How do we deal with poverty?
4:08 pm - February 27th 2009
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Over at CentreRight, Jill Kirby eviscerates the ’shamelessly cheerful’ Harriet Harman for attending the launch of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s report into poverty, inequality & government policy.
She interprets the report like so:
As we stare into the pit of a plunging labour market, there is not much for the Government to be proud of. While she wages war on Mandy, staking out her place as the true champion of equality, Hattie would do well to apologise – on behalf of all her colleagues and especially her erstwhile friend and mentor Gordon Brown – for the wasted years, the wasted billions and the wasted opportunities. Opportunites to create a pro-work, pro-family welfare system with reduced dependency and genuine (not grade-inflated) educational opportunities for all. It’s no good telling us you cared, or asking us to let you try more of the same. You had your chance (and our money) and you blew it. You might at least say sorry.
There’s a little too much tubthumping here for this to be a fair analysis.
It’s certainly true that when you consider the expenditure over the last decade, the government’s successes seem meagre and their failures seem egregious, and the fact that progress seems to have stopped dead after 2004 should be a real cause for concern. And yes, this being central government, I’m sure money has been wasted, and that there were schemes which never worked or which should’ve been ditched when they reached their sell-by date.
But what renders this criticism slightly mute is that we don’t actually know how much it costs to lift a person out of poverty, short of introducing a fairly generous citizen’s allowance. One of the key conclusions in the JRF’s report is that the ‘trickle down’ approach of the 1980’s and ’90’s didn’t work, and whilst three Labour governments have had some qualified successes in reducing poverty, the immediate effect of its ‘pump up’ approach has merely been to enrich the ‘low-hanging fruit’ who were able to find work during a decade of economic growth, and who had their income supplemented by tax credits. Even during our days of plenty, we still had long-term unemployment, and as a result we had entrenched, immovable poverty.
For Kirby, this probably points to dependence on an overly-generous, overly-lenient welfare state. For me, it shows that the welfare state isn’t really the problem. Those who were unemployed during the boom years aren’t suddenly going to find employment in our days of scarcity, no matter how many sanctions you throw at them; many simply don’t possess the skills required by employers, and they are competing with experienced & driven immigrant workers on one hand, and a next generation of younger, more skilled and experienced workers on the other. One of the consequences of the 80’s and 90’s was that it created a lost generation of would-be workers, and the least we can do is keep a roof over their heads.
To prevent there from being further lost generations, we must look at the results of our education system, and in this area it still isn’t possible to determine whether the government’s been a success or failure. Kids who entered school in 1997 are only just beginning to revise for their GCSEs, and government reforms to schools didn’t even begin until after 2000. As the report notes, it won’t be possible to know what effect Labour’s education reforms have had on the poverty rate for another 5-10 years, by which point it’ll probably be a Tory government claiming credit/taking the blame for the results.
To conclude: no, the JRF’s report doesn’t make the government’s record on poverty & inequality look great, but nor does it lend itself to the same old Tory assumptions about the evils of the welfare state. We really need to get past that.
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Neil Robertson is a regular contributor to Liberal Conspiracy. He was born in Barnsley in 1984, and through a mixture of good luck and circumstance he ended up passing through Cambridge, Sheffield and Coventry before finally landing in London, where he works in education. His writing often focuses on social policy or international relations, because that's what all the Cool Kids write about. He mostly blogs at: The Bleeding Heart Show.
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Story Filed Under: Blog ,Economy ,Education ,Equality ,Westminster
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Reader comments
How are you defining poverty?
Here are the UK poverty indicators.
http://www.poverty.org.uk/summary/uk.htm
“It’s certainly true that when you consider the expenditure over the last decade, the government’s successes seem meagre and their failures seem egregious, and the fact that progress seems to have stopped dead after 2004 should be a real cause for concern.”
This isn’t hard to explain – after 2004 the government stopped increasing welfare spending by more than the rate of inflation, so poverty stopped falling and started to rise again.
In other words, the evidence is pretty clear – there needs to be much higher levels of redistribution (whether through tax credits, tax cuts for lower income people, expanding services such as free childcare or whatever) to make progress in tackling poverty.
You’re right that we don’t know how much it would take to end all poverty, but the JRF put a figure on how much it would cost to reduce child poverty to less than 5%, which is about £20 billion per year extra. Which in some ways doesn’t seem that much these days.
There is a right-wing fantasy that it is possible to reduce poverty while cutting government spending. Some of them instead fantasise about making people homeless and watching them starve, as in the comments on Kirby’s piece.
In terms of how to deal with poverty, there are five strands:
*adequate income
*decent jobs
*high quality services
*ending discrimination
*participation in decision-making
Since when has the right wing ever cared about poverty ? Only when rich people are a bit short of cash. I will stop asking for money to be thrown at the problems of poor people when rich people stop throwinhg money at the problems of rich people.
“Opportunities to create a pro-work, pro-family welfare system”
Translated mean… lets have more tax cuts for rich people who live in a family model we regard as normal.
“You had your chance (and our money) and you blew it. You might at least say sorry.”
Like you said sorry for massive unemployment of the early 80s. 3-5 million unemployed. And most of the current global finacial problems are a result of the Thatcher /Reagan free market, deregulated bullshit that businessmen are geniuses and must be left alone to do what ever they want. The only thing Blair and Brown should appologise for is that they copied the right wing. Both the financial claptrap, and the right wing wars for empire and profit.
A hundred years on…
In Joseph Rowntree’s Memorandum to his advisers on setting up a charitable trust (the “parent” trust of the aforementioned Joseph Rowntree Foundation) in his name, written in 1904, he said: “Every Social writer knows the supreme importance of questions connected with the holding and taxation of land, but for one person who attempts to master this question there are probably thousands who devote their time and strength to relieving poverty and its accompanying evils. … Such aspects of [the Land question] as the nationalisation of land, or the taxation of land values, or the appropriation of the unearned increment – all needs a treatment far more thorough than they have yet received.”
…and we still haven’t taken up Rowntree’s founding commission.
The 1909 Group.
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