The only way forward is to split the poverty atom

Oh yes, I am becoming more boring and repetitive. I cannot put this down to age. It is my increasing obsession with finding the way to end poverty.  

I used to be so fresh and entertaining. In bed with hundreds of vital thinkers who had come up with some magic solution to homelessness that would lift a handful, a hundred, a thousand out of homelessness and poverty. But as the cold decades oozing failure passed I had to admit that being part of a clever bunch of activists who had come up with some bright ideas lost its lustre.

We were nothing more than some bright light in a sea of darkness. Whatever we did we never went mainstream. We showed all our fellow enterprising brothers and sisters how we avoided trying to get rid of poverty by coming up with yet another new bright sparkling light.

So we never, ever found a way to come anywhere near turning the poverty tap off once and for all.  

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As a species we are great at showing our ingenuity. We know how to try and make things kind of work when really they don’t. We circumnavigate the problem – poverty – that for thousands of years we have yet to deal a death kick to. In other words, we go for the emergency handholding of people in poverty, the stop gap, the lovely shining initiatives.

But never do we put our minds to actually obliterating poverty from our lives. We are serious jokers. You can see that carrying this contempt for all of those stop-gapisms can get you into miserable waters. So I become repetitive and boring because I ask, when are we going to ‘spilt the atom’ over poverty rather than produce another band-aid to stick over the problem? Splitting the atom means becoming forensic about poverty’s causes and their eradication, rather than going after the latest coping initiative.  

Governments are largely a lost cause in getting rid of the ‘inheritance of poverty’, which to me is the major problem currently facing us: the millions of people born into poverty whose parents were born into poverty, often going way back. A culture of inherited poverty means you are harmed and held back even at birth.

Read more:

• How government inaction is radicalising Britain
• My hiatus from work led to some new ideas around poverty prevention
• I’ve written over a million words about poverty – here’s what I’ve learned

Poverty dominates your horizon. It determines the trajectory of your health. It takes over your thoughts and how you respond to events in your life. Yet governments seem incapable of grasping the need to allocate resources to those early years to break poverty’s inheritance.  

Look, I know it’s difficult. It’s much easier to allocate small amounts of money to millions of people caught in the poverty trap of social security, and leave them there forever, than to create the social tools to get people out of poverty. Warehousing the poor in poverty is incredibly expensive but hey, at least it stops the majority starving before your eyes, or being thrown out into the streets.

Yes, we cannot turn a blind eye to need. And there are thousands of people and organisations that try and address need. Addressing the emergency of need, the pressing shortages of food and housing, of clothing and warmth, cannot be the only show in town. But by and large it is, with some small investments around the edge of the social security bubble that tinker with the issue for a bit and then drop out of sight. 

Imagine we didn’t have a Ministry of Defence and suddenly we were threatened. What would we do? We’d create one and bring together all the equipment and systems to address the issue of defending ourselves. Ditto if we didn’t have a health ministry.

What I am asking is that we bring all of the roots of poverty, and the initiatives to solve it, into one Ministry of Poverty Prevention; so we can begin the process of preventing poverty from harming every aspect of contemporary life.  

But if we are going to split the atom over poverty we are going to have to get even cleverer. So I advocate that, from perhaps the age of 11, we have the topic of poverty taught in schools, colleges and universities. Make it compulsory to educate people in understanding how poverty has rotted our social learning in society and has created an appalling and empty and vacuous class system.

For among the winners in this game are educated idiots. Oxbridge regularly produces people who do well out of the highly oxygenated esoteric education on offer but who waste their talents in simply maintaining a system that fails. And nearly always produces the plodding political and social leaders who forever clog up our ability to think fresh and anew. Who never get around to splitting the atom over poverty.  

We could have done this in Victorian times if we didn’t have dullards running the show. Imagine a nation having to do a module on poverty and its causes – creating a vast body of flatulent thinking for sure, but among it all serious thinkers would produce gems. There would be lots of knowledge thrown around about poverty and its causes.

A national obsession with seeing how poverty undermines a healthy reality for us all. Out of this understanding we would get to see how our history has been riddled with poverty. I am convinced we would produce some great brains around splitting that poverty atom; so we could lay the beast of poverty to rest at last.  

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

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