Boutique poverty measures

Ryan Bourne has a topical CAPX piece on invented forms of poverty. Interesting and worth reading as another example of campaigners shifting goalposts and inventing new bits of language to obscure the shift and also obscure pragmatic solutions which don't require campaigners. 

Invented bits of language are also used to obscure the totalitarian narrative in the political background, but we already knew that.


Why are the Greens campaigning against invented forms of poverty?

• Green MP Hannah Spencer is backing a campaign to end 'furniture poverty'
• Households do not receive neat little envelopes marked ‘for beds’
• Slicing poverty into ever more theatrical subcategories won't help struggling families

Amid some brief research about the new MP for Gorton and Denton, Hannah Spencer, I came across her campaign against a boutique poverty measure I hadn’t previously been aware of: ‘furniture poverty’...

This methodology is now standard fare among anti-poverty charities. You take the old workhouse noun ‘poverty’, bolt a spending category in front of it, and declare a new affliction which society (read: taxpayers through government) must deal with. We’ve seen ‘food poverty’, ‘fuel poverty’, and now ‘furniture poverty’. But why stop there? One could imagine ‘car poverty’, ‘clothes poverty’ and ‘cutlery poverty’ if we want to explore a new first letter. Or what about sub-components of furniture? Perhaps ‘futon poverty’, ‘ottoman insecurity’ or ‘coffee-table precarity’.