Poverty

Pessimism sells. It shifts books and newspapers, sends ratings soaring. It fills lecture halls, wins research grants, makes political careers. We are fed this constant diet of doom, predicting anything from meteorological Armageddon to a tyranny of austerity, and so it is little wonder that we tend to miss the bigger story. A cold, dispassionate look at the facts reveals that we are living in a golden era. and that, if you use objective measures, 2013 has been the best year in human history. As a public service – and one which is rarely provided in broadcast or print – The Spectator will below provide evidence for these assertions. We can

Fanciful predictions of all the deaths that will result from climate change, decades into the future, are regularly thrown into public debate. Less attention has been given to a real statistic from the here and now, released by the Office of National Statistics this week, which shows the effects of one of the policies designed to tackle climate change: high energy prices. It emerged this week that there were 31,000 ‘excess’ deaths in England and Wales last winter, almost a third more than the previous year. Almost all were, in effect, British pensioners who died of the cold. It’s odd: Britain is a rich country with a massive welfare state

No serious person today views the Cuban Revolution as anything other than an impoverished tyranny – up to and including the leaders of that Revolution, who have been hastily turning toward capitalism since learning in 2009 that the island was on the brink of insolvency. It remains much easier to find useful idiots willing to defend Venezuela’s so-called ‘Bolivarian revolution’, however, which until recently was supposed to promise something better than its ossified Caribbean neighbour. Not for much longer, perhaps; for Venezuela is on the brink of a social explosion after 15 years of economic incompetence by Islington’s favourite petrocrat. It was reported this week that, absurdly, the most oil

The problem about relative poverty is precisely its relativity. The child poverty index, which measures whether a family’s income is below 60 per cent of the average, is a case in point; when incomes go down, bingo, so does child poverty. Which means that one sure fire if controversial way to improve the Government’s child poverty record would be to drive down everyone’s earnings. Iain Duncan Smith, Work and Pensions Secretary, made just this point yesterday when he made a speech about whether the definition should be rather wider than it is. ‘As we saw last year,’ he observed, ‘when the child poverty level dropped by two per cent –

Yesterday’s reshuffle isn’t the only story in town. Save the Children, a global charity, has today started to fundraise for children in Britain whom it says are affected by the government’s cuts. It is now run by Justin Forsyth, an ex-aide to Gordon Brown, who will have understood the political implications of the research: that coalition policies are making child poverty worse. The problem is that this analysis mistakes the nature of poverty in Britain, and – worst of all – the ways of alleviating that poverty. The root problem is a confusion of low income as a cause of these issues, rather than the symptom of wider social failings

One million children at risk of starvation in Niger; global food inflation last year of approximately 6 per cent; political instability linked to food price rises; drought in the US forcing corn prices up by 23 per cent; and more trouble down the road with Russia possibly banning wheat exports after failed harvests. Food is a very hot topic. The Prime Minister is right to use the Olympics to focus on global hunger. But while the main focus of this summit must be to address the problem in poor countries, it’s important to remember that food poverty exists in every country – rich and poor – in the UK as

‘You attack poverty by knowing what you do changes the lives of those people.’ In that phrase on this morning’s Today programme, Iain Duncan Smith summed up the difference between his approach to combating poverty and Gordon Brown’s. As Fraser has put it, Brown saw poverty as ‘a statistical game… his great spreadsheet puzzler’. The aim of the game? To reduce the number of people living in households below the ‘poverty line’ — set at 60 per cent of median income. The easiest way to achieve this is to move people from just below the line to just above it by giving them a bit of extra cash (in the

It’s the same for celebrities and policymakers: talking about marriage gets you headlines. Hence why the newspapers have concentrated on Iain DuncanSmith’s remarks today that ‘marriage should be supported and encouraged’ by the state. But there were two other parts of IDS’s speech — and the ‘social justice strategy’ document behind it — that I found more arresting. The first was his incisive attack on the Gordon Brown approach to fighting poverty (define it statistically and then massage the statistics so that they work in your favour), which deserves repeating: ‘First, we have seen a social policy overwhelmingly focussed on moving people above the income poverty line. A laudable ambition

My Daily Telegraph column today is about how poverty is a greater problem in Britain than racism, which I describe as an ‘almost-vanquished evil’. This has drawn some criticism, not least from those asking (understandably) what a white guy like me can know about racism. Not much, but plenty of academics have done a hell of a lot of work into racism in Britain (including two brilliant, young academics, Matt Goodwin and Robert Ford). And their studies present a far brighter picture than we’re used to. The abject failure of the BNP is not just down to Nick Griffin being a plumb — it’s because he tried to hawk a