Poverty isn't a lack of character: it's a lack of cash

Rutger Bregman begins his TED talk like this:

I'd like to start with a simple question: Why do the poor make so many poor decisions? I know it's a harsh question, but take a look at the data. The poor borrow more, save less, smoke more, exercise less, drink more and eat less healthfully. Why? 

Well, the standard explanation was once summed up by the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. And she called poverty "a personality defect." 

[Laughter] 

A lack of character, basically.

I'm suspicious of quotations that are so convenient for the speakers' argument, but Thatch really did say this. It was in a 1978 interview with the Catholic Herald.

But then large parts of the Labour Party are more interested in reforming the working class than liberating it too.

As I said of Blair's new government in a letter to the Guardian in 1997 (which I later found quoted in a book I had bought):

Labour is effectively recasting unemployment as a form of individual delinquency.

And Labour is still at it. Today Darren Rodwell, who is apparently a rising star of the party, was threatening to evict families from council accommodation if their children don't inform on people who commit knife crime.

So it's important that Liberals continue to discuss utopian ideas like basic income and a reduced working week. Most will probably prove to be unworkable, but where there is no vision the people perish.