US Edition Last week a "state of the nation" report was offered to us by the reliably left-wing Institute for Public Policy Research. If you listened to the news you might have heard something about how Britain was doing a bit better on poverty than before but still had a bad record compared to elsewhere in Europe.
The question of "how Britain is doing" comes up repeatedly on the news these days. It is a curious thing. We refer to poverty much more despite the fact that there is less of it than there used to be. Why? In the Middle Ages there was real poverty.
In 1235, some 20,000 Londoners died of starvation and many resorted to eating tree bark for survival. There were 95 famines in the Middle Ages. Yet the word poverty was used sparingly. In the Canterbury Tales, the word "poverty" appears only 26 times.
In "The Parson's Tale", those condemned to hell were said to be going to suffer the misery of poverty, defined, among other things, as lack of food and drink - "they shall be wasted hunger" - and lack of clothing - "they shall be naked of body save for the fire wherein they burn".
Shakespeare's time was more prosperous than Chaucer's, yet there were still famines. Peasants - the majority of the population - shared unheated hovels without lavatories or baths. Shakespeare, though, used "poverty" only 24 times.
In the 19th century, the condition of the poor vastly improved. The cost of food and clothing went down while average incomes went up. Yet curiously, Charles Dickens used the word "poverty" many more times than Chaucer and Shakespeare put together - a whopping 179 times. As the incidence of poverty was going down, the use of the word was rising.
In our own time, living standards have been transformed yet again. The cost of food has fallen through the 20th and early 21st centuries while incomes have multiplied. So the percentage of incomes spent on food has fallen dramatically. Clothes have become cheaper.
More than 99 per cent of households have a television. Some 96 per cent of 15- to 24-year-olds own a mobile phone. The major nutritional problem for the less well-off in British society is now obesity. But what has happened to the use of the word poverty? It has soared. We hear the word frequently on radio and television. Members of Parliament talk about it as if their seats depended on it. In the House of Commons in 2002, the word was used in 1,307 speeches and, in many of those speeches, the word was used several times.
What happened? By the 1959 party conference, Labour had lost three elections in a row. Barbara Castle, the chairman of that conference, seeking to explain what had gone wrong, remarked that "the poverty and unemployment which we came into existence to fight have been largely conquered". It was a worrying problem for Left-wing politicians.
Richard Titmuss, the professor of social administration at the London School of Economics and two of his protogees, Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith tried to help. They got to work re-defining "poverty".
Abel-Smith and Townsend argued that the amount given in what was then called "supplementary benefit" should be considered as the "poverty line". Anybody with less income than that should be categorised as being "in poverty".
Prof Townsend presented some of his research findings and theories on poverty at the British Sociological Conference in 1962. Harriet Wilson, an academic who was there, said that amidst all the evidence about the poor presented at the conference and the redefinition of poverty, there was developing "a mood of conspiratorial excitement".
It may seem strange for people to get excited - in the sense of thrilled - about defining more people as being in poverty. But they were onto something - they had found a new weapon in the war between Left and Right. They could use a word which, to most people, has connotations of starvation, homelessness and lack of clothing, to mean something far less emotive: some people being poorer than others.
The idea was taken up by Labour politicians who saw how useful the redefinition would be. They could complain about the terrible "poverty" in Britain, referring to learned, academic surveys (which were actually highly political) to prick the consciences of the middle classes. The new meaning of "poverty" has since been refined and it now means having an income which is 60 per cent of average or below. So, on that basis, no matter how rich Britain becomes, the "poor" will always be with us. How convenient for Labour.
- James Bartholomew's book, The Welfare State We're In, is published next month. Nigel Farndale is away