Poverty always gets our prime ministers in the end

For some years now I have had the habit of renaming pubs. Not for any reason other than the fun of it. In the 1980s, in order to revive a sagging pub market, the brewery and pub owners started the trend ahead of my renaming. The ‘Something and Firkin’ was the kind of renaming that took off almost overnight. I think my first renaming was ‘The Firkin Nuisance’, inspired by this attempt at making pubs sound modern and trendy. Soon I was producing such new names as ‘The Torn Chemise’, or ‘The Whingeing Liberal’. 

But working in Westminster, and seeing the flurry of pubs around parliament, I started to take reinvention to a new level. ‘The Misguided Member’ was down a side street minutes from the Palace of Westminster where after hours the parliamentary workers gathered. Another one even nearer to parliament was seeking a new name in my imagination when I came up with ‘The Stumbling Minister’. 

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‘The Stumbling Minister’ was though in some ways a more serious attempt at political commentary. It could have easily been called ‘The Stumbling Prime Minister’ for in my power-watching over the years I have noted that eventually ministers and prime ministers seem to lose their footing. 

Has there in my lifetime, going back to the foundations of the welfare state and the end of the Second World War, been any gracious exit from power by any of our political leaders? All seemed to end a-stumbling. All unable to deliver the great promise that oozed from them when they assumed the power of minister, or prime minister. 

Whoever takes up the mantle of office seems incapable of laying it down without the embarrassing feeling that they fudged it or wrong footed the electorate in their time in office. 

Few retirements have ever been accomplished without evoking a stumbling and a falling. A loss of vision at the end, even in the case of Churchill and the supposedly Teflon Thatcher, who was poignantly pictured exiting Number 10 in the back of a car in tears. 

Possibly Gordon Brown’s exit from power, he who almost single-handedly rescued the banks after the 2008 collapse, was the most memorable, striding out of Number 10 with his family. He managed to put a brave face on rejection 20 years after Thatcher’s humiliating last moments. He made falling and stumbling look acceptable. 

Read more:

• The UK’s political map is changing almost overnight. Starmer will have to get tough
• Poverty policy needs a rethink. One day, we will replace the fish with fishing rods
• The story of my life – in 62 pubs

Why is the promise of early days so often commuted into at best a half-arsed moderate success? Why is it that a regime ends with a stack of ‘pilots’ and ‘initiatives’ in their wake yet little evidence of pressing issues having been resolved? Unfortunately there is very little evidence coming from government that they entirely understand the corrosive power that poverty plays on their intentions, their budgets and their departments of government.

It’s as if they assume government and accept its existing form. Not realising that without a specific government department given over to poverty, then poverty will leech into and corrupt and undermine the actions and plans of other departments. 

If you wish to have healthy people then you have a Ministry of Health. If you want to educate people you have a Ministry of Education. If you don’t actually tackle poverty as an insidiously spreading phenomenon then you leave government departments having to do their work through the haze of poverty. 

With our NHS doing its best to make the poorest among us as healthy as possible, you are actually appointing doctors and nurses to face down poverty when it is not in their skill base to do so. Yet doctors and nurses have to try and return people to health when it is often poverty that is the cause of their illness. 

They can do precious little about this poverty. Why are teachers trained increasingly to spot the evidence of poverty in the classroom while they can do very little to prevent it entering the classroom? Because teachers are trained not to dismantle poverty but to live with its consequences. 

Police officers in their jobs are not trained to end poverty, yet have to live with its consequences in their work. 

Poverty eats into ministerial plans and ambitions. So when a Tony Blair comes into parliament stating that he will bring people out of poverty then unfortunately the dreadful ghost of all former failed promises is there to slap him down. Why? Because it would mean taking the creaking, ill-formed structural ineptness of government itself and trying to breathe new life into its dead thinking. 

So in the end it’s back to a plethora of pilots, initiatives, programmes and partial targets reached to cover the nakedness of his achievement. Unless you recognise the cancer of poverty and deal with that then you have to fall back to another generation of tinkering. We need to open ministerial eyes and address the predictability of failure which they inherit and loyally adhere to. 

Yet if you had a Ministry of Poverty Prevention and Cure – MOPPAC – and converged all poverty efforts into one department, then you could start looking for answers that reduced the terrible damage done by poverty to schooling, to health and so on.  

Unless we have a big intellectual revolution in government thinking then more of the same will continue to erode the quality of delivery to us and those in need. And leave another befuddled generation of ex-ministers and ex-prime ministers trying to justify their actions in the face of their half-arsed achievements. 

Perhaps the ‘more of the same’ stops here? We can live in hope.

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

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