What can we do about poverty? First, stop blaming people for being poor

theguardian.com:

Three years ago, having passed the audition to play myself, I sat in a sweltering recording studio with a Very Nice Middle Class sound technician recording the audiobook for Lowborn: Growing Up, Getting Away and Returning to Britain’s Poorest Towns. Around two and a half days into hearing me talk about every brutality growing up in poverty had visited upon me, he interrupted me mid-sentence and shouted loudly over the recording, “But what can I do? What can I possibly do?”

We stopped recording. He explained to me that he didn’t have a lot of spare money and barely any time himself. Only then did I realise he had spent those days feeling I was personally targeting him for society’s ills.

I am used to this question: “What can I do?” I have been asked it hundreds of times by overwhelmed, decent-hearted people who have done their food bank drop-offs, circulated petitions, donated what they can, and still feel helpless.

I answered him as I usually did, explaining that people usually have more resources than they recognise. That the problem needs to be tackled at root and perhaps he had skills to pass on, a network he might call on to help improve access to the privileges that had led to him sitting there, healthy enough to go to work, recording my book.

And, along with my stock response – that a society needs affordable housing, functional social security, state education and medical care – I felt that I gave him as good an answer as I could. Because in that moment I was shuttled back to another sweltering recording studio, 10 years earlier. Visiting a national radio station as part of my job with a charity, a quite-famous-at-the-time breakfast presenter told me a particular X Factor contestant was actually “a nasty little chav”.