Daily Mail Welfare Story - Untrue and Dangerously Misleading

If I blogged every time the Daily Mail printed an untruth about people on benefits I wouldn't get away from my laptop very often. But today’s untruth is designed to soften up public opinion for benefit cuts to be announced on Wednesday – and as such it deserves some examination.

The argument from Government which is supported by this erroneous article is that the UK cannot afford the current welfare system and that its costs have spiralled out of control. Affordability is a value judgement – is the benefit of our Welfare system worth the price. The price however is a matter of fact. A useful understanding of the price is can be informed by data and is all too easily misinformed by distortions and untruths.

The key line in the article is “In 1948 spending on benefits accounted for 10.4% of Britain’s total income, against 24.2% this year.” This is under no circumstances true.

National Income is a term that generally refers to the Gross National Product* (GNP). “Benefits” is a difficult term to define but to illustrate I have produced a graph showing both the Office of National Statistics and the Department of Work and Pensions figures at their very largest. They include, in size order, pensions (over half of total spending), sickness and disability, Tax credits (ONS only) income support, unemployment (under 5% of total spending) and various other money transfers. It is a graph of Welfare spending as a proportion of GDP over time from 1979 to 2012/13. These are the numbers I have to hand  – but the point is clear – Welfare spending is a lot less than 24.2%

Graph of Welfare spending as a proportion of GDP data available Data

You may notice something else – that using the very sensible measure of Welfare spending as proportion of GDP welfare spending is still lower than the mid-1990s. Not something you will hear Government spokespeople saying. Indeed the article quotes an increase in 60% of benefits under Labour – I am sure there is a way of defining the terms such that this is true – I am equally certain it is at best a small fraction of the truth.

Other points made in the article are that the state pension has trebled since 1948 and unemployment benefit has doubled. I wouldn’t take the numbers at face value as the make up of the benefits has changed markedly eg. Pension credit, contributory pension, housing benefit, winter fuel allowance and other transfers may or may not be included in the comparison. It is important to realise that neither the state pension nor unemployment benefits have kept pace with the average wage for over 30 years. Recipients of only these basic benefits are in reality a great deal poorer than the 1980s.

Can we afford the current Welfare Budget?

In cash terms and real terms (where the numbers are adjusted for inflation) Welfare expenditure has increased – a great deal. Our personal incomes and national income has also increased a great deal – in recent years faster than the welfare budget.

The question is do we think the old, the sick and the vulnerable (who make up the vast majority of welfare recipients) should share in our increased national wealth? The alternative is that these groups become increasingly disadvantaged relative to the rest of the population. If, as I do, you think these people should not be gradually disadvantaged the comparison of national income to welfare spending is the most important measure to use. In which case we have afforded greater than the current welfare levels in the past and should not accept the argument that we are unable to afford it now.

Link to the data – workbook include graphs of the groups receiving benefits over time, essentially working age families decreasing as a proportion of spending and retired age families increasing.

 

*The term “total income” might mean the UK Govt’s tax take but that doesn't get to 24.2%. My best guess is that the number is derived from the ONS welfare expenditure, which is the largest measure available, and projected to be 24.17% of the Total Govt's managed expenditure in 2013/14 - nothing like "Britians Total Income".

Welfare Spending Cuts – IMF data undermines the case

Welfare Spending Cuts – IMF data undermines the case

Christine Lagarde Director of IMF

This month the IMF has published its latest report into the world economy -  the  IMF World Economic Outlook . News stories talked of the report’s lowering of UK growth predictions, but much more importantly the IMF report contains a finding that undermines one of the central assumptions of UK’s economic policy. It provides substantial evidence that Government spending cuts do much more damage to the economy than had previously been thought

.

When the Government cuts its spending everyone agrees that the UK’s economic output (GDP) will be reduced – the question is by how much. The Government has underlying its policy and predictions the assumption that for every £10 of spending cuts only £5 will be lost to GDP. What the IMF report says is that for every £10 of spending cuts somewhere between £9 and £17 of economic output is be lost. In the jargon the fiscal multiplier is not 0.5 as previously thought but varies between 0.9 and 1.7.

