I BELIEVE that a crucial element of a life of faith is that we offer truthful witness to “what is”. Those who experience poverty describe it as a web of challenges. It is not simply about having less money, which we could call a poverty of resources, but that economic hardship leads to poverty of relationship and to poverty of identity.
The pressure on parents can be immense. I write as someone who was born and raised in a poor working-class family. My father took a much lower-paid manual job (cleaning toilets) in his forties, after being made redundant by his former employer, to stay in work and support his five children.
That decision and its consequences were present throughout my childhood. I never went hungry, but I never had adequate footwear and had noticeably fewer opportunities than my grammar-school peers.
I did not go on a residential geography school trip with the rest of my class, because there was no money for walking boots, which were listed as necessary on the kit list. My clothes were always hand-me-downs. I shared a bedroom with my three sisters. I finally had a bedroom of my own and my first new clothes when I went to university at the age of 18 (on a full grant).
I AM now in my sixties, and Britain still has a hidden poverty epidemic. The worst- affected households are unable to clothe their children, feed them, and keep them warm. It has been described by the former Prime Minister Gordon Brown as less a “cost-of-living crisis” and more a “cost-of-staying-alive crisis”. In 2022, one million children in the UK were living in destitution. Child poverty has not gone away; rather, it is on the rise.
Living untruthfully, hiding from truth, really does not help, and perpetuates injustice. James Baldwin spoke of the need to build nations that were capable of bearing the truth. In his book Remember This House, he wrote: “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
I want to urge people of faith into naming the current epidemic of poverty affecting this nation’s children for what it is: a deep wound, as we fail the most vulnerable. Rising child-poverty levels, using the Government’s own definition of poverty, should be a front-page issue, but it hardly gets a mention.
In March, I was one of 35 faith leaders, including the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Williams, who signed a letter to the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, and the Work and Pensions Secretary, Liz Kendall, calling for a “bold and ambitious” approach to tackling the issues of child poverty (News, 28 March).
It was organised by the multidenominational Joint Public Issues Team (JPIT), which pointed out that 4.3 million children in the UK — three in ten — were living in poverty. In a further perpetuation of intersectional injustice, we must recognise that people from ethnic minorities are disproportionately affected: 49 per cent of black children live below the poverty line, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) reports.
SOME of what we must face to begin the necessary change and transformation is clear for all to see. The Prime Minister promised last year that he would introduce a plan to raise children out of poverty “by the millions”. The last Labour administration lifted more than half a million children out of poverty in its first five years. It has been done before: it can be done again, if we show boldness and courage now.
Sir Keir Starmer has said that lifting the two-child limit on benefits cannot be afforded “at present”; but a fair levy on the unacceptably high profits from gambling would release considerable resources. What kind of powerful nation do we want to be? It is noteworthy that the use of power in the New Testament is almost always to do with the freedom to release people from bondage.
Mr Brown has urged the Government to seek a partnership with the third sector, companies, and local government to work on a strategy. I support such a move. I want us to be truthful about child poverty. I want us to be those who in their rigorous thinking challenge current prejudice, disturb the complacent, question the foundations of all about us, and, in Harry Blamire’s words, “be a nuisance” to those who promote falsehoods.
The Hebrew prophets are clear that God’s people need to stop being uncaring and ignoring the suffering of the poor, but they must also stop actively courting catastrophe by failing to be what they are in essence called to be.
The Revd Helen Dixon Cameron was President of the Methodist Conference, 2024-25.
