How do the poor save for a rainy day when every day is a rainy day?

A letter a day to number 10. No 1,315

Thursday 14 January 2016.

Dear Mr Cameron,

oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, just who do you think you are? Professor Henry Higgins? If only the poor was more like you, talked proper and done the proper things, they wouldn’t be such wretches.

I am so impressed by your ‘help to save’ scheme to encourage those on low incomes to build up a rainy day fund. You are ‘avin’ a larf guvnor! You are so rich, privileged, stupid and ignorant you have no idea what it means when every day is a rainy day.

In your speech you had much to say about the first two years of life as crucial to a childs development, which is true, and that includes you and you appear to be suffering from such crippling ignorance and prejudice that I am pretty sure you have little chance of recovering.

It’s true that money isn’t everything, although I am very sure you don’t know what I mean by that, but try living without it in a modern post industrial nation in which it is, actually, the means of our survival. We are not an agrarian country any more, we don’t, in general, live off the land or even have access to it to grow stuff, we are a monetary exchange country, pretty much everything is based on the exchange of tokens of money for every aspect of our material needs.

You are prepared to throw money (we’ll see) at all sorts of projects about life chances to deal with ‘cultural disenfranchisement’, as you put it, and yet you will continue to financially impoverish people, allow Iain Duncan Smith to continue to deprive people of the means of survival and allow employers to exploit people and not offer them decent contracts, hours and wages.

To be honest, your speech was almost unreadable, not least because you have history of dribbling insincerity, empty words and empty promises. Talk about life chances to every disabled person from whom you’ve cut the Independent Living fund, they’ll laugh in your face – if you’re lucky. Tell it to those being deprived of motability. Tell it to those whose only hope of a meal today is from a food bank. Tell it to every child going hungry to school today. Tell it to every jobseeker being sanctioned and deprived of the means of survival.

Henry Higgins thought that Eliza Doolittle was held back because she couldn’t talk properly and that speech was what truly separated the social classes, rather than money, and he set about turning her into a lady. You are promising to throw hundreds of millions of pounds, perhaps a few billion,  at what you think the problems are, have you spoken to even one poor person to ask them what they think? I suspect that if you threw a million pounds at every poor person, you might see a vast improvement in their lives and an end to poverty as well, but as that will never happen we’ll never know.

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/prime-ministers-speech-on-life-chances