Please Keir Starmer, Stop Trying to “Lift” People Out of Poverty
Starmer is now staking his political career on his insistence that he’s “lifting half a million children out of poverty“. The Prime Minister might think this will be an impressive effort, but others may find it a fairly questionable boast. If Starmer (and it’s a BIG if) can indeed lift 500,000 children out of poverty – how on earth will he do it? With a trawling net? A fairground claw? One of those mechanised shovels that lifts whole flocks of chickens from the shed floor before slaughter? The whole concept of ‘lifting’ anyone out of anywhere epitomises socialist central planning: that humans have no agency whatsoever, and can only succeed by being lifted somewhere – out of poverty, to the gulag – by the state.
What Starmer is trying to say, I think, is that thanks to his cancellation of the two-child benefit cap and introduction of free school meals, 500,000 children will no longer live in poverty. Perhaps. The Government currently suggests that 4.5 million children are in relative poverty and two million children are in ‘deep material poverty’. The difference is explained within the Government’s Child Poverty strategy:
Relative low income AHC is calculated based on household income and housing costs, identifying families whose equivalised net income falls below 60% of the median after housing costs. …
Deep material poverty, however, is based on whether families report that they can afford a core set of 13 essential items such as adequate clothing, heating, nutritious food and a safe, well-maintained home.
Even if Starmer is successful at ‘lifting 500,000’ children out of poverty, a lot are set to remain flailing around like upturned woodlice, entirely immobile and useless waiting for the next Starmer forklift to raise them out of the mire. The use of such an insulting expression suggests to me at least that Starmer has no idea what poverty is, how and why it destroys children and how it will in no way be helped by Prime Ministers thinking all they need to do is ‘lift’ people out of it, as if they’ve merely tripped and fallen into a puddle.
I met a senior civil servant recently at a London event and when I told her my job she said: “How interesting, are you able to explain why the poor don’t make use of the free things available to them?” I asked “like what?” (she surely couldn’t mean benefits). “Free museums. Free art galleries. Free Park Runs,” she replied baffled. I think perhaps Starmer actually believes that once he’s lifted children out of poverty and fed them breakfast, they really will turn into tedious middle-class bores who do Park Runs and visit museums.
Through my work supporting out -of-school children I visit homes and families that certainly qualify as existing with “deep material poverty”. Their ‘lived experience’ is far removed from even the contemplation of park runs and museums. I’ve supported children who lived in hotels, rooming next to pot-smoking asylum seekers. I’ve been in houses where the black mould combined with the dust to create a layer of sooty silt on every windowsill, flats where a father and son lived amidst takeaway rubbish and cans, sharing a bag of clothes from a historic trip to the laundrette, and numerous properties that have been taken over by animals where no-one seems to mind the sharp smell of urine. I’ve also visited families in immaculate homes, new build mansions and old rectories where children are similarly damaged and distressed, hooked on tech and a wide variety of illegal and prescribed drugs, and no conception of the numinous possibilities that life may offer.
When Sir Keir Starmer says: “Poverty holds children back like nothing else on earth. And so getting rid of child poverty opens up opportunities for so many,” I want to know if he’s forgotten how Gordon Brown tried to outlaw poverty in 2010. The Child Poverty Act 2010 enshrined targets to eradicate child poverty by 2020-21 and unsurprisingly didn’t work.
Such approaches don’t work. It is not poverty that holds children back “like nothing else on earth”, but human flaws. Human lack of love, human cruelty, human neglect, human despair. Happily it is also within humans to escape the grip of poverty. All of us, including those in deep material poverty, have freewill and agency, and all the distressed people I work with retain a sense of dignity. The urine-drenched puppy farmer told me how he refused to sell dogs to certain people because they were “unkind”, the mother in the homeless hotel wanted to study psychology, the squalid father and son cherished their family collection of scrimshaw. The notion that the Government should – let alone could – “lift” people anywhere is deeply insulting. Instead all of us must have the freedom and incentives to use our agency in a way that enhances our innate human dignity.
Cheap energy and low taxes would also of course help.
Mary Gilleece is an education support worker and her name is a pseudonym.
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You nailed it in the last line. But the Government does not want to make the connection between making fuel to heat and eat cheap which they could do if they opened the oil and gas fields, and stopped the levies which means oil companies pay over 100% tax.
likewise if they allowed people and companies to keep the money they work for instead of taking it to spend on free park runs etc, then there would be more businesses more work, more jobs that would lift people out of poverty. but to do that means letting go of the reins of control, and nothing labour likes more than having ultimate control over people’s lives and death as evidenced by the assisted killing bill and the abort your child as it enters the world bill.
But you see they have to answer to their phoney planet saving bosses at the UN and WEF.
