With almost a year having passed between the two verdicts many will be tempted to ask why lessons were not learned from Rochdale which might have shortened the ordeal of the girls in Oxford.

In fact, for all the similarities, there are a number of key differences between the two cases which, despite the time-lag in the trials, were actually taking place over the same period. The Rochdale abuse was from 2008-9. The Oxford ordeal stretched over eight years from 2004 to 2012.

The greatest difference lay in the motivation of the two groups of abusers, according to Mohammed Shafiq, of the Ramadhan Foundation, a Muslim youth organisation, who was one of the first Asian community leaders to acknowledge that a disproportionate number of the men involved in on-street grooming are British Pakistanis.

“The Rochdale abusers were taxi drivers and takeaway workers using the girls for quick sex. When they took money from other men to have sex with the girls the amounts which changed hands were around £20-30 a time,” says Mr Shafiq. “Oxford is much more to do with money. The men exploiting the girls were charging others £200-£600 a time and bringing 8 to 10 men a day into hotels and restrooms.  It was much more organised.”

That view is echoed by Alyas Karmani, a Muslim imam who is a psychologist with more than 20 years of practical experience in youth and community work – and who works within the Pakistani community in major UK cities to combat attitudes which tolerate or encourage attitudes which lead to sexual violence against women. “It’s important to understand the different pathways in and out of the offending behaviour,” he says since that makes a difference to how they are tackled.

“The ringleader in Rochdale was a serial paedophile but the men in that case were not paedophiles in the classic sense,” he says. “They were not looking for under-age girls; they took the opportunities when they were presented.” The men groomed under-aged girls because they found that easier than persuading an adult woman to have sex.

“Oxford is a more gang-related crime,” says Alyas Karmani. “They were younger men, linked to drug-dealing, money-laundering and financial crime along the M4 corridor. They were making their money from drugs not from pimping out the girls.”

But in the Oxford case the sexual violence was more extreme.  One of the victims described what she had undergone as “torture sex”. Another was told the gang would cut of her head if she did not perform oral sex on them all. One was branded with a hot metal hairpin bent into the initial of the abuser’s name to claim his “ownership” of her. Another was told that, if she was not compliant, her brother would be burnt alive. The detail was so gruesome that the media only published about 10 per cent of what the police uncovered.

“In the Oxford case the humiliation and torturing was much more sadistic,” says Alyas Karmani. That is because, he suggests, the abusers there were significantly younger men than those in Rochdale. “The culture of sexual violence is more prevalent among younger than older men.”

By contrast in the Rochdale case some of the girls were so confused by the nature of their abuse that even during the trial they were still insisting that the men involved loved them, though one victim told the Oxford trial that she believed her abuser loved her and was going to marry her when she was 16.

“It is often difficult to get girls to speak against groomers”, says Louise Ball of Parents Against Sexual Exploitation (PACE UK), former known as CROP. “Grooming drives a wedge between child and parents – and is designed to do that.”

What both cases highlight is the progress which has been made against child sexual exploitation – and the work which is yet to be done.  The Pakistani community, which was so long in denial about the acts committed by a few of its members, has begun to confront the problem. “We can’t refute the statistics that a disproportionate number of those involved drug supply, which links to pimping and prostitution, are British Asian men,” says Alyas Karmani who runs programmes across the UK which he says are getting strong take-up from local communities now.”

The problem he identifies is not confined to young Asian men. “Get a group of young men in a room and they are ambivalent about violence against young women. You hear the sentiment you find in “choke this bitch” lyrics by the likes of Eminem.” It is nothing to do with Muslim culture, he insists, though that culture does have traditions which can help counter such thinking.

Some of his strategies, as an imam, are straightforwardly religious. “That thinking is not compatible with Islam,” he says. But it also trades on the strong family traditions of Asian culture. “ ‘Would you want someone to do that to your sister’, I ask them.” Many of the youths have never had such a conversation with an adult before.

