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opposition frontbencher, David Willetts, has committed a future Tory government to target not only absolute poverty, but relative poverty. Second, and more important, the employment market distributes rewards ever more unequally - because of the decline in heavy manual work, the reduced power of organised labour, and the increasing international mobility of both capital and labour. A government bent on social justice, therefore, has to work harder just to keep everybody in the same place and prevent the poor sliding into greater poverty. New Labour has done more than that: for example, child poverty, the most grievous legacy of Tory rule, is down by a quarter on 1997, though still twice what it was in 1979. Where ministers have set out to tackle injustice, they have at least partially succeeded, refuting the argument that governments can change nothing. But they have been selective in their targets, echoing the Victorian distinction between the deserving and non-deserving poor. If you live on income support, and you are neither a pensioner nor a parent, life under Labour has gone from grim to grimmer. With your benefit rises pegged to prices rather than earnings, you now get 8 a day to live on after rent, 6 if you're under 25, less than 5 if you're under 18. This is social exclusion with a vengeance. New Labour's attitude is simple: adults should find jobs, which are now plentiful, and the state's priority is to help only where children are involved or where people are too old or too ill to help themselves. In any case, ministers may say, the benefit system has to command public support: children and pensioners evoke sympathy, oafish young men don't. But today's childless poor are often tomorrow's parents and they will pass their accumulated disadvantage to their children. This applies most obviously to the pregnant under- 25-year-old who will have to live on that 6 a day while her child's health is directly dependent on her diet. Moreover, many of the single unemployed turn in desperation to crime, making things worse for families in poor areas. Idling on benefit is bad, but mugging, housebreaking and drug-pushing are worse. The childless poor are not so numerous as to make their better treatment prohibitively expensive. They are often the victims of the child poverty that flourished under the Tories and which, despite Labour's efforts, continues at significant levels now. If it is right to stop children falling into such poverty in future, why is it wrong to help those who suffered it in the past? It is still unclear whether new Labour, in the historical record, will appear as a government that largely accepted, but significantly modified, the neoliberal consensus that marked the Thatcher years or whether it can create a fresh and lasting alternative consensus. The answer may well depend on which of the Downing Street neighbours finally comes out on top. But it is precisely because wider economic forces now favour inequality that the need for a strong state, egalitarian, interventionist, even (dare it be said) socialist in outlook, and openly so, is greater than ever. A manifesto commitment to a 50 per cent tax on top incomes in the third term would be a good statement of Labour's future intentions.
2. Are states the most important agents of political decission making? Explain your answer !
Answer : No, not really important, in my opinon, civilians are are more important agents of political decission making, because they are more know about what happened in the states ( commonly what happened in around of them ) and theyre the owner of the states which is the governments ( states ) as the ruler to control everythings in the states. The states and the civilians must be work together to make their state strong even make a political decission.
6 J. Pub. L. 279 (1957) Decision-Making in a Democracy: The Supreme Court as a National Policy-Maker; Dahl, Robert A. (from :
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