I began my speech from the pulpit, bringing me back to the first time I spoke in a pulpit a few months after Big Issue was launched (I’ve been at it a while). And I pointed out forcefully that most of the social support money given out does not get recipients nearer to exiting poverty. It is a handholding exercise. What we have to do is, yes, help people in need, but help them also to get out of poverty. And to prevent people falling into poverty. End the inheritance of poverty.
I have been going on about this issue for so long and yet we have moved no nearer to the solution. Afterwards, a professor of physics from Cambridge hit the problem full square as we sat in the college common room: “But it’s all well and good saying that we have a problem and that we are not doing any more than holding people’s hands while in poverty. But where are the answers?”
Wow!
That reminds me of my youngest brother Peter when I asked him to help me start Big Issue. He said: “But how do you know it’s going to work?” I thank Pete almost daily for the back-handed wisdom that is hidden there. What you might call wisdom by default.
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“The problem,” I answered the Professor of Physics, “is that until you know you have a problem you won’t be looking for solutions. If you know you’ve got a problem then out there are the answers, the solutions. But until you recognise the problem you are not going anywhere.”
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He couldn’t quite get it. But when you look at what governments say, new ones in particular, it’s always that they are going to get rid of poverty, but they don’t. That they are going to reduce it, but don’t. If they were to accept that whatever they are doing they are largely maintaining people in poverty and that they will have to build something splendidly different, then that at least gets us to recognise the problem.
Then the energies can be rallied to actually come up with how you can break the inheritance of poverty. How you must direct resources not into a costly maintenance of poverty, but into what should actually reduce poverty.
It is so interesting to me that so many educated and clever people don’t realise that until you recognise you’ve got the problem you are not going to do anything about it. That the professor asking “It’s all well and good saying you’ve got the problem, but where are the answers” denies the reality that no one in power actually recognises the ineptitude of almost all governmental efforts hitherto with regard to ending poverty for as many people as possible.
They cling to their poverty programmes that keep people in the warehouse of social security. Social security needs to help those people who can’t help themselves. It should not be a graveyard for giving up on people who never have a full life because they have never been given the means to get out of poverty.
I learned something from the professor: that once again, knowing you have a problem is not a matter of words. You have to get off your rear and do something about it. But the first thing is to embrace the fact that we’ve got a problem. If governments embraced that, then we would at last be on the road to recovery from poverty.
John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words from our archive.
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