CONCERN about poverty and calls to action for justice appear in more than 2000 verses in the Bible. One out of every 16 verses in the New Testament mentions poverty, and, in St Luke’s Gospel, it is one out of every seven. There are at least 14 passages in Luke which refer to the tragedy of poverty. “Blessed are the poor” is probably the first and most memorable sound-bite in history. The text often translated as “The poor are always with us” actually means that we should always stand with the poor.
Yet, as a country, we seem to be forgetting the messages of the Sermon on the Mount and the parable of the Good Samaritan: that we should help those in need. Nor do we seem to remind people as often as we should that that there is a golden rule that is common to Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Sikhism, and unites every other faith with my own, which asks us to treat everyone as we would want to be treated ourselves: a shared view of our obligations to one another which we are not acting on today when we see the scale of need in our midst.
For too long, the political system has downplayed the scale of poverty in our country and the desperate sorrows of the 4.5 million children who are in poverty today. The condition of those in the greatest need is rarely discussed in Parliament, and is barely covered by newspapers and the media; so poor children suffer in silence and behind closed doors, their plight too often unreported, their pain unacknowledged, and their needs unaddressed.
And, even when politicians and the media do talk about poverty, they consider it more a social than a moral issue about human dignity; all too often, they peddle the wholly inaccurate allegation that children are poor because they have feckless, work-shy, incompetent parents, who are part of a dependency culture. The truth — that 70 per cent of them are growing up in working families on low pay — rarely merits a mention in any conversation.
BUT poverty — and particularly child poverty — is now so ingrained in our country, and so divides our society, that I consider it a moral issue: it is about how we value each child’s life, and whether we can stand by as poor children live lives so different and detached from the mainstream that we are no longer one nation but two, the one barely recognising the needs of the other.
In fact, today, one million children are destitute or near-destitute, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation: that is, children who lack at least three of the basic essentials for civilised living, such as food, clothes, hygiene essentials, and a roof above their heads. This includes 180,000 children in England alone who are homeless — an increase of 15,000 in temporary accommodation in just one year.
Charles Dickens, 175 years ago, alerted us to the danger of nations so divided that people were living different lives and failing to understand one another. Today, according to the Children’s Commissioner, children are living in Dickensian-level conditions; and yet we could begin to solve the problem of a broken support system tomorrow.
Breakfast clubs, free school meals, and family hubs can make a difference in helping poor children; so can help with housing, health, and education, as the experience of the Sure Start programme proved.
Multibanks, which I play a part in running, have given out 11 million goods in almost every region of Britain, helping children. Like foodbanks, faith-based charities, and anti-poverty groups, they mean that children do not have to be taken into care or that families are not forced into evictions. Breakfast clubs are worth £9 a week, and school meals £12 a week, for each child. Families have lost more than £70 a week, and, in some instances, £130 a week, because of the iniquitous two-child benefit rule, which has to be abolished.
IF WE fail to act soon, it will be a stain on our souls and a scar on our national conscience. This should concern all decent-minded people greatly. Social security was conceived on the principle that, as a community, we advance together or not at all.
Our Welfare State was built on the belief that progress was not one person succeeding at the expense of others, but all of us moving forward together. And so it is not anti-enterprise to say that those who have done well in enterprise should help those who have not had the chance to be enterprising; and it is not anti-wealth to say that those who have amassed wealth should do more to help the not-so-wealthy.
This is why I advocate a tax on the hugely profitable gambling industry, to be allocated to taking the first 500,000 children out of poverty (News, 8 August). One hundred and twenty years ago, when social reform was being demanded to deal with rising poverty, Winston Churchill called for an end to a world in which there was such a gap between the vast concentration of accumulated wealth and the gaping sorrows of the left-out millions.
The UK today can never be a community of equals if millions of children are, as now, permanently left out and left behind. This November’s Budget must take the first steps in bridging this economic, social, and moral divide.
Gordon Brown, a former Prime Minister, is the president of the Multibank.
