their victims.