What happened to making poverty history? Since 2008 a mountain of research has documented the growing use of food banks, the extent of fuel poverty and the inadequacies of the state pension to provide housing or social care. And now the Joseph Rowntree foundation gives damning evidence that more than a million of us live in destitution. Like every study of poverty over the past century, from Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree’s in York in 1901, these researchers show incontrovertibly that the poor are not to blame for their poverty but have it forced upon them by circumstance – specifically low or no income, ill health or homelessness.
Poverty researchers have always done great work. They embarrass politicians who want to claim their actions cause prosperity not hunger – witness the current Conservative attempt to rebrand the minimum wage a “national living wage”. And they provoke readers of a liberal or leftwing persuasion to sympathy or anger – in 1965 poverty research led to the establishment of the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG). But talk about poverty and the poor rarely provokes riots, or prompts lasting change.
It isn’t that nobody cares. Donations to charity shops and food banks have soared in Britain over the past eight years. And the general public are consistently more generous in our definitions of poverty and destitution than rightwing politicians. In the 1980s, one of CPAG’s founders, Peter Townsend, found that most people believed that those unable to afford a television, a cooker and toys for their children were poor – which was a far broader definition than Thatcher’s government was willing to accept.
The recent Joseph Rowntree report defines “destitution” according to the views not only of experts in social policy, but also of the general public. Researchers found that ordinary voters believe that anyone who lacks shelter and three meals for more than two days, or the ability to heat or light their home for more than a few days, or the money for warm clothing, shampoo or toothpaste, is destitute – that’s to say, unable to meet their most basic needs. Far from disputing whether or not poverty existed, these respondents were clear that there are gradations of poverty, from living below the breadline (surviving on less than 60% of the national median income) to being destitute.
People don’t identify as poor, though, and it’s hard to mobilise around a group who were historically disenfranchised and still are widely considered unable to participate in economic or political affairs. When researchers and pollsters ask us what class we are, more than 60% of us identify as working class. But research on poverty tends to ask how “we” define “them”. The poor are always other people, in need of charity or discipline. They are the socially and economically “excluded”, according to Tony Blair, a group that needs to be spoken for, rather than listened to; who require “inclusion” in existing institutions, rather than equal power in deciding how those institutions will operate. Those who are poor “take”, and have to be persuaded or forced to “give”, usually through their labour.
In fact, poor people are very active citizens, who often give generously of their time and resources, not least to researchers like me. Far from being marginal members of society, they are absolutely core to social research, charity and politics – the Conservative party has always invoked the itinerant vagrant, begging migrant or the “skivers” of David Cameron’s “broken Britain” to win popularity. They don’t lack media coverage, either: “scrounger” was used 46 times by British newspapers in 2007 but 240 times in 2011. It might be helpful if the media, politicians and universities started acknowledging that the poor are already high up their agendas, since these same institutions tend to question whether the working class still exists.
But those of us who want to turn austerity Britain into a fair and democratic society might want to stop talking about the poor so much. Rather than wringing our hands, we could acknowledge that destitution and poverty are just extreme manifestations of the economic inequality that is, as Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson point out, bad for at least for 99% of us. The Rowntree research points out that the destitute, like the poor, are a fluid group who have more in common with the rest of us than we often acknowledge. Most people live in poverty or destitution for limited periods of time, with millions of us vulnerable to experiencing poverty at some point in our lives. If we are to make poverty history, then we need to change the terms of a debate that has gone on for more than a century, and ask not what makes particular people poor – thanks to researchers, we know the answer – but how to wrestle wealth and power away from the 1% who have tenaciously clung on to it.