Poverty has become everyday. It's time to give our children some hope

The cost of living crisis, like Covid nasal tests and Line Of Duty, feels of another time. Though just a few months ago a dominant global concern, it’s now yesterday’s man. So, clearly, now it’s all over and everything is absolutely dandy and tickety boo.

If only. This is the problem with neat phrases to sum up a host of major interlocking issues. When another phrase comes along, the older one is immediately binned. Like that meme of the bloke holding hands with his girl but rubber necking to check out the new girl who has just caught his eye. That meme also, ironically, is something that feels of the time of the cost of living crisis.

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There is a point to this blitheness and these merry japes. It’s to focus minds. The cost of living crisis hasn’t gone away. It has metastasized. Poverty has become so pervasive and endemic that it is a regular companion, a part of everything all the time, and the darkness of it becomes just another stat. The cost of living crisis has not been calmed, it has been normalised.

It’s important to continue to look at the evidence and see the depth of the problem. Big Issue reported last week on new figures about the bleak, spidery reach of child poverty. Over 40% of schools in England and Wales are dipping into their budgets to buy additional food for hungry children. This figure grows to 60% in the most impoverished areas, according to a survey carried out by charity Teach First. This figure includes payment for catering debt and food, whether in breakfast clubs or after school.

You and me, we can have a long, extended debate about what schools are for, about where parent ends and teacher begins, about the need to make pupils ready for the world or ready for exams, and whether, at times, schools are a more than useful place of childminding to allow parents to construct working weeks. 

However, what is not up for argument, something that schools should not have to be is a place of last resort for the hungriest of children in society. It puts a burden of expectation and no doubt guilt on teachers about what they’re doing, and whether it’s enough, and makes uneven the places that should be an open opportunity for all. The pearl-clutching by some commentators over potential VAT on private school fees is a long, comfortable road away from this.

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When we had the Big Debate in Newcastle a few weeks ago, there was a question from the floor about the poverty of optimism strangling the chance for new ideas and hope to seed and take root. It’s a thought that I keep putting round and round. It feels fundamental.

How do we raise eyes above the horizon and look hopefully to the future if we’re caught in a cycle of either apathy, because we believe nothing will really happen anyway, or, in the case of the children in so many schools across Britain, because the actuality of being is so crippling.

If you’re hungry, bigger thoughts are not possible. At Big Issue, we are pretty tireless in working to new solutions to defeat poverty.

As an aside, this idea of finding hope and optimism being important probably also accelerated because I learned last week that Gustavo Gutiérrez had died. He was a Catholic priest, a founding father in the liberation theology movement in Latin America.

For him, and those who espoused his thinking, there was no way to show the poorest salvation without first fixing their earthly lot. Gutiérrez always spoke for the poorest, sometimes against the prevailing ideas of his church, and tried to help them. Even if you are not of faith, you could see the clear benefits of this. And you can substitute faith for a simple hope in a better tomorrow. 

One other story we reported on last week was the New Economic Foundation’s findings around the two-child benefit cap. They found that lifting it would have massive economic benefits for those trapped by the cap, and also for the rest of society. 

They calculated an annual boost of £3.2bn to the national economy, per year, within the lifetime of this parliament, by ending the two child cap – tied to lower public services demand, and annual net savings in the longer term, as well as lifting hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty. To keep it would mean that almost half of children in larger families – HALF – would be living in poverty by the end of this parliament.

And following the wider ideas of Gutiérrez, and that question from our guest in Newcastle, if they were out of this anchoring poverty, young children would be free to look above the horizon with hope. The change in life chances would be remarkable.

It really is no longer a question of if Labour can afford to make this change. It’s now clear they can’t afford to maintain things as they are. 

Paul McNamee is editor of the Big Issue. Read more of his columns here. Follow him on X.

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