The little people don’t matter and are simply a bloody nuisance interfering with the Davos people and their most important agenda. —–Controlling the worlds wealth resources and YOU
The left define poverty as a relative issue. If the whole nation or even just those below average were raised up significantly I doubt the percentage in “poverty” as they define it would change.
There always has to be a bottom decile just as a top decile.
Absolutely right. Poverty is in the head as well as the pocket. Hilariously the government’s definition of relative poverty makes it impossible to lift anyway unless you reduce median income for everyone……. but maybe that is what they are trying to do!
They love the pretend ‘relative poverty’ as it is a gift that keeps giving and if far detached from real poverty such as there was at the beginning of last century. Relative can mean you are deprived if you do not have the latest X-Box game for example. I happened across Eric Sykes’s autobiography at our village fete and he endured real poverty as a child when meals would consist of a slice of bread and dripping. That is probably banned today as not being gluten-free or vegan and poverty is not being able afford curry sauce on your chips.
Perhaps Keir’s been studying those artworks from North Korea, where smiling patriarchs of the Kim dynasty lead smiling families on an happy adventure into a bright future?
In contrast to the reality of a country where most people (away from the governing class) live in poverty: struggle to find enough to eat, crime is endemic (and rarely solved, except for political or religious beliefs) and are forced to work for the state.
Come to think of it, perhaps that’s the grander vision of Keir.
Make Poverty History, eh?
So it follows logically then that you want to Make Wealth History, too. Oh yes, we see you.
Starmer (and the media) present this as a binary event. The Govt have decided to spend a bit more on welfare and overnight “500,000” are ‘lifted out of poverty’. Da da! Easy as that.
Of course nothing could be further from the truth. No family or child is going to change due to an extra tenner a week. It’s not going to alter their mindset. They will still live in the same house, same neighbourhood and town. They weren’t starving before, they won’t be starving now. Possibly some more Deliveroo in the week though?
It’s pure virtue signalling, as ever using vast amounts of borrowed money.
Or, £520 per year in return for one potential vote for Labour (cost to the taxpayer, obviously). It’s a great deal!
It doesn’t even qualify as “gifting”. So, legally watertight, too. A blinder by 2TK.
This is 100% correct.
Poverty cannot be solved by purely economic measures.
There are African countries that are incredibly rich in natural resources, yet dirt poor.
In contrast, Switzerland is quite poor in natural resources, yet wealthy.
Besides, as far as I can see, nearly every political initiative seems to only make matters worse. Ultimately the political class suffers from the delusion that every problem can be tackled by legislation, regulations and redistribution of wealth.
Interesting photograph accompanying the piece… that’s not poverty, that’s the slovenly living standards of people who don’t give a toss.
Chances are that there’s a family living in this place and the breadwinner makes significantly north of £50,000/yr as senior software engineer or something like that. Many outwardly perfectly respectable people’s private lives look similar to this.
In the 1970s we lived 3 doors away from a hospital doctor and his wife who was a ward sister. Our boy played with their son and my wife called one day to bring him home. She was shocked by the dirty state of the house. Apparently, a number of the doctors lived in rented accommodation provided by the hospital and when they moved on many of the houses had to be deep cleaned.
He thinks giving them a piece of toast, a bowl of cornflakes and a cup of tea is some silly “Breakfast Club” should do the trick while at the same time plunging millions into fuel poverty pretending to save the planet with Net Zero.——It is government and their absurdity that is causing poverty with the highest energy prices in the world, meaning parents have to choose to eat or heat.
Comparison is the thief of joy. I am
lucky enough to be in the top few % in terms of material wealth in the UK, top
even less globally and top even less of everyone that ever lived. I still think about what I’d do with more. I have needed to work for a living most of my life- I guess I could have retired already but I like my work (I’m 60). I have spent the last 20
years trying to be excellent at various sports and playing musical instruments (and failing). Some people who don’t know better say I am an accomplished skater but I want to be John Curry. There’s nothing wrong with trying to make as good a life for yourself as you can but there’s a dangerous road that most of us go part way down at least sometimes. Politicians who encourage this kind of thinking are in my view despicable.
I find it interesting that lots of these people believe in Natural Selection as defined by Darwin, but seem to imply that the natural order of things is that everyone should be equal.
The fact that dare not speak its name is that some people are inadequate and live inadequate lives. The bill chasers for my old employer reported that some people (and their children) lived in houses with only bare boards and dog waste on the floor. Along with empty baked bean cans. Similarly I have been told of children coming to school with no socks – because their parents had sold them for drugs.
The Progressives believe that inadequate people may be lifted up because they are merely born blank slates and may be educated out of their inadequacy. This is a fallacy. Some may be ‘rescued’, some will not.
Education does work in some cases, but why were Grammar Schools discontinued when they increased social mobility? I can only conclude that the Great and Good are happy to play Lady Bountiful but are rather against the poor bettering themselves.
