Dear Lord Bird,
I read in an edition of The Big Issue that you had decided to stop work on your paper It’s Expensive Keeping People Poor and concentrate your efforts on tackling the cost of living crisis. However, I would like you to reconsider your decision.
Judging by the title of your paper and the content of the article it was addressing the situation that keeps people in poverty. The article suggested that your paper would argue that moving resources to education and early child and family intervention would prevent poverty. Your paper sounds as though it could make an important contribution to eliminating poverty.
The UK is in a cost of living crisis that is predicted to last many years. Therefore it is important that there is a safety net in place to prevent more people slipping into poverty. Switching your effort into making sure that they are as strong as possible is very important. However, there will always be some crisis that draws our attention to the short term: today it is the rising cost of energy and food caused by the war in Ukraine, tomorrow it could be China flexing its global muscles or another pandemic. In a crisis it is important to keep an eye on the medium to long term if anything is going to fundamentally change for the better.
In a crisis priorities change, things that were thought important are dropped and other areas become more important. Covid, our last major crisis, showed that family and community were more important than the ‘me society’ People on low wages who were keeping us safe and fed have received an increase in public support for an improvement in their lives. I believe now is the time to build on this change in people’s perception. As priorities change then the key factors to eliminate poverty can be embedded in the new priorities. Your paper, along with your other initiatives, such as Big Futures Campaign should be given maximum promotion to push the UK government into taking focused action to eliminate poverty.
I appreciate that you are extremely busy and that you need to concentrate your efforts on the cost of living crisis. However, the solutions to eliminating poverty is not an either / or situation. We need the short, medium and long term situation to be address at the same time if poverty is going to be eliminated. Hope is a quantity that is in short supply at the moment. If you find a few minutes in your busy schedule then please continue with your paper and add a spark of hope.