By Guest
If we want to end poverty in this country we are going to have to deal with the way voters think about people in poverty.
Richard Exell is a senior policy officer at the TUC.
In my lifetime, nothing in domestic politics has seemed as unfair as the increase in child poverty in the 1980s and 90s. In 1979, 1.7 million children were poor; by 1998, this figure had risen to 4.2 million. Being poor when you are a child hurts you for the rest of your life:
- Poor families have unhealthier children,
- These children do worse at school (children who aren’t poor but had lower intelligence scores as babies get better qualifications),
- When they leave school they are less likely to get jobs,
- Those who do tend to get lower-paid, lower-status ones,
- When they retire they are entitled to lower pensions,
- And they die at an earlier age.
On top of all this, people who were poor children are more likely to be poor adults, so there is a strong chance their children will be born into poverty as well.
This is so obviously unjust, we have to ask why it hasn’t been sorted out.
It isn’t because the Government doesn’t care about the issue. Famously, the Government adopted a target of ending child poverty by 2020; they have spent a lot of money on tax credits, and Child Benefit is worth a lot more in real terms than it was in 1997.
It isn’t just the Prime Minister – other members of the Cabinet have accepted Budgets that spent billions on child poverty, at the expense of priorities in their own Departments. When ambitious politicians accept that other priorities come first you know its something they believe in. It may be a generation before we have another government led by people as personally committed to ending poverty.
That commitment has had results – more than half a million children taken out of poverty at a time when global economic forces have been pushing us in the direction of more inequality, not less.
But, even so, the achievement hasn’t matched the scale of the ambition. The Government’s halfway target of halving the number of children in poverty by 2010 will be missed by a mile.
Most significantly, the commitment faltered last year at Budget time. To hit that half-way target the Government needed to commit an extra £4 billion to benefits and tax credits for children.
In the Budget they actually found just £150 million. In the middle of a recession it was always going to be fantastically difficult to meet the target, but even so, many people in anti-poverty organisations were surprised as well as disappointed.
Why did people who have made really difficult choices to make a difference on child poverty eventually give up? In my view, part of the answer is the politics of this last year before the general election. Ending child poverty simply isn’t popular enough with the general public.
It’s more complicated in reality, but a reasonable calculation might go something like this:
- Every time Ministers agree to spend our money on a service they eventually have to raise taxes to pay for it.
- Taxes are unpopular and a Government that increases them pays a price in terms of lost support at the next election.
- But some causes are so popular that spending more on them will increase a Government’s popularity -this is usually true of the NHS and education.
- Ending poverty by raising taxes and benefits costs a fantastically large amount – even small changes cost billions.
- The commitment to ending child poverty has cost billions so far – and the lost votes are much harder to afford now than they were in previous elections.
But this policy has won the Government remarkably little support in return. Even those of us who care about child poverty have been grudging about handing out praise for a commitment that has demanded significant political will power.
It is wrong to blame the politicians for this. They can give a lead – and they have been doing so for a decade – but they can’t continue in advance of public opinion for ever. Democracy is supposed to work something like this, after all.
So the key question is: why isn’t spending on poverty a vote-winner? That’s a much more complicated question than it seems; part of the answer is about persuading people that there are links between our persistent economic problems and this country’s persistent inequality.
But part of the answer lies in the general public’s perception of people in poverty. In Britain we have unusually punitive attitudes to people in poverty. In 2007, a European survey asked people about the causes of poverty; the UK was the only country in Western Europe where more people thought poverty was caused by “laziness and lack of willpower” than by “injustice in our society” [1]
Why are British people prone to thinking that people in poverty have only themselves to blame? Last year research by the Fabian Society produced some fascinating answers to this question.
First of all, a large majority of the British people believe that everyone really does have a chance to succeed if they work hard – 69% believe this and only 14% disagree.
Now, if you think that society really is fair, then it makes sense to assume that rich people must have deserved their success – and when people plainly aren’t getting on to say that it must be their own fault.
