My hiatus from work led to some new ideas around poverty prevention

I return after many weeks of absence due to an operation for a new hip, injured on my 79th birthday. I have not had the headspace to write. I have been reduced to physio and reading lots of Maigret detective novels, and trying to sleep through sleepless nights.

What should I write about? Probably I should try and stick to my main theme that I left unanswered before my operation: that is ‘the inheritance of poverty’. That we have a vast section of society who, because they inherited poverty from their parents, are themselves stuck in poverty.

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And that most agencies and individuals working with the results of inherited poverty, with poor health, poor education and subsequent poor job opportunities come nowhere near tackling that inheritance.

And that government seems to spend its poverty money on emergency and rarely on the prevention of poverty or the cure of poverty.                

That sounds like a permanent complaint that I have been making for many, many years. And I have yet to get a serious player in politics to do any more than say, “Great idea to get rid of the inheritance of poverty. But because we haven’t surely that speaks volumes, else we would have done it.”

Not one supposedly serious voice has said to me that we should reinvent what we are doing because obviously it’s not working. Whatever it is that we are doing. I get smiles but the nearest to a confession I get is: “We avoid tackling the inheritance of poverty because you’re asking for the impossible. We have to stick with the possible.”

Sticking with the possible means we have a burgeoning government budget for keeping people ticking over in poverty. And then we find that keeping people in this state of dependency means it’s difficult to get people out of poverty and into highly skilled and rewarding work. 

Suddenly, while lying through one of my sleepless nights, I came up with an idea that in the cold light of day had credibility to me: What if we just accept those organisations and public bodies who provide for the emergency of poverty but never prevent or cure it? If we accept that they will be always be responding to the problems of poverty but will never develop the mechanism to ‘turn off the tap’ by preventing it; or curing it when it happens. What if we accept that that’s all they can do; provide food or shelter, or clothing, or a shoulder to cry on?

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That has been one of the most difficult things for me to accept because I believe poverty can be destroyed, got rid of, and be made a thing of the past. But what if we accept that they will never do any more than ameliorate the issue, meaning it will always exist? Keeping future generations busy with something we never solved. So what if you could then could say, “No, you get on with the emergency and hopefully we can help you do a better job of it.”?

My idea was to borrow something from ‘carbon credits’. That is, carbon credits are bought to offset the damage done by carbon. You build a carbon-causing building or business, and you pay someone to offset the carbon cost to the planet by paying for more than the carbon that is created. 

A forest, for instance, will be planted to offset the damage. And if done arithmetically correctly, you get more carbon reduction by such a transaction.

What if you had ‘poverty credits’. Meaning that we know you are not getting rid of poverty in your work so why not give a poverty-ending body credits so that they can do the poverty ending, since the emergency body are not doing it.

I hope this doesn’t sound too complicated. You are offsetting your inability to get rid of poverty by supporting a body that is there to get rid of it, and is not simply there to keep it as bearable as possible. (In fact, all the emergency interventions only extend the life of poverty, so by getting their support you are asking them to contribute to getting rid of poverty.) 

Then they can get on with their emergencies. You build a well-financed poverty-ending mechanism. Gradually, the poverty-enders should reduce the need for emergency. By reducing the size of poverty.

Big Issue is ideally placed to converge all of the poverty-enders in the world into one body. The projects that do genuinely get people out of poverty and away from poverty. The government initiatives that work, somewhere in the world, to get people out of poverty. You converge them all and you start making poverty history, as was the big promise 21 years ago with the ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign that changed very little.

It is obvious that those people who have consistently told me I’m expecting to create the impossible are dead right. And that I should accept the possible. 

But then I would become a part of the system that brings kindness into poverty but not exit or prevention of poverty. Then my 79 years would be little more than me pissing up the wall. 

From slum-born to just being another brick in the wall of accepting poverty as something that we can only feed and not slaughter. 

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