A bit of Beethoven can ensure we’re not deaf to the dangers of falling into poverty 

Three violins and a cello from the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra provided some of the works of the young Beethoven on the stage at Bristol Beacon last week. He died almost 200 years ago and the aim of the programme was to ground the audience in the life and works of his genius. Having been woken to the glories of classical music while doing bird for fraud 64 years ago as a disturbed 16-year-old, I can commend Beethoven as a soother of troubled minds.

A young offender institute that allowed excursions to hear the Guildford Symphony Orchestra play Ludwig Van Beethoven set me up for life, introducing my mind to soul-enriching music, to combine with my love of Buddy Holly and Elvis. And traipsing to Bristol was a continuation of what my elder and younger brothers described as me poncifying myself up.

John Suchet, biographer of the great man, told Beethoven’s story so expertly simply at the Beacon by alighting on when he was born and whether he ever got married. He told of the joys of his music, his child prodigy status, his constant falling in love and the onset of his impediment of deafness. His 45 minutes as key speaker was not enough;  he is one of the best storytellers I have ever heard.

Why in the middle of a life devoted to banishing poverty and one of its constituent parts – homelessness – should one slip off to savour the life of a man dead 200 years?

And that of course is one of the tricks that the comfortable classes gift their children in order hopefully to deepen their understanding of the passage through life. To insure them against falling into poverty they give them education and money, ballet lessons and classical music, and holidays doused in museums to ward away the demons of social and financial illness, with poverty the big killer. Prevention is stamped all over their lives, if mum and dad are any good at the mum and dad-ism job. But at times they are not and little Nobby or Nobbina slides into the social illnesses of booze and drugs, and terminates in the shite.

So if His Maj’s Gov were ever going to get off their intellectual arses and converge all of their poverty prevention efforts into one government department, they would nick or borrow from their own prevention experiences to stop people slipping into the Bastille of poverty. They would decorate their hearts and minds with all of the greatnesses of art and culture, compulsory Shakespeare – or their scrubbing the playground with a toothbrush (I joke) – and a deeper history of how we got to where we are in history.

Read more:

• Behind the wild man of Vienna: Who was the real Beethoven?
• Why classical club night concerts are now the hottest ticket
• This diagram shows exactly where the government is going wrong on poverty

My five kids were marinated in what my own family growing up saw as posh culture. Not so that they could be better supplied with polish to make them shine at their next dinner party, alas one of the side effects of culturising, but in order to enrich their understanding of what it is to be human.

I love train journeys and after a Cornish pasty I was then off towards Portsmouth to see the inestimable
Gordon Roddick who, as social historians among you will know, is the founder of The Body Shop and, with his late wife Anita, gave me the money to start Big Issue.

He is the father of our movement and a sterling example of a man putting his money where his mouth is – I know not a better example. I first met him in a pub in Edinburgh in 1967 when, aged 21, I was hiding from the London police. He kindly bought me pints and I took him to crazy parties where he got to dance like a zombie. Something he was good at. I reminded him that next year it’ll be 60 years and he promised to be available for a celebration.

I returned to London and sat in at a debate in the Lords on whether we should stop prisoners from having social visits if they misbehave. Lord Farmer stalwartly pointed out that prisoners who have regular visits from family and friends tend to reoffend less. A really good, impressive argument with stats to back it up.

Social visits should not be seen as a gift. Alas the government seems intent on presenting it that way. The ugliness of prison life, in a multi-occupied cell largely living in a toilet, often banged up for 23 hours a day. Where’s the rehabilitation in that?

What a bucket of problems the government has to sort. A coordinated dismantling of poverty would help to empty that bucket.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words from our archive.

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