MARY GILLEECE
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.
This article (Please Keir Starmer, Stop Trying to “Lift” People Out of Poverty) was created and published by The Daily Sceptic and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Mary Gilleece
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