The poor, are they always with us?
I will respond to all the comments individually, but I must start by thanking those who responded to my transparent cry for some online TLC. I like being complimented as much as the next person but more important, in the context of a busy responsible job here at the RSA, is the reassurance that my blogging isn’t entirely self indulgent.
I am currently on my way to a Governors’ meeting at the RSA Academy in Tipton. I am looking forward in particular to hearing from the head boy and girl and seeing progress on the new building. The Academy is in a disadvantaged area of a poor part of the country and one which has suffered more than most in the recession. So on the train journey up it was powerful to read the latest poverty report produced by the New Policy Institute for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
The top line is that levels of poverty, unemployment and repossession have been rising, not just with the recession, but since 2004. Overall poverty levels are now back at 2000 levels, the number of people out of work and looking for a job is as high as it has been since 1997 and repossession rates are back at 1994 levels. How we respond to these figures will, of course, reflect our different beliefs and values, but I wonder whether some important changes over the last decade may shift the terms of the debate?
Those who see inequality as fair, a reflection of merit or effort may find it harder now to argue that the poor are to blame for their plight. First, surely we all accept that there are many victims – particularly among the young – of a recession caused not by the failings of the general workforce but by greed and stupidity among the rich. Second, the last decade and more has seen the gradually tightening of welfare to work rules. Hardly anyone is now exempt from the requirements to look for or prepare for work. Third, a growing constituency among those in poverty is the working poor. According to the NPI report there are now two million children living in low-income working households, the highest figure ever recorded. Yet, all this is despite the redistributive impact of Labour tax and spend policies since 1997 (to be highlighted in the next few days in a report from the 2020 Public Services Trust, based at the RSA).
All of which suggests that the debate we need about the kind of society we want, and what this means for all of us, needs to be braver and more far reaching. To make a fundamental difference may require society-wide commitment and mobilisation. As Professor Stein Ringen recently argued at the RSA, for all its efforts New Labour never explained that all of us – not just ministers and officials – would have to play a role in creating a fairer society. The biggest danger is that, having had a Government which has tried to tackle poverty and inequality, we look at the grim statistics published today and abandon the hope of progress, perhaps accepting endemically high levels of poverty as he inevitable corollary of globalisation. Whether starting from a political perspective on the right, left or the centre I hope RSA Fellows agree with me that this is a danger we should seek to counter in our lectures, our research and in the activities of our Fellows.
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Comments
13 Comments on The poor, are they always with us?
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Alan on
Thu, 3rd Dec 2009 12:55 pm
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Julian Dobson on
Thu, 3rd Dec 2009 1:11 pm
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Steve on
Thu, 3rd Dec 2009 1:49 pm
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Livy on
Thu, 3rd Dec 2009 5:49 pm
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Alan on
Thu, 3rd Dec 2009 7:26 pm
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Livy on
Thu, 3rd Dec 2009 8:52 pm
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carl allen on
Thu, 3rd Dec 2009 9:21 pm
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Livy on
Thu, 3rd Dec 2009 9:59 pm
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Livy on
Thu, 3rd Dec 2009 10:02 pm
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Joe Nutt on
Thu, 3rd Dec 2009 11:42 pm
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Livy on
Fri, 4th Dec 2009 12:18 am
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High earners, low earners « Clive Davis Blog on
Fri, 4th Dec 2009 2:05 pm
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Alan on
Mon, 7th Dec 2009 10:47 am
All that and not one use of the word ‘relative’? For that is the poverty the Joseph Rowntree Trust are measuring. So long as we measure poverty in that way yes, ‘the poor’ will always be with us.
Unfortunately the recession will ameliorate this depressing picture as the median income will fall, thereby reducing the numbers in the percentage brackets the JRT are measuring. But that is just the other side of the statistical coin whereby accelerating incomes in the boom time exaggerates the numbers in relative poverty because their incomes do not grow as quickly.
Yes, in relative terms, the poor are always with us. But that doesn’t mean there have to be as many of them, or that they have to be so badly off.
But as you hint, Matthew, the concept of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor is still very much with us. Back in the summer John Denham, the communities secretary, pretty much spelled it out at a speech to the Fabian Society (my post here comments on this: http://livingwithrats.blogspot.com/2009/07/its-not-fair.html )
What may also come as a surprise to people who’ve listened to the government’s rhetoric on poverty, including the pledge to create a statutory obligation to end child poverty, is that it’s taken so long to accept simple ideas to change the benefits system in order to achieve real improvements in the quality of people’s life in poor communities. The struggle to get the Community Allowance accepted speaks for itself (see http://livingwithrats.blogspot.com/2009/11/break-down-hate-and-bring-out-kindness.html for more on this).
The interesting thing for me is the fact that the increases seem to be in the ‘working poor’ rather then ‘benefit poor’. So well done Gordon you scared them off the dole and into poorly paid jobs then took away the lowest rate of income tax and made them poorer, not so much ‘New Labour’ as ‘Who? Labour?’
Sorry a little simplistic but that’s the way it feels to me
@Steve: Touché
@MT: How many right minded people actually argued all poor people were responsible for their own plight? And yes, obviously its impossible to verbalise anything as despicable as that in front of somebody who just lost their £11,000 a year job at Woolworths.
