Poverty

Thursday

Anna Aslanyan

Putting the boot into Italy

A young woman, naked and covered in blood, totters numbly down a night road. A driver spots her in his headlights and swerves. Was he the last to see Clara alive? Did she jump to her death from a parking structure, as stated in the report? Are her rich family trying to hide more than their property deals? What was the preternatural bond that tied together Clara and her brother? Why did she let various older men seduce her? Who is running a Twitter account in her name, having begun with ‘I didn’t kill myself’? These questions will keep haunting you even after you’ve turned the last page of Ferocity.

Thursday

Anjali Joseph

Change and decay | 17 August 2017

Writing of his grandmother’s cremation, Kushanava Choudhury reflects in The Epic City that, while his expatriate Indian cousins are separated from the occasion, ‘I was sipping tea in Nimtala, present in the moment at the centre of our world’. It’s Choudhury’s longing to be back in this centre, which might have seemed less than obviously central to a metropolitan American, that takes him to Calcutta after he graduates from Princeton. He spends a few years working at the Statesman, Calcutta’s most venerable English newspaper, and later returns to the city, eventually getting married to his girlfriend, who happens also to be an American of Bengali origin.

Thursday

Daniel Hahn

The classic that conquered the world

Somewhere between his first and second drafts, Victor Hugo decided to change the title of his great novel from Les Misères to Les Misérables, shifting the focus from society’s problems to the people suffering them. And what problems they were. Hugo had never been brutally poor himself, but he’d borne witness to enough brutal poverty around him to know it was real, and to understand what it did to people. He knew, too, how ill-equipped his society was to help the poor, or to fix the causes of their predicament. Not least because in the 1840s, when he started writing Les Misères, only land-owning citizens voted, so as long as the poor didn’t create trouble they weren’t a constituency in whom politicians were especially interested.

Monday

Fraser Nelson

What Oxfam won’t tell you about capitalism and poverty | 16 January 2017

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.

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 12 January 2017

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.

Tuesday

Lloyd Evans

Hedda Garbler

Hedda Gabler is one of the most influential plays ever written. It not merely illuminated an injustice, the enslavement of women within marriage, it fomented the revolutionary achievements of feminism. It deserves to be done as Ibsen intended. This updated version from Ivo van Hove locates Hedda in one of those posh urban dream homes that resemble an art gallery. Stage left, buckets filled with flowers. Centre, an abandoned plinky-plonk piano. At the rear, a lamp the size of a traffic bollard. Scruffy off-white masterpieces deck the walls. Everything looks chic and scaled-up. Tesman is a penniless American academic married to tetchy Hedda who pads about barefoot, in her nightie, grousing. Effortful gestures abound.

Claudia Massie

Artist gets £15,000 of public funds to live in Glasgow and eat chips

The Glasgow Effect is a term given by epidemiologists and sociologists to describe the disproportionate levels of ill health and early death in Scotland’s second city. Disproportionate, because even when the usual factors of poverty are accounted for, Glasgow exceeds expectation. People in Glasgow have the lowest life expectancy in Scotland but even the wretched figures given for the city as a whole mask appalling local discrepancies. In 2008, a study for the Centre for Social Justice found that a white male in the Calton area of the city could expect to live until the age of 54, some twenty seven years less than his Bearsden counterpart.

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 8 December 2016

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.

Thursday

Matthew Parris

My fascist moment on the ship of failures

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.

Thursday

Johan Norberg

Our golden age

‘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.

Matthew Parris

Something must be done for Wales

On Monday 25 July we climbed Cader Idris. No particular reason except a free Monday and a memory of what a fine mountain it looked when, many years ago and heading for the north Wales coast, I skirted this massive ridged hunk of green and black rising from oak forests. Some hills have a strong sense of their own identity and Cader Idris impresses itself on all who see it. It’s a walk, really, not a climb, but at just under 3,000 feet a big, steep walk, taking four or five hours up and down. So we set out from Derbyshire at seven and were there in three-and-a-half hours. In a little sunshine and some misty drizzle we left the car and followed the trail. Our route was to be circular, clockwise, right over the top.

