Poverty

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.

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.

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.

[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.

David Cameron's decision to bin the disastrous measure of child poverty  is an important step towards improving young people’s life chances. Its very existence has led policymakers to use tax credits to manipulate this metric, rather than turn lives around. Child poverty refers to parents, not children: the parents whose income is below 60pc of the national average. This was set up by left-wing academics in the 1960s and then adopted by Eurostat. This means, for example, that ‘poverty’ can fall during a recession (as it did after the financial crisis), or rise if the state pension goes up. Children can go to bed in poverty and wake up out of it without experiencing any change in their lives whatsoever.

It's sad to see so many genuinely well-meaning people judge the fight against poverty by the publication of a massive spreadsheet, but that's the trap the UK government has been caught in for years. The Child Poverty Act is about income redistribution, and success is judged by how many people are seen to be below an arbitrary threshold: 60 per cent of average income. The figures came out today, and show that the number in poverty has barely shifted - which will surprise those who thought government cuts would push poverty figures higher. But is this really much cause to celebrate? There are still 2.3 million (17 per cent) of children in households deemed to be 'in poverty' - but, more importantly, this measure is pretty appalling.

Bashing the rich has become trendy. Last night, the Spectator hosted a debate at the Guildhall School of Drama on whether the rich have contributed their fair share to society, or if we should ramp up wealth taxes. It’s a very emotive topic and each of the speakers made a solid case for and against the motion: politicians should leave the wealthy alone — they already contribute more than their fair share. Proposing the motion, Spectator editor Fraser Nelson described how London is a city ‘shaped by the super rich,’ pointing out the number of places that serve a £20 vodka martini. But Fraser argued that society needs these wealthy people and taxing them more isn’t the best way to get money out of them.

A day after the BBC admitted to misquoting David Cameron on foxhunting, the broadcaster made another admission of error last night over the numbers of people using food banks. A Newsnight package on welfare initially declared that ‘numbers using food banks will hit a million this week’, but this figure was clarified with a short correction at the end of the programme: ‘In our welfare discussion we said there were a million people estimated to use food banks. There were actually a million uses by a smaller number of people than that.

Global capitalism has eradicated poverty and generated prosperity in the developing world at an unprecedented rate. You might imagine that a global anti-poverty charity, such as ‘Oxfam’, would celebrate this fact. But no – today Oxfam is making the headlines instead because it is worried about global wealth inequality. In particular, that ‘the wealthiest 1 per cent will soon own more than the rest of the world population combined’. Oxfam has been pushing this sort of meme for a while. Last year, it made the startling claim that ‘the world’s 85 richest people own the same wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion combined’. It was shown at the time, not least by Reuter’s Felix Salmon, that this statistic was bogus.

‘I shoot further than you, I am the biggest of the men!’ says John Sentamu, Archbishop of York. He is talking about the way politicians conduct themselves in the immigration debate. ‘We have got to be more grown up about it and not be like people who are screaming at each other across banks of a river,’ he says. ‘They mustn’t do what some people call male diplomacy which is always around the urinal… that kind of argument, it doesn’t work!’ Sentamu prefers a still small voice of calm from politicians, even if his own voice is booming and indomitable. His is never more than a few words away from a chuckle or a joke. This week sees the publication of a collection of essays called On Rock or Sand?

Were you aware that the famous actor Andy Garcia was born with a foetus growing out of his left shoulder? It was removed from him when he was a toddler. I had not known this and I am unhappy that some sort of conspiracy, some wall of silence, was constructed to keep this news from the paying public. I watched The Untouchables in blissful ignorance of the fact; had I known I would have picketed the cinema. Come clean about the dead foetus, Garcia! I am aware of the foetus business now only because I stumbled across an excellent website entitled ‘25 Celebrities With Hideous Physical Deformities’, and Garcia was there at number six.