SPOUTING POLEMICS DOESN’T HELP ANYONE IN POVERTY

As I’ve written a thousand times before, I do not buy into the Left/Right view of politics. Apart from anything else, it has brought us to the mess we’re in today – where a tidal wave of fudged numbers, hidden reports and mendacious ‘data’ have to be employed 24/7 just to keep the sclerotic incompetence of the British political class slightly less obvious than it would be.

I would imagine that roughly 40% of what follows will offend the Fluffies, and about 90% will be hysterically denied by the Greedies. When you’re dealing in facts, that will always happen. But clear away the clutter of bigotry and fantasy in both groups, and the best way forward is quickly made obvious. Nowhere is this more true than on the issue of poverty.

For starters, I think we need to stop talking about ‘child poverty’. It’s a heartstring mandolin without doubt – Help a London Child and so forth – but it is meaningless: kids do no opt for or cause poverty. Child poverty is caused by the tribal poverty and hopelessness of their parents – whether they’re around or not. The ‘child’ shtick is conducive to good PR copy, but far too often PR delivers for the politician, not for the Poor….as we shall see.

If it is impossible to deny the correlation between several factors and child poverty (which it most certainly is) then those factors must be faced. If it is obvious that cruelty to children predominates in one social group rather than another (and is often interwoven with poverty) then that too must be recognised. A social worker going into a home where there is no tradition of work, some evidence of child abuse, evidence of housing neglect in the street, high debt, and a history of parental neglect is also (studies suggest) going to find household cleanliness issues, poor quality food in the fridge, and low cooking skills between the parents. That same social worker going into a middle class home may well find the same debt levels and perhaps also an alcohol problem. But what Mr or Ms social worker will not find is the same ability to deal with the problems between the two homes…or the same ‘presentation’ of social wellbeing by the adults who live there.

Not all poverty is down to having less money. Other important factors are involved, and yes, they do include intelligence, drive, mental state, addiction, cultural and familial values. Dickens wrote “The poor are not made more noble by being so” and he was right: some people are in that state because they can’t cope, can’t manage finances, and can’t work out what’s going wrong. Most of them, however, have their condition exacerbated by the unsubstantiated theories and catechisms of Fluffies and Greedies. The Poor, as for once Gordon Brown accurately pointed out, lead lives of unimaginable chaos. That they do so is as much about the tribal values and personality psychography as it is about money.

The first question to ask, however – devoid of political bias – is are we tackling it? To which the answer is we were, and we aren’t.

The graph at this Embed shows pretty clearly how absolute poverty fell from 36% after housing costs in 1994/5 to a low of 20% after housing costs in 2006/7.  Since then, absolute poverty has been going up: to 23% after housing costs in 2011/12. I only ever use the ‘after’ housing costs measure of poverty, for the simply reason that everyone needs somewhere to live: you can’t invent a world where there are no housing costs: poverty is partly a function of it….especially among the old.

Neoliberal economists are fond of using the ‘relative poverty’ measure because this suits their agenda about the poor becoming better off. In fact, rp did fall during this period, but I’m afraid this is all much too clever for me, and thus I need someone to explain why 21% of citizens in rp is a somehow qualitatively better social result than 23% in ap. If absolute poverty is the inability to maintain the dietary and health standards common in a society, the relative position of an ap family is irrelevant. Dan Hannan knows this perfectly well, but uses the number anyway. It’s what Greedies do.

Fluffies, on the other hand, prefer to blame neoliberalism rather than praise it, while pretending it didn’t happen under New Labour. The Child Poverty Action Group, for example, puts it like this: ‘Under current government policies, child poverty is projected to rise from 2012/13 with an expected 600,000 more children living in poverty by 2015/16.Link This upward trend is expected to continue with 4.7 million children projected to be living in poverty by 2020…’

Note how the Child thing is played hard, and the 1997-2006 thing carefully airbrushed out. Also, of course, there are lots of projections: which is all they are – guesses.

The facts remain regardless of politicians and their interest groups manipulating them: over the last hundred years, Britain has without doubt reduced poverty….but the overall incidence of absolute poverty has been going up since around 2007.

So the answer is no, we’re not dealing with it: poverty remains, and if anything of late it has been getting slightly worse.

Now, there are equally mind-concentrating questions raised by this too: is this nothing more than the natural order of things? And this is there really any more we can do?

To which the answers are yes, and yes. We are a hierarchical pack species, and some of us are blessed with more street savvy, better social skills, and more brilliant abilities than others. Some people will always be left behind: trying too hard for Utopia always leads to parallel dystopia….as for instance did Comprehensive Education. This is the central problem, to my mind, with socialism.

But equally, there is far more that we can do. The main reason politicians don’t do anything more is that their votecentricity as usual tends towards quick-fix money-chucking and/or risible PR stunts. Just as the Fluffies won’t accept pack anthropology, so in turn the Greedies won’t accept that their economic model is at fault because it cannot employ or house enough people to reduce poverty further. This is the central problem, to my mind, with neoliberalism.

It has also, of course, been made worse by politically correct immigration policies. This in turn is causing more houses to appear, and cultivable land to shrink. And that will in turn make things even worse, because it reduces our ability as a nation to feed ourselves. And so the import bill gets higher and and and….well, we’ve been there before, let’s stay with the focus here.

Here are the three things we could do NOW to decrease absolute poverty further…but in a lasting, structural way:

1. Invest massively in a skill-based manufacturing revival designed to export more to Asia.

2. Get those in poverty onto training courses, and give them the skills to do the jobs created by the manufacturing revival. As post-prison studies show beyond doubt, give people a money-earning skill and their self-esteem sky-rockets. Give people a fulfilling job, and they can be released from the poverty trap.

3. Stop all immigration immediately and pull up the drawbridge. No ‘skills need to be imported’ tommy-rot can deal with the reality of a million unskilled folks (‘NEETS’) we have on benefits already. Get that cost down and employ them to work in Britain’s export economy…don’t increase the population further.

Be in no doubt, by the way, that poverty is a horrendously expensive social cost if all you do is ‘manage’ it. Best estimates suggest the bill is at least £29 billion a year.

At the moment I’m afraid, we aren’t even managing it. Even doing what I suggest above (while a good start) won’t address the underlying issues and face up to one simple reality: we have made some terrible social engineering mistakes, and we need to reverse them.

Our education system lacks any hope for the alienated kid. Our attitudes to alcohol are too lax and should be corrected by education. We need to rebuild the kind of community mutuality that can give tough love to the younger poor, and succour to the old. We need to raise the stakes on aspirational ambition to make it about infinitely more than material concerns. Above all, we need to bury once and for all the insane notion that not paying your taxes while getting big bonuses keeps multinationals and banking in Britain, and is thus more important that our social civlisation.

Earlier at The Slog: How Stunts & Punts failed to make a dent in London poverty