They found that middle of the road people will bend over backwards to justify the incomes of the rich, but take a much more censorious attitude to the poor – only a quarter of people agreed with the notion that it makes sense to give people benefits now because they’ll make a contribution to society later.
What really fascinated me about the research (I suppose I must be a genuine policy wonk, I found this as enthralling as a thriller) was the way in which people in their study reacted when asked to discuss poor and well-off characters who’d been invented specially for the study. Even though it wasn’t part of the exercise, they would invent characteristics to justify the wealth or poverty of these characters – contributions the rich might have made to society, for instance.
It seems as though the pain of accepting that our society isn’t fair is so great that people will create a fantasy reality in which everything is for the best. This means that, for a large swathe of people, if you force them to accept the reality of child poverty, they will react by blaming the parents, not injustice.
Now, if you think that the cause of most child poverty is laziness or drug addiction then you’re unlikely to have a positive image of parents in poverty and to think that they don’t care about their children.
This is why I’ve been increasingly concerned about ‘povertyism’. I know it is an ugly word, but we do need a word to deal with the problem of prejudices and stereotyping that stop people supporting policies to counter poverty.
Prof. Ruth Lister has called it ‘othering’: people in poverty are thought about, talked about and treated as ‘other’ and inferior to the rest of society. A dividing line is drawn between ‘us’ and ‘them’ with everyone on the wrong side of the dividing line judged negatively in some way: as a threat, an undeserving economic burden, failures, or at best as objects of pity.
A by Prof John McKendrick from Glasgow Caledonian University on the media treatment of poverty, revealed the importance of the language used to describe poverty, particularly in creating a dichotomy between a passive ‘them’ who represent a burden on an active ‘us’.
Language is also the stock in trade of the politicians. Much of the language, which politicians use when talking about poverty, reinforces povertyism and othering. The most obvious example is use of the term the ‘underclass’, resurrected recently by Conservative politicians, albeit in less hostile terms than in the 1980s. The idea of the ‘underclass’ defines poverty in relation to behaviour rather than income and lumps together disparate marginalized groups under one stigmatising and fear-inducing umbrella label. And politicians from all parties have talked about ‘welfare dependency’ and people ‘languishing on benefit.’
And when politicians refer to ‘hard working families’, as they do incessantly, it is always implied, they mean those in paid work, as if they were the only group that counts.
Some of my friends have disagreed with me when I talk about Povertyism: they think I want to talk about changing language instead of building the coalition that will be needed to transfer resources to people in poverty. And they think it’s just a new variety of identity politics, dividing that coalition, instead of looking for what unites us. And some people I’m much less likely to agree with have moaned – “oh no, not more political correctness.”
I would never say that changing language can be a substitute for changing the world, but I do think we should start to challenge negative descriptions of people in poverty as part of a progressive political strategy:
- One powerful reason for this is that it’s about time that people active in politics started showing a bit of respect for people in poverty. Povertyism humiliates people in poverty; as one parent on benefit said: ‘we hear how the media, and some politicians, speak about us and it hurts’. Not making jokes about chavs, respecting the dignity of people on benefits, challenging negative stereotypes – these are minimum standards for progressives.
- Secondly, turning people in poverty into ‘the other’ has the effect of legitimating the privileges of the comfortable. The people who benefit from an unjust state of affairs have moaned about “the PC brigade” for twenty years, we should not be intimidated by them.
- But, most importantly, if we want to create space for successful anti-poverty politics we’re going to have to change how people in poverty are seen. That isn’t an alternative to designing and campaigning for positive politics, its part of the same struggle.
Notes
1 Eurobarometer 279.
[...] negative stereotypes, and reacting to them. Indeed, it could be argued that government have thwarted their own ambitions for tackling poverty by turning the public against poor [...]
[...] LinksUK blog team are debating the way in which poverty is portrayed in the media. Richard has a guest contribution up there today, about the general public’s unusually punitive attitudes to poverty in the UK. [...]
[...] The way voters think about poverty is crucial to ending it | [...]