And Muslim community leaders are anxious that their acknowledgement of the problem should not focus disproportionate blame on British Asians. “Child sex abuse happens in all communities,” says Mohammed Shafiq. “The white abusers tend to be loners or do it online, or are friends of the victim’s family. It’s only in on-street grooming that there is an over-representation of Pakistani men – and the media are much more selective in the way they focus on that.”

Police, social workers, academic researchers and children’s charity workers all agree. Greater Manchester Police, in whose area the Rochdale offences took place, says 95 per cent of the men on its sex offenders register are white. Just five per cent are Asian. Wendy Shepherd, child sexual exploitation project manager with Barnardo’s in the north of England, says that most abusers are white and most child sex exploitation happens in the home. White males who are predators on the street tend to work alone, though they also prey in internet grooming rings, she says.

Asians can be the victims too. One Bangladeshi father has recentlyrevealed his daughter is being groomed by a Turkish gang who have been giving her heroin. But it has not been reported. “In the cases which have been given a high profile by the media Asian men have been caught because the group they have operated in is big and blatant,” Alyas Karmani says. “Other groups are more skilled at hiding their activities; they are lone actors, smaller groups of just 2 or 3, and harder to get evidence against.”

But most of the lessons which needed to be learned were among state authorities. “Social workers and police failed to take victims seriously: they said they had made an ‘informed choice’ which was wrong,” says Jim Taylor, who has taken over as chief executive at Rochdale Borough Council in a post child abuse shake-up. “The Council and other agencies missed opportunities to offer assistance.”

In Rochdale, one year on, that learning process is well underway. Disciplinary investigations are being conducted into the culpability of three individuals who have been suspended pending the inquiry. An independent review of processes and procedures has been set up under an outside expert. But even before it reports a number of new measures have been put in place.

“We’ve appointed a brand new leadership team with a wealth of relevant experience,” says Mr Taylor. It is led by Gladys Rhodes White who some years ago set up a pioneering project named Engage to prevent and prosecute child sex abuse in nearby Blackburn. The team has re-examined the files of the 47 victims from the original  cases and two more sets of prosecutions are in the pipeline.

“We’ve directed more funding to Sunrise [Rochdale’s equivalent of Engage], the multi-agency team dedicated to tackling child sexual exploitation,” says Mr Taylor. “We’ve had awareness workshops for 10,000 children in every local secondary school and 1,500 council staff have had face-to-face training. And we have a Child Sexual Exploitation car staffed by police and youth workers patrolling the hotspots on our streets.”

Rochdale social services now have a single point of contact for all referrals of concern on child sex abuse. Local taxi-drivers are more regulated with Criminal Records Bureau checks having been made more consistent. The town now has an accreditation scheme called Safe Rochdale Taxi. There is a monthly forum where police, youth service, youth offending team, social workers and private providers exchange information. A scheme to help police share data across all 10 Manchester boroughs is being investigated, though it is encountering data protection problems. “There’s still a lot to do,” says Jim Taylor, “but we’re improving rapidly”.

There is more to do in the Muslim community. “There’s a disconnect between the elders and the young people,” says Alyas Karmani. It reaches across poor Asian communities in the northern mill towns and comparatively affluent Muslim communities in places like Oxford. “We need better youth programmes but there’s not enough funding to be pro-active,” he laments. “There’s enough work for a fulltime street worker in Bradford, Manchester and Birmingham.”

But Muslims want action in wider society. “There are serious questions to be asked about the behaviour of the owners of the hotels who allowed these men to check in with young girls and then have multiple visitors to their rooms,” says Mohammed Shafiq. “The local authority and the licensing authorities should be asking questions about them.”

Jim Taylor wants to see other changes. A council from another part of the country can send a child in its care to a private children’s home elsewhere, where care is cheaper.  Rochdale has a large number of outsiders in such homes. But those far-away councils can manage the care of that child “by remote” without any duty to inform or liaise with Rochdale social services.

