Another voice

On the bread line

Auberon Waugh

(-Ill Tuesday of this week we read a head- V line in the Daily Mirror announcing that 15 million Britons were now living 'on the breadline'. In an 'urgent call for action' the Low Pay Unit revealed that the total had 'shot up' from the 11,580,000 who were living on the breadline in 1979 when the Tories came to power. They ascribe the increase to Mrs Thatcher's policies, and urge MPs to persuade her to change them.

Perhaps I am wrong to find it comforting that there were already 11,580,000 Britons Living 'on the breadline' in 1979, after 11 years of Labour rule scarcely interrupted by the Heath episode. The breadline can scarcely be such a terrifying place as its name suggests. What, in fact, does it mean? It might be a bread queue along the lines of the old soup kitchens but that, of course, is misleading because there are no such bread queues, and it would be absurd to suggest that 15 million people stand in them. Alter- natively, it might imply that 15 million live so close to starvation that only a diet of bread saves them from death by malnutri- tion.

Once again, this is simply not true. Deaths from malnutrition, if one excludes new-born babies unable to take food, are statistically insignificant, and almost entire- ly confined to cases of elderly patients where pneumonia has been aggravated by malnutrition brought on by self-neglect. I do not think there is a single Health Authority in Britain, however left-wing, which can honestly claim that malnutrition, brought on by poverty rather than by an imprudent diet, is a significant feature of the health scene.

What in fact these people mean by 'the breadline', I have learnt, is that 15 million people have incomes which are less than 40 per cent over the supplementary benefit rate. One turns to Mr Christopher (needless to say, he prefers to be known as Chris) Pond, director of the Low Pay Unit, who, in the words of the Mirror, 'spelled out just what poverty means in 1983':

• Families can't afford to heat their homes properly or buy waterproof clothing.

• Parents can't give their children three meals a day.

• Shopping for clothes has to be done at second-hand shops.

• Children go without birthday or Christmas presents.'

Before examining the truth of Mr Pond's propositions in the light of our own obser- vations and experience, we might notice what appears to be an internal contradic- tion between the emotive statement that the poor cannot afford to buy waterproof clothing (which suggests, in the context, that they are soaked to the skin as they sit in their unheated homes) and the statement that they do go shopping for clothes, if only at Oxfam. Are there no mackintoshes at Oxfam? Is waterproof clothing more expen- sive than the permeable variety? What on earth is Mr Pond talking about?

Now let us examine the four propositions in this catalogue of suffering by the light of our own experiences. The poor cannot af- ford to heat their homes properly. Neither can I. Two winters ago I discovered that the central heating in Somerset was costing £40 a day, and promptly switched it off. Now we shiver. My parents never had any central heating at all — neither, I imagine, did the parents of the 'breadline' poor. We enjoyed our central heating, expensively fitted at a time of ludicrously cheap oil, for only six winters. Why are the 'breadliners' any more to be pitied, and why should any of us sup- pose we have a natural right to central heating?

Next, parents can't give their children three meals a day. I doubt whether this is true, but quite accept that many parents don't. My own children have never had more than two meals a day in their lives. Twenty years ago a Labour Party study group proposed that four million children in the country were undernourished. If one read on, one discovered this meant four million children were not given a cooked breakfast. My children have never wanted or been given one.

Next, shopping for clothes has to be done at second-hand shops. But what on earth are second-hand clothes shops for Hooray Henrys and Henriettas to rig themselves out in fancy dress? In fact the clothes at Oxfam are generally better made and sometimes more fashionable than anything to be found in any but the most expensive new clothes shops. It would never occur to me to buy a new overcoat when so many dead men's overcoats are available at a tenth of the price for twice the quality. Once again one is tempted to ask what the `breadliners' are blubbing about, but of course it is not the 'breadliners' who are blubbing, but 31-year-old 'Chris' Pond who is paid £10,000 a year to blub on their behalf.

The last proposition, that children go without birthday and Christmas presents, strikes me as an obvious lie. In its baldness, it cannot even be described as a pilgerism. Just as a lie. You do not need my own par- ticular focus — that the children of the poorest parents usually receive the most pocket money, eat the most sweets, appear the fattest and generally, but not always, receive the most lavish presents — to work out that the statement is nonsense. No doubt there are many parents — myself among them — who are reluctant, and in some cases unable, to lash out on a new bicycle, Sony Walkman or home computer for a birthday, but the emotive idea of no present at all — not even a ball Pentel or a Mars Bar, when it is the thought that counts — is self-evident rubbish.

We may ask ourselves why Mr Pond bothers us with this boring nonsense. The answer, I suppose, is that Chris is into the business of job creation — his own and the 12 other people employed by the Low Pay Unit. Internationally, I suppose his 'fin- dings' provide useful material for the Alter- native Statistics Department of Pilger Inter- national — it is now an 'official figure' that 15 million Britons live on the breadline. This may bring some comfort to the unfor- tunate inhabitants of Soviet Russia and its satellites, where the words 'bread line' mean exactly that — a queue for bread stretching front the October Revolution into any fore- seeable future which occurs to their benighted imagination. But any Soviet citizen who genuinely believes that there are 15 million Britons living on the bread line is so stupid that it matters not what he thinks.

In one aspect, I feel, this ludicrous exer- cise in political propaganda does real harm. This is by generating a disbelief which is not easy to distinguish from cynicism or callousness. If I may illustrate my point, on the page after the '15 million Britons "on the breadline" ' shock horror sensation in Tuesday's Daily Mirror there is another, almost equally lurid headline: 'Children "doomed to die because of the cuts": Doc- tor pleads for transplant cash after tragedy of Anne Marie, 6'.

The story which follows tells how 15 children have been taken off the waiting list for a bone transplant operation at the Westminster Children's Hospital — and ef- fectively condemned to die — because of scarce resources. Already 105 children on the waiting list have died.

As one reads on, the shock horror ele- ment becomes less clear-cut. In 12 years since long before the 'cuts' — the bone transplant unit has carried out only 142 transplants, and with only a 65 per cent rate of success. Inevitably, only those children are chosen for this operation who have a better chance of survival. Like kidney units, the operation is too expensive to be univer- sally available under any conceivable allocation of health resources.

But there is nevertheless a good case for more resources to be made available to this particular ailment. It is quite right and reasonable for the Daily Mirror to urge this case. My point is that by succumbing to the temptation to use these unfortunate children to make a party political point, and by giving this story exactly the same weight as Mr Pond's claim that 15 million Britons are nearly starving, the Mirror destroys its case and does the suffer- ing children no good at all.