Poverty

Can Priti Patel really stand in Barrow-in-Furness, which has some of the most deprived wards in the country, and say that the government isn't responsible for poverty? The Home Secretary's comments to the BBC's North West Tonight have unsurprisingly gone viral because of the juxtaposition between the charity she was visiting and the stridency with which she said them. It's worth noting that she wasn't, as some have claimed, standing in a food bank. In the interests of accuracy, Patel was actually visiting The Well, which is a local charity helping people with with addiction (I live in the town, and it's a fantastic organisation, like so many of the charities and community groups who tend to be staffed by Barrovians with their own stories of poverty and struggle.

‘What a fabulous tan, where did you get it? said one of my fellow lunch guests as we entered the women’s powder room of a Mayfair hotel. I get this a lot. I want to talk about where I have wintered, or summered, or springed, because although I am poor I am lucky enough to mix with people who are not, and I love people who are not. I will defend them to the death. The poorer I get, the more capitalist I become. I can trace my attraction to Trump directly along the lines of my diminishing bank account and mounting credit card bills. I think it is to do with the fact that when one encounters poverty it is so unutterably awful that one can bear it only by taking refuge in the knowledge that somewhere else there are people who are comfortable, some fabulously so.

I became aware that there was real destitution in modern Britain five years ago. Destitution, as I see it, arises when a family or individual is hungry, unable to afford gas and electricity, and on the brink of homelessness. It was apparent to me then that too many people at the bottom of the pile who fall on hard times are slipping through holes in the nation’s safety net — some are even forced through those holes by the modern welfare state. The model of how society worked, which I had picked up as a child of the 1945 Attlee Government, survived my decade at the Child Poverty Action Group and many of the years I have spent as Birkenhead’s MP. It is the model that most voters held — a great story of British progress.

Your average milkman has more wealth than the world's poorest 100 million people. Doesn’t that show how unfair the world is? Or given that the poorest 100 million will have negative assets, doesn’t it just show how easily statistics can be manipulated for Oxfam press releases? They’re at it again today: the same story, every January. “Almost half of the world's wealth is owned by just 1% of the world's population” it said in 2014. It has done variants on that theme ever year, each time selling it as a new "big" story. All the time peddling the impression that inequality is getting worse, that the rich are engorging themselves at the expense of the poorest.

Still depressed, or, as Matthew Arnold put it, ‘the foot less prompt to meet the morning dew’, I got out of bed one afternoon and exchanged the soggy Devon hills for the tower blocks of Canary Wharf. I went at the invitation of Dr Ivan Mindlin, orthopaedic surgeon, Las Vegas casino house doctor during the mob-run era of ‘Lefty’ Rosenthal and Tony ‘the Ant’ Spilotro, and one of the most successful sports bettors in US history. He kindly put me up in an ‘executive’ room at a hotel round the corner from his 18th-floor apartment. The first night we went for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. We went there on foot. It was like going for a walk in a multicultural concrete-and-glass future.

We’re driving east, destination Grasse. Hairpin bends circling oak-clad hills. Autumn gold and scarlet. Exciting cambers. Blinding winter sunshine. The radio tuned to France Musique. A virtuoso Latin jazz trumpet. A bit poncy but it’s better than nothing. We’ve been talking and not talking. Now we’re talking again. She asks me if I like the social class I was born into. I like it very much,I say. ‘You didn’t rebel against your parents as a teenager?’ she says. I might have against my parents but not against my class, I say. I thought everyone was lower middle class. And when I was old enough to recognise other social classes, I was pleased to be lower middle class because it seemed to be the funniest class. I didn’t stop laughing.

There are no roads from the Peruvian river port of Iquitos, but the rich take aeroplanes. Those who cannot pay to fly may pay the premium for the 40ft motorised express canoes that take only a day to roar to and from the upriver port of Yurimaguas with its bus station. But losers in the global race cannot afford speed. For them there are only the big, slow, hot, lumbering cargo boats: nearly four days’ journey from Iquitos to Yurimaguas. So the moment a passenger walks up the gangplank and strings their hammock between the iron rafters of the open--sided deck, we can guess he or she is not one of life’s winners. Anyone who was wouldn’t travel this way. No less than among the rich there is social stratification among the poor, and the river fast shakes people down.

‘We have fallen upon evil times, politics is corrupt and the social fabric is fraying.’ Who said that? Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders? Nigel Farage or Marine Le Pen? It’s difficult to keep track. They sound so alike, the populists of the left and the right. Everything is awful, so bring on the scapegoats and the knights on white horses. Pessimism resonates. A YouGov poll found that just 5 per cent of Britons think that the world, all things considered, is getting better. You would think that the chronically cheerful Americans might be more optimistic — well, yes, 6 per cent of them think that the world is improving. More Americans believe in astrology and reincarnation than in progress.

There were moments while reading this sprawling, ambitious novel when I thought I was reading a masterpiece. But at other times, it felt as if the author was convinced that she was writing one. The Sport of Kings is the story of the Forge family of Kentucky. They’re a brutal lot. In the opening scene, John Henry Forge ties his son Henry to a post and whips him. A black employee, Filip, caught with John Henry’s wife, is lynched. As well as violence, John Henry instils a fierce sense of destiny in his son. Against his father’s wishes, Henry turns the family farm over to raising racehorses. Through some severe inbreeding, Henry creates the horse from hell, the aptly named Hellsmouth, an immensely strong but fragile filly.