LABOUR MP Ian Lavery pointed out in our paper yesterday that too many well-heeled MPs have no conception of the grimness of life for millions of people in foodbank Britain.

Lavery may not have expected to have his assertion confirmed so quickly or so conclusively, but the statistics revealed by the Poverty and Social Exclusion in the United Kingdom project expose a sorry reality.

Politicians of all stripes intone the received wisdom that the way out of poverty is through employment, which seems to make common sense.

Yet such is the yawning gap between low earnings endured by millions and accumulated wealth enjoyed by a rich minority that this truism no longer tells the whole story.

When a third of all households do not earn enough to reach the minimum acceptable standard of living, something is seriously amiss.

Government claims that unemployment is falling need serious examination, not least because of soaring self-employment figures.

Accepting self-employment as an escape from life on the dole can appear superficially attractive because of tax credits and other benefits. But inability to earn enough, especially in areas of casual employment that attract large numbers of competitors, quickly dims the shine of economic independence.

Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation indicates that the majority of those in poverty — 6.7 million out of 13 million — live in a household where someone works.

People are looking for work and taking jobs, but they can’t make ends meet because their pay is too low and the cost of living is too high.

Forget the politicians’ claim that inflation has fallen to an annual rate of 1.5 per cent. The consumer price index (CPI) grossly underestimates living costs for poor people.

Even the 2.4 per cent level shown by the retail price index (RPI), which includes an element of housing costs, fails to take full account of the prices that afflict the low-paid.

Real wages have plummeted by an annual average of £1,600 under the coalition government while transport costs, energy, food, housing and indirect taxation have risen inexorably.

The TUC Britain Needs a Pay Rise campaign, including the October 18 national demonstration, must be supported strongly, but employers will not hand out more pay than they are obliged to.

Parliamentary pressure to boost the minimum wage to the level of a living wage is essential to raise many people from poverty.

But prices cannot be left out of the equation. 

The initial popular welcome given to Ed Miliband’s modest proposal to hold down energy prices for a year bore eloquent testimony to the pressure imposed by the oil, gas and electricity transnational corporations that have doubled per-customer profits recently.

Any effective plan to reverse the rich-poor gap must involve action against these pirates, as well as banks, supermarkets and landlords ripping off the working class.

Social justice won’t be achieved by a combination of charity and tinkering with a system based on exploitation.

The wealth is there. It’s just in the wrong hands, but it can be accessed through tackling tax dodging by the rich and corporations, imposing a wealth tax and reversing the privatisation bandwagon.

The alternative to a radical reorganisation of society in the interests of the working class is a mass wringing of hands every decade or so when anti-poverty campaigners publish their latest reports indicating that nothing substantial has changed.