A good school and good social training, all the advantages of a good social environment and the security to make the most of what is on offer.

We could therefore say that the middle and upper classes, that is to say those where we formerly placed the Johnsons and the Camerons, spend a lot of money on “prevention” (today we try not to use too much often the term “class” because it disrupts our efforts towards an appearance of equality between all ranks of society).

So, “prevention,” I would argue, is the best tool in the toolbox for raising children so they don’t end up stabbing themselves or complete strangers.

What’s interesting is that about 80% of all the money spent by government leaders to fight poverty is for “holding the hands of the poor” and never for prevention. Never on the prevention of poverty. However, everything in their lives, everything that allows them to climb on the shoulders of others to lead parties, then countries, is a question of prevention. All their parents do for them – if they do it correctly – is to prevent them from falling into crime, poverty, prostitution; It’s all about prevention.

Yet when they had the opportunity to lead a government, they did not try to cure people of poverty or prevent them from inheriting a life of poverty.

If there is a winning solution to lifting people out of the world of poverty and crime, it is these prevention methods. But these social methods like concerts and music, arts, museums, reading books; or the plethora of prevention mechanisms – these are not used. As a member of government, one already accepts assigned positions in society, such as children starving for prevention who end up needing school meals. And their starvation is not only of the body but also of the mind and spirit.

We therefore have a society divided between those who make prevention the leitmotif of their children’s development and those who do not receive help to develop this prevention.

However, the administrators of this system which divides those who benefit from prevention from those who do not are responsible for the division of the human species. And those who do not live in need are often the ones who care for those who are trapped in non-prevention.

An “us and them”.

Boris and Dave were overly preventative and, even if they had problems, these did not exclude them from the game of life. The game that makes them accepted as leaders in life.

Yet, as I said, most governments do not know how to approach the problem of extending “prevention” to those who need it; or the conditions that allow some to transcend the limitations imposed on their class.

We know that the current government has a real mix of people who have not had access to Boris and Dave’s prevention toolkit. Star he himself insists on the humility of his rise from an honest job, not really burdened with opera tickets; and Angela Rayner struggled and managed to escape in terrible conditions. They prove that with great effort, you can get out of the class corral and reach the leadership of a party. In previous generations, Diane Abbott proved that it could be done from a Hackney council house, without many of the bonuses that Dave and Boris had in abundance.

But even those who have escaped want and poverty, myself included, do not deny the enormous rescue work that must be done for those who remain stuck in poverty. And a social security system that does not take into account dismantling the powerful effects of inherited poverty is only a partially functioning organism.

In short, we must do more than hold the hand of the poor in their inherited Bastille of misery. Until now, no government has developed the toolkit to lift people out of poverty en masse, not just “one here and one there,” piecemeal. We need a new toolbox, and we need it now.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read the rest of his words here.

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