That must change. So must the fact that Ofsted doesn’t have to inform local social services of the results of its inspections of smaller care homes.  But responsibility to stamp out child abuse must go far wider, according to Rochdale’s new child sex exploitation watchdog Gladys Rhodes White.

“I want the message out there to the public,” she says. “If you see something not right like older men with young girls buying drinks and gifts don’t be afraid to report it”.  That responsibility cannot be limited to one community or one set of public officials. It is the job, she says, of us all.  

end

The atmosphere on May day was heady with excitement as tens of thousands of people waited for the arrival of Pope Francis to tour the square before his address to mark the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker whom the former Cardinal Bergoglio regards, along with the Virgin Mary, as the model for the ordinary believer seeking to be faithful to God through the small tasks of everyday life.

Work, he declared, was fundamental to human dignity. It is how we participate in the work of creation – which is why it is a scandal that so many today, particularly young people, are unemployed thanks to a “purely economic conception of society” which puts “selfish profit” before social justice.  Those in public office must therefore make every effort to give new impetus to employment. But society also needed to guard against making people victims of work that enslaves.

This points up one of the interesting characteristics of this new papacy. His remarks at the general audience were measured and largely abstract. But that morning at his daily 7am mass in one of a new style of off-the-cuff sermons he had been much more direct. He expressed his shock that the workers in the collapsed Bangladesh clothing factory were being paid just €38 a month. This was nothing less than a modern form of slavery which goes against God, he thundered.

Vatican officials are unsure yet as how to handle these unscripted homilies at the early morning masses to which the Pope invites different members of the public each day. When members of the Vatican Bank, known in Italian as the Istituto per le Opere di Religione  (IOR), were in the congregation he made a cryptic aside about “those guys at the IOR” adding “Excuse me, eh?” before describing their controversial institution as “necessary… up to a certain point”.  Vatican Radio reported the remark, but the official newspaper L’Osservatore Romano censored it. Slightly less cryptic was his decision to axe the bonus all the employees traditionally receive on papal transitions,  along with the annual €25,000 stipend paid to the five cardinals on the bank’s supervisory board.

The lack of a clear party line between the official radio station and newspaper is revealing of the liberating creative uncertainty currently abroad in Rome – and not just over how to handle the Pope’s much more free “thinking aloud” style of pronouncement. Curial officials are simultaneously stimulated and intimidated by Pope Francis’s more demotic approach and vivid turn of phrase condemning the “babysitter Church” which only “takes care of children to put them to sleep” instead of acting as a mother with her children – or telling priests that they should “smell of their sheep”.

Perhaps most unnerving was his joke about the doctrinal watchdog historically responsible for the Inquisition and, in more recent year under the then Cardinal Ratzinger, for silencing theologians and disciplining errant nuns. Barnabas’s apostolic visitation to the Christians in Antioch, the new pontiff quipped, could be viewed, “with a bit of a sense of humour” as “the theological beginning of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith”.  A joking Pope. No wonder Rome is abuzz.

The Church Times

This is, apparently, because they are full of middle-class children whose parents refused to have them vaccinated during the MMR scare, as well as overseas pupils with unknown immunisation records. Such folk, he later added, are as dodgy as groups such as gypsies and travellers, who he says have previously spread the disease.

The said schools were, predictably enough, outraged. The chairman of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, Dr Christopher Ray, who is High Master of Manchester Grammar School, said the picture painted by Dr Ashton of the independent school sector’s approach to health was “woefully inaccurate”.  Such schools had close links with the NHS, and their policies were highly regulated. Another head accused Dr Ashton of “peddling emotive opinions without regard for accuracy”.

Professor Ashton’s tone offers a salutary reminder of an aspect of the MMR controversy which has generally been forgotten in the concern at the current measles outbreak in which one man has died.  But first I must declare an interest.

