If you don’t want people in poverty make them well waged. Make them skilful, artful and careful. Make them knowledgeable.
Make them dedicated to the power of application; to the 10,000 hours of practice Tiger Woods put into perfecting his skills – by learning how to get a golf ball into a tumbler across a large room. To putting in the sweat of brow and mind. Of course, you can have all this shit going for you (I use the word as meaning ‘good stuff’), but then the economy, mental wellbeing or accident can take the shine off your hopefulness.
Ideally, we would create safety nets to catch you from falling. And we would create clever social and educational systems to ensure that we’re producing the astute. And we’d provide people with every opportunity to develop – and then help them to translate – those skills and abilities into a strong wage packet. But if you give people education that doesn’t bring out the best of them, or if you underinvest in them, you condemn them to an eternity of low or no wage. They will join the ranks of the working poor and the unprivileged.
Right now, the rental payments of the UK’s 11 million renters aren’t recorded or recognised in the same way mortgage payments are@johnbirdswords Creditworthiness Assessment Bill wants to change that https://t.co/BOASQlBykS
— Big Issue (@BigIssue) July 19, 2018
Most people’s privilege comes from the accumulated privileges of the people who brought them into the world. Parent(s) who could hold your feet to the fire – David Lammy, Diane Abbott – to do your school work, and push you out of under-privilege. Or the deals daddy did so that you went to a good school – David Cameron, Nick Clegg. Privilege is nothing more than opportunity; and the greatest opportunity is to put children on a trajectory towards higher wages, and the social esteem that comes with it. And hopefully, the full and democratic life we all yearn to share.
The problem is we’re going to have to buck the system. The system is flawed. We produce too many people who have fraught lives, even before they draw their first breath or take their first halting steps. We have too many people who’ve been advantaged by previous generations – and the breaks they’ve been given even before birth – deciding on how to handle this predictability of failure. From Corbyn to May, and Thatcher to Blair, birth privilege seems to impede them from making a leap of faith into breaking open the predictability-of-failure system.