Poverty

It might seem puzzling that we have seen such a furore about racism and racial discrimination at this particular time in our history when all possible measures of racism indicate that there is less of it in Britain than at any time in the past 70 years. A decade ago, 41 per cent of us ‘-strongly agreed’ that we would be content for our children to marry someone of a different race. That has now risen to 70 per cent. In 2006, 55 per cent ‘strongly disagreed’ that you had to be white to be ‘truly British’. That has risen to 84 per cent. It may surprise many that blacks

Filthy germ-laden townsfolk were out and about on the footpaths near my home on Easter Sunday, dragging with them their awful, mewling children. I got the dog to harass them and occasionally shouted out: ‘These are local paths for local people. Clear off.’ One youngish father — lightly bearded, self-satisfied smirk, probably a sticker on his car window saying ‘-Refugees welcome here’ — even had the nerve to ask me for directions to the nearest train station so that he might return to his squalid Remainer tenement. I directed him and his family through a field which was fecund with manure and full of restive bullocks. The child — four

‘What a fabulous tan, where did you get it? said one of my fellow lunch guests as we entered the women’s powder room of a Mayfair hotel. I get this a lot. I want to talk about where I have wintered, or summered, or springed, because although I am poor I am lucky enough to mix with people who are not, and I love people who are not. I will defend them to the death. The poorer I get, the more capitalist I become. I can trace my attraction to Trump directly along the lines of my diminishing bank account and mounting credit card bills. I think it is to

I became aware that there was real destitution in modern Britain five years ago. Destitution, as I see it, arises when a family or individual is hungry, unable to afford gas and electricity, and on the brink of homelessness. It was apparent to me then that too many people at the bottom of the pile who fall on hard times are slipping through holes in the nation’s safety net — some are even forced through those holes by the modern welfare state. The model of how society worked, which I had picked up as a child of the 1945 Attlee Government, survived my decade at the Child Poverty Action Group

Your average milkman has more wealth than the world’s poorest 100 million people. Doesn’t that show how unfair the world is? Or given that the poorest 100 million will have negative assets, doesn’t it just show how easily statistics can be manipulated for Oxfam press releases? They’re at it again today: the same story, every January. “Almost half of the world’s wealth is owned by just 1% of the world’s population” it said in 2014. It has done variants on that theme ever year, each time selling it as a new “big” story. All the time peddling the impression that inequality is getting worse, that the rich are engorging themselves at the

Still depressed, or, as Matthew Arnold put it, ‘the foot less prompt to meet the morning dew’, I got out of bed one afternoon and exchanged the soggy Devon hills for the tower blocks of Canary Wharf. I went at the invitation of Dr Ivan Mindlin, orthopaedic surgeon, Las Vegas casino house doctor during the mob-run era of ‘Lefty’ Rosenthal and Tony ‘the Ant’ Spilotro, and one of the most successful sports bettors in US history. He kindly put me up in an ‘executive’ room at a hotel round the corner from his 18th-floor apartment. The first night we went for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. We went there on

We’re driving east, destination Grasse. Hairpin bends circling oak-clad hills. Autumn gold and scarlet. Exciting cambers. Blinding winter sunshine. The radio tuned to France Musique. A virtuoso Latin jazz trumpet. A bit poncy but it’s better than nothing. We’ve been talking and not talking. Now we’re talking again. She asks me if I like the social class I was born into. I like it very much,I say. ‘You didn’t rebel against your parents as a teenager?’ she says. I might have against my parents but not against my class, I say. I thought everyone was lower middle class. And when I was old enough to recognise other social classes, I