My wife and I did not give our son the MMR. The scare around the triple vaccine was couched in fears that it might trigger autism in a few susceptible individuals. But the later discredited research on which the worries were based also suggested children who had had the jab might develop a serious bowel condition called Crohn’s Disease – from which our son’s aunt suffers. Moreover his cousin had such a bad reaction to his first MMR jab that they had to admit him to hospital to do the second. And our boy had exhibited a spectacular series of allergic reactions to a wide variety of foods, colourings, flavourings and additives as a baby. We decided to have the three vaccines administered singly. There seemed no downside to that.

Doctors and politicians did not agree. Separately injecting the three same vaccines would undermine the MMR public health strategy, they said. Families would miss some vaccines, or forget to have the boosters done. To ensure this could not happen the government in 1998 withdrew the importation licence for the single vaccines leaving concerned parents with the bald choice of the MMR or nothing. Government bullying tactics backfired when large numbers of parents chose nothing, though many, like us, traversed the country, or even went abroad, to find the separate antigens.

When the single vaccines were available MMR uptake fell but it was matched by an uptake in the separate jabs. Only when the government banned the separate jabs did vaccinations overall significantly fall.

The MMR controversy has been blamed on bad science and hysterical parents (though I never saw what was hysterical about the application of the precautionary principle).  But those were not the only factors. A key component was a political and medical arrogance which made a cavalier succession of inaccurate broad-brush statements – with ill-founded hints that the separate vaccines were not effective – to rebuff parents’ anxieties rather than owning up to the fact that single vaccines were just too untidy for the public health strategists.

All that is now long forgotten. But, as Professor Ashton has reminded us, high-handed patronising arrogant assertions by the medical establishment live on. And then they wonder why the public does not always believe everything they say.

Paul Vallely is writing a biography of Pope Francis from Bloomsbury Publishing

Yet the real truth about Lady Thatcher does not just lie somewhere between these two polarities. It is to be found somewhere different.

Someone with her fondness for reducing national issues to domestic metaphor might begin by quoting the proverb that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. To those enjoying the meal the Thatcherite omelette was undoubtedly a tasty dish. Those whose lives were broken would tell a different story. Her supporters shrugged that this was an evil necessity. Rising unemployment and recession were “a price well worth paying” to get inflation down, as a Tory Chancellor. Norman Lamont, was later to succinctly put it.

Such a view is at heart utilitarian. It holds that a society’s purpose must be to maximise the greatest happiness of the greatest number.  But, as the recent debate between church leaders and government ministers on welfare reform has shown, Christianity has fundamental questions to raise about any system which assumes that it is necessary for one man, or one minority, to suffer for the good of the people. The insistence of Mrs Thatcher in 1983 that “the denial of personal choice is an outright denial of Christian faith” reveals a selective and rather eccentric notion of the values embodied in the gospels.

The British economy may have been on a sounder footing when she resigned but it is incontestable that in her time the poor got poorer and inequality increased. Traditional industries like shipbuilding, coalmining and steelmaking may have been in long-term decline but Thatcherism’s acceleration of that process disproportionately affected particular communities. Germany shows a different approach was possible. That is why those who, like me, live in the North of the country will have noticed a markedly different response to the news of Lady Thatcher’s death to the tone struck by our largely metropolitan national media. One shopkeeper told me he had opened a bottle of champagne the day the ex-PM died.

The unskilled working man in places like the North of England has been particularly badly-hit by the Thatcher revolution which later governments, of both parties, have failed to reverse.  The urgency of welfare reform is a consequence of the depletion of Britain’s manufacturing base on a scale which not even the Luftwaffe managed. The number of people in out-of-work benefits trebled in the Thatcher years, from two to six million, and today’s “underclass” of unemployables is its legacy.

So too is a recession, now more prolonged than that of the Great Depression, which was triggered by a banking crisis rooted in Mrs Thatcher’s deregulation of the City.  So too is a housing crisis which grew from the Thatcherite prohibition on councils building more houses to replace those she sold off.