But as for UK poverty levels being the inevitable consequence of globalisation? I don’t know…this isn’t the States. We barely make anything, so haven’t exactly lost a plethora of skilled manual jobs to overseas developing countries. The problem is we haven’t had enough of those jobs for a very long time, and are overly reliant on migrant workers just to make our cappuccinos.
What we have is the first massive generation of kids who’s parents are kids, often with no male role model with a trade to look up to. Added to that all the education problems and the colonisation of postcodes with good schools by middle income earners; then yes, you end up with the segregated society in which we live.
What we have lost however are middle income computer programming jobs to India due to our education system’s lack of mathematical rigour. But that’s another story..
There is another issue I forgot – inflation. It is regressive in that it hits the poorest hardest, yet the Government has needed inflation in order to make us look productive. Want to help the poorest in society? Do everything you can to lower the cost of living rather than try to subsidise it. That is how living standards shot upwards in the last few centuries. Yes it will benefit rich people as well, but in absolute terms the biggest benefit will be to the poor.
Free trade and lots of it would lower our cost of living and redistribute wealth to poorer nations (particularly African ones) by choice rather than by Government direction. Sadly, Governments will not give up such power and conscience soothing easily.
But Alan, how protectionist do you feel the UK is? Forgive my age and naivety but I thought we were all free traders now. Or at least that the argument had been won.
And not for nothing, but free trade doesn’t always help poorer African nations, thats the problem with it. Yes, on balance there are more winners than losers, but the losers lose big.
But agreed, re: the cost of living. In fact the problem isn’t even the cost of living, its the cost of existing. Living is something else.
Still, Merv was right last week. As we come out of recession and world output starts to expand again, part of global re-balancing will require a shift in the UK away from consumption and towards net exports. Similarly, China will have to reduce its reliance on exports in favour of consumer spending and domestic demand.
The protectionism we have to worry about relates to employment rather than trade. From the 15th anyone wanting to employ a foreign national from outside the EEA will have to advertise that job vacancy at the Job Centre Plus for four weeks before they can take the non-EEA national on. 2007 party conference anyone?
Thirty years ago a bandit teenager told me that I am a good person but that I just do not get IT. I was then and still am a community contributor.
IT being that there are simply not enough jobs that pay a living wage and that they watch their parents being the working poor and prefer to live fast and die young.
As he further explained, if there were enough jobs paying a living wage, the numbers of youngsters not taking full advantage of education would drastically drop.
So the statement of the poor always being with us is a loaded statement.
Oh what, so “It’s all society’s fault” or “the system”….. “the man”…
Come on.
There are enough jobs paying a living wage if you’re prepared to live within your means. One of the reasons we’re in this economic mess right now is that so many people weren’t.
The people we should really be concerned about aren’t the working poor but the growing underclass who are completely beneath the radar. Places where kids grow up with the main or only local economy being drugs. Where gang culture swallows them up at too young an age to rescue them from, and jail is no longer seen as a deterrent but rather the cost of doing business.
The real problems we face are mainly social. Not economic. Which is why no politician will address them; no endeavour to do so would bear fruit within 4 years.
And besides, why even bother. They don’t even vote, right?
Isn’t most writing self indulgent to some degree Matthew?
Putting aside Alan and Livy’s astute points about “relative” poverty and living within one’s means, it’s the assumptions behind the idea that we need a debate about the kind of society we want, that intrigue me. If economic performance were in any way dependent on the quality of a nation’s education system, the US would have the best schools in the world…so much for that theory!
Maybe, just maybe, it’s better to approach the entire business of education as truly great teachers and schools have done for centuries: as predominantly about the individual and not about society? That way, the kids you educate become genuinely free to choose the society they need: where “society” connotes the flesh and blood human beings one chooses to share one’s life with, and not an ideological construct rooted in chronic dissatisfaction and envy.
Joe… very difficult to sell that.
Trust me. If you could, Cameron wouldn’t have been keeping his mouth shut for 3 years.
[...] credit-rating agencies and the “medieval scholasticism” of academic economists. Matthew Taylor asks why poverty levels in Britain are so stubbornly entrenched. The FT’s energy editor [...]
Livy,
There is plenty of trade protectionism as we are within the EU. Unadulterated free trade with producers in African countries would put our money in *their* hands, by choice. Our Government being charitable to poor African countries puts our money in African Government’s hands without us having much say in the matter, and African Governments do not have a good record of spending money wisely.
You’re right on the employment protectionism. The minimum wage served to distract from the increases in living costs this Government has encouraged. The regulations from Brussels adopted as a matter of course have increased the cost of employing people. The ever extending statutory maternity leave requirements is also adding to this burden. I sometimes wonder if the Government is trying to make women unemployable to try and ‘create’ more jobs for unemployed men. They aren’t, as that would require some intelligence rather than the incompetence that runs rich through our Government, but that’s what it looks like.
These various attempts at nationalising employment contracts benefits corporations and the Government not workers and consumers. Life gets more expensive and employees see more of their wages disappearing in taxation.
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