The implications for economic policy are huge. Many counties, the UK included, are reducing their levels of borrowing by rapidly cutting government expenditure. Slow economic growth reduces government income and reduces the government’s ability to service its debts. So borrowing less can make a nation worse off if it hurts economic growth too much. If the effect of spending cuts is 2 to 3 times more than anticipated then policy needs revised - and quickly.

As can be expected a number of people have challenged the data, and it will take time to reach a new broadly accepted position on the effects of cuts. What is fascinating is the extraordinarily poor evidence base for the previous consensus and the numbers that underlie the Government’s current forecasting. Moreover the Government numbers for economic multipliers are based on the data of the past 30 years unaltered since the economic crisis. It is not surprising that the current climate has changed the effects of government spending dramatically. What is surprising is that many economists and politicians are unwilling to even contemplate the possibility that the facts are changing – even in the face of the new IMF data.

The driving force behind huge swathes of the austerity policies which are causing pain to the poorest all round the world  appears not to be strong evidence but worryingly inflexible ideology. As someone who in my previous career designed new vaccines it shocks me that the level of evidence necessary to test a new medicine on ten volunteers appears to be several orders of magnitude greater than the level of evidence required to impose a potentially catastrophic economic policy on billions.

Welfare spending makes economic sense.

Economic case for further £10Bn of Welfare Cuts undermined

The economic multiplier story has a further twist as everyone acknowledges that different types of government spending have different economic effects. If the money government spends goes to a person or company that in turn spends the cash quickly, then this will have a good economic effect (or high fiscal multiplier). If the money is put into savings or spent abroad, this is economically inefficient government spending (with a low fiscal multiplier).

Poor people have no choice but to spend their money quickly. Poor people have no choice but to spend their money in the UK. For this and a number of other reasons welfare is an economically efficient way to spend government money. Moody’s, a stalwart of the US financial establishment as well as the world’s largest credit ratings agency, in a US study estimated that for each $1 spend on welfare the economy $1.73 of economic growth was generated. The study was performed in 2008, pre-crisis, and all indications are that performed today, the benefit of increasing welfare spend would be considerably more. They also noted that the methods of stimulating the economy preferred by the UK Government – tax breaks to business and people higher up the income spectrum - were much less effective at generating growth, with $1 of government money adding only $0.34 to $0.50 to the economy, largely because the money is not spent by the recipients quickly.

The Effects of Further Welfare Cuts.

You can forget the maths and the jargon if you want but the implications of the data should be remembered. The Churches have argued that hurting the poorest most in public spending changes is morally wrong as well as being socially divisive. The IMF and others have now produced strong evidence that hurting the poorest is also economically damaging.

It is now difficult to find any evidence for the view that the £10Bn of further welfare cuts as announced last week would be either morally, socially or economically wise. Let us hope the evidence reaches the policymakers before further harm is done to the most vulnerable communities in this country.

A brief guide to obscuring child poverty

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.  

Justice for All

Early advice and help can stop people becoming homeless, be consumed by debt or be treated unjustly at work or by landlords. The Baptist Union of Great Britain, the United Reformed Church and the Methodist Church are supporting the Justice for All campaign. This campaign is needed because community legal and advice services which help the most vulnerable in a community get treated fairly are under threat through the Government's Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill and through spending cuts.

The President of the Methodist Conference, Revd Leo Osborn, said recently:

"It is clear that over the coming months and years the
numbers of people in living in poverty will increase. Decisions regarding benefits and housing will become
increasingly crucial in people’s lives. Sadly there are people that seek to exploit those who have fallen on hard times. This is a time when legal advice and access to justice for the poorest will become increasingly important and it is vital that the government recognises
this priority.

"Justice should be available to all, it is not a commodity to be bought and sold. Any system which makes just treatment dependant on a person’s income is profoundly at odds with Gospel values."

Research by Justice for All suggests that under the new arrangements, a third of the country may not have face to face employment, housing or debt advice.If you would like to write to your MP in advance of the report stages debate in the House of Commons, find out more information from the Justice for All website or use their online tool to write directly to your MP.

A sickness in society – I blame the politicians (and their parents).

