Could we please have a ban on the all too common, absurd claims that x numbers of people in the UK are 'living in poverty'?Could we not instead, have an independent review body which does not use the dubious claims of relative poverty in order to justify spurious assumptions to make leftwing political points?
We need a clear definition of what poverty is to which all fairminded people might subscribe.
We already have: clean water; removal of sewage; food; access to medical care; local and guaranteed education; benefits when out of work; almost negligible numbers living on the streets.
Where the average salary is £100k per annum, the person on £60k is living in poverty. This is simply ridiculous and why relative poverty as a concept is useless and why it has multitudes of definitions.
Try telling my son who worked for a medical care charity in Malawi that we have poverty in this nation and he just laughs.
Children in horrific conditions? - Of course there are, but this is from neglect and not poverty. I have lived in a slum clearance area in Sheffield and the 'impoverished adults' drank, smoked and would not today dream of wearing a £5 pair of jeans instead of Levis; they shop carelessly without deigning to buy 'own brands'. Many take drugs, have made themselves deliberately unemployable and pray for any minor medical condition which will put them on enhanced benefits for life.
That some young women use child-bearing as a career choice is undeniable.
I would claim that many of the problems arrive from a benefit-driven society which takes responsibility for themselves away from far too many individuals who are encouraged to become feckless.
America has had a number of states which have restricted the number of benefits citizens may draw in a lifetime and the results have been astonishing. Unemployment has plummeted as people recognise that they cannot leech from society over a sustained period.
Melanie Phillips perhaps puts it best:
The high-minded, Quaker Rowntrees would undoubtedly have grasped in an instant the point behind this apparent paradox: that a post-religious culture consumed by materialism has simply lost its moral bearings along with its soul.
And they would probably also have seen that, unlike the great social reformers of the Victorian era for whom the alleviation of poverty was a religious and moral crusade, today's equivalent activists have systematically refused to acknowledge that holding people responsible for the consequences of their own actions lies at the heart of any effective anti-poverty programme.
