There’s a difference between being born into a “comfortable” family and being working class made good.
At first, you don’t see it — both sets of people are buying Fired Earth tiles, eating at the restaurants with the classy hand cream in the toilets and proudly parking a new electric car in the drive.
There are tells, of course: perhaps your working class made good person will stumble a bit on the word “sommelier”, or look confused when the conversation turns to skiing.
Other tells: the working class made good will usually insist on picking up the bill for everyone. If you know them well, you’ll probably have heard them mention they’re “helping” their mum, a sister, a cousin to buy a house, pay for a lawyer or get an operation. They will “lend” numerous struggling friends money — but “never seem to get round” to asking for it back.
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The restaurant bill, the houses, the “loans” — this is all because people who have come from very little know the shot of after-dinner adrenaline that comes with the bill for someone already in their overdraft. They know “saving for a deposit” is impossible for those already saving to pay for school shoes. And those “loans”: they are for people who are already paying bigger bills — with extortionate electricity keys and 1,500 per cent interest on payday loans — rather than those who are better off. It literally costs more to be poor. This is mad, but true.
Poverty is, supposedly, a fact – but it’s actually a feeling. A haptic memory. Unless you’ve actually experienced what having nothing feels like, I honestly don’t think you can know what it means. At the poshest dinner party I ever went to — businessmen, cabinet ministers, heirs — I mentioned my brother’s disability benefits being frozen. The man I sat next to — who worked for a charity — sympathised, with, “I guess he’ll have to sell his car — or holiday home?” Twenty years later, I still can’t believe I heard him say it. I often see him on the television, talking about poverty. He’s a kind, liberal man — but he did not understand “nothing”, however many ways I tried to explain it. The next time I spoke to someone equally comfortable, I’d got a useful metaphor: “You know when your mobile battery is on 4 per cent? That anxiety? That’s what being poor feels like. For ever.”
All this came to mind as I watched Rishi Sunak deliver his spring statement. Obviously, it’s already been criticised — the disproportionate help for the better off; the benefits freeze. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation published its report immediately: this statement will push 600,000 into poverty, a quarter of them children. Perhaps, if you’re “comfortable” you think “the summer we slipped into poverty” is a child with no holiday. A sad summer. What it actually means is “being so tired and hungry you fail GCSEs”, “staying in bed, in your nightie, while your only clothes are washed and dried”, “watching your parents’ mental health disintegrate in anxiety and shame”. Not a sad summer, but the summer where your whole future disappears.
The average family already in poverty will suffer a financial loss, with this statement, of £446 a year. For those who made this statement, £446 means “a day’s skiing”. For those who live this statement, it means entering a whole new world: it smells of your dad’s sour sweat as he opens a red bill; it feels like shoes, two sizes too small, shredding your feet as you walk. A Samaritans report said that suicide rates increase 0.5 per cent for every 1 per cent increase in debt – so it’s a sober fact that people will, literally, die because of this statement.
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But people also won’t live because of this: plans will be abandoned; relationships will fall apart; communities will fray. It doesn’t matter if “things get better” in the next budget. There is a branch of lived economics that knows how much more costly it is to restore broken towns than having offered the financial help now. But that’s the difference: you need to have lived it to know it.
I’ll be honest: I don’t think a millionaire can be in charge of poor people’s budgets. They don’t have the… qualifications. I’ve never seen someone born into wealth offer to pay the restaurant bill — they don’t have that urge. And the urge isn’t “generosity” – because “generosity” makes it sound like a lovely option – like something you could or couldn’t opt into, depending on how you feel.
But “generous” people don’t see it as optional — because it’s not. Giving people enough money to live on isn’t “one of many ideas on the table” — it should be the only idea that’s ever on the table. The only “option” is whether you know that or not. Whether you feel it in your bones.
