Understanding Society

Poverty, Wealth and Inequality in the UK

Carlo Morelli, Paul Seaman, Carlo J. Morelli, Paul T. Seaman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781138894440
• eBook ISBN: 9781351717885
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Lavoro in ambito sociale

This poignant book examines poverty, wealth and inequality in the UK, and provides insight into its history, its present-day forms and possible routes to its eradication.

The book demonstrates how poverty, wealth and inequality are constructed in the UK, noting that it is not an innate part of the human experience, but a phenomenon which is constructed by economic and social circumstances. Using work ranging from Malthus' interrogation of the ' natural right of the poor to full support in […] society ' to more contemporary approaches, including Thomas Picketty's Capitalism in the Twenty First Century, the authors examine various forms of poverty, wealth and inequality in the UK, using the UK Household Longitudinal Study, Understanding Society, dataset to ground their findings in quantitative evidence. The book concludes with an assessment of what is required to potentially end poverty in the UK, and a call to apply evidence-based research to the reshaping of social policy in the UK.

This book is an excellent resource for students, policy makers and lecturers seeking a greater understanding of poverty, wealth and inequality in the UK. It will be of particular interest to those working in or studying the fields of human geography, economics and social policy.

1INTRODUCTIONUnderstanding society: poverty, wealth and inequality in the UK

DOI: 10.4324/​9781315179957-1

Introduction

This book seeks to use the Understanding Society, UK Household Longitudinal Study survey (UKHLS) dataset to examine the extent and characteristics of poverty, wealth and inequality in the UK. In doing so the book provides students, policymakers and academic lecturers and researchers with an assessment from the Understanding Society dataset and disseminates policy-focused research and new thinking to highlight the advantages of, largely underutilised, longitudinal research methodologies.

Inequality, wealth and poverty surround our daily lives. In the week of the 30th April 2018 when we first started researching this book, the news of Amber Rudd MP’s resignation as Home Office Minister was the first item on the news, as a result of the racially motivated inequalities faced by the Windrush generation of Commonwealth migrants, in relation to government immigration policy (Financial Times, 2018, p. 1). This was followed by news of the extent to which the British overseas territories act as tax havens for the laundering of ‘dirty money’. Estimate of £68 bn from Russia alone is suggested to have passed through the British Virgin Islands before being invested ‘legally’ in property and other assets (Guardian, 2018, pp. 1–4). Finally, the Scottish Government introduced new legislation imposing a minimum price of alcohol to address alcohol- related poverty and ill health (Herald, 2018, p. 1). Some three years on these three events will have been largely forgotten but could be replaced by the recognition of the failures of COP26 climate change conference to address the impact of climate change on the global south (Financial Times, 2021), the uproar of the return to sleaze and corruption of MPs in the House of Commons (Guardian, 2021, p. 1) and the impact the withdrawal of additional £20 per week support for low-income households through Universal Credit (BBC, 2021). By the time readers are reading this three almost identical examples of inequality, wealth and poverty in the press could be found if we take a moment to look.

While poverty is the everyday lived experience of vast numbers of the population in the UK, at the same time a tiny minority have levels of personal wealth beyond what most individuals would find possible to comprehend. As a result we often seek measures of income inequality which place the scale of inequality into recognisable and understandable forms. Pen’s Parade was used to illustrate the levels of income inequality in which the population of a country is suggested to walk past a single spot during one hour (Pen, 1974). The original parade illustrated that it is not until 48 minutes into the hour that we will see individuals pass the spot who are of average height, before then all that can be observed is a vast stream of stunted and reduced height individuals. Even median income individuals are only half the height of the average. However, just five minutes before, the end giants begin to appear, and in the last minute individuals who are miles high end the parade (Colbeck, 2010). Similarly, as with other forms of inequality our understanding requires means by which the data can be brought down to a recognisable level. So, the Fawcett Society’s use of ‘Equal Pay Day’, the day when women cease to be paid relative to male earnings as a means to illustrate gender pay inequalities. In the UK, 20th November 2020 was calculated to be Equal Pay Day, despite being 50 years since the introduction of the 1970 Equal Pay Act (Fawcett Society, 2020). Finally, we demonstrate how falling life expectancy across a city can be depicted by the distance walked, a number of traffic lights passed or tube stations travelled to represent years lost in life expectancy between the wealthiest and poorest areas in communities that exist cheek by jowl to one another (O’Brien, 2014).

Inequality and wealth

Poverty, for decades, has been the focus of attention for academics from across a range of social science disciplines. A veritable industry exists ranging from research networks, policy institutes and campaigning charitable organisations, whose aim is the creation of a wider and deeper understanding of the existence and experience of poverty both in the UK and the wider world. Demand from the non-governmental sector to listen to, and frame policy from, the perspective of those facing poverty has been a persistent conclusion from those working with and representing disadvantaged and excluded populations.

A key difficulty with this focus upon poverty, however, has been the emphasis within social policy of seeking to address the condition of those facing poverty. Poverty research seeks to identify the characteristics and uniqueness of this sub-group of the population, to determine the vulnerabilities, predispositions and inter-relationships within society that places this group at risk of poverty. While this may derive from a sympathetic rather than punitive perspective, this research nevertheless is indicative of a focus upon deficiency, deviance and ‘othering’ as an intellectual basis. Inequality, by contrast, examines the totality of a social hierarchy in which the basis for the hierarchy’s existence is the focus of attention.

