"Every member of the cabinet should be compelled to read it, apologise and then act," wrote 'Observer' Editor, Will Hutton, of Polly Toynbee's study of life in low-pay Britain, "Hard Work." Every seat at the Theatre by the Lake was occupied on a glorious Saturday afternoon when Polly came to speak about her work and the experiences on which it was based.

As a profoundly anti-religious member of the National Secular Society, she might have been expected to bin a challenge from Church Action on Poverty to live on the National Minimum Wage during Lent. It was impossible, she reflected. How long would £164 a week last on the things she took for granted as part of her working life like meals in restaurants and taxis to press conferences? Yet her respect for the Church's devastating report on life in Thatcher's Britain, "Faith in the Cities" compelled her to take seriously its challenge to try living on the sum fixed by a Labour Government as the National Minimum Wage. "Work is the best welfare," the Government claimed, but what if it disguises the fact that those on low pay are still "excluded, marginalised, locked out?" Much to her own surprise, she found herself taking up the challenge.

Her book expresses the experience of being excluded. "It is a large No Entry sign on every ordinary pleasure. - It is a harsh Apartheid. Exclusion makes the urban landscape a forbidding place where every brightly lit shop doorway designed to invite you in to buy, buy, buy is slammed shut to one third of the population." She explores the humiliation of negotiating a council loan to furnish a squalid, empty flat on a run-down council estate, the problems of living in debt between benefits and work or one job and the next, and the shockingly poor rewards for the really valuable work which care home assistants perform. "Cleaning bottoms and being kind doesn't require qualification, only being a woman. At the heart of the low pay problem lies the continuing low valuation of what are regarded as women's skills."

Of course, as a highly skilled journalist (What the papers say Columnist of the Year) she was able to put her experiences into perpective as few other lowly paid workers can. She submitted to the National Institute of Fiscal Studies a comparison between the rate of pay for hospital porters in 1971 (£12.50 a week) and in 2002 (£174 a week). The Institute concluded that to keep pace with general earnings their pay would now need to be £210 a week. Now no longer employed by hospitals but by agencies, the real value of their pay since 1971 had actually fallen by £36 per week.

She retained her balance. Things have improved since the Tory years, she insisted, with programmes like Sure Start to raise the confidence and expectations of young families, and bus passes and free admission to galleries and museums. But that brief period of Lent left her not only with the material for a book which should shake anyone who feels complacent about what the Government has done for the very poor. It left her with a passion which inflamed her delivery and seared the consciences of the audience, very few of whom lived on the National Minimum Wage. Only by giving an absolute priority to raising the living standards of the very poor can these problems be addressed. She spoke contemptuously of unions which aggressively pursue inflationary claims for workers earning at or slightly above the national average, and showed no patience with a questioner who asked her to support the case for an across the board increase in pensions. The Minimum Income Guarantee for the poorest pensioners was a Government measure she warmly approved.

So back to Egremont with her words ringing in our ears. Here, too, there are many young workers starved of opportunity and self respect, measured by their status rather than their unrecognised gifts. It is to these workers rather than any particular group of professional politicians that we pledge our loyalty.