Tories attack Brown on poverty

In a sign that the Tories are seeking to move onto what was once sacred ground for Labour, the shadow Chancellor George Osborne has criticised Gordon Brown for not doing enough to alleviate poverty.

Writing in the Guardian, Osborne declared that redistribution of wealth had failed as a tool for tackling poverty, and claimed that free markets are the fairest and most effective way of pulling people out of poverty.

"We know that redistribution alone, as the sole policy tool to tackle poverty, has failed," Osborne writes. "There are 900,000 more people in severe poverty than in 1997 and child poverty has been rising for two years in succession."

Pointing out that the life expectancy gap between the richest and poorest is at its greatest since Victorian times, Osborne calls for Labour's "target-driven, top down, statist approach" to be abandoned,for "it relies on a flawed assumption that only the state can guarantee fairness."

The attack could prove risky for the Tories, as it will allow Labour to claim that 'Cameronomics'is in effect a right-wing, free-market agenda of tax and spending cuts.

Osborne has been forced recently to guarantee current spending levels will be maintained for the first two years of a Tory administration, and has maintained that there are no plans to scrap the tax credit system brought in by Labour after 1997.