Boris Johnson and David Cameron are not sticking knives into human beings. So what stops them?

Let’s take Boris Johnson. I cannot imagine Boris Johnson pulling out a knife and sticking it into someone. I can imagine him doing other bestial things but not that.  

But why not him, or say David Cameron, or the chairman of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden? We know that it is human beings who are sticking knives in other human beings, so why not any of these people?    

What stops the two former prime ministers of the UK from sticking knives in other human beings? We know from our observations that they have two legs, a head, arms and all of the features of most human beings. 

Yet they do not stick knives into human beings. So what prevents them from so doing?  

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‘Prevent’ is the key word here. Preventions. Things that were done to Boris or David, or the chairman of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, to prevent them from going down the knife-slashing route. Their parents or guardians, their teachers, all conspired to prevent them from taking that road. Ballet lessons, music lessons, visits to art galleries and museums, holidays abroad. Good and nourishing food, beds with blankets and duvets, warm houses; the list is endless, with all of this myriad of things acting as ‘prevention devices’, social devices, along with enough money to sustain a living beyond poverty. 

A good school and a good amount of social training, all of the accoutrements of a good social background and the security to make the most of what was on offer.  

So we could say that the middle and upper middle classes, which is where in earlier times we would place the Johnsons and the Camerons, spend an enormous amount of their money on ‘prevention’ (nowadays we try not to use ‘class’ too often as it upsets our striving towards the appearance of equality among all the ranks of society).  

So ‘prevention’, I would say, is the greatest tool in the toolbox of bringing up children so they don’t end up knifing each other or perfect strangers.  

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What is interesting is that about 80% of all poverty money spent by government leaders goes on ‘holding the poor’s hand’ and never on prevention. Never on preventing poverty. Yet everything about their lives, all the things that enable them to climb on the shoulders of others in order to lead parties and then lead countries, is about prevention. All that their parents do for them – if done properly – is to stop them from crossing over into crime, poverty, prostitution; it’s all about prevention.  

Yet when they got the chance to run governments they did not try to cure people of poverty or prevent them from inheriting a life of poverty.  

If anything is a surefire winner for bringing people out of the world of poverty and crime it is those methods of preventing. But these social methods like concerts and music, the arts, museums, book reading; or the plethora of preventing mechanisms – these are not used. As a member of government, one is already accepting the assigned positions in society, like the prevention-starved children who end up needing school dinners. And their starvation is not entirely of the body but also the mind and spirit.  

So you have a society that is divided between those that provide prevention as the leitmotif of their children’s development, and those who are not given the help to develop this prevention.  

Yet the administrators of this system that divides those that receive prevention from those that didn’t are responsible for dividing the human species. And those that do not live in want are often the ones that administer to those who are caught in the non-prevention trap.  

An ‘us and them’.  

Boris and Dave had a superabundance of prevention and though they did have their problems, the problems did not rule them out of the game of life. The game that gets them accepted as life’s leaders.  

Yet as I have said, most governments do not know how to address the problem of spreading ‘prevention’ to those in need of it; or the conditions that enable some to transcend any limitations placed on their class.   

We know the current government has a real mix of people who did not get access to the Boris and Dave prevention toolbox. Starmer himself insists on the humbleness of his rise from honest labour, not exactly loaded down with tickets to the opera; and Angela Rayner struggled and made it out of appalling conditions. They prove that with grim effort you can get out of the class corral and ascend to leadership of a party. In previous generations Diane Abbott proved you could do it from a Hackney council house, without many of the bonuses that Dave and Boris had aplenty.  

But even those who escaped from need and poverty, including myself, do not deny the big rescue job that needs to be done for those that are left stuck in poverty. And a social security system that does not factor in the dismantling of the powerful effects of inherited poverty is only a part-functioning body.  

In short, we need to do more than hold the poor’s hand in their Bastille of inherited need. As of yet no government has developed the toolbox to get people out of poverty en masse, not just ‘one here and one there’, in dribs and drabs. We need a new toolbox and we need it now.   

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words here.

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