What is poverty? Is it absolute or relative? Is it ever capable of agreed definition? I wonder yet again because whenever I support the overseas aid programme in my weekly column for The Daily Express, I receive angry emails accusing me of being out of touch with the needs of this country. Do I not realise, thunder the writers, that there is a need to be met here and that charity begins at home?
Inevitably I am often told that I am out of touch with “real” people.
Let me say at the outset that I think much aid is misdirected. But that is an argument for redirection not for withdrawal. The crux of the problem is one of simple communication, or to put it more crudely, public relations. People resent the aid programme because they do not see the results.
I am profoundly sorry for the recent victims of flooding in the north of England and elsewhere. But if one were to put a picture of a British homeowner rescuing belongings alongside one of an old man in a hut in a leprosy community in an Ethiopian slum, then the question of whose need is greater cannot be denied. The one is well-fed, healthy, clothed and with possessions to rescue from a solidly built house. The other is without regular food and never has enough to eat, is ill without access to medication, poorly clad and living in a hut with rags for a roof. He shares a hole in the ground with hundreds – yes, hundreds of others – for sanitation. In the slum I visited there were 200 such holes serving a population of 24,000. Running water was a luxury.
There can be few in Britain who would begrudge aid to such deprived communities. But that is not the average person’s understanding of where aid goes. The government does not show us pictures of the leprosy hospitals – the wells, the basic schools, the slum clearance or the tarmac roads which replace dirt tracks – and if it tries to, large sections of the media are unresponsive. They prefer to wax indignant about the Indian space programme or some corrupt dictator siphoning off the money into a Swiss bank account.
Of course there is poverty in this country, but to anyone coping in a Third World mud hut or shanty town the lives of our poorest are those of kings.
Meanwhile, many of those who protest about sharing our wealth talk about “must-have” consumer items, grab fast food and collapse on sofas to watch entertainment on huge screens, taking it all for granted.
I recently endured five days living as a Victorian worker for the purposes of a television documentary. We slaved all day in physical labour and then ate bread and cheese if we had enough pennies. We slept on lumpy mattresses on the floor and had access to neither baths nor showers. For sanitation we used privies.
Oh, it must have been so hard, said those who watched the programme, and I pointed out as often as I could that millions in the world would think all their Christmases had come at once if they could live like that, let alone live as they did in the East End of London in the 1950s.
Perhaps the next reality TV show should be to send a group of those who think overseas aid an unnecessary indulgence to live in a Third World leprosy community for a week. They would be howling for mercy on the first day.
The mantra that the poor are getting poorer in this country is manifest nonsense. Fifty years ago many people still had outside loos, the poorest children went without shoes and diseases from malnutrition (such as rickets) were commonplace. We are all becoming better off but some much faster than others.
Today’s Western poverty is more evident in the breakdown of community and family life than in disease or starvation. It is not something we should ignore, but that does not mean that we are justified in neglecting those farther afield for whom disease and starvation are still everyday realities.
I love Western wealth, love the way our shops are full of fripperies, our supermarkets stacked high with food, our pharmacies full of medicine. I love the ease with which we can travel, the purity of our water, the provision of light and heat at the flick of a switch. But I want to share it both at home and abroad, and I do not think the average kindly Briton would resent a mere fraction of our resources (0.7 per cent for heaven’s sake!) being spent in deepest Africa if he could only see from time to time the smile on the face of a mum who can feed her baby properly for the first time.
Ann Widdecombe is a novelist, broadcaster and former prisons minister
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