We must change the terms of the debate approximately poverty – and that means looking at the behaviour not of the destitute but of the super-wealthyWhat happened to making poverty history? Since 2008 a mountain of research has documented the growing utilize of food banks,the extent of fuel poverty and the inadequacies of the state pension to provide housing or social care. And now the Joseph Rowntree foundation gives damning evidence that more than a million of us live in destitution. Like every study of poverty over the past century, from Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree’s in York in 1901, or these researchers indicate incontrovertibly that the poor are not to blame for their poverty but have it forced upon them by circumstance – specifically low or no income,ill health or homelessness.
Poverty researchers have always done grand work. They embarrass politicians who want to claim their actions cause prosperity not hunger – witness the current Conservative attempt to rebrand the minimum wage a “national living wage”. And they provoke readers of a liberal or leftwing persuasion to sympathy or exasperate – in 1965 poverty research led to the establishment of the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG). But talk approximately poverty and the poor rarely provokes riots, or prompts lasting change.
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Source: theguardian.com