Education does work in some cases, but why were Grammar Schools discontinued when they increased social mobility?
That’s one of the rather sad or rather disgusting stories about how social justice really ‘improves’ the world: Forcing bright kids into comprehensives drags them down but they still drag the average performance up. That’s how a real world loss for some people can result in a feigned performance improvement someone who’s in charge of something can then make good use of.
The sad bit is that this isn’t even malice. The people who engage in this kind of social engineering simply don’t understand the outcomes they achieve. The average grade has increased! Surely, that must be a good thing!
Averages. Mathematical curiosities much admired by conmen.
And yet we get comments on here from sanctimonious and judgemental individuals who disparage others for not having kids and generally making major life choices which do not align with their own values.
If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a hundred times: some people should not become parents, because ultimately it’s the kids that suffer. These adults are incapable, dysfunctional or both.
Aside from the obvious examples of who shouldn’t have kids, here’s another one. Apparently his one year old daughter “decided” she wants to follow Ramadan fasting. I hope he’s not seriously saying this little girl has had no fluids, let alone food, all day. He’s on TikTok with another video called: “My one year old baby decided she wants to wear Hijab.”
”Found a COLOSSAL platinum evil bellend! How can a One year old make decisions? This is in the same vein of children deciding what gender they are! Surely this is child abuse? All evil wankers need to be be deported!”
https://x.com/IfindWankers/status/2024076371060813929
The problem is the measure of “net income falls below 60% of the median”. There are therefore two ways you can improve this metric. Raise household income – difficult. Far easier to lower the median through higher taxes, unemployment, loss of overtime or bonuses. With this metric, if the country is doing badly child poverty decreases but when the country starts doing well, child poverty increases. Totally misleading measure.
Half of people are below the median!
This can’t go on!
The primary role of law is to protect individual rights, particularly life, liberty, and property.
The only duty Government has is to uphold the law to protect its citizens. It is not for Government to provide for them.
The welfare-state is a system of corruption and bribery, whereby Government robs selective Peter to pay collective Paul to gain votes and power.
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men together in a society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorises it, and a moral code that glorifies it. —Frédéric Bastiat
There are no ‘free’ anythings as unless they are run by private people who grant access through their largesse and generosity, everything is paid for by taxpayers, and we are all taxpayers at some level because of indirect taxation at every step as I was painfully reminded of on an order today that pointed out the bill included £100 in VAT.
And if this government of morons was so worried about poverty, why is it so intent on increasing unemployment and in particular youth unemployment via its economically illiterate policies? And if you want a real laugh, the clowns have confirmed that pubs will be able to opne late during the World Cup – presuming that there are still any left or that they can afford to open late. Perhaps we will see pubs change their opening times to suit kick-off.
The poverty level is about twice the level of the basic state pension, so even married pensioners are on the verge of poverty if they have no other source of income. Nice to know that the government is happy to consign so many people to poverty.
The left talk about ‘The 1%’ as if they are from outer space. In the UK, everyone, pretty much, is in the Global 1%, of top incomes.
As a matter of interest, Billionaires constitute about 0.000000375% of the world population.
I’d be interested to see the figures on how much of the money they have and what percentage of the taxes they pay, if you have that information, Neil?
After the poverty of the 1930s had been eliminated in the 1950s, Labour had to redefine poverty to keep themselves in business.
After all, what’s a socialist party to do if there are no more poor people. The poor always have to be with them. And in a post-industrial society where there is no working class, people have to be redefined as ‘working families’.
See for example, The Welfare State We’re In, by James Bartholomew.
I have no doubt that there are many children living in ‘poverty’ but I quibble at the huge numbers being quoted by politicians. I was born during WWII and looking back I suppose I was living in poverty but we didn’t think of it like that. We were just hard up and got on with what we had. I remember once in the early 1950s we were each given an apple in school courtesy of the Canadian govt where there had been a glut and we were delighted. Of course we grumbled about our lot but on the whole we were content. Before anyone is classed as living in poverty I suggest that they are given a questionnaire. What is your total income? Do you have a colour TV, or the internet and a smart phone? Do you have SKY TV sports and films? Do you smoke? Do you have a car and which make? A questionnaire such as this could be quite revealing.
I forgot to add that if anyone (politicians, perhaps?) would like to know about poverty they should read George Orwell’s ‘The Road To Wigan Pier’.
When energy costs more than 10% of income you are in “Fuel Poverty”. —–The tragedy is that government are deliberately creating this in their drive to pretend they are saving the planet.
The Establishment has been importing poverty for several decades and this one is doing it as fast as it possibly can.
If you really wanted to stop child poverty in the UK, you would stop bringing it in …. including the 3rd world people who will produce the next generation of children living in poverty.