Peter Rhodes: Will the poor always be with us?

I FLICKED on the car radio to hear a woman describing how very useful, in her first prenatal classes, she found a knitted uterus. Whatever would we do without Woman's Hour?

WEATHER-forecasting terms. Remind me again. Are dribs and drabs wetter than spits and spots?

DID you begin losing the will to live as you followed this week's Supreme Court hearing into Brexit? That's how it is with lawyers. I've covered hundreds of court cases and heard many barristers and judges doing their stuff. You get the impression they are paid by the word. There are honourable exceptions but, as a rule, lawyers simply adore delivering long, intricate screeds punctuated with many sub-clauses and endless references to obscure precedents. There were times this week, as the dissection of Brexit plumbed depths of mind-screaming intricacy, when the nation would have gladly settled for the judges deciding the future of Brexit by electing one of their number to toss a coin. Heads, we're out.

INCIDENTALLY, this week's Commons vote on Brexit may not be as epoch-shattering as some folk think. It was more like MPs agreeing that Christmas will fall on December 25, but without promising any presents.

BANK of England governor Mark Carney says millions of jobs could be lost as a result of automation and robots. This news is greeted as a nightmare. Which is odd because the last time it came around, it was regarded as a dream. In the 1930s, automation promised an end to mankind's drudgery. A brilliant columnist, Phil Hickman, once told me the dream of the pre-war years was that people would have to work only a few hours per week "and we'd spend the rest of our time writing poetry and making mandolins and suchlike."

IT never happened. The Second World War came along and kept everybody busy for six years. The following decades were spent recovering. Today, nearly 90 years after Phil Hickman's childhood, the prospect of jobs being taken by machines fills us with dread. But why? I bet the answer is that the jobs we do today, mostly in warm, clean offices, are far removed from the dirty, back-breaking labour of yore. Work gives us status and colleagues. We don't want it to end. If the age of the robots is coming, we will have to make them our servants, not our masters, and find new ways of keeping ourselves occupied and fulfilled. Anybody want a mandolin?

JESUS allegedly declared: "The poor will always be with us." Those words have been debated for the past 2,000 years and interpreted in all manner of ways. When the Joseph Rowntree Foundation reported this week that 3.8 million British workers are in poverty, we should be aware that "poverty" is defined as having less than 60 per cent of the average income. So if the average wage rose to £100,000 a year, you could be poor on £60,000. It is a mad way to measure poverty and as long as we use it, the poor will indeed always be with us.

ACCORDING to this week's OECD report, out of 72 countries, British pupils are ranked 27th for maths. Still, that's better than being 26th, isn't it?