I've written over a million words about poverty – here's what I've learned

Each Wednesday morning I rise early and begin the process of writing my 800/900 word column. For 30 years I have been doing the same. That’s about 45,000 words a year, multiplied by 30 equals 1,350,000 words. One day I hope to go through this mountain of words and extract the most useful of them. Some, I remember, are precise and clever, thoughtful and clear. Others are ponderous, obscure, unworthy of a second read.  

And wrong. Yes, I have been wrong. I remember, although not swallowing the shite about weapons of mass destruction under the tutelage of Tony Blair’s thinking, I had my own beef, because Saddam Hussein had murdered the Marsh Arabs who lived in the flooded waters of Iraq, and I had had a great personal attachment to Mesopotamia since my late teens, Nineveh and Ur and historic Iraq: I wanted Saddam dead.  

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I wrote an article when it looked as if it was all over, about how the US could give a health service to Iraq but could not do it for its own people. The younger Bush wanting to leave behind American goodies so that they behaved themselves. Trying to be perceptive makes me now realise, in this constant stream of comment, that you have a hit and fail rate.

Perhaps like Winston Churchill, who openly praised and courted Benito Mussolini and Italian fascism, not realising that Mussolini was the precursor of Adolf.  

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I am pleased that at times I suggested decent things, like walking around town and country, taking advantage of free things. Using buses and trains rather than cars. Going to museums and free exhibitions. Using libraries; use those libraries or find them snatched from you.  

Describing my favourite libraries growing up, where the smell of books and paper mixed with the sweat of human thinking seemed an aphrodisiac to learning. Fulham’s public library to me as a boy was a refuge from a mad adult and child world where people seemed to walk around on their heads. Everything seemed so illogical and harmful and threatening, and therefore painful.

Fulham in the 1950s was the awful Bastille I had to escape from; and did so successfully by always getting nicked and put away. I finally broke all umbilical cords to the place by leaving a young offenders’ place and getting into Chelsea School of Art. Thereby joining the middle classes, who I soon learned had their heads somewhere equally dark.  

I have written about the simple pleasures of walking and the cheap pleasures of now disappeared cafes that littered my early life: the greatest one being an outdoor cafe opposite Westminster Abbey where the world witnessed the outpourings of grief when Princess Diana’s funeral took place.  

The cafe was destroyed in the days of Tony Blair by the building of the Queen Elizabeth II Centre. Imagine an all-night, 24-hour outdoor cafe with an awning under which you ate at a long table that circumnavigated this working-class haven of plasterers, postmen, roadsweepers and scaffolders; often mixed in with late-night debs and toffs back from a dinner and dance. And aspirant leaders from parliament nearby.  

And of course me who escaped from school and Fulham and Chelsea and took the 11 bus all the way to the cafe! Such grandeur. 

But increasingly I find myself waking early full of thoughts about the ruination of poverty that each succeeding administration seems to accommodate. The life-shortening ugliness of bringing our children into a world so bereft of hope and opportunity that it’s as though we have condemned them to a nothingness for the rest of their lives. 

No wonder they pass that trauma of inheriting poverty on to the school room and the street, where it brings death and harm to many. No wonder drink and drugs play such a big part in lives empty of a future. No wonder mental health has nosedived, added to by Covid, a world-shattering event with effects as long-lasting as the 100 days of Trump may well prove to be.  

But writing also about how Trump is the likely outcome of a world that does not have a leadership that can dismantle the evils of not being able to guide and feed your children into health and wellbeing. About the vacuous leadership offered by politicians over here who are duplicitous and empty of creating a future for many of our poorest citizens.  

Yes, now I mainly go on about poverty and its dominant form in our political and social life; and how it limits us all because it is never prioritised as the killer of our communal life. Our society.  

Exhibitions have been described by me, always joyous, never disappointing. And places like the National Gallery, which I encourage everyone who gets to London to go to, celebrating its 200th anniversary last year. My attachment runs deep: when I was a rough-sleeping runaway boy of 15 they allowed me to wash in their facilities, as did the National Portrait Gallery next door.  

Writing is always a challenge. Putting down on paper things that will lift people into being useful in the world. And realising and tackling the impediments that stop the growth of true democracy; for democracy withers where poverty thrives.

The creation of a Ministry of Poverty Prevention and Cure still seeps into my words because I cannot see how this government, or the next, is ever going to sort poverty out, unless it coordinates and converges its energies into one department. 

The gentrification of the world that excludes the poor might well be the hidden theme of these near one and a half million words, to which the words of this column are but the latest addition. 

Await The Best (and Worst) of Birdswords. It may come.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words here.

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