If you earn £50k per year in a nation where the average is £100k, apparently 'you are living in poverty'.
It is certainly in the interest of many socialist and leftwing groups to make absurd claims based on 'relative poverty'.
It is a farce.
We are assailed constantly with absurd claims of X millions of children living in alleged poverty in the UK.
The con trick is that as long as you are working on a relative basis this figure can never drop, whatever measures are taken.
Obviously, the only way the figure can drop on such logic, is if income levels become greatly compacted - a clear and deeply puerile socialist aim.
The media happily reports these claims from political groups and leftwing institutions like the Rowntree Foundation as if they are Holy Writ. They are not.
We desperately need an independently produced, accurate, realistic definition of what poverty is, as a matter of some urgency. This definition would not 'move the goalposts' on the whim of any passing marxist.
What is poverty?
I am actually far more concerned about the quality of family environments for children than mere finances.
{Many of my readers would be astonished by the income levels of many people living 'haphazard and chaotic' lifestyles in the back streets and 'sink' estates.}
For me, a child dragged up by an unnecessarily single parent; latchkey children; those with no spiritual input;' children who spend large amounts of time on the streets; ones who are educated to expect handouts; those brought up in criminal, amoral , ill-disciplined environments - THESE are where the REAL poverty is in evidence.
These are things NOT based on weekly benefit levels. In the 1930s the vast majority of objectively poor parents did not inflict these forms of poverty onto their offspring.
