He told the gathering: "So, while others want to talk about coalitions, deals, pacts, hung parliaments, confidence and supply motions - insider Westminster talk - we will spend all our time discussing with the people what really matters: poverty, unemployment, deprivation, bad housing, inequality and the neglect of the NHS".
Day after day, the government and its supportive press pump out the nonsense that money doesn't matter: poverty is due to lack of aspiration, "immobility" or bad parenting.
In its subject matter of poverty, its meticulous research (she says the first six months of material were "absolutely worthless" – a vivid illustration of the commitment involved), and Boo's great gift for sympathy, the book seems an obvious next step in a successful career.
American social policy survives on over-promise, and necessarily so, I suppose, given a public that has a limited attention span on matters of poverty and inequality, an unwillingness to be separated from their tax dollars, and general skepticism about government competence in matters from hurricane relief to child-protection services to homeland security.
The problem in Zambia is first a matter of poverty.
Others saw the case as a matter of poverty, ignorance and neglect by the state of its responsibilities to immigrants.
But also as in America, it is unclear how far the problem is race, and how far it is a matter of poverty and other factors.
And there's the irony: that on the matter of poverty it is the church that gathers data and hard evidence, while the government is doggedly dependent on faith and mysticism.
It is not necessarily even a matter of poverty, as the middle-class attackers of 9/11 demonstrated, but of resentments and conflicts that are barely evident on the surface.
There is also the small matter of poverty and social exclusion: well away from the middle of the city, Manchester Central contains such neighbourhoods as Hulme, Moss Side and Ardwick, all affected by the kind of problems that tend to go hand-in-hand with political disconnection.
Geography and ethnicity matter in poverty in China.
