You could be forgiven if you hadn’t noticed that England are playing in a football match tonight in the World Cup semi-finals against reigning champions Japan. Although the game is being shown live on BBC1 there has been relatively small coverage in the media. The highest earning player in the tournament is reportedly paid almost £2million per year, largely from sponsorship deals.

Alex Morgan is the USA striker, currently employed by Portland Thorns, a women’s football team. Not bad you might think, but compare it to £13million the average English Premier league male counterpart earns and you see the huge inequality that still exists in sport.

Captain of the women’s England team Steph Houghton earns around £65,000 per year playing for Manchester City. The average wage of a male Manchester City player is £102,653 per week.

Despite the Englishmen’s failure to win the world cup since 1966 if they were playing tonight in a semi-final the coverage would be fever pitch. Every advert on TV would be for cheap alcohol, cheap TVs and no doubt fast food chains sponsoring the game. The women’s team have played some very decent football. There are dozens of women’s teams up and down the country playing in all sorts of leagues but barely any of them receive any media attention. A quick google search to find the best paid woman in football brings up a site that shamelessly states that Alex Morgan is one of the most beautiful women in football. I googled best paid male and there was mention of how attractive Manchester city captain, Vincent Company is.

This week also sees of course tennis from Wimbledon. While the prize money of the completion will see men and women both earn a massive £1.88million each, the top three highest paid players are all men.  Swiss Roger Federer reportedly earned $56.2 million last year, compared to the top female player- Maria Sharapova who earned just $24.4 million.

Forbes rich list reported this year that the world’s wealthiest man Bill Gates has a net worth of $79.2billion. The highest ranked woman on the list is Wal-Mart’s Christy Walton who is worth $41.7billion although some might argue she gained the money from her late husband John T Walton. Way down the list at number 22 is the highest paid individual woman who is worth a measly $26.6billion.

So could England’s women winning the world cup be the springboard needed to make us recognise the contribution of women both in sport and in the workplace and paying them what they rightly deserve? I doubt it but hopefully the game will be worth staying up for.

C’mon England!                                                                                            

Child Poverty measures scrapped by Tories.

Just short of two years ago I wrote an article, published in the Sheffield Star about child poverty. In the article I quoted a strategy report from 2011, published by Sheffield City Council, which stated that poverty is not just about wealth but also about health, community, aspiration and education. At the time of writing the piece a family was classed as living in poverty if the household income was less than 60% of the average wage, £359 per week (by the end of 2013 this had risen to £517). In Sheffield, 27,000 children were judged to be living in child poverty, 24% of the city.

The report also said that certain groups were more likely to live in poverty – ethnic minority families, single parent families and families with more than three children particularly.

One of the wealthier suburbs of Sheffield, Dore has 0% teen pregnancies compared to less well-off Arbourthorne where teen pregnancy was at almost 15%. Less than 8 mile separates the two areas but they are worlds apart in real terms and therefore it is vital that those levels of poverty are measured.

Today work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith, announced plans to scrap the current measures claiming they were deeply flawed. The four UK children’s commissioners have urged Mr Duncan Smith to stop his benefits cuts programme and said that the levels of child poverty are unacceptably high.

Duncan Smith insists that ending child poverty is still a priority but he intends to do this by changing the long term chances of those in poor families. He intends to introduce new legislation that focuses on educational attainment and long term worklessness. He said they will also look at causes of poverty such as drug and alcohol dependency and family breakdown.

All very good but we already know from the current measures that those things are all contributors to poverty.

The smug Tories are relentlessly telling us that under their leadership the national debt is lower and that unemployment is lower. They claim that more people are in permanent employment and that more apprenticeships have been created along with more doctors and nurses, and yet are determined to drive on with their ideological cuts to the poorest. They claim we now have the fastest growing economy in the developed world but still believe that the poorest and least able should be punished.

 Before the election the conservatives said it was necessary to implement more and more cuts but refused to tell us where these cuts would come from. It was clear that they knew exactly where the cuts would come from but refused again and again to confirm the cuts to working tax credits attacking families who do work. 

The promises they made during the last government were nearly all broken and almost all the targets that PM David Cameron set himself were missed. The government along with the right wing media have repeatedly led the public to believe that the economy state they inherited was entirely down to the Labour party, despite supporting the spending figures during their stint in opposition. They have tries consistently to imply that the actions of Gordon Brown and his Labour party were solely responsible for a global financial meltdown. They say we were on the brink when they took over and had it not been for the tough decisions chancellor George Osbourne took we would now be in the same situation.

If they weren’t brave enough or honest enough to tell us their real plans before the election, why should we believe them now? Why would we think that a collective of the very wealthiest in society should care a jot about equality or politics of compassion when they deny food, well-being and in many cases life, for the most vulnerable people in society.

Despite the massive increase in people using foodbanks, Cameron claimed during PMQs today that child poverty fell during the last 5 years.

The announcement today smacks of moving the goal posts. A change of measure invariably means a change of results but can we trust Mr Duncan Smith, who along with 18 other MP's today had his official credit card suspended by ipsa for failing to show his expenses were valid, not cook the books and simply deny the existence of child poverty like they do the need for foodbanks?