THE industry in which I’ve worked all these years was never going to make me rich. Journalism has much in common with show business in the sense that hoofing about in the provinces will never glean the rewards that the national stage can offer.

Don’t worry. This is not the preamble to some kind of hard luck story. I chose my life path and happily take full responsibility for the outcome. After all, it was out of the question that any other calling – other than farm labouring – would have suited my slender talents.

My hard luck… or good fortune?

It all depends on your slant on life.

I can’t speak for any other trade but I suppose that what I have in common with other people of my age will have been the relative struggle to support a family and the small sacrifices that this lifestyle choice entailed.

However, any deprivations – such as they were – pale in significance compared with the experience of so many others elsewhere on the planet. There was always food to eat, a roof over my head, music to listen to, and the odd libation or three. I was lucky. It could have been a lot worse.

Yet these days, it’s scarcely possible to read a newspaper, listen to the radio or watch the television without some white, middle-class politician or activist talking about ‘poverty’ and the ‘most vulnerable members of our society.’ This is, of course, the verbal incontinence of the sloganistas, the people who reach for a cliché the moment a microphone is thrust into their face. Fabulously wealthy – by my standards – Labour politicians talk as if they’ve just come back from the barricades rather than the House of Commons bar with its cut-price drinks cabinet.

Meanwhile, horsey girls with south-eastern accents pretend they’ve seen the rough end of life after giving the perimeter fence at an open-cast mine protest a slight shove.

Let’s get real. There is no longer any deprivation in Britain. Our streets are actually awash with electronic gadgetry, obesity, alcoholic abuse, rudeness and spiritual torpor.

The word ‘poverty’ can only be used when describing regions such as the Horn of Africa. To use such terms to describe fat, smug, affluent Britain is nothing less than a cynical obscenity.