ABSTRACT
Jesus is recorded as saying ‘the poor you will have among you always, and you can help them whenever you like’ (Mark 14.7 Revised English Bible).
We have seen in Chapter 2 that social exclusion has many aspects and many faces, and that unemployment, disability, single parenthood, and race have strong influences on exclusion. But for me, poverty is the core of exclusion, as a factor in itself and compounding the others just mentioned. In this section I look at why we have so little data on leisure and poverty and often use social class as a surrogate measure. In the next section I set the context for policy since the 1970s.
