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Much of the media coverage of the latest pension crisis implies that penury lies several decades ahead. But, of course, poverty is already an issue for far too many.

Ruth Lister has just published a scholarly book called Poverty, which challenges the reader to look again at the meaning and experience of deprivation in today's society and how it might be measured in more relevant ways.

Lister is professor of social policy at Loughborough University but prior to that she spent 16 years campaigning with the Child Poverty Action Group.

She analyses how we see poverty culturally and symbolically as well as in material terms - and how some terms can obscure as much as they clarify. A single parent, for example, may suffer social exclusion as a result of not having a job, but in some cases it's precisely that lack of a job that permits her to build local social networks which provide their own sense of inclusion. Confidence and a sense of connectedness can come from sources other than a wage packet.

Lister examines the conditions which poverty engenders - for instance, the lack of a voice in the public arena, which amounts to the theft of citizenship from the individual. And she considers attempts to measure poverty not just by income but by "constrained expenditure" - that is, the absence of durable goods and luxury items in a household in these consumption-mad times. She also looks at more democratic, consensual approaches to measuring poverty. Here, lay people rather than "experts" decide what constitutes an acceptable minimum standard of living.


She also endorses "participatory research" ("less a method than a philosophy"), committed to principles of democracy and empowerment, in which the real experts in poverty - the poor - have their views taken on board at all stages of research. It's a task that requires some researchers to overhaul attitudes and work practices.

Lister ends with a demand that the poor be regarded as citizens like every member of society, not "the other". The poor want power not pity. The issue is not the precise amount acceptable on the poverty line but the right to respect, recognition and redistribution.

Even if that's what you already believe, Lister's book may well add edge to your argument and greater insight into why the eradication of deprivation is so important to the very soul of the body politic.

• Poverty by Ruth Lister, published by Polity, priced £14.99.