Thursday

Mark Mason

Maryland’s mean streets

Quick tip, should you ever find yourself alone in the interview room at the police headquarters of Prince George’s County, Maryland: don’t go to sleep. The officers will see you through the peephole and assume you’re guilty. Anyone innocent finding themselves in that windowless, 8ft by 8ft room paces around, bounces on their toes and sobs. Only the guilty snooze there. It’s known as the ‘felony nap’. Del Quentin Wilber learned a lot as he tailed the PG homicide squad during February 2013. His account of the experience is a non-fiction version of faction, the genre in which novelists incorporate real people into their stories. Coming at it from the opposite end of the spectrum, Wilber presents his facts as if in a novel.

Thursday

Henry Jeffreys

The horse from hell

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.

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life | 7 April 2016

My adventures in penury land me with two job applications on my screen, one for MI6, one for Sainsbury’s. Do I become a spy, or stack shelves in a supermarket? The vacancies are on a recruitment site called Indeed, one after the other: Counter Assistant, Sainsbury’s. Intelligence Officer, London. Just like that. I began googling jobs in a panic because embarrassing things started to happen. For example, a friend who runs a tack shop gave me a broken bag of feed for the horses, saying, ‘Please, take it, I can’t sell it. Really, you’d be doing me a favour.

Monday

Fraser Nelson

What Oxfam won’t tell you about capitalism and poverty

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 peddling the impression that inequality is getting worse, that the rich are engorging themselves at the expense of the poorest. This narrative (which is discredited as it is old) suits Oxfam’s fundraisers.

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

Around the world, poverty is collapsing. Why is that so hard to believe?

In 2012 and 2013, The Spectator opened its Christmas special issue with a leading article counting the ways in which the world had never been a better place, and was set to get better still. We didn’t do so this year, as the list would have been a bit too similar to previous versions – but others did pick up the theme, including Dan Hannan on ConHome. This was taken up by Matthew d’Ancona in the Guardian making an excellent follow-up point: if things are so good, why don’t people feel it? He traces this argument to Matt Ridley’s 2010 book, the Rational Optimist, and to Stephen Pinker’s 2011 book about declining violence. I agree with him that Ridley’s book is a landmark in the debate: if you haven’t read it, go buy it now.

Thursday

Matt Ridley

The real victims of climate change

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thegreendelusion/media.mp3" title="Matt Ridley and Michael Jacobs debate the point of the Paris climate change conference" startat=31] Listen [/audioplayer]The next generation is watching, Barack Obama told the Paris climate conference: ‘Our grandchildren, when they look back and see what we did in Paris, they can take pride in what we did.’ And that, surely, is the trouble with the entire climate change agenda: putting the interests of rich people’s grandchildren ahead of those of poor people today. Unfair? Not really, when you look at the policies enacted in the name of mitigating climate change.

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Does George Osborne really want to make himself the scourge of the strivers?

Without George Osborne, we’d probably be living under Prime Minister Ed Miliband right now. His value to the government goes far beyond his brief as Chancellor; he is across most departments most of the time. But as Chancellor, he is judged by the success (or otherwise) of his Budgets – which is why he is now in a moment of great danger. His love of complexity has come to threaten not just his own reputation, but that of the Conservative Party too. Sometimes, Osborne is so clever that he can be downright stupid: This is one of these times. In my Telegraph column today, I say that Osborne is currently planning to soften – but not abandon – his tax credit cuts programme.

Thursday

The Spectator

Hot air summit

The delegates who will gather for the star-studded Paris climate summit include celebrities, presidents and perhaps even the Pope. Among other things, they will be asked to consider the formation of an ‘International Tribunal of Climate Justice’, which developed countries would be hauled before for breaching agreed limits on greenhouse gas emissions. That the proposed body will seek to be ‘non-punitive, non-adversarial and non-judicial’ does not reassure. A tribunal, if it is worthy of the name, ought to be all those things. Does the threat of climate change really justify such a system? It is disturbing to think how many world leaders and policymakers might casually answer ‘yes’.

Thursday

The Spectator

The Australian example

For many years, Australia has been turning away boats filled with migrants. From a remove, this looks cold--hearted — a nation built by immigrants showing no compassion for others who want a better life. But it is precisely because Australia is an immigrant nation that it understands the situation: if you let the boats land, more people come. People traffickers will be encouraged, migrants will be swindled, and their bodies will wash up on your shores. Any country serious about immigration needs a more effective and robust approach. Tony Abbott, the former Prime Minister of Australia, made that point clearly this week on a trip to London.