By Guest
Josh Fenton-Glynn has worked on UK poverty issues for Oxfam and the Child Poverty Action Group, and is writing in his personal capacity.
Now is an apt time for Community Links to run this much needed debate on media attitudes to poverty and the effect it has on the political discourse. Having worked in policy around UK poverty and social exclusion for the past two years, I have found that one of the biggest barriers to political change is the way people talk about poverty.
For example the current debate about the importance of “warm parenting” as opposed to child poverty highlighted in David Cameron’s recent speech takes the responsibility away from government and places it on low income families themselves.
We are all used to the weekly benefit fraud story in some publications – exceptional cases where the perpetrators are unsympathetic and only engaging in this activity to line their own pockets. One would believe that benefit fraud is rife while in reality it is at an all time low. The view we see in most of the media is that those in poverty are all scrounging, feckless and unsympathetic.
The fact that the media unjustly attacks those who need our support empathy and solidarity is bad enough. Worse is that it often results in an unholy feeding frenzy where politicians play to a media that demonises those on low incomes, lessening understanding of the real problems they face. Soon the debate becomes about the party who best punishes those they should be helping.
An example of a media feeding frenzy leading to poor public policy was last year’s change in the awarding of housing benefits (the local housing allowance) to larger families, punitively affecting less than 1 per cent of Housing benefit recipients and seemingly entirely in reaction to the story of one family, highlighted by the right wing press. Blogging on the issue at the time. I called on the government not to ‘condemn children to a cycle of re-housing, repossession, and overcrowding for the crime of having been born in a large family,’ sadly to no avail.
Inherent in the recent debates about the importance of parenting as opposed to poverty in determining child outcomes is a debate over whether failure is the responsibility of parents or social policy. No one would dispute that parenting is hugely important to child wellbeing; poverty makes it more difficult to do those things which constitute good parenting. It is easier to spend time with your children when you are not working extra hours in a poorly paid job, it is easier to have dinner around a table if you don’t have substandard accommodation without a dinning table, and it is easier for your child to achieve at school if they have access to the internet at home, as many GCSE courses now expect of them.
A quick glance at statistics showing a 15-28% earning gap between those who grew up in poverty and those who didn’t shows us the importance of poverty. However this is seldom discussed, as the media work hand in glove with some politicians demonising the poor.
The job of the media should be to challenge those politicians to put in place policies that give everyone a fair chance and help all parents have the time to be good parents, not bully those who don’t have a fair chance because of the family they happen to have been born in.
On the subject of a weekly benefit fraud story, today’s is about fraud and error in the benefits system – highlighting the ten most extreme cases where government has overpaid. I’ve written about this before, highlighting the fact that overpayments, when aggressively clawed back, can be crippling for the recipients.