Iain Duncan Smith said last week that he was going to ‘lift a million out of poverty’. Lifting is something of which people in poverty run a perennial risk, especially if they are children. It is as though they were a field of root crops. ‘Some potatoes in Lincolnshire are lifting well, others are below average,’ the agricultural news used to say, when papers ran such items.
Iain Duncan Smith said last week that he was going to ‘lift a million out of poverty’. Lifting is something of which people in poverty run a perennial risk, especially if they are children. It is as though they were a field of root crops. ‘Some potatoes in Lincolnshire are lifting well, others are below average,’ the agricultural news used to say, when papers ran such items.
David Cameron’s mind, though, runs more on technological than agricultural metaphors: ‘We must think in terms of an escalator, always moving upwards, lifting people out of poverty,’ he said in 2006.
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