The knee-jerk call to remove social housing from people who were involved in recent rioting may be populist but is a great example of why the poorest continue to get poorer and are badly served by politicians. A further call to remove benefits from rioters has not been implemented - yet - but is receiving a sympathetic ear from government

The plan has many obvious flaws. Should the innocent brothers and sisters be made homeless because of the actions of one member of their family? Should the sins of the son really be visited upon the father (or even the single parent)? But the truly discriminatory aspect is that this extra punishment is meeted out only to those in social housing, by definition some of the poorest in society. Should you own your own house you are exempt.

There are two ways to live securely in one house indefinitely; a mortgage or a social tenancy. Both involve keeping up regular monthly payments for a prolonged period. The difference is if you have a good credit rating and enough money for a deposit (for 4 out of 5 new house buyers this means having parents wealthy enough to give them the cash) you can buy a house using a mortgage with the massive advantage of only needing to pay for a limited amount of time and having an asset to sell at the end. If you can’t get a deposit or have a poor credit rating then if you are very lucky you might get an indefinite social tenancy. You will have to pay every month indefinitely and you won’t have an asset to sell – but at least you will be secure.

Removal of a social tenancy is the equivalent of forcing a person with a mortgage to sell their house and smearing their credit rating such that they will never get a mortgage again. Will such equal punishments be dealt to both rich and poor – Not a chance.

To make matters worse the government plans to stop new secure social tenancies next year - so if you lose yours now you will probably never have a secure home again.

A society which taxes the poor more than it taxes the rich – is sick. A society which responds to having the lowest social mobility in the developed world by stigmatising the poor and cutting their support and benefits – is sick, and a society which punishes the poor more than the rich – is sick.

Why do I blame the politicians? The “sick” level of economic injustice in the UK requires that thousands of small discriminatory decisions such as this one be taken. Most politicians don’t come from these communities and are able to make these thoughtless decisions because they lack any real understanding of this entire sectire section of society. Nor do they make effective efforts to bring them into decision making processes either as politicians or as community representatives. Until every community is listened to the sickness will continue.

Ten things I learned at this year's Methodist Conference

(For those of you who don't know, Methodist Conference is the governing body of the Methodist Church which meets annually to vote, discuss and discern God's will for our Church)

1. Methodists are fired up about poverty and inequality. As many people were turned away at the end of the debate on the report on Poverty and Inequality as managed to speak it in. Many spoke about their personal concerns and experiences of poverty and the impact of spending cuts.

2. Methodists want to engage with the Big Society, not endorse it. Methodists don't walk away! You can see the Poverty and Big Society debate by clicking here and read the full report here (reports 10 and 11)

3. These are issues which are central to our understanding of what it is to be a Methodist and an active disciple of Jesus Christ. One person tweeted during the debate that they had "fallen back in love with Methodism".

4 . Social media works! On the day of the debate on Poverty and Big Society 55,000 people saw a tweet about Methodist Conference. Amazing. At its peak there was a tweet with the hashtag #methconf roughly every 17 seconds. You can find out more by reading this post by our Director of Communications, Toby Scott, here. As a result I've finally started tweeting, and we're hoping to get the Joint Public Issues account @publicissues twittering more actively soon

5. The Joint Public Issues Team has been asked to do a report for next year's Conference on drones. Drones operated by the UK and US in Afghanistan and northern Pakistan against individuals suspected of terrorist activity have been responsible for approximately 1000 civilian deaths. The Methodist Bishop of Pakistan spoke to Conference about the impact of drones on the populations and the chances for peace.

6. Young people really care about politics. This was a reminder rather than a newly learned fact, but it was really encouraging. We met with the Youth Assembly representatives and others to talk about how the participation of young people can be supported as they engage practically in faith and politics. Find out more through the hashtag #cpol on twitter.com

7. The Bible is the single most influential document in political history. This was the introduction by Nick Spencer of the public theology thinktank, Theos, to the annual Beckly Lecture at Conference. You can read his full lecture here.

8. Coraling the current and former Presidents and Vice Presidents of Conference for a photo in support of the Close the Gap campaign (see above), the anti-poverty campaign led by Church Action on Poverty, is like herding cats.

