We have beaten absolute poverty in the UK

We’re told that poverty is still among us:

“There is no primary poverty left in this country,” Margaret Thatcher told the Catholic Herald in 1978, five months before she became prime minister. “There may be poverty because people don’t know how to budget, don’t know how to spend their earnings” but such poverty is the product not of social policy but of “personality defect”. Almost two decades later, in her 1996 Nicholas Ridley Memorial Lecture, six years after she had been pushed out of No 10 by her own MPs, she insisted again that “poverty is not material but behavioural”.

In between those two speeches, during her 11 years in power, the reality of Thatcherite policies, of reducing the top rate of taxation while cutting benefits, of devastating manufacturing industry and destroying trade unions, led to a huge increase in both poverty and inequality though the 1980s.

This much as Barbara Castle said back in 1959. The destitution Labour was set up to alleviate had already gone by that point.

There is a Britain in which last year the income for the poorest fifth of the population fell by 3.8% while that of the richest fifth rose by 1.6%.

Well, yes, and using those same ONS numbers we get this:

Median disposable income for the poorest fifth of the population decreased by 3.8% to £14,500 in FYE 2022;

We can check that against global numbers. For a single person household that £14,500 puts one in the top 10% of global incomes. For a two adult one, top 17%. For two adults, two children (and it’s not really possible to be a larger household than that and have an income that low given the benefits system) it’s still true that 75% of the world is poorer.

Yes, those numbers are already adjusted for the different prices in different places, they’re at PPP exchange rates.

Poverty, as an absolute - and barring significant addiction or mental health problems - is something that just no longer exists in Britian.

We do have inequality, most certainly we do. We might have too much of that, or not enough, to taste. But actual poverty, in the sense of having nothing rather than just less than others, that’s gone. Probably worth starting all debates about poverty alleviation with that acceptance that there is no poverty left to alleviate. There’s just inequality, something we may or may not wish to deal with.