Established 2005 Registered Charity No. 1110656

Scottish Charity Register No. SC043760

current issue

October – November 2025 : Making a difference READ ONLINE

RECENT TWEETS

Adventures in poverty

October 01 2025
© John Sheehy © John Sheehy

In a parallel universe, a scientist has taken the poor people on earth to a new dimension to start afresh. How would the two dimensions get on? By Chris Sampson

The United States military is rumoured to have spent millions of dollars trying to develop an invisibility cloak, the better to camouflage its soldiers from enemy combatants on the battlefield. In Britain, it has long been possible to conceal oneself from the middle and upper classes: just become homeless and you’re instantly invisible to those with money.

Now, scientists have managed to access the multiverse – and with it, long-theorised alternate realities. Some parallel universes differ from ours only by a single atom, others by vast differences.

There is probably a universe where Noel Edmonds is lauded as a great entertainer rather than reviled as a beardy git, as he of course is in our reality.

But I digress. The discovery of portals to parallel universes has opened up huge possibilities for humanity. All the resources currently in short supply in this dimension could be harnessed in others where there is an overabundance. Poverty and inequality could be ended, and the human race could live happily ever after. Fast forward five years…

Guess what? Those in power weren’t keen to share it! And so the old system prevailed, with the rich getting richer, and the poor? You guessed it: poorer. Until, that is, a ‘small L leftie’ scientist took pity on the poor, and whisked them all away to an empty dimension where they could start afresh, free from the inequities of our reality.

Initially, this exodus of the disadvantaged was welcomed by the middle classes who remained. After all, there were suddenly no more people scrounging benefits or clogging up the NHS with their penury-induced diseases, so taxes would surely come down! There were no more vulgarians employing incorrect grammar, nor using the wrong spoon at dinner parties in front of ones friends. Blue collar crime was a thing of the past, overcrowded prisons abruptly empty; all manner of proletarian drains on society were gone!

The euphoria lasted about a week. Then the middling sort started to notice the smell from unemptied wheelie bins, from unattended sewers, from unscrubbed floors and unweeded gardens. Of course! The cleaners, au pairs, labourers – all gone. A few brave chaps from suburbia looked things up in YouTube videos: how to fix this or clean that. After all, how difficult could it be? The plebs had done it for centuries, hadn’t they?

Yet the middle class found things more difficult than anticipated. There was, it seemed, an art to manual labour. Proles had previously to be trained and tested, apparently. They had had to have – gasp! – a teeny amount of intelligence to operate machinery. Even those who had worked, unseen, down the sewers below the level of the middle classes (in every sense) weren’t just dropped down a manhole with a shovel and told to clean the sewage away.

And now the petit bourgeoisie had to do the work they had previously delegated: drive buses and lorries, cleanse squalor and bring up their own children. This brought a shocking realisation: the middle classes could no longer command huge wages for doing very little! Rather, they got less wages for doing all the hard work – a system which had seemed fair enough when they were running it, but now that they were at the business end of it, wasn’t it a tad, you know, unfair?

“But I’ve got a degree!” was a common bleat from those formerly indulged. As if that should preclude them from changing a plug, being an Uber driver or zero hour-waged delivery driver on a crappy sub-Quadrophenia moped (with a perpetual ‘L’ plate. As they never intended to get a driving licence).

With lower wages, most middle-class folk were forced to move out of the suburban houses left to them by their parents, as their incomes could no longer stretch to pay ever-increasing utility bills. Some even had to relocate to the tower blocks and council sink estates recently vacated by the departed poor. Some even had to use foodbanks and claim benefits, despite being in work!

Soon, smugness was down 84%! That sense of others doing everything for them in exchange for a pittance was evaporating, it was them now doing the dirty work, the ‘hard graft’ as the vanished poor had termed it.

“One is put in mind of the Morlocks and their, erm, opposites in HG Wells’ The Time Machine,” quoth a former middle manager, who couldn’t even recall that the correct term for opposites was ‘Eloi’. Now that his intellect was being sapped by ITV3 and Channel 5-style dumbed-down TV content, he could no longer afford Netflix or other platforms, merely basic Freeview!

His fellow former pampered executives nodded in recognition: the split of society into two factions, as prophesied by HG Wells in his 1895 novel, was now apt for their own situation. And they, they realised with increasing horror, were now the Morlocks – the lower orders!

As for the poor, they had begun their new society afresh in their new dimension. All were equal, and not just all in the same boat as they had always been under the old system. At first, anyway. But, alas! Human beings always seem to impose a hierarchy to mess every society up, and soon the proles divided themselves into the clever and the thick, with the latter doing the bulk of the work while the former supervised, paid more despite doing less and began to see themselves as superior to the lowly thick heads.

Smugness levels soon rose to 84% among the emerging, superior class.

Back in the middle-class reality, the newly minimum waged could no longer afford holidays abroad, and even had to send their offspring to state schools! And there were no more cheats: no longer could they move to an area with a better education record or pretend to be religious just to get little

Jocaster and Auberon into religion-based schools that had superior exam scores in the league tables.

All too soon, all the advantages they had taken for granted had slipped away. Some were drafted into the army to fill the huge gaps left by the departed proles. Others had to sell The Big Issue and some were even forced to beg for small change outside tube stations and by cash machines, only to be ignored or kicked, or even pissed on by the more mean-spirited members of the emerging superior class in the new pecking order.

It wasn’t long before those on the receiving end yearned for the return of the proles who’d been whisked away to their Brave New Dimension. Some had wondered in the old days: “What would we do without the poor?” Now they knew, for they now had lived experience of what they had subjected others to.

Welcome to our world, folks. Please live carefully, and try to be kind to those less fortunate than yourself.

< Working together It is what it is >
October – November 2025 : Making a difference

CONTENTS

BACK ISSUES
BACK TO PAGE TOP