Poverty is a growth industry
Bubble — By Angela Elniff-Larsen on October 23, 2009 6:00 am
This Picture Post image of poverty in Wigan in the 1930s recalls a time when there was more understanding and less condemnation of the poor in the media
POVERTY has become a political adjective in Wales. You could lose count of the Assembly Members, MPs and councillors who claim to represent the most deprived, most socially excluded – or least socially included – part of Wales. Often, those very same councillors will sit on local authorities that produce reams of glossy marketing that promotes the wonderful opportunities for inward investment and middle class aspirational living that their areas present. What you might call a two-sides-of-the-same-coin plan.
There seems to be plenty of league tables that prove poverty and how bad it really is. They are often viewed as the key to unlocking funding that would eliminate the poverty and bring the poor in to the New Jerusalem. However, in the past 30 years or so, the gap between the haves and have-nots has grown ever wider. It is one thing to discuss poverty and prosperity in the abstract. It is another, more dangerous task to discuss the poor and the prosperous.
We now have different classes of poor – even different genres. In his 2002 report, Catalyst – Poverty and the Welfare State: Dispelling the Myths, Paul Spicker points to a continuum along which many of us travel at some point in our lives and which takes us into the realm of poverty. So not only are the poor growing, the variety of poor is growing, too. We now have a segmented poverty market.
To serve that market we have a growth industry. Objective One, Communities First, Welfare to Work and others like them have spawned a whole army of professionals who – in the nicest possible sense – administer and support poverty – or, as the new euphemism would have it, social exclusion or inclusion”. Most of these jobs pay £25k plus, while some offer up to £50k a year.
Coordinators manage workers, who manage partnerships, who feed the National Assembly to roll out Communities First. Dozens and dozens of new jobs for the management, support and edification of communities and their needs have been created across Wales. There are also those consultants who justify the new professionals by providing evidence of the need for their jobs. They use the poor as a free source for the reports and strategies and models that they churn out, and charge between £350 and £850 a day for their services. And we now export these services, too.
It would be interesting to see how much the National Assembly, local authorities and Welsh non-governmental agencies have spent on consultancy. With Westminster and Whitehall’s bills for such services now reaching around £2bn a year, it would seem a decent educated guess that the overall amount is over seven figures on this side of the border. How much of it is destined to shelf decoration, nothing more than justification for ill thought-out policy?
Looking through the situations vacant pages in the Welsh newspapers, which until farily recently carried pages of public sector, bilingual, logo-included positions, its hard to escape the conclusion that the poor are a job creation source. This appears to have become the perception across Wales, a shared experience and a unifying factor among poor communities that want to know when they will the receive tangible resources they need.
By talking to the communities targeted by these programmes, and by studying statistics that report upon them, some stereotypical perceptions emerge. They are:
* The south gets all the money and doesn’t need it, says the north;
* The north is full of tourists and English and is affluent, says the south;
* Rural Wales is full of rich farmers, says urban Wales;
* Cardiff gets everything, says Swansea;
* The M4 belt is a funding Mecca, say the A470 and A55 corridors;
* Nothing gets further north than Caerphilly, says the Valleys.
The so-called excluded do not like or accept the label, and problems faced by the poor are compounded by the benefits system, which crushes expectation and creates another form of poverty. Call it poverty of experience, or poverty of opportunity, but it’s hard not to be pessimistic and foresee this issue being addressed through capacity building, which lead to the establishment of another battalion of professionals paid to improve chances for the poor. Of course, there will have to be research into what capacity means, how we evaluate it, how we model it, and how we replicate it.
The media does little but reinforce stereotypes of the poor with reports from noted sink estates – ignoring the efforts of people in Ely, Gurnos, Townhill and Maesgeirchen who are working to improve infrastructure and services – that skew the general view of the poor.
We have a real need to look at poverty and its causes, to understand why we have people – often our most vulnerable – living and existing in such dire circumstances. Poverty is not a problem connected with the way poor people behave. Poor people are often forced to behave differently because of their circumstances. Poverty is full of myths that inform the prejudices we have about the subject – prejudices that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in the 18th Century.
The welfare state does not encourage people to be poor. It still manages to keep to its core mission of providing social protection for all of us. The costs and abuse of the system are often exaggerated, and very few are actually “better off” on the dole. Meanwhile, the argument that welfare creates dependency has been around – unproven – for over 200 years.
“Apart from pensioners, it is rare for people to stay on benefits for more than a few years. Most children born into poverty cease to be poor before long. There is no evidence of a dependency culture .The cost of welfare in Britain is rather less than in other, economically successful countries,” Paul Spicker found in his report.