For all her rhetoric about prudence, saving and hard work Margaret Thatcher has bequeathed us a culture which is hedonistic and debt-laden. Her insistence that “there is no such thing as society” has left us atomised as well as acquisitive. It has made selfishness respectable.  That was the underbelly of the entrepreneurial spirit she so effectively unleashed. Her legacy has left us paradoxes we must now struggle to resolve.

Paul Vallely is a policy and communications consultant at paulvallely.com. He is currently writing a biography of Pope Francis for Bloomsbury.

 from the Church Times

The contradictions of the phenomenon that was Margaret Thatcher were all on show in this one incident.

It was 1987 and the height of the Iron Lady’s implacable opposition to the struggle of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela for freedom for the black population of South Africa. She had branded Mandela as a “terrorist” and was a virulent opponent of international sanctions against the white minority-government. She was, many felt, apartheid’s greatest friend.

The guest of honour at that Downing Street dinner was Joaquim Chissano, the President of Mozambique, from whose country I had been sending back reports on his government’s struggle against the economic mess the former Portuguese colony had inherited on independence – and against guerrillas backed by the apartheid regime in neighbouring South Africa.

Thatcher ought to have hated Chissano, a black Marxist liberation-fighter in the Mandela mould. But in her first year in office Chissano and Samora Machel, his predecessor as president, had privately helped steer Robert Mugabe away from booting the whites out of Zimbabwe when he took over at independence. So Chissano was a Good Guy in the Thatcher litany. Yet at the end of the dinner, when I raised apartheid and sanctions, she cut me dead with steely imperiousness and, turning to make appreciative comments about my wife’s dress, took her off on a smiling tour of the Downing Street portraits of past prime ministers.

It was all there in a single incident –political prejudice, fierce loyalty, implacable certainty, easy contradictions, cognitive dissonance, ruthless assertion and the eye-flickering charmless flattery. No British prime minister of the last century has created greater myth than Margaret Thatcher. And yet there are huge chasms between the myths and the Mrs.

To those who seek to deify her Margaret Thatcher she was a Saviour who rescued the nation from a post-war socialist decadence with a weak currency, feeble business spirit, ineffective incentives and an interventionist statist consensus government. She cut taxes and sold off council houses and flabby nationalised industries. She stood up against the unions at home and the Russians and Argies aboard. She made Britain great again.

But there is an obverse of that coin. The myth of those who, in the words of Elvis Costello’s song, want now to Tramp the Dirt Down on her yet undug grave, is that she was the hard unfeeling wicked witch of selfishness and privilege. She began by to ending free school milk for schoolchildren – “Maggie Thatcher Milk Snatcher”  and then went on to kill Britain’s great heavy industries, create mass unemployment, destroy entire communities, take money from the poor and give it to the rich and deregulate the City, paving the way for the global financial meltdown of 2008. The day she resigned they sang “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” outside Downing St and made pacts to throw parties to celebrate her funeral.

She was Britain’s first woman prime minister and yet there is not even agreement on what that meant. Her notion of women’s rights – to compete, fight, and succeed on equal terms with men — did not fit the orthodoxies of contemporary feminism. She made great play with the bogus idea that the economics of housewifery can be transferred to the Treasury. She tickled the spare rib of those who felt women to be the superior sex.

By contrast, her opponents saw in her saw none of the traditional female qualities of gentle, caring, compassionate, nurturing sensitivity. Feminists noted that she did little to promote the rights of women. In eleven and a half years as prime minister, she brought only one woman into her Cabinet, and she did not last long. The women of Greenham Common were among her most vehement critics. Thatcher was not bothered. “The feminists hate me, don’t they?” she said. “And I don’t blame them. For I hate feminism. It is poison.”

Among men her gender, one biographer noted, “elevated her visibility but undermined her credibility”. To many Conservative men in the early years she looked pushy rather than plucky. She manipulated Tory ex-public school boys with a mixture of coquetry and cajoling, knowing that they had been brought up not to argue with women.