9.While Methodists may have spent the 19th Century being critisised for too much "religious enthusiasm", Close the Gap is as far as we can tell the first campaign the Conference has officially "enthusiastically" supported. See the video of Methodist Conference members explaining why they want to Close the Gap here!

10. Southport, where Conference was held this year, was a lovely friendly venue. However it's a bit misleading to claim that it's by the seaside. You'd have to walk a long, long way for a swim... see you next year in Plymouth!

"Doing the Right Thing" - the new deserving poor

The quest to identify those impoverished people who are not to blame for their poverty from the other poor people - who by inference are receiving the poverty they deserve- is as old as the hills. Rowan Williams wrote last week of “a quiet resurgence of the seductive language of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving” poor’” within the political debate. He was right to do so.

The phrase “deserving and undeserving” is no longer used but there are many codes in its place. The new acceptable discriminator is to talk of “people who do the right thing”. The phrase crosses the political divide, David Cameron used the phrase 7 times in one pre-election debate; Ed Milliband used it last week when suggesting some deserving people should have preference in going up housing waiting lists. It is an obvious phrase, which tests well in focus groups, but its implications are, in my view, both socially damaging and profoundly contrary to Christian teaching.

The Government has now begun to haphazardly convert the rhetoric of the “those who do the right thing” into policy. Initially Benefit Caps – limiting the total amount of benefit which could be received - were to apply to all. As time has passed those “doing the right thing” have been exempted - the old, the disabled, the war widow(er)s, and other special cases. Every Housing Benefit claim will be reduced by mathematical formula but now a discretionary £200m will go to those considered to be unjustly affected, to be determined by individual local authorities – these will be the old, the sick.... The welfare cuts are gaining similar grossly underfunded exemptions on a daily basis.

The problem is that it is easy for the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) to supply examples of the feckless poor to be derided in the pages of the Sunday Telegraph – but it is much harder to define a group as undeserving with any degree of justice or accuracy. Whole categories are labelled so that the majority of the public believe them undeserving (alcoholics for instance) but talk to your minister or others who work with addicts and very quickly it becomes much harder to use words like “undeserving”.

The hunt for the undeserving poor, despite many attempts, has never found large enough numbers of people to save significant amounts of money. This enthusiastically publicised scrounger hunt has served to stigmatise people who least deserve it and have little opportunity to fight back. The unjust sigma is also used to penalise those who clearly have “done the right thing”. The reason being if you just take money from the “undeserving” it doesn’t save much and don’t be fooled into thinking it does. But even if making moral judgements on past behaviour was a fruitful exercise I would argue for a benefit system focussed on meeting needs rather than judging behaviour.

Some of the most compelling Gospel stories are of Jesus’ encounters with people as he went about his ministry. My reading of these encounters show Jesus to be profoundly disinterested in someone’s past commitment to “doing the right thing”. Jesus was unimpressed by the Pharisees - who made a fetish out of “doing the right thing” – yet those who society judged harshly - those who hadn’t “done the right thing” eg - Zacheaus or the Woman at the Well – seem to emerge from their encounters with Jesus much better. Jesus seemed much more concerned with meeting the needs of the person he met than judging them on past behaviour.

Our liturgy says we have “all sinned and fallen short”. In past times Christians would describe themselves as “wretched” or “sinners” or other colourful words to acknowledge the fact that even the best of us have not always “done the right thing”. The very heart of the Christian faith is the acknowledgement that although we do not always “do the right thing” we are still loved, still valuable and still acknowledged as made in the image of God. A Christian who wishes others the full consequences of “doing the wrong thing” should really ask themselves if this is a rule they would be happy to see applied to themselves.

My view is that Christians should not set themselves up as the uninvited judges of others behaviour, nor ask the DWP to judge others’ behaviour. Christians instead should be focused on ensuring that people’s needs are met – irrespective of how they came to be in need.

Is Hard Work a Good Thing?

