Poverty in the UK: radical social re-engineering

There was a revealing exchange between Krishnan Guru-Murthy and a Treasury minister after Channel 4 led with the UN Special Rapporteur’s report on UK poverty. After the minister trotted out various statistics about trends in poverty and inequality, Guru-Murthy said something like you have just proved the report right when it says the government is in denial. The Treasury minister was right about some of the things he said: the poverty statistics are not getting noticeably worse and might even be getting better if you choose your dates carefully, and increases in the minimum wage have helped the poor (see the IFS here).

But Guru-Murthy was also right. Under the Labour government the aim was to reduce poverty by a significant amount, and if poverty had only fallen by a small amount that was regarded as a failure. In contrast, the Conservatives have no interest in trying to reduce poverty, and many of their policies make poverty worse, and are expected to make child poverty noticeably worse. It is this change in attitude that is crucial.

Philip Alston’s report is very good, and I encourage people to read it. He makes an interesting argument that may surprise some people, but I think is correct. Here is a long quote.

“Although the provision of social security to those in need is a public service and a vital anchor to prevent people being pulled into poverty, the policies put in place since 2010 are usually discussed under the rubric of austerity. But this framing leads the inquiry in the wrong direction. In the area of poverty-related policy, the evidence points to the conclusion that the driving force has not been economic but rather a commitment to achieving radical social re-engineering. Successive governments have brought revolutionary change in both the system for delivering minimum levels of fairness and social justice to the British people, and especially in the values underpinning it. Key elements of the post-war Beveridge social contract are being overturned. In the process, some good outcomes have certainly been achieved, but great misery has also been inflicted unnecessarily, especially on the working poor, on single mothers struggling against mighty odds, on people with disabilities who are already marginalized, and on millions of children who are being locked into a cycle of poverty from which most will have great difficulty escaping.”

Blaming austerity for continuing poverty leads people in the wrong direction because it is too easily justified by ‘we had to take hard decisions’ and so forth. The key point is that the neoliberal Conservative party have no interest in making poverty reduction a major target, and their press backers have considerable interest in demonising the poor. That is not a partisan statement but a fact. For example raising the tax thresholds is not an efficient way of reducing poverty, because much of the benefits go to people who are clearly not poor.

There is another point worth exploring in that interview I noted at the beginning. Most people will be surprised to hear that aggregate poverty is not getting noticeably worse when it seems like it is. I think this paradox can also be explained by a feature of Conservative policy that Alston notes in that quote, and that is to destroy the state’s role as providing a safety net for the poor who fall on hard times, and indeed to often force them itself on to hard times. There may be a very limited role for benefit sanctions, but current policy has made them pervasive and downright cruel.

There is an obvious parallel here with immigration. In both cases the state is turned into a Kafka like organisation, that makes decisions that are not explained, are sometimes inexplicable and sometimes simply malicious. Getting bad decisions changed is costly and often requires help. There is a strong link between benefit sanctions and foodbank use. The Conservatives have known about this for some time but have done very little to change anything. And benefit sanctions are just one example. To quote the report once again.

“British compassion for those who are suffering has been replaced by a punitive, mean-spirited, and often callous approach apparently designed to instill discipline where it is least useful, to impose a rigid order on the lives of those least capable of coping with today’s world, and elevating the goal of enforcing blind compliance over a genuine concern to improve the well-being of those at the lowest levels of British society.”

There is so much more I could mention (about how disabled people are treated for example). But I will just make one final point. We have a profound change in UK policy that seems little noticed by much of the media, and it takes someone from outside to point it out.

This stage managed, policy free election

The real drama of the election so far was provided after the GMB union called a strike at Nestle’s York factory to protest at the management’s announcement that they were going to shift production of Blue Riband to Poland. Although the company merely talked about cutting costs, the local Labour MP blamed Brexit.

The day began with Theresa May, frontrunner in the forthcoming election, visiting both company management and union leaders to discuss the situation. The real drama began when Tim Farron, leader of the Liberal Democrats, who is campaigning to allow another referendum on Brexit, ambushed May by visiting workers who were picketing the factory. The anti-Brexit candidate shook hands and took selfies, and later said there was no doubt that the job cuts were a direct result of Brexit. I’m on the side of the workers who will lose their jobs as a result of leaving the EU, he said.

But Mrs. May was not to be outdone. After her talks she too went to talk with workers on the picket line, despite chants from some of the workers of ‘we want a second referendum’ and ‘Farron for PM’. She talked with them for an hour, and although she might not have convinced them that she could help, she did win the respect of some.

This is fiction of course, apart from the job losses at York. But those who read this Guardian article, or who live in France, will know that this is exactly what happened in the presidential run-off, with Le Pen performing the ambush and Macron having the courage to subsequently talk to the striking workers. As the article pointed out, this French political drama is in complete contrast to the stage managed campaign of Theresa May. In addition Macron has not refused to debate Le Pen for tactical reasons, as both May and then Corbyn have done.

This and the last election have been about selling brands, but unlike advertising there is no requirement to tell the truth. 2015 was all about a strong economy in capable hands: the economy was not strong and the hands sacrificed the economy for political gain but they kept on saying ‘long term economic plan’ and won. This time they are selling Theresa May as strong and stable, strong enough to bow to pressure on self-employment tax and stable in her views on Brexit, but again the marketing will win.

There is no doubt that something is very wrong when politics becomes about selling advertising slogans that are not true. But who is to blame for this situation? Janan Ganesh says the problem is that there are just two attitudes among the public about politics: indifference and obsession. I often think that the indifference is summed up by the phrase ‘all politicians are the same’. Taken at face value this assertion is clearly wrong, but what I think it means is that the person talking does not have the time or inclination to work out how politicians differ in a way that matters to them.

But this indifference does not stop people forming political opinions, often quite strong opinions. So why are we getting an election where the Prime Minister wants to avoid debate or questioning as far as she can? Krishnan Guru-Murthy is right that the media should try and discourage this way of running elections. But that needs to involve more than telling people when meetings are completely stage managed. The media needs to look at why spin doctors might want to minimise encounters with the media. For part of the answer you only need to look at how it puts gaffes before policy, as Diane Abbott discovered on Tuesday. Guru-Murthy’s own news program led with it, and all the discussion was about gaffes rather than police numbers.

Justifications along the lines of how this can reveal something about the competence of the person who made the gaffe may sometimes be true, but as a general defence it is not very convincing. As Mark Steel tweeted, if she had only put the numbers on a bus she would have got away with it. The real reason broadcasters make so much of gaffes is that they make great television. Who doesn’t want to see a politician embarrassed? But the consequence is politicians retreat to gaffe-proof platitudes. Labour politicians used to speak in a strange manner that seemed to be designed to avoid giving ammunition to the Daily Mail. It was one of the reasons Jeremy Corbyn, who said what he thought, won the Labour leadership.

If the broadcast media saved all the time they currently spend commenting on the polls and instead used that time to talk about policy, it would allow viewers to connect their own opinions to each party more easily. We do not want to end up like the last US election, where the average voter who just watched the nightly news on the non-partisan TV channels saw more time devoted to Clinton’s emails than all policy issues combined. That way we will end up with an incompetent, dishonest leader running a party whose policies will harm the country. Oh, wait...