The verb “to handbag” became common parlance for her bossiness and even brutality. So much so that, at one Cabinet meeting, ministers arrived to find that she had popped out leaving her bag on the table. “Why don’t we start?” one suggested. “The handbag is here.” She was parodied in the satirical tv programme Spitting Image with her Cabinet colleagues in a restaurant. She ordered steak. “And what about the vegetables,” the waiter asked. “Oh, they’ll  have the same as me,” she replied.

On the Labour benches she liberated the repressed misogyny among politically-correct male MPs who chanted “ditch the bitch” when she entered the Commons. They called her Attila the Hen and likened her voice to “a perfumed fart”.

But a new myth was forged in 2011 with a film made by three women, actress Meryl Streep, director Phyllida Lloyd and writer Abi Moran. The Iron Lady recast Thatcher with two distinct narratives – one in which she was a member of the lower middle class struggling to overcome the snobbery of Tory upper-class culture and, most strongly, as a woman who vanquished all comers in a male-dominated world.

It was about as accurate a portrait as that of Richard III at the hands of Shakespeare. The great opponent of feminism had become a feminist icon. The politician who had waged the most naked of class wars, describing striking miners as “the enemy within”, had become a warrior against class prejudice. This was a Thatcher with a softness, a humour and a humanity which led many on the Left to describe it as a “whitewash”. On the Tory side Mrs Thatcher’s insightful biographer, Charles Moore, to describe the Oscar-winning movie as a “most powerful piece of propaganda for conservatism”.

But the truth was that Margaret Thatcher had long been a re-maker of her own image. As Education Secretary in the Cabinet of  Edward Heath – a grammar school scholarship boy, note, rather than a well-bred Tory patrician – she did not object to the middle-of-the-road policies of the time. But by the time she entered Downing Street in 1979 –  and had the temerity to quote the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi, “where there is discord, may we bring harmony” – she had remoulded herself into a hard-line free-market monetarist.  As her policies were refashioned so too was her image – her shrill voice was softened, her fussy frills and furbelows banished, her teeth straightened and her hair made more elegant.

Even so, the simplicity of the myths concealed a chain of contradictions.

She promoted the idea that inflation at 27 per cent was somehow the fault of inefficient nationalised industries and the failure of a post-war mixed economy when it had as much to do with the quadrupling of oil prices after the Yom Kippur War. By contrast, the idea that she killed off British shipbuilding, coalmining and steelmaking does not bear scrutiny, for all were in long-term decline long before she took office; the acceleration of their decline was as much to do with global recession as Thatcher governments.

There were other paradoxes. The great tax-cutter, we now know, actually opposed her Chancellor’s 1979 decision to cut income tax from 83 per cent to 60 per cent. Though she sold off many state-owned enterprises the welfare state actually expanded in her time. Unaccountable regulators now wield the power once exercised by the bosses of nationalised industries. She emasculated local government and promoted the remorseless growth of big and intrusive government at the centre.  And her carefully-engineered economic recovery policies merely fuelled the credit boom of the mid-1980s.

On Europe, for all her passionate Euro-sceptic No-No-No speechifying, she led the Tory Yes campaign in the 1975 referendum on staying in the Common Market. In 1986 she signed the Single European Act which strengthened the European Economic Community and gave away many British independent powers, though she was myopically unable to see the inevitability of German unification.

The contradictions abounded. For all her fierce nationalism over the Falklands she passively handed Hong Kong over to China in 1997 without insisting on democracy for its residents. On Iran, when President Jimmy Carter asked her to withdraw diplomats from Tehran to support the US she refused; yet later she allowed the SAS to storm the Iranian Embassy in London. When PC Yvonne Fletcher was shot from the Libyan embassy she permitted the killer to leave the country yet, despite the opposition of almost all her Cabinet, gave permission to use British air bases for the bombing of Libya

It was the same with the IRA. Publicly she spoke about unwavering resistance to terrorism. She stood firm and watched ten Republican prisoners, one of them an MP, starve themselves to death for their political rights. Yet behind the scenes, recently-released government papers show, she authorised three sets of negotiations with the IRA in secret. At the end of the following year, she signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, conceding for the first time that the Republic of Ireland should have any say in the affairs of Northern Ireland.

