Stupid Poor People.

Polly Toynbee writes:

Child poverty is "boring" because it hasn't entered the political bloodstream..... But the word "poverty" plays badly with focus groups, even with the poor themselves: people are unconvinced it exists outside Africa.

So the people whom Polly is so keen to rescue from poverty, don't actually consider themselves to be in poverty? To me this suggests that the formal definition of poverty is not really measuring poverty. To Polly Toynbee this shows that she is better able to judge whether someone is impoverished than the poverty stricken wretch themselves.