The state by any other name ....

The British Conservatives have signed up to Labour's child poverty reduction target. BUT it is up to the supportive state to make child poverty disappear. So says Oliver Letwin, head of Conservative Party policy UK.

"It is a problem of demoralised neighbourhoods, of broken families, of drug and alcohol dependency, of poor schooling, of poor housing and decrepit estates, of unemployment and unemployability, of children growing up with too little hope and too much fear."

These problems, Mr Letwin said, could only be dealt with "bottom up, from the locality, from social enterprise meeting local needs" – local campaigners were the "heroes" and it was up to the state to set up the framework in which they could flourish.

"It is not the commanding state but the supportive state that we need: enabling society to support, inspire, mentor and lead young people out of deprivation," he wrote.

As long as the state keeps paying for all of the afore-mentioned, that is what we will get. How we describe the state won't make a blind bit of difference.

Then the Guardian asks, What would Margaret Thatcher think?

Certainly the Conservative switch is unlikely to have been entirely altruistic. Any party trying to remove its "nasty" label needs to do something dramatic. Inequality has become so familiar it is easy to forget just how rapid its growth was under the Conservatives in the 1980s. Three decades into the welfare state, both inequality and relative poverty in Britain were at their lowest points in 1979. Seven years later child poverty had tripled: from one in nine to one in three living below the poverty line. No other country except New Zealand suffered such a brutal reverse.

Child poverty is largely bound up with sole parenthood. Yet it is discussed in terms devoid of any association. The state paid for it - the state got it. When the state started doing it, the politicians of the day most certainly would have described themselves as proponents of a "supportive" state.