New ONS figures highlight the problem of the Big State mindset better than any rhetoric could.

It may have been April Fool’s Day last Thursday, but the Office for National Statistics carried on spewing out the truth. Its main feature that day concerned the trends in improving the lot of the UK poor since New Labour came to power. I can’t imagine how an independent stats organisation arrived at that timeline, but let’s not go there.

On the face of it, the numbers look good for any Government dedicated to ensuring that society’s most vulnerable are looked after. Thus there are half a million fewer children in poverty than there were way back then when things could only get better. And there are 200,000 fewer pensioners in the same position.

Unfortunately, there are 600,000 more working-age adults living in poverty-stricken households. And there’s a very good reason for this.

Children and Pensioners’ problems can be remedied with a stroke of the Chancellor’s pen – for he has direct control over child allowances and State pensions.

But economies can’t be. And this has always been Labour’s failure: the Party knows how to give wealth away, but is clueless when it comes to creating it.(See previous post)

This particular ‘New’ form of Labour is different only in that it tries to give off an image of dynamism and business acumen, but it doesn’t have any. The Government has:

* Failed to train poorer kids in the skills required to put them in work, preferring instead to set insane targets for everyone to have a degree in Media Studies by 2020.

* Failed to reduce the country’s dependence on banking, business services and oil revenues – and in fact made it worse by providing no stimulus for small-scale manufacturing.

* Failed to break the dependency culture – but instead, cemented it in place by providing more money for dependents, and less work for breadwinners.

* Increased personal taxation levels by almost exactly one hundred per cent in order to achieve this effective standstill. The HMRC figures show that in the last year of Tory government, the Revenue raised £69 billion from salaries. This year the official estimate is £139 billion. CGT, council tax and Stamp Duty have in turn more than doubled since 1997.

* But the rich and the large corporate concerns are paying a smaller contribution to that total than they did thirteen years ago. Only 9% of large UK companies paid more than £1 million in tax last year, and 78% of all corporate taxation was paid by small entrepreneural outfits. According to the HMRC again, virtually nobody earning over £1 million pays any tax at all over the 35% rate. Those who can afford to avoid tax do so.

You see, Labour can only do BIG. Big Government, Big Business, Big Unions, Big poverty holes, Big tax rates, Big Vetting & Barring, and Big Donors. It doesn’t do tiny loopholes, small business generation, and small-scale paedophile investigations. The only small things to have received any help from New Labour since 1997 have been foxes.

I should add, by the way, that the definition of poverty in this hopelessly spoilt country of ours is ‘earning 60% of the average wage as total household income’. In most of Africa and India, such people would be seen as wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. (I would wager that, over the next decade, the UK’s definition of poverty is going to have to change somewhat).

The bottom line, however, remains the same: during one of the greatest boom-periods in economic history, dependence on the Government grew, and taxes on those who can most afford it fell. That, I’m afraid, is the syndrome with only one name: failure.