10 Propositions on modern poverty

Prepared for a BBC R4 Sunday broadcast for 26 December, 2004. The occasion was a debate from York Minster with Lord Richard Best of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, following the release of the thinktank's centenary report on modern povery.

1 This is Britain: we are inclined to believe that people sink or swim according to their own efforts. If you want somewhere more consensual, go to the Continent.

2 But if you go there, remember that you will be disapproved of in quite painful ways if you don't conform. Babies born out of wedlock, not taking your schoolwork seriousy, being drunk in the pub: these don't go down well in the Lutheran and Gallic cultures which dole out more welfare.

3 New Labour is quite a good government, if you like centre right policies. They are doing the Clinton thing of making work pay and making idleness more painful. Maybe they should do more of this, and raise our taxes for this good work. My own prejudice is to reduce the State Take - but that will make society tougher as well nicer.

4 Remember, the jobs they say they've ceated came along when the economy was booming. Who's to say there would not have been even more jobs if the economy had done even better because taxes were lower?

5 Or that a lower tax economy would face a less severe bump than this one may soon experience because of world economic facors and an imprudnet chancellor? What then might have been the preferred option for the poor?

6 The modern poor are either mostly stupid, lazy or feckess (a very few are fabulously unlucky). How else did they not join the millions of other working class people who stopped being working class (let alone poor) years ago? And why do their more successful relatives so often leave the state to pick up their familial mess?

7 Rember the old probem: wefare makes weak people even weaker.

8 And this one too: helping poor people get work a) subsidises cheapskate employers and b) creates more comeptition for hard-working unsubsidised quite poor workers one rung up

9 We like having poor people in Britain. When we get rid of one lot by enrching them, we import another lot from poor countries. The immigrants tend to be much more talented and certainly much harder working than our own poor people.

10 The right-wing is much kinder than the left. There would be very few poor native-born people in this country if the poor had read granny's right-wing tapestry homilies and had feared poverty more.

ends