Winning the argument on poverty

By Ruth Lister

In his keynote speech to the recent Compass conference, Gordon Brown acknowledged that “we are barely at the foothills of meeting the challenge we face” to eradicate child and pensioner poverty. In response to questions, he conceded that the government had to do more to go out and “win the argument” and that hitherto they had not done it as well as they could.

How is the argument to be won? There are no easy answers. Indeed I once asked J.K. Galbraith the question at a meeting he addressed and he didn’t have the answer either! It is an issue that the Fabian Commission on Life Chances and Child Poverty is currently grappling with. So I certainly do not claim to be able to offer a blueprint for how the government can do better. But what is clear is that “doing good by stealth” needs to give way to a higher profile, unequivocal, anti-poverty commitment across government and in the run-up to the next general election. Also, some of the arguments in my new book on the conceptualisation of poverty may offer some clues. Here are five that I hope we might be able to debate through Catalyst.

First, the statistics of poverty are, of course, important. They underline the scale of the problem, especially among children. They identify groups that are at particular risk such as black and minority ethnic groups and female-headed households. When contrasted with the situation in some of our continental European neighbours, they demonstrate that such high levels of poverty are not inevitable. And they help us to hold government to account. But I do wonder whether they do much to win over the uncommitted. I suspect many people switch off and, to the extent that we are successful in getting the figures across, they become inured to them.

We therefore need to balance the statistics with a better understanding of what it means to live in poverty. If we listen to what people in poverty themselves say, it helps us to understand the ways in which poverty means not just a disadvantaged and insecure economic condition but also a shameful and corrosive social relation. Accounts by people with experience of poverty of the contempt and disrespect with they are often treated and the sense of shame and worthlessness this can engender have helped me understand better how poverty is experienced. Such accounts might have more impact on public attitudes than dry statistics. They also help “us” to see “them” as human beings with agency who have something to say rather than as, at best “deserving” passive victims or at worst “the undeserving poor”. In this way solidarity between the “non-poor” and the “poor” has a better chance of taking root.

This brings me to my second point, which concerns the language used about people living in poverty. Language is important both to how the wider society sees “the poor” and to people experiencing poverty themselves. Labels like “underclass” and “welfare dependant” are explicitly stigmatising. A government minister who used the term “underclass” in a meeting with parents living in poverty met a storm of protest because they felt demeaned by it. A parent living on benefit, participating in meetings of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Poverty said “we hear how the media, and some politicians, speak about us and it hurts”.

While thankfully ministers do not now talk about the “underclass”, I’m sure it hurt some people to hear Tony Blair describe them recently as “languishing on benefit” or when benefits are constantly dismissed as “passive welfare”. Such pejorative statements disregard all the evidence we have of what hard work it is to get by on benefit and of the valiant efforts many make to get off benefit. Conversely, the unwritten subtext of New Labour’s new mantra of helping “hard-working families” is that those who are not working hard in employment do not matter. And one can almost hear the unspoken “decent” before “hard-working”, recreating historically rooted divisions between “deserving” and “undeserving” poor.

Stigmatising language is not only harmful to those it describes. By “Othering” those in poverty as different from the rest of us, it also serves to distance “us” from “them”. The result is that comfortable Britain is more likely to write “the poor” off as beyond the bonds of common citizenship than to respond to appeals to support a concerted attack on poverty.

Third, increasingly it is being argued that the fight against poverty cannot be divorced from underlying inequalities. In the famous words of R. H. Tawney, “what thoughtful rich people call the problem of poverty, thoughtful poor people call with equal justice the problem of riches”. The general case for addressing inequality is well put in the recent Catalyst pamphlet by Ben Jackson and Paul Segal. Cross-national analysis indicates that the countries with the lowest levels of poverty tend to be more equal overall than countries with higher levels. The relevance to my argument here is that the wider the gap between those in poverty and the better off, the less likely it is that the latter will recognise the equal worth and common citizenship of the former. Indeed, they are less likely even to be aware of the reality of poverty, a point underlined by Adrian Sinfield in his evidence to the House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee inquiry into child poverty.

Nevertheless, the British Social Attitudes Survey reveals continued antipathy towards high levels of inequality and majority support for the proposition that government has a responsibility to reduce the gap between high and low incomes. It’s true that, when asked explicitly about redistribution from rich to poor, enthusiasm seems to wane somewhat. But perhaps when even a Labour government is uncomfortable with the “r” word, it’s hardly surprising if the wider public comes to think that redistribution is a “bad thing”. This could then weaken support for the further redistribution that is necessary to tackle poverty effectively.

Poverty is not only associated with inequalities of class but also cross-cutting social divisions of gender, “race” and disability. My fourth argument, therefore, is that anti-poverty policies need to be embedded in wider policy debates. The rationale is not only to underline how poverty overlaps with other policy issues but also, more importantly, to engage the general population by combating the tendency to residualise the issue of poverty. A similar point was made in a New Policy Institute/Fabian Society report published in 2001. It argued for a vision of a socially inclusive society that engages us all rather than separating out the problems of groups separated off as “other”. Such a vision could draw on notions of flourishing and well-being, which are being articulated by organisations such as the New Economics Foundation, and on discourses of human rights and citizenship deployed by organisations working with people in poverty such as ATD Fourth World and Oxfam.

This brings me to the fifth and final point. Links need to be made between the anti-poverty and democratic renewal agendas. Conceptualisations of poverty as loss of human rights and citizenship emphasise how poverty typically entails voicelessness. This undermines effective democracy. The UK is a signatory to the UN Copenhagen Declaration, which states that “people living in poverty and their organizations should be empowered by involving them fully in the setting of targets and in the design, implementation, monitoring and assessment of national strategies and programmes for poverty eradication and community-based development, and ensuring that such programmes reflect their priorities”.

The government has made some progress in this area, particularly at local level, and more recently in response to the requirements of the European Union for participation in the drawing up of regular National Action Plans on Social Inclusion. The latest UK National Action Plan claims that “this participative approach … provides further impetus to the fight against exclusion”. But there is a long way still to go. Greater involvement of people in poverty themselves in anti-poverty policy development and campaigns might help to strengthen the bonds of solidarity between non-poor and poor and provide the stimulus needed to spark the popular crusade against poverty sought by Brown.

Ruth Lister is Professor of Social Policy in the Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University and a member of Catalyst’s National Council. She is currently a member of the Fabian Commission on Life Chances and Child Poverty.

“Poverty” by Ruth Lister is published by Polity Press at £14.99 and can be ordered through www.polity.co.uk.

Pamphlets cost £5 each and are available from Central Books. They can be ordered by credit card on 020 8986 4854 or by cheque from: Central Books, 99 Wallis Road, London, E9 5LN (plus 75p p&p). They are also available by subscription.

To read PDF documents you will need Acrobat Reader installed on your computer. If you do not have a copy you can download it free from Adobe.

Publications list