2009 marked the 20th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) (UNICEF, 2009). It marked the 10th anniversary of former Prime Minister Tony Blair's pledge to eradicate child poverty in the UK by 2020 and to halve it by 2010. And 2010 was also the European year of combating poverty and social exclusion. That the European Union (EU) designated a specific year for this indicates the subordination of its social goals to the economic goals of continued growth: the latter are ongoing and dominant, and thus do not need a particular year for their promotion. This chapter considers the principles on which society would have to be organised to ensure the genuine eradication, rather than merely alleviation, of child poverty. It focuses primarily on the UK, but the framework has general relevance. It broadens out into a global perspective on the kind of society that would secure the rights of children to economic and social security and the ‘development of the child's personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential’ (UNICEF, 2007, p 10).

2009 also marked the centenary of Eleanor Rathbone's election to Liverpool City Council, and the 80th anniversary of her election to Parliament, aged 56, as an Independent member for the now abolished Combined English Universities constituency: until 1948 alumni of Bristol, Durham, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Reading and Sheffield Universities received a second vote by virtue of their graduate status. Rathbone began campaigning for some form of family allowance in 1917, and in 1924 published the first edition of The disinherited family (Rathbone, 1986 [1924]). She argued that the principle of paying men a ‘family wage’ sufficient to support two parents and their children was impractical and uneconomic, and did not keep working-class families out of poverty. In order to provide adequately for the support of wives and children, wages would have to be set much higher, but they would then be unnecessarily inflated for those men who were as yet unmarried and/or childless, who had fewer children than the norm (presumed to be three) and for those whose children were no longer dependent, as well as inadequate for those whose families were larger than average.