though ‘wealth and ‘poverty’ are.

I’m not a linguistics expert but I would say that an opposite is a reverse of its counterpart. So left and right are opposite because they are exactly the same in nature but mirror each other in practice. Similarly height and depth are opposites (2 feet deep is a mirror of 2 feet high) but high and low are not because they can be different ways of describing the same thing (a bar can be low when it is 1 metre high).

The distinction is important because wealth and poverty are entirely measurable, quantifiable and comparitive. Though poverty can be measured in relative terms, i.e. relative to the general population, once the bar is set, wealth and poverty are directly measurable and opposite by the same metric, hence you can legislate on poverty and wealth. However to be rich or poor is more nuanced than to be wealthy or in poverty as I will hope to show from a recent Facebook thread I engaged with.

A conversation of Facebook

Recent events in England and my conversation on Facebook have highlighted the point I’m making. The thread was all about Tory MP’s voting down giving children Free School Meals over half term and Christmas holidays when they are not at school. In a post by the local newspaper a lady responded:

“I might be wrong but wasn’t a extra £20 a week given to people on Universal Credit to help out with this sort of thing. And before anyone complains at me. I do think our children should be fed but how do we do this to make sure that money is being spent on the children.”

An extra £20 per week was added to household benefits because of the impact of Covid19 but Free School Meals is an entirely different benefit. While checking whether a benefit is being used for the intended purpose sounds entirely rational, this argument encapsulates a toxic brew of assumptions that poor people cannot be trusted with their money. After pointing out the flaws in her reasoning I got this reply:

“I’m not complaining, this day and age no child should go hungry. I thought the extra £20 a week was to help out with this.”

I was struggling to answer this but simply pointed out how far £20 would go for a familily of four. While she agreed that 75p each per day was paltry she saved her best till last:

“No a extra £20 a week to give 4 children 5 meals each isn’t a lot but it’s better than nothing. I don’t think we should just be handing money out. But I do think we should be making sure that no child is without food. I’m not sure how to do this but there must be a way. Maybe open up school kitchens and let all children go in for a hot cooked lunch.”

First I’ll point out the huge problems with this, though in her defence she was not being combative:

“I don’t think we should just be handing money out”.
Why not? Are you assuming that families eligible for free school meals don’t put their kids first?

“there must be a way”.
There is a way. Give families enough money to feed their kids. And anyway, its vouchers they are getting, not money.

“open up school kitchens and let all children go in for a hot cooked lunch”.
Do you realise how insulting this is? Not to say how far you believe the government has to go to keep the unwashed poor from stealing the food out of their children’s mouths?

The problem with ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ being opposites

In heraldry, something to the left is ‘sinister’ and something to the right is ‘dexter’. These gave rise to the definitions of sinister being evil and dextrous being good at something, because to be left handed has traditionally been associated with being morally deficient and only recently has that distinction been erased. Likewise its not uncommon to assume that being poor means you lack dexterity when it comes to managing your finances and living responsibly. But the the truth is that being poor is much more expensive than being rich and if you have no disposable income, buying a packet of cigarettes or a pint becomes a moral dilemma, something alien to those who are rich.

If there is one legacy of the last century that cripples progress in this, it’s the myth that being poor is the left handed equivalent of being rich. While the origins of this myth lie with the elite, it gets its oxygen from those who have crawled into relative prosperity, like the evolutionary fish, and consider themselves to have got there on their own merit. I’m not questioning that lady’s sympathy with families not being able to feed their kids but the mindset behind her questions is troubling.

Its every bit as troubling as racial bias because while there is an acknowledgement of universal human rights there is also an unconscious judgement of social groups, how they should be treated and what precautions should be taken in dealing with them. There is a realisation of the widening gap between rich and poor but the dynamics are more opaque.

Epilogue

To further clarify why I contend that ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ are not opposites:

In a way rich and poor are different measures on the same scale in the same direction. If I have £500 in the bank and my neighbour has £5 million, by a single metric he would be rich and I would be poor. In a game of monopoly, if I have Whitechapel and no houses and my friend has Park Lane and Mayfair and 2 hotels, we are no longer playing the same game but we are on the same board and playing by the same rules.

Yet while it might seem Jeff Bezos has simply played the game much better than I have to make his fortune, becoming a billionaire is generally achieved through exploitation of the poor or inheritance which is simply being born with wealth that was extracted from the poor by parents or ancestors. And the real divide between the rich and poor is not down to what car you drive or how big your house is, it comes down to choice and power. The rich have all the choices and all the power and they choose to keep the poor down by limiting real choices.

The poor are a product of the rich —  being poor is not the opposite of being rich.