As I write this Ireland are losing to Spain in the European
championships – but only because we insist on measuring success by how many
goals are scored. Football is about entertainment, excitement, lots of money
and according to my more lecherous friends the sexiness of the players. Why
insist on only counting goals?
When Sepp Blatter stands down as FIFA president Ireland should
vote for Ian Duncan-Smith as his replacement. We know that poverty especially
child poverty is now rising. Thursday’s announcement of reducing child poverty
figures describes the situation as it existed 2-years ago. It is acknowledged probably the last positive set of figures for child poverty maybe for a decade. The solution
proposed by Ian Duncan-Smith today is to change what we count. Don’t count
incomes and levels of deprivation as we do now but instead count other factors he believes are important to poverty, such as
addiction, “worklessness” etc.
Ending poverty by changing the definition of poverty is not
an original idea, but what makes this variation particularly worrying is that it
is openly driven by the need to justify lowering the costs of benefit payments
– and even worse it seeks to measure factors that have been consistently used
by the press and politicians to blame the poor for poverty.
Should the proposal go through, every-time that the
political poison of rising child poverty figures are released they will be accompanied by the political antidote of an itemised list of the failings of parents
in order to divert the blame.
Ian Duncan-Smith, when making the announcement on the Today
programme, chose to tell a selective story of poverty and welfare spending
during the 2000’s as a justification for the change. The story goes that by focusing on incomes
the Labour government spent huge amounts of money on benefits, which meant that
4.5 million people stayed on “out of work benefits” because it was better for
them to stay on benefits than work. At one moment of revealing hyperbole he
suggested that that was what caused deficits and was bankrupting the country!
Let’s leave aside the fact that enough money to pay all
unemployment benefit for a quarter of a century was created on Thursday by the Bank of England in
order to lend to banks suggests some more substantial causes for our economic
problems. The 4.5 million workless people he talked of were not the unemployed
– they were not people unable or unwilling to work – they were those on
sickness and disability benefits. Their barrier to work was not that benefits
were too high but that they were assessed by independent agencies to be unfit
to work. I have blogged on this repeated inference that [workless = unemployed
= lazy] before – and how it has been repeatedly used to stigmatise people who
are least able to defend themselves.
Child Poverty and Tax
credits
During the years of economic growth the labour market
polarised with increasing low paid employment and vast increases for those near
the top of the income scale. This created a large number of families in work
but also in poverty. These families as well as those unable to work were left
far behind. New Labour’s solution was to focus government money on pensioners
and on families with children. It worked in reducing pensioner poverty and
child poverty. This ameliorated the problem that the economy does not give the
poorest any of the money generated from economic growth – but did not address
the underlying problem. It also meant that the poor single and childless were
in a great deal of trouble.
The price of ameliorating this problem will continue
to rise if economic growth is unfairly shared. It is obvious but worth saying
this is not a trend that was caused by the poorest – it has been driven by the
market demands of those with money.
Ian Duncan-Smith’s announcement neither recognises nor wishes
to deal with the underlying problem, and it also rejects New Labour’s
amelioration plan because of its cost. Instead it seeks to identify the “flaws”
in the poor implying, contrary to the evidence, that it is these “flaws” that are driving poverty.
Government
and independent analysts recognise that without increases in benefits or
radical change in the labour market the Child Poverty Targets will not be met.
The new proposals will set new targets - maybe ones that can be met – but which
will inevitably add more stigma to the poor while drawing attention away from
the underlying problem that even when the economy is working well the proceeds do not reach the
poorest.
