The Fabian Society, in partnership with the Child Poverty Action Group, hosted a roundtable event at the Houses of Parliament with Professor David Brady to discuss how politics and poverty reduction interact.

Brady’s findings have suggested that a key determinate of poverty levels in developed nations remains public spending on the welfare state. Brady contests that poverty campaigners need to push back against the prevailing notion that poverty is an inescapable outcome of individual failings or a society’s labour markets and demographics.

On the other hand, while Labour remains committed to ending child poverty by 2020, Ed Miliband has recently suggested that you cannot spend your way to social democracy and has advocated a return to the ‘something for something’ contributory aspect of welfare.