“My young men shall never work. Men who work cannot dream, and wisdom comes to us in dreams.” Smoholla (Wanapum 19th Century Prophet)

If earning a living is a right and a duty, it is only just that work should provide an opportunity to do more than subsist as a wage slave. The Joint Public Issues Team is delighted that Central Finance Board of the Methodist Church has recently committed to lobby FTSE 100 companies to adopt the Living Wage.

But should work be about more than money: what about the ‘work ethic’? One old fashioned idea that hard work is a religious duty. This involves the belief that it is part of the ‘curse’ for humanity’s disobedience to God and therefore, the harder and more disagreeable the work, the better! There is doubtless a religious mystery around the inevitability of toil and pain in our lives, but all too often this belief is taken to imply a sadistic God; it has been abused to justify both metaphorical and actual slavery, and the dour notion that we must work hard and joylessly all our lives, finally to be released from slavery by death to become free citizens of Heaven. Or perhaps not...

Our present attitudes to work, and to workers, are still deeply bound up with a slave model whereby workers are ‘sinful’, must be disciplined, and their rights minimised. Worryingly, George Osborne has recently announced various measures which privilege the interests of employers over employees. This appears to represent a mistrustful and punitive view of workers, in contradiction to the belief in the dignity of work which Ian Duncan Smith’s Welfare Reform Bill supposedly implies.

The second dangerous half-truth, recently popularised through the language of New Age pop-psychology, is that work is about fulfilment or self-actualisation. We should relish change, development and creativity; we should want to be working all day. This can be true for some people in some jobs, but doesn’t reflect most people’s experience. In some corporate cultures, professing a love of hard work, and seeing insecurity as exciting, is demanded: we are expected to multi-task, relish new challenges, look forward to acquiring new skills, ‘hit the ground running’ and so on. But it is one thing for a person to say that they enjoy work. It is quite another for a master to insist that his or her slaves profess love of hard work in a stressful environment, ruled by the clock or the punch-card.

Half-understood philosophies of work are a scourge of humanity. Many people still believe that hardship is the result of laziness or stupidity. This one-sided view also informs theologies which claim that ‘God rewards hard work’ and that therefore ‘if you succeed, it must be because God wanted you to’. By implication, those who do not succeed either did not work hard enough or were not acceptable to God.

One of the problems with this hyper-individualistic attitude to work is that it supports the gradual erosion of its deeper social context, rendering workers into atomic, competing units. Society and employers have a responsibility to support workers through just wages and working conditions. The individualistic attitude breeds competition rather than cooperation; it divides people into successes and failures, and erodes family life.

Churches have a role to play in promoting the ‘dignity of work’; this may sometimes involve the dignified, temporary acceptance of servitude, but ultimately it is about freedom rather than slavery, fulfilment rather than drudgery and the common good rather than selfish motivation. As well as the campaign for the Living Wage, let us hope churches like Methodism continue to remember their historic concern with workers’ rights.

In an age that has largely lost the Sabbath, churches also have the potential to remind people of the true meaning of leisure, quiet time and celebration.

Lastly, isn’t it time that theologians started challenging the notion that ‘hard work’ is a good in itself, and that life is meant to be a struggle, and restored the notions of holiness and vocation to the idea of work. They might also suggest that it is time we prioritise radical social sharing, to lessen the time spent on subsistence and maximise the opportunity for people to discover what their truly creative and fulfilling work might be. Radical, utopian thoughts, but maybe their time has come?

The Budget - Bad for the Poor but Good for Donkeys.

As expected the Chancellor did almost nothing in the budget. The July 2010 budget plotted the course and we all wait to see where it will take us. Already the statistics show that where we will end up is a place where the poorest are much worse off, where the services which the poorest rely on are also much worse off, and the standard of living of the wealthiest is left largely unaffected.

The two great hopes for the poorest are that public services can be provided to the same standard for much less money (hmmm....we’ve heard that before) and that the charitable sector will step in and provide more help. To this end the Chancellor changed Gift Aid and Inheritance Tax rules so that people will be able to reduce their tax bill by giving instead to charity. The inheritance tax change is a straight forward 1 to 1 shift of money from the public purse to the charitable sector.

Sounds good? Well for churches it maybe but for the poorest definitely not. Tax money is much more likely to be spent on the needs of the poorest than