For all the myth-making Margaret Thatcher was a conservative who promoted accelerated change.  She was for a traditional view of life but in the end promoted the individual – there was “no such thing as society” – over the family and the common good.

All political lives, Enoch Powell famously wrote, “end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs”. Perhaps myth is what makes that different. Myth does not, in the end, require fact or explanation. “Myth is never driven out by reality, or by reason,” wrote the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, “ but lingers on until another myth has been discovered, or elaborated, to replace it”.

It’s easy to see why the case, with its tone of social and sexual degeneracy, has aroused such vehement responses. Philpott’s children were not just his meal ticket but the providers of his fags, booze, drugs and the monster plasma tv set which Osborne & Co see as symbols of what has gone wrong with a welfare system intended to be a safety net for the truly needy but which has become a dependency trap for many. When it was set up the British welfare state cost the nation under 5pc of our annual national income; today that figure has risen to 13 per cent. One in eight Britons now live in a house where no-one has a job, compared to just one in 30 in Japan.

Last year Philpott trousered £8,000 in child benefit, another £8,000 in housing benefit, plus £38,000 from the working tax credits paid to his wife and mistress. Added to the £14,000 they earned between them from their cleaning jobs, that is a total of £68,000 a year – the take-home pay of someone earning £100,000 pa.

The semiotics of this are clear. Here is a poster boy for an underclass that breeds children it doesn’t much want, is not interested in caring for, and will not work to support. He is the exemplar of the generation of spongers who are bleeding the taxpayer dry. QED, suggests George Osborne.

But the statistics tell a different story. Around 8 million families in the UK are paid child benefit. Some 1.35 million families with children have a parent claiming out-of-work benefit. Of those around 45,000 have four children or more. Only 190 have more than 10 children. So the truth is that the awful Mick Philpott, far from representing an entire underclass, is typical of only a tiny percentage of the population. And most of those may not share his thuggish, misogynist, manipulative and vile behaviour.

You can do a similar analysis of housing benefit.  Iain Duncan Smith is fond of holding up the terrible example of out-of-work families who rake in more than £100,000 a year in housing benefit, because they live in posh parts of the capital. But when the Daily Telegraph sent out reporters to find them they could find only three, all in the London borough of Westminster. The truth is that of the three million people in receipt of housing benefit only 160 got £50,000 or more in 2010. That’s 0.005 per cent.

The semiotics and the statistics tell entirely different stories. But so too do the politics and the morality. “There is nothing moral or fair about a system which traps people in welfare dependency,” Duncan Smith countered last month when the new Archbishop of Canterbury complained about the unfairness of the welfare reforms. A stand-off between a politician and a cleric is more enlightening here than the usual polarisation between Conservative and Labour.

Both the archbishop and the minister have in the past professed themselves to be students of something called Catholic Social Teaching under which heading popes and theologians have, over the last 100 years, struggled to find a third way between unfettered capitalism and state socialism. Tackling social issues requires two key principles, it insists: solidarity, the idea that we all have a moral responsibility to look after one another, and subsidiarity, the idea that the state should not take over what individuals or groups can do.

These two principles apply equally to welfare reform. It too must involve a moral imperative to protect the vulnerable and yet an acknowledgement that individuals have a duty to look after themselves. That means finding reforms which do not disproportionately penalise the poor and disabled (as the current Tory plans do) while finding ways of stopping benefits from creating perverse incentives not to work (which Labour has been historically reluctant to address).

