Poverty and Inequality

Chris Jones, Tony Novak, Jones, Chris, Novak, Tony

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781447316152
• eBook ISBN: 9781447315902
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

Neoliberalism and austerity have led to a growing inequality gap and increasing levels of poverty and social harm. In this short form book, part of the Critical and Radical Debates in Social Work series, Chris Jones and Tony Novak look at consequences of poverty and inequality and the challenge they pose to the engaged social work academic and practitioner. There are many studies of poverty that look at competing definitions (and some of the consequences) of poverty in modern society. Here the authors argue that, especially for a profession with a claimed commitment to values based on equality, social justice and meeting human need, poverty and immiserisation impose a requirement on social workers to speak out and not to collude with social policies that make the plight of the impoverished even harder and their lives even worse.

PART ONE

Lead essay

“We don’t want to be ashamed tomorrow”: Poverty, inequality and the challenge to social workers

Chris Jones and Tony Novak

Austere times

We are living in turbulent times. Across the globe, regimes have been toppled and people in unprecedented numbers are taking to the streets in protest as austerity politics sweeps away their jobs and their incomes. The notion that individual debt-fuelled consumerism could provide both the economic drive and the social glue for a rampant capitalism unchallenged in the globe has proved to be disastrous. In the midst of one of the most serious crises of global capitalism, a crisis that is both economic and political, even the most cautious analysts have to face up to the fact that something new is happening in the world. The poor are stirring and rising against their punishment for an economic crisis not of their making; they are angry because the perpetrators are left free and untouched; they are increasingly sickened by the extraordinary disparities in wealth and income; they are insulted by the conspicuous greed and consumption of the rich as their own living standards and well-being decline, and they have had enough of being ignored.

Such stirrings are necessary. Because as well as ‘impoverishing the many’ capitalism is also plundering the earth’s resources with no regard for the human and environmental carnage it brings in its wake. The clock is ticking for the human race. It is a time for clear thinking, strong words and action. It is time for social workers – both academics and practitioners – to speak out and act against the human destruction we are now witnessing.

The scale of hardship that has been dealt out in recent years cannot be underestimated, both nationally and globally. People are hurting and dying now as a result of deepening inequalities and the extraordinarily brutal attack on the most vulnerable which features in virtually all the so-called austerity programmes launched by governments. The current onslaught on the mass of the people everywhere is ferocious, coming, for many in Europe and the US, on top of three decades of neoliberalism, which has eroded living standards and well-being for millions. There is a saying in Greece that you cannot get fat from a fly, but that is not stopping those in power from turning the screw even harder with devastating consequences.

The management of poverty and inequality in the attempt to prevent it from becoming an explosive challenge to the system has for long depended on keeping the gaze of the majority downwards; so that people compare themselves and their fortunes with those beneath them rather than those above. Rarely have people been encouraged to look upwards, and when they did what they saw was justified if not by reference to god-given superiority then by claims of exceptional talent, merit and intelligence. The people’s gaze, however, has now shifted considerably upwards, revealing the greed, parsimony and avarice of our elites. Bankers, at one time seen as the paragon of respectability and ‘good business sense’, are now exposed to all as greedy, ruthless and, what is more, incompetent. People everywhere recoil at the immense amounts of money that are speculated, stolen and wasted to the cost of the jobs and livelihoods of millions, while multinationals sit on vast reserves of capital waiting for wages and conditions to deteriorate further and new ‘market opportunities’ to arise. And everywhere the politicians who serve this system are regarded with contempt. It is now evident that more and more people have had enough and in diverse places and in diverse ways, some massive and some small, they are on the move. From Egypt to Wall Street, people are demanding justice, an end to inequalities and unsustainable exploitation and, with it, a ‘system change’. There is an active international dimension to these struggles that we have not witnessed before, with those in the squares in cities across the globe inspiring one another with their mobilisations, solidarities, initiatives and achievements.

At long last, it seems that more and more people worldwide are making important connections as they search for explanations and strategies for understanding and transforming the grotesque and obscene features of much of our contemporary world. Naming and placing capitalism in the public dock as being the system that has allowed for the simultaneous enrichment of the very few at the cost of poverty to the many is no longer confined to groups on the Left or to those places at the periphery of capitalism where the yoke of exploitation has been most extreme. It is now taking root in the very heartlands of the system itself.

In all its diverse forms what we are witnessing is a global convulsion and movement of the poor. It is notable and united in accurately identifying its core enemy as capitalism, imperialism and the nation states and federations that sustain, manage and legitimise these interconnecting systems. It has brought people together from a wide range of backgrounds and shown the potential for alliance. Sceptics scorn the lack of a systematic programme of action coming from the streets but never highlight the importance and significance of the identification of the enemy. State elites and institutions have invested heavily and systematically in creating divisions between the people with the intent of turning anger and disappointment inwards. They have abused their power and control to construct false enemies and scapegoats to divert attention and dissipate and confuse the majority.1 How they have delighted as the poor fought each other, white workers against black, Protestants against Catholics, men against women, and left the real cause of their problem unscathed. And yet, despite being deeply embedded and endlessly nurtured, such divisions prove quickly breakable as the sight of Egyptian Christians protecting Egyptian Muslims from the brutality of the state, of migrant and refugee workers being embraced by the social and workers movements of Greece, or of homeless people being embraced by the Occupy protests shows. Such events are profoundly troubling for the status quo.

