FOR July 7, 2006 my diary has an article on the Poverty Campaign. For all the progress made by Labour since it was elected – and it was impressive – the challenge of creating a fairer society remains daunting.

A report, A More Equal Society, from a team of researchers at the London School of Economics, shows the poverty tide has turned but still Britain remains a deeply divided and unequal society.

As a report by John Hills (Inequality and the State) noted, the idea of Britain being an unequal society is familiar. By 1979, income inequality and relative poverty in Britain were at or near their lowest ever levels. Incomes of the poorest fifth had grown rapidly in real terms over the previous seven years and the poverty rate had fallen by 10 per cent.

What was to follow was a brutal reversal. Child poverty alone tripled in just five years from one in nine to one in three in the 1980s; only the USA and Ireland had worse overall poverty rates, only the USA with worse child poverty and Ireland a worse pension poverty rate in 1999.

This brings me to comment on statements by Robert Buckland, MP for North Swindon: ‘Cameron is to continue to increase pensions using the double lock; it will rise every year by either the rate of earnings that Mrs Thatcher scrapped in 1979 and Osborne reinstated in 2010 after freezing wages for three years, with another three years at one per cent’. Labour has also agreed. After all, it was they who gave it in the first place.

Before the 2010 election Cameron said: “We will need to pay the pensioners for all those benefits Labour gave them”. It did help them to win three consecutive elections, but he still cut it by using CPI rates instead of RPI rates and he froze allowances in 2012, thereby increasing taxes.

M J Warner Groundwell Road Swindon