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.

The unique blindness of some commentators on the right

Janan Ganesh of the FT talks about the unique moral arrogance of the left. They have too often “impugned the motives of Conservatives”. He says that “the reality of politics in a rich, modern country is that parties are squabbling over marginalia”. He is wrong, and should get out more.

For example, take the issue of benefit sanctions. No doubt he might say that sanctions existed, and indeed the regime was tightened, during the Labour government. But the reality is that something very horrible, and morally shameful, is currently going on. The number of sanctions per claimant remained below 4% from 2000 to 2010. In 2013 it peaked at above 7%, and in 2014 was between 5% and 6%. Behind these statistics are a wealth of examples of where sanctions have been applied for minor infringements, and have ignored excellent reasons like the death of a spouse, or the long que at the jobcentre. Frances Coppola gives these and more examples here.

She points out that Department of Work and Pension (DWP) guidance states “It would be usual for a normal healthy adult to suffer some deterioration in their health if they were without essential items, such as food, clothing, heating and accommodation or sufficient money to buy essential items for a period of two weeks…” Sanctions often operate for 4 weeks or even longer. It is causing people to become homeless, and children to go hungry. This is not “marginalia”.

The current sanctions regime is one of the main causes of the increased use of food banks in the UK. Yet Ganesh instead likes to focus on inaccurate use of foodbank data. The DWP says that the sanctions regime is important in providing incentives to get people back to work. But is there any evidence that it does this? You would think that the department would have produced some evidence by now, although one of the comments on Frances’s post (and yes, we cannot know it is genuine) suggests why we have not. Yet this did not deter the department. They put out on their website (now unsurprisingly withdrawn) quotes and a picture from ‘Sarah’ who had been sanctioned and as a result had been encouraged to produce a CV. The only problem was that Sarah was completely fictitious.

There is widespread talk of jobcentre staff being put under pressure to sanction. The relevant select committee of MPs has asked for an inquiry, but this has been refused. Benefit sanctions are just one of a range of policy mistakes by this department that is causing real harm to the disadvantaged, and will continue to do so. All these problems were quite clear before the election, but the Prime Minister has kept Iain Duncan Smith in post. George Osborne has been happy to feed off the stigmatisation of benefit claimants stoked by the tabloids.

So please, Mr. Ganesh, no more lectures about moral arrogance on the left. Not, at least, until you have recognised what is actually happening to many of those who are unfortunate enough to be claiming benefits administered under this government, and the government’s apparent indifference to that.