Huge numbers of people are furious with their political class and its networks and institutions. They feel betrayed and abandoned. Every new revelation that the rich have got richer as the majority move in the opposite direction is like rubbing salt into the wounds. As the gaze deepens and more examples of extraordinary acquisitiveness, greed and embedded corruption emerge so the hypocrisy of the powerful sickens and stimulates resistance.2 Centuries of effort to seek compliance through divide and rule among the dominated and exploited are now at risk. For many, if not for all, the scales are slipping away and they see so many of the things that have separated them are no more than artifices which weaken as well as divide them.

The British state and ‘the problem of the poor’

Of all the industrialised countries, Britain’s ruling class has the greatest history in dealing with the problem of poverty and the poor. Fashioned through over five hundred years of uninterrupted capitalist development, its ideas and its policies have sedimented into a particularly callous treatment that marks it off from many of its European neighbours. It is no accident that Britain, one of the richest countries in the world, has levels of poverty and inequality above the European average; it locks up more poor people, spends less on their health and education and has some of the lowest levels of benefit within the European Union.3 Nor is it accidental that Britain is exceeded in levels of poverty and paucity of state assistance only by the country it helped to form, the United States. Throughout the centuries the rich in Britain have viewed the poor with a disdain that is deeply embedded in their class structure, which asserts their own superiority at the same time as it brands those at the bottom as degenerates, failures, and the like. Their treatment of the poor is also embodied in accompanying ideologies of legitimation which blame, insult and degrade the victim. It is quite simply an outrage and one which over the years has seen some of the most vulnerable (and not so vulnerable) people starved, imprisoned in workhouses, emigrated to the Empire, institutionalised, sterilised, and fast-tracked as inmates of children’s homes into prison, joblessness and prostitution.

Ask yourself what words or phrases have been used to describe the poor in Britain: ‘the residuum’, ‘the undeserving’, ‘the underclass’, ‘scroungers’ are just a few. Now ask yourself how many positive images you can think of. Seeing the poor through such a distorting lens means that they are not heard or seen. They are denied sympathy and understanding. They are punished and seen to deserve even less because it is argued that even pathetically small benefits make them work shy and welfare dependent. As the neoliberal attack has deepened and widened to bring about a massive redistribution of wealth and life chances to the rich and from the poor, engulfing more and more people, so the language of the elites has become more violent and aggressive. ‘Scum’, ‘nasty pieces of work’, ‘feral underclass’ are just some latest examples of the terms used by government leaders to describe some of the poor.4 They in turn, like John Major at the time of the Bolger tragedy and David Cameron after the British riots in 2011, demand that the time has come to condemn and punish and not make any effort to understand.5

An astonishing number of people in Britain go along with such a pathologisation of the poor, even those who themselves are poor by any reasonable standard. As Louise Bamfield, Research Fellow and Secretary to the Fabian Commission on Life Chances and Child Poverty, observed:

The tendency to blame poverty on deficiencies in personal behaviour is not wholly surprising, given the prevalence of negative stereotypes in the media. But the size of the gap between popular perceptions and the reality of life in poverty is nevertheless profoundly depressing – and difficult territory from which to start to put together a compelling public case for tackling poverty. (Bamfield, 2005)

In the meantime the poorest live in the most extreme conditions of poverty; these include the low-paid, the vast majority of the unemployed, most disabled people, single parents and working-class older people. Many of them have no choice but to depend on the state for survival and do so at the expense of their dignity and freedom. In the face of increasingly whipped-up hysteria about scroungers and benefit cheats, those on disability benefits are being tortured by new eligibility demands and criteria that humiliate, stigmatise and frighten. Young unemployed people are being forced through a variety of mandatory workfare schemes to work in degrading jobs for no return other than their Jobseeker’s Allowance (O’Reilly and Clarke, 2011). Funding is evaporating monthly for those dealing with drug and alcohol addictions, HIV, for working-class youth activities and so on, which is wreaking havoc on people’s lives and well-being.

But poverty is much more widespread than official statistics suggest. In the middle of this unequal society, and above the very poor, the ordinarily poor struggle to keep their heads above water, to hold on to their jobs and pay the bills. The pressure to consume, which feeds capitalism’s relentless search for expansion and markets, does not provide satisfaction but stress. People are not happy. Millions juggle with debts and income to chase a life defined largely by what you possess, and that which is already obsolete and overtaken by some new fashion or invention before you reach it. Compared to the standards set around them, and enjoyed by those at the top, it is scarcely a life of luxury. Most households need two people at work just to get by. For many this means that time with children, family or friends is sacrificed, and the poverty of people’s lives increases. The break-up of relationships under stress, violence, abuse, suicide, depression and illness should remind us that poverty is pervasive and cannot be measured in money alone. For the majority the constant haunt that threatens in the background is that through sickness, divorce, unemployment or bad luck they will lose their position and begin an inexorable slide into the ranks of the poorest. So they work harder, and even for less. Most would not count themselves as poor. It would be small wonder if those slightly better off than the poorest did not seek to keep their distance, did not try to avoid being tagged with the same labels and tarred with the same brush. Hostility and resentment towards those dependent on state benefits is not of course the only response, but it is one which plays an important part in weakening solidarity.

Some may also, and this has often been the case, turn their attention downwards and blame those ‘below them’ – immigrants, welfare dependants – for their situation. In a sense they are right. The competition of the very poor – for work, for housing, for some assistance, even if from the state – impacts on the poor above them, and the mechanisms have long been laid to encourage them to blame each other.

But, ho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Series editors’ introduction
• Part One: Lead essay
• Part Two: Responses
• Part Three: Concluding remarks
• References