BBC Radio 5 Live has just been poring over poverty in South African townships and today’s UK Budget.

They interviewed some township shack-dwellers in Port Elizabeth where, you will remember, veteran collectivist ANC/Communist Govan Mbeki was all against local self-help. With the dismal results now apparent today, albeit not for his ANC/SACP pals in power who live very well indeed.

The township people spoke with commendable energy about their miserable plight, calling again and again for opportunities to work: "Let me come with you to England – I’ll feed your dogs".

An ambitious worldview not usually associated with the UK underclasses?

Back to that Budget. Lord Ashdown (Lib Dem) bluntly and correctly blamed Labour for leaving the new coalition government such a feckless debt mountain. He was then asked what the answer was to poverty.

His reply was … well, wrong.

He said that there is no one answer, but a combination of policies (taxation, education, public services).

In other words, in Paddy Ashdown’s mind the answer to poverty is only some or other deft bundle of centralised redistributive measures.

But that assumes that there just IS something to redistribute.

The answer to poverty is wealth. What is wealth?

The combination of human ingenuity and natural resources. Where human ingenuity is suppressed and natural resources are underused or just meagre, you get poverty – the natural state of things.

The only way to end poverty is to identify the motors which create wealth, and the circumstances in which people do all they can to work creatively.

That might mean some centralised government support for the policy framework which lets that happen and eg takes some wealth from the successful to try to boost the prospects of the unsuccessful (although many different ways to do that effectively suggest themselves).

It also means government getting out of the way and not piling on requirements which make it harder for people to work and/or discourage the people who do most to create wealth.

Lord Ashdown asserted that the Fairness agenda was the Lib Dem’s gift to the nation, or somesuch.

Not that I am ungrateful for such LibDem munificence.

But perhaps it is not much of a gift if it comes with no sense of how the creation of wealth actually happens?