The number of people living in relative poverty in the UK is rising. But does this really matter if everyone’s getting richer – just some faster than others? Directors of two opposing think-tanks – the New Policy Institute’s Guy Palmer and Civitas’s David Green – debate how we define poverty
‘Relative poverty’ might be accepted by politicians on the left and right these days, but that’s a worrying thing. The concept is wielded by authoritarians with a command-and-control approach. They have repeatedly redefined poverty to allow an ever-increasing number of people to be identified as the class requiring political action on their behalf: first it was physical efficiency; then the line was the benefit level; then a percentage of average or median income, and then it became ‘exclusion’ from the dominant lifestyle. At each step the intention was to exploit the sympathy that the term ‘poverty’ evokes.
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