The Spectator's Notes

20 June 2009

Charles Moore's reflections on the week

In fact, you cannot eradicate child (or adult) poverty if you choose to define it in the way the government does. Last week, Professor Peter Townsend died. He was the guru of the idea of ‘relative poverty’. In some ways, this notion accords with human experience. In the 1950s, you did not feel poor if you could not afford a television: today you do. But if poverty comes to be defined relatively for all purposes of public policy — households with less than 60 per cent of the median income, says the government — then poverty and inequality become the same thing. So socialism then wins every argument about how poverty should be alleviated. Since it is unimaginable in a free society that incomes could be equal, Prof. Townsend and now Ms Cooper have promoted a way of ensuring that Jesus was right when he said ‘the poor you have always with you’.

Walking past the Church House bookshop in Westminster this week, I noticed an entire window display devoted to one book. It was called Lay Presidency at the Eucharist? An Anglican Approach. What a perfectly undumbed-down title — not the faintest attempt to vulgarise, or, indeed, to interest anyone in any way. Right down to the question mark and the offer of ‘an’ approach rather than ‘the’ approach, it had a wonderful Anglican tentativeness about it. I felt it would be crassly against the spirit of such a publication to march in and buy it.