Both are moral issues as well as political ones. The critique of the churches is more potent here because theology has a more profound understanding of the common good than does politics, perhaps because the notion was invented by a theologian, Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages. The default creed of modern politics is utilitarianism which seeks “the greatest happiness for the greatest number”. The common good, by contrast requires those social conditions which allow the fulfilment of everyone in society. It understands that the majority are not always right, even if it is usually not popular to say so. Polls show that most voters back the Tory welfare reforms. But it is not always right to allow the majority to tyrannise or scapegoat minorities.

We may need new incentives to spur the feckless in our society to get a job. But that cannot be done by removing benefits to families with children to force idle parents into work. Other mechanisms must be devised. In any case, there is no proof, despite what dog-whistle politics suggest, that benefits incentivise people to have more children. It is a queer view of the world which suggests that anyone would have another child just to secure another £13.40 a week in child benefit. Indeed, turning to statistics not semiotics again, the figures suggest that most new housing benefit claimants were until recently in work. Most people do not have more children to get benefits. Most need benefits because they have lost their jobs. Overall official figures suggest that for every £10 paid out in benefits only 7p is claimed fraudulently.

There are no quick fixes in welfare reform, as Iain Duncan Smith has found out the hard way. But there are easy options in politics, which is why George Osborne has been seeking to make political capital out of the Philpott freak-show. It may win him a few votes. But it won’t solve the problem.

Last time the UK held the presidency it met in Gleneagles and a similar coalition, Make Poverty History, conducted such an effective campaign that a $1bn a year of debt was dropped and the rich world pledged more aid; it has given extra $11bn a year – less than was promised but a substantial increase. Make Poverty History had no real success in securing fairer trade practices for poor countries but the debt cancellation and extra aid have save 1,700 children’s lives every day, got 21 million more kids into African schools, halved malaria deaths in many countries and provided life-saving drugs to six million people with HIV or Aids.

This time the G8 will meet at Lough Erne near Enniskillen in Northern Ireland in June.  In the interim, though massive strides have been made in reducing poverty, this is still a world in which one in eight people go to bed hungry every night. Each year 2.3 million children die from malnutrition and many more are physically and mentally stunted from lack of good food. The new campaign focuses on hunger.

At first glance its four main planks sound an odd collection of issues. The first If suggests that hunger could be alleviated if there were more aid for nutrition programmes and small-scale farming. That sounds obvious enough. But the other three Ifs concern themselves with tax, land and transparency – a trio which seem to lack the coherence of the Gleneagles aid, trade and debt strategy.

Last week, however, I chaired an interesting discussion at the Frontline Club with the title “Can we fix a broken food system?”. It revealed that the issues which constitute the underlying causes of hunger can appear unconnected – as do the trunk, legs and tail of the elephant to the six blind men in the Indian proverb – but are actually inter-related.

It is admirable that in the Budget the Chancellor George Osborne stuck to Britain’s promise, made in response to Make Poverty History, to reach the target of spending 0.7% of our annual income aid. But is not enough so long as the rich world indulges in practices which hinder the development of the poorest.

Unfair trade does that. But so do land deals which increasingly take soil, which should grow food for the hungry, to grow biofuels to feed Western energy consumption. And tax dodging by transnational companies cheats developing countries of three times more tax than they receive in aid each year. The If campaign wants Western governments to close loopholes that allow companies to do that.

But it is the fourth If which can make that effective. If there were greater transparency, forcing governments and investors to be more open about their activities in poor countries, change would come more swiftly. Mr Osborne missed a trick in the Budget in not requiring UK multinationals to reveal the tax avoidance schemes they use overseas. But it is not too late to top that.

The powerful players in the global food system should be required to make disclosure to public registries. And governments in the developing world should do the same by opening up budget processes so that citizens can see how their resources are being used and hold governments to account.

That is not all. There are issues like waste to be addressed. The European Commission estimates that up to 50 per cent of edible food is wasted across the EU. Stewardship and justice are interwoven. There will be no shortage of material for the next campaign.

from the Church Times