A largely new found focus upon inequality and wealth has required a shift in the approach undertaken by academic scholars who were previously dominated by the question of poverty, to the almost exclusion of inequality. Barriers to movement within a hierarchy, social immobility, structural impediment and differential advantage are now the intellectual starting point for study. Concepts of deficiency, deviance and ‘othering’ are rarely applied to those populations who are the beneficiaries of income inequalities. Remedial action for the disadvantaged minority at the bottom of society may still be a policy outcome of such research, but now it is within a broader question of addressing the structural nature of poverty and addressing the injustice of inequality that is the context of such work. The emergence of this structural nature of inequality and poverty can also be readily identified by a historical examination of its origins.

Inequality and poverty in historical context

The existence of a tendency in mankind to increase, if unchecked, beyond the possibility of an adequate supply of food in a limited territory, must at once determine the question as to the natural right of the poor to full support in a state of society where the law of property is recognised.

(Malthus, 1964, p. 55)

Thomas Malthus, nineteenth century political philosopher, arguably provides the most important starting point for the study of poverty and inequality in contemporary capitalism. The primary reason for this is that, as his quote above highlights, one of the most central, yet un-debated, tenants of the poverty literature is that poverty is a state of human existence which has always existed in all human society and that poverty and inequality can only therefore be ameliorated, but never eradicated, as part of a wider gradualist process of economic development. As Malthus maintains, there is a natural tendency in mankind to generate demand which is beyond the potential for its satisfaction. Therefore, let us start with a heresy; poverty and inequality have not always existed. The concept of poverty can only emerge with the rise of an economic system for two reasons. Either society generates insufficient resources to permit all individuals to avoid poverty or alternatively a society emerges with sufficient resources, but this wealth and income is concentrated in the hands of a minority at the expense of the majority.

As the twentieth century demonstrates the Malthusian population trap of rising population outpacing the growth of world, output has been discredited leading to an understanding that poverty has been socially constructed by the choices of individuals and institutions to facilitate a specific form of inequality. That earlier societies did not have access to the forms of human wealth available to later human societies cannot be used as a measure of the poverty in any specific society. Just because an ancient slave owner or their slave, or a feudal Lord or their serf, did not have access to an automobile, a mobile phone or antibiotics does not make the entire population of earlier societies poor (Flannery and Marcus, 2012). All poverty therefore is a relative assessment of the disparity that exists within a society at any given point in time. Thus, any statement we make about poverty must be contextualised within the historical developments of the period under consideration.

In starting with this point, we follow the criticism of Malthus that has been available since his original Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society was published dating from Ricardo and Marx. As Engels (1996) writing in 1844 notes in the Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, ‘if Malthus had not taken such a one–sided view of the matter, he could not have missed seeing that surplus population or labour power is always bound up with surplus wealth, surplus capital and surplus landed property’ (Meek, 1953, p. 60). Thus, the critique of the Malthusian law of population was one which located poverty within the structural organisation of modern economies and therefore derived from inequality rather than lack of resources. This point is made much later in the twentieth century in the critique of the more modern economic concept of ‘effective demand’ in which a contemporary Malthusian limit is reinvented to explain poverty. As Meek, writing in the 1950s, again points out ‘an important part of Keynesian theory of effective demand has been made to play a role just as reactionary as that which Malthus intended the original theory [of population] to play’ (1954, p. 21).

When examining poverty and inequality, we are undertaking an examination of the structures in society that generate inequalities and as a result poverty. A key consideration is then that poverty can only exist where a hierarchy of power emerges within the specific social relations of society ensuring that poverty not simply emerges but is enforceable over time.

An examination of inequality is then to recognise the institutional structures within society which are necessary for the creation of poverty. Poverty becomes the individual representation of inequality within any specific set of institutional arrangements and is absolute in all its forms. Social exclusion and lack of access to resources becomes the lived experience of those in poverty and is felt in absolute, rather than in relative terms, by those facing poverty. Neither poverty nor inequality are therefore a product of human nature but instead are products of the specific form of economic development a society has created. Therefore, poverty and inequality needs to be understood and placed within its own historic and institutional context. One central underlying theme, in this study, is the examination of the forms of inequality created and re-constructed over time and to examine how even minor changes in the institutional structures of society can impact on inequality and poverty.

Contemporary recognition of inequality

The recent revival of interest in inequality, as opposed to poverty, within academic research follows on from the publication of two highly popular and influential books. The first by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (2009), The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, and the second by Thomas Piketty (2014), Capital in the Twenty First Century. Together these volumes brought academic evidence to a wide readership of a growing phenomenon which had deep roots within contemporary advanced capitalism, namely a rapid increase in income inequality. Wilkinson and Pickett drew attention to the correlation between national levels of income inequality and a diverse range of social and health inequalities, i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• List of Boxes
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Understanding society: poverty, wealth and inequality in the UK
• 2 Understanding Society: Subjectivity, datasets and methodological approaches
• 3 Extreme Poverty: A structural inequality?
• 4 The Top 10%: Income and wealth inequality
• 5 Inequality and Devolution: Localised solutions to poverty and inequality
• 6 Child Poverty: Creating intergenerational poverty
• 7 Conclusion: An evidence-based policy agenda for ending poverty
• Index