Modest proposals for reducing poverty in the UK

Now that an election is near in Britain, our political parties have once again discovered that many of our people live in poverty. Poor people may lack the resources to bankroll political parties and are unlikely to make the dinner tables of senior politicians, but there are an awful lot of them, and they have votes. About a fifth of the population of the UK has an annual income of less than 60% of the median. For a single person, ‘poverty’ is therefore defined as a weekly income of less than £115 after tax and housing costs are met (see the website http://www.poverty.org.uk/summary/key%20facts.shtml. Reducing poverty would mean increasing wage rates for those on or near the minimum wage, and raising welfare benefits (particularly for families with young children). This is expensive, and would require unwelcome action for governments, like increasing tax on the very wealthy or diverting the billions of pounds of public money spent on the privatisation-management consultancy-IT complex.

So here are my own ideas for what government can do:
1. Declare all low wage earners to be non-domiciliary. Most people living in poverty who are of working age live in households in which one or more people are in work. Yet they still pay income tax and national insurance on their miserably low earnings. Very wealthy people such as Lord Ashcroft and Zac Goldsmith have avoided this inconvenience by declaring themselves ‘non-domiciliary’ in the UK, even though this is where most of their income is derived. I would extend this privilege to all people on low incomes, who can be given notional residence in the Cayman Islands, Jersey, or other locations for tax refugees which happen conveniently to come under the British crown.

2. Declare all poor people who live in houses with gardens to be farmers. Farm subsidies are always presented as a means of supporting low-income farmers. In fact, most of the cash goes to big land-owning corporations and the most wealthy farmers (the Duke of Westminster, the richest man in England, receives £300,000/year). Landowners also get a subsidy not to grow anything at all (called ‘set aside’). My plan would be to extend these EU subsidies to all low income people with gardens. They would receive guaranteed minimum prices for the potatoes, runner beans etc they grow in their back gardens and allotments, or set-aside payments if they grow grass, flowers or concrete. This would all come from EU funds, and so would have limited impact on British government expenditure.

3. Set up local versions of the House of Lords in each area of deprivation. Members of the House of Lords currently get £80/day attendance allowance on a SISO basis (‘SISO’ means sign in - sod off). There is also an overnight allowance of £160 and generous allowances for travel and other costs supposedly associated with having a title. In my plan, membership of each local house of lords would be open to people on low incomes who are not eligible for the first two payments I have proposed (ie those who are not receiving a wage and do not have a garden). Getting poor people to advise on poverty would also be a pleasant change from paying large sums to management consultants and academics to undertake this task.

So we can see that Britain has one of the best welfare states in the world for wealthy people. All we need to do now is to extend it to the poor.