What we need are programmes that ensure a level of services for every one adequate to what they need, and services that can be used by anyone when they need it. Targeted programmes to date have not worked. The psychological impact of recession, failure of industry, economic decline and the loss of well paid jobs have given communities in all areas of Wales a shared psychological proclivity to depression. We have to look to economic causes and economic solutions to raise that depression and escape the poverty trap in Wales.
Maybe the focus should be on prosperity. Isn’t that what we all aspire to?
Tags: Economy, inequality, poverty, social mobility
Tweet This
Share on Facebook
Digg This
Bookmark
Stumble
14 Comments
This is an excellent article. I’d like to point out however that another big stereotypical perception produced by politicians is to do with bogus class politics, whereby Labour politicians, usually from South East Wales, accuse Welsh-speakers of being ‘middle class’, and behave and speak as if there were no poverty in Caernarfon, Bethesda, Blaenau Ffestiniog etc. This has been one of the nastiest and most corrosive elements in the Welsh Labour establishment’s rhetorical arsenal. Needless to say this rhetoric comes against a background of Welsh Labour increasingly trying to suck up to ‘aspirational’ and ‘middle class’ voters to stop them voting tory. Whole parts of Wales don’t feature on the ‘poverty map’ of Wales projected by the political establishment.
Surely it would help if the country’s ruling political party didn’t consistently claim that one section of the population was more ‘middle class’ than another based on the language it speaks? This rhetoric comes out at elections, in political leaflets, in discussions of schools and Welsh-medium schooling, etc., and is always used as a political tool and never an attempt to resolve the issues around poverty and dependency.
To that extent I agree entirely, and it’s well put, with the idea that poverty haas become a ‘political adjective’. It has joined the ranks of words with almost no existence outside the immediate rhetorical use they can be put to, and whose meaning, scope and action-inducing potential is purely secondary to that rhetorical use.
Wasn’t it former Welsh secretary Paul Murphy who said we needed a ‘minister for the valleys’, on the grounds of their ‘special’ and ‘unique’ problems? A quite extraordinary piece of tribalist grandstanding that was, which carried with it an admission of long-term failure: after all, with every AM and every MP in the valleys a Labour one, and a Labour government in Westminster and (at the time) a Labour government in the Assembly, and all but one Valleys council a Labour council, one would have thought that Labour might have made some inroads into these special and unique problems. Clearly not. We need a minister now, for one specific area of the country. Terrific: a man who doesn’t want devolution nonetheless supports the idea of regional ministers, but only of course for specific regions (coincidentally his own).
What most worries me about the so-called ‘poverty’ issue is the way , fundamentally, it has been tribalised by the very people who have been charged with seeking solutions to it. Any Welsh leadership candidate who got my vote back (if I was still a member) would be the one who de-tribalised the issues.
Well said Angela, although I think you risk casting the net of blame too widely. Some of the programmes you mention such as Welfare to Work are genuine attempsts to tackle the cause of poverty and, although I disagree with much of the way Welfare to Work is delivered, helping people into jobs is the best prospect for improving people’s quality of life. The other programmes you mention are no more than sticking plasters (and what’s worse, the one’s that come off after half an hour), which are often half baked attempts to paper over the cracks. My particular irk is ‘school uniform grant’, given by WAG to local authorities to give to parents to give to overpriced school uniform suppliers, instead of tackling the underlying problem of stupid and overpriced uniforms.
You are also right about the poverty label becoming a badge of honour – my report ‘Good to be Here’ argued that the poverty label was damaging thinking about the regeneration of the Heads of the Valleys because it meant that the potential offered by, for example, the thousands of graduates from the area, was being overlooked.
The fundamental issue is not poverty but inequality – the gap between the haves and the have nots. Labelling the people at the bottom of the spectrum as the problem lets the people at the top of the spectrum off the hook.
Congratulations on a very good and thoughtful article.
You might also be interested to read Leanne Wood’s article for Cambria which is in a similar vein. See here http://cambriapolitico.com/2009/10/fair-unfair-and-workfare
Coordinators manage workers, who manage partnerships, who feed the National Assembly to roll out Communities First. Dozens and dozens of new jobs for the management, support and edification of communities and their needs have been created across Wales.
Shades of ‘Atlas Shrugged’ by Ayn Rand.
an excellent article that really blows some long held myths out of the water about welfare and poverty Angela, thanks for your thoughts.
There is certainly plenty in this article to challenge our political leaders thinking here in Wales, especially the point about aiming for prosperity for everyone no matter who they are or where in Wales they live because for many Welsh politicians the heartache and misery surrounding welfare and poverty issues that they can’t seem to solve for those families really suffering the most is a comfort blanket they can’t do without.
Patrick
I don’t think it’s reasonable to single Labour out for singling the Valleys out from time to time. All parties have at various points called for special initiatives to support/regenerate the Valleys, often including new institutions, quangos etc. The late Phil Williams was a particularly powerful proponent of such support on behalf of Plaid. I think that was called “policies geared toward the specific needs of Valleys communities” rather than “a quite extraordinary piece of tribalist grandstanding” back then. You say tomato, I say tomato (not sure if my own bit of rhetoric works in the written form).
Also, the notion that Labour’s almost complete dominance in the Valleys means it alone takes the blame the area’s perpetual economic under-performance only works if one assumes such dominance was converted into political power – which of course it was not for most of the 20th century. Now there’s an argument for devolution…
Best
Adam
All true Adam, but then again I don’t think Phil Williams was calling for a minister for the valleys, and he wasn’t a noted opponent of devolution on the grounds that it added extra layers of government and isolated Wales from the UK.
It’s a far cry from Williams arguing, from the 1970s onwards, for specific Valleys-geared policies from the perspective of a party without power, and the Welsh secretary in 2007 with 10 years of Labour government and an essentially one-party dominance of the country asking for a region-specific minister to add to the nearly 20 AMs, MPs, councils etc. they already have, or had then. That certainly is tribalist grandstanding – after all, I don’t imagine that mooted minister for the valleys was going to be from any other party than Labour…
I see your point about Labour’s dominance of the landscape not equating to political power, but it certainly can’t be equated with lack of power either! If dominating the political landscape of a whole country is powerlessness, then it’s the kind of powerlessness megalomaniacs would find very attractive, as indeed they seem to.
And I agree completely that it’s an argument for devolution.
My point was to add one item to the list of ‘stereotypical distracting images’ that Angela gave as clouding the issue of debating poverty, and to make my own claim that if poverty is a growth industry, it’s also been a tool of tribalist posturing. I was also , I’ll admit, being a bit polemical.
Actually Adam – thinking back on that, I think ‘dominance without actual power’ is exactly what people like Murphy thought they were going to get with devolution, which was the only way people like Peter Hain could sell it to them and people like Rhodri Morgan could be seen to have their aspirations met.
So yes, long live dominance without power!
On a point of fact, I think you have Paul Murphy’s inclination wrong. He voted for devolution, both as an MP and as a voter, in 1997. But – for the sake of argument – wouldn’t it be entirely consistent for an opponent of devolution to support a the creation of post of Valleys Minister as an alternative to devolution, on the grounds that it would do good things for the area from within the British government, thus avoiding both extra layers of government and the risk of isolation from the UK?
And I’m not really sure what “dominating the political landscape” means in this context. Labour had a near-hegemony in the Valleys but all that amounted to to was control of an exceptionally weak (by international standards) tier of local government, and the occasional (and mostly short) spell in power in central government. Labour undoubtedly deserves its share of the blame for the ongoing relative under-performance of the Valleys, but we shouldn’t fall into the rhetorical habit of implying Labour representational dominance equals Labour governmental dominance.
Well, Murphy was well-known to be opposed to devolution, and had , like Touhig, has talked it down. As I opined (and it was an opinion) he was persuaded to vote for it in the end on the grounds that it was a much watered-down and largely powerless institution that would make little difference. The Valleys minister he proposed (interviewed on Dragons Eye about it) was a minister in the devolved assembly rather than an alternative to that Assembly.
Interesting to see that that idea went absolutely nowhere. His party was obviously unwilling to take it forward and the opposition parties too self-involved and amateurish to pick out its implications. Or maybe it just wasn’t interesting.
He calls himself a ‘devo-sceptic’, but then again Norman Tebbitt calls himself a ‘Euro-sceptic’. That noble word ‘sceptic’ is doing rather more work – a very different work – from what it was meant to – i.e. designate the use of a probing, rational but essentially open mind on a particular problem. It’s basically a euphemism for ‘anti’. Paul Flynn has called Murphy ‘viscerally’ anti-devolution (and called him anti-Welsh too, but let’s not go there), and perhaps pragmatism has softened that but it remains the case.
I’m not trying to blame Labour for failure on poverty – that’s simplistic. I’m trying to say that with the power and representation it had and has, we might have expected it to do more, and to do it less divisively, not to mention to discuss it more responsibly.
I maintain that Labour does have governmental dominance here in Wales as it has in the UK, or at any rate it has the only dominance that political system makes possible – in other words, lots of AMs , MPs, and a government in power in London and Cardiff. It doesn’t get more powerful than that.
I also think the problems it has dealt with (not very well) have pre-dated that dominance and will outlast it, so I’m not laying all blame at their feet.
It’s too easy to say that Labour have all the representation but no real power. It is hard to imagine a situation where Labour in Wales has had more potential to swing policy than the last 12 years. That was probably the high-point of Labour potential in Wales: a mix of power and massive mandate in London, with a new Assembly designed to be dominated by Labour. When they didn;t get enough seats, they simply tries to change the list system, which they did. They kicked the Richard Commission into the long grass too. That all that power, influence, dominance brought so little is a sign of a fundamental problem. There will never again be a time when Labour in London was so strong, and Labour in Wales so dominant. Where it’s got us as a country is not very far. What utterly baffling is that in the long run it’s also damaged Labour.
That’s an argument for more and faster devolution.
He calls himself a ‘devo-sceptic’
I believe he calls himself a “devo-realist”, but your point is taken Perhaps “realist” will supplant “sceptic”.
I’m trying to say that with the power and representation it had and has, we might have expected it to do more
A fair criticism. I wrote about it once: http://welshpoliticalhistory.com/?p=18
It doesn’t get more powerful than that
True. It’s just that the last few years have been rather atypical.
Best
Adam
Thanks for the comments and responses. Having read the dialogue between Adam Higgitt and Patrick Mcguinness, perhaps combining the article and responses would make a very good publishable discussion paper for the Bevan Foundation: what do you think Victoria ?
Re:Maybe the focus should be on prosperity. Isn’t that what we all aspire to?
Dear Angela Elniff-Larsen,
You prepared an excellent article explaining the basic points about the problem of the poverty, however I think you also found the solution.
Yes you are right we are looking only to solve the poverty but we are doing nothing to create prosperity four our poor population.
Why we are not creating our own help by way that we the poor are create our own people economy..why we are only accepting offer from the establishment based on their established economy. Why we are not learning from the establishment and using than their tecnics to create wealth for the poor families.
I am 70 years of age born in Germany and I lived my life in wealth and with the establishment however I think it is time for me to give my expirience to the poor population to help that they coud prosper.
I am German but because of the nice weather I am living now in Costa Rica .While I am living in Costa Rica I saw lot of poverty day by day. Therefore I established my project ” Programa Nuevos Recursos” which I designed with the goal to create New Recouses for poor families.
Well..this project will be funded by way of that I raise funds from wealthy families which will be used to purchase gold raw material for re-sale and ONLY the profit will be used to fund my project.
That means the amount raised will function as seed capital and could be returned at any time as it is requested.
Presently I am in London to establish my foundation under UK charity regulations to raise funds from intern investor.
My first project will be to establish a new concept of a homelessnes recovery centre.
This by way of that I plan to establish a Homeless Co-Operative founded by selected homeless friends.This co-perative will get funds through the foundation to purchase an old residential building and after refurbishment, done by the homeless friends, the building will be sold.
Whereby the homeless person will get for his work a min. wage paid financed by the foundation and the invested amount will be returned to the foudation for an other purchase and the profit will be distribiuted to the homeless friends. This to start with..to create prosperity for poor families.
I plan that this concept will be used to create projects such as a workshop to manufacture furniture for sale in the co-operativ’s shop.
This with the goal is to establish a new “people economy” involving poor families as purchaser. This to create an to the economy established by the establishment.
Please feel free to contact me for further information and to be active in my project.
Rudolf H.P. Meyer
Angela, i like your article and realism.
Poverty is an industry as you say with communities first and other quango’s who are lacking in focus upon job or welath creation for thise they represent. Maybe only wealth creation for themselves.
‘Rural Wales is full of Rich farmers’ Young farmers with no land are not and I know a couple who earn every penny and often are in two minds whether what they are doing is viable or not.
On the other hand older Farmers in most cases have a life of Riley. Able to build houses on there land, renovate buildings into holiday cottages, massive extensions, Rolls Royces serviced when the Single farm payment comes…it’s unbelievable. As a city boy I never realised this until I lived in the country.
With all this affluence there is the old woman who cannot get to the doctor because of no buses and the disabled ex-soldier with pleurisy who cannot to the doctor either . Lot’s of inequality. It’s government policy that is doing this.
‘We have a real need to look at poverty and its causes, to understand why we have people – often our most vulnerable – living and existing in such dire circumstances’
David Willetts MP in his book ‘Pinch’ gives an idea why egalitarianism has failed. It may be acidic rapture to Feminists . He believes it is the rise of women earning more. Two income families have increased. While the number of no income families have also increased. Child poverty has emerged and inequalities have risen. ‘Feminism has trumped egalitarianism’ to quote him.
I also believe the rise of technology has a pert to play and will increase inequality.