SHUT OUT

Growing up in India I heard my parents speak of the ‘deserving poor’. For my mother it was usually in relation to beggars in the street. People fending for themselves with visible disabilities or frail elderly people looking lost to the world would have her rummaging in her handbag. Young people inevitably got short shrift and were admonished, told to ‘go out and work’. For my father, who administered a small family fund that dispensed charity to applicants who had come to hear of it, the term applied to the perceived character of the person involved. Single mothers who impressed him with their honesty and hopes for their children were helped, men who looked like they might squander the cash on drink were not.

I found it difficult to make such distinctions. From those who were clearly destitute to those who laboured without rest and yet looked threadbare and undernourished, they all shamed me, but especially children my own age. It was fundamentally unfair that anyone should have their choices so reduced. But in my home town such poverty was everywhere, unavoidable. Today, populous India, despite impressive economic growth, still has the largest number of people living in poverty of any country in the world.

Recently I have become more aware of another meaning of the term ‘deserving poor’ – this time not condescending but contemptuous. It’s in the context of austerity Britain, where social security payments are now at the lowest levels, after accounting for inflation, since the welfare state came into being, where 2,000 new food banks have been established in the last decade and 14 million people (21 per cent of the population) are living in poverty, with 1.5