来源：《卫报》
原文刊登日期：2022年7月4日
It is dismaying, though not really surprising, that lone parents and their children are very nearly twice as likely to be living in relative poverty than families with two parents. Over the past decade or so, the work on reducing child poverty led by Gordon Brown when he was chancellor has been comprehensively undone. Conservative benefit cuts and changes aimed at reducing public spending, and incentivising work by making welfare more conditional, have disproportionately harmed many already vulnerable groups. That around 1.5 million children and their lone parents, 90% of whom are mothers, face such severe hardship should shame the ministers responsible.
令人沮丧的是，单亲父母及其子女生活在相对贫困中的可能性几乎是双亲家庭的两倍，尽管这并不奇怪。在过去十年左右的时间里，戈登•布朗担任财政大臣时领导的减少儿童贫困的工作被全面取消。保守党的福利削减和旨在减少公共支出的改革，以及通过增加福利获取条件来激励工作参与，对许多已经脆弱的群体造成了不成比例的伤害。大约150万儿童及其单亲父母（其中90%是母亲）面临着如此严重的困难，这应该让负责的部长们感到羞愧。
It is almost a century since the suffragist Eleanor Rathbone published her pioneering analysis of motherhood and poverty. The child allowances she advocated became a cornerstone of welfare policy after the second world war, in recognition of the fact that primary carers (then, as now, mostly mothers) need support in order to care. Yet, while the benefit remains, many of the assumptions that underpinned it have been stripped away. The message communicated by such policies as the two-child limit and benefit cap has been that having children is a kind of luxury – not a vital task that parents perform on behalf of society as a whole.
将近一个世纪前，妇女参政论者埃莉诺·拉斯伯恩发表了关于为人母与贫困的开创性分析。她倡导的儿童津贴在二战后成为福利政策的基石，因为她认识到，孩子的主要照顾人(当时和现在一样，大多是母亲)需要支持才能照顾好孩子。然而，虽然福利仍然存在，但支撑它的许多假设已经被剥夺了。“二胎限制”和“福利上限”等政策传达的信息是，生孩子是一种奢侈，而不是父母代表整个社会履行的重要任务。
Analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies confirms that lone parents have seen the sharpest falls in living standards: they are more likely to go hungry, skip meals and be in debt; and less likely to be able to afford to heat their homes. Mr Brown shares desperate stories from the constituency he represented of “poverty at its demeaning and degrading worst”. Evidence about the damaging impact of Covid, particularly on the under-fives, mounts up along with warnings of energy and other price rises.
财政研究所的分析证实，单亲父母的生活水平下降幅度最大：他们更有可能挨饿、不吃饭和负债累累；而且不太可能负担得起家庭供暖。戈登•布朗分享了他所代表的选区的绝望故事，讲述了“最有辱人格的贫困”。随着能源和其他价格上涨的警告，有关新冠肺炎的破坏性影响，尤其是对五岁以下儿童的影响的证据越来越多。
The package of support announced recently by the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, and worth £650 to 8.3m households, along with a promise to raise benefits in line with inflation, shows that the government is not impervious to the strain that people are under. But what has been promised falls short of what is needed. The benefit cap was a punitive measure and should be abolished; as a first step, it must be increased when benefits rise. Child benefit too should go up; it is widely recognised to be among the most effective ways of targeting funds at children.
财政大臣里希·苏纳克最近宣布了一项给830万家庭每户价值650英镑的一揽子支持计划，并承诺根据通胀提高福利，这表明政府并非对人民所承受的压力无动于衷。但所承诺的与所需要的相去甚远。福利上限是一项惩罚性措施，应当废除；作为第一步，当福利增加时，福利上限必须提高。儿童福利也应该提高；儿童福利被广泛认为是将资金用于儿童的最有效方式之一。
But besides such specific measures, broader recognition is needed of the ways in which care and needs continue to be overlooked and penalised by a government that remains committed to shrinking, rather than growing, the UK’s social infrastructure – or letting private equity owners buy it up. We all have a stake in the future. That future includes the 3.1 million children who live with just one parent. Nearly a hundred years after Rathbone made the case for family allowances, she would surely be appalled to hear that children are still going without hot food and sleeping on floors with not enough blankets.
但除了这些具体措施之外，我们还需要更广泛地认识到，英国政府是如何继续忽视和惩罚社会保障和需求的，而英国政府仍致力于缩减(而非扩大)英国的社会基础设施——或者让私人股本所有者买下这些基础设施。未来与我们所有人息息相关。这种未来包括310万只与单亲生活在一起的儿童。在拉斯伯恩提出家庭补贴的近百年后，如果她听到孩子们仍然没有热食物，睡在没有足够毯子的地板上，她肯定会感到震惊。