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Debating the "underclass" By Martin McIvor October 2002 "Underclass is a myth, Left admits" announced the front page banner headline. It had to be the silly season - and here indeed in the dog days of August was a particularly silly piece of over-the-top journalism from the redoubtable Daily Telegraph, making hay with the new Catalyst pamphlet Poverty and the Welfare State: Dispelling the myths, authored by Paul Spicker, Professor of Public Policy at the Robert Gordon University Aberdeen. It was silly first of all because, as a news story, this was pure "dog bites man". There should be nothing surprising - nothing terribly original, indeed - about a leftwing think tank contesting the construction of an "underclass" as the organising concept of welfare policy. It was thinkers of the right, such as Sir Keith Joseph and the American neo-conservative Charles Murray, who were originally most vocal in raising alarm that modern systems of social security were nurturing a new social strata of feckless indigents, dependent upon state handouts and teaching their errant ways to their (all too numerous) offspring. At its most inflammatory the notion carried slanderous insinuations of criminal propensity and disturbing undertones of genetic or racial determination. The story was also silly in a more mischievously opportunistic way because the pamphlet does not, as the Telegraph would like to think, "demolish Labour policy" - it never claims to. Blair (and Mandelson) may have used the language of the "underclass" in the early days of the government, but, gratifyingly, have lately avoided it; responding to the pamphlet in the media Work and Pensions minister Malcolm Wicks was happy to acknowledge that this was a "sociologically dubious" category. More importantly, perhaps, the pamphlet emphasises that "there have been genuine improvements in the condition of the poor under Labour" - something few can deny, as major resources are channelled into funding a more generous and redistributive system of benefits and tax credits, in pursuit of a wholly admirable and impressively ambitious commitment to abolish child poverty. But Spicker adds that "there have also been negative, punitive measures", making for "a mixed, and sometimes inconsistent, policy programme." Here is where the argument no doubt does become controversial. Spicker's claim is that New Labour's discourse of "social exclusion", and emphasis upon "targeting" measures against poverty, has failed to fully break free from the assumptions and priorities which underlay the New Right's onslaught on welfare provision, and which he traces back to the "Poor Law" culture that predated Beveridge. There are perhaps two crucial issues that can be pinpointed for debate here. One is the danger that a properly contextualised, holistic understanding of the experience of poverty may lead us to try to combat it not by providing more resources, services and opportunities but by intervening to suppress the attitudes, behaviours and forms of social relationship associated with it. This is a genuine dilemma for progressive public policy and will always be a question for difficult judgements. There may indeed be cases where simply "throwing money" at someone will not be enough. But re-education can shade into crude social control if the communitarian language of reintegration becomes detached from the attention to economic injustice that must be our primary commitment. The second area of contention and potential misinterpretation concerns the dynamics and demographics of poverty as it is customarily defined. The rightwing press jumped on the recognition - already well-established and familiar to anyone working in the field - that most income poverty is temporary. Fewer than half of the children who spent one of the years between 1996 and 1999 in the lowest part of the income distribution stayed in that bracket for the whole four years. But the obvious arithmetical correlate of this fact, given the "snapshot" poverty totals we all know, is that a far greater proportion of the population experience poverty at some point in their lives than is readily imagined. 39 per cent of all children experienced poverty for at least one of those four years. 60 per cent of the entire population spent at least one year in the bottom 30 per cent of the income distribution between 1991 and 1999. The implication of such figures is not to diminish the seriousness of income poverty, but to show it to be even more pervasive and far-reachingly destructive than those headline figures reveal. It is a reality that afflicts the majority of society, not just in those years when they actually do fall below the statistical poverty-line, but for the rest of the time when they live with it as an ever-present threat, and indeed continue to suffer the educational, employment and health disadvantages of those periods of particular deprivation. And that, of course, was what the whole concept of "social security" was meant to address - as a system of collective insurance which protected us all against the inevitable contingencies of a market economy and a dynamic society, tiding us over periods of difficulty and preventing us from falling into deeper disadvantage as a result. This is the pamphlet's core message, and its most valuable one. "We are in danger of losing sight of what the welfare state is about", claims Spicker - not an institution for policing the margins of society, but a universal public service upon which most of us depend. If the Labour government were able to revive this notion in the public mind - and entrench it in its policy by favouring upfront universal provision over means-testing and swingeing conditionality - it could trumpet its acts of stealthy redistribution with the same pride and populism as it proclaims its diversion of taxpayers' money into rebuilding our health and education systems. Welfare for the many, not the few, they might say. And if our own intervention helped prepare the ground for such a paradigm shift in policies and perceptions, if only by awakening a national debate about poverty and welfare in an otherwise somnolent late summer, then, maybe, it was worth it. Published in "Poverty", the journal of the Child Poverty Action Group. Martin McIvor is Director of Catalyst. |
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