A simple solution

There is something deeply unfashionable about British poverty. We worry endlessly about melting glaciers, and wear wristbands to demand an end to hardship in faraway lands. Christmas cards are sold in aid of dogs, birds and children in other countries. But we prefer to avert our eyes from the British poor. They’re looked after by the welfare state, aren’t they? Problem solved, now let’s get on with enjoying Christmas.

It might be easier to ignore problems at home, but that won’t make them disappear. This Christmas one in six British people will be jobless — and even this horrific figure masks a far worse picture regionally. A quarter of Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow and Middlesbrough are now living on benefits.

Joblessness begets joblessness: statistically, anyone who is on benefits for over two years is more likely to retire than to find work again. This is now true for three million British people — 750,000 of them under the age of 45. Many of those on the dole are people who did not recover from the last recession.

For all the pious promises made ten years ago — an end to poverty by 2020, etc — the decade now drawing to a close has seen little progress. When the economy grew, it did so in such a way that bypassed the welfare ghettoes, where people were paid not to work. We used the new immigrant workforce instead and extolled their virtues. This has led to social segregation; the unemployed isolated in a culture built around benefits.

The British jobless have been betrayed by the error of the noughties: a love of complex, top-down, target-driven fixes. Poverty was translated into figures on a computer screen, and then these figures were mani-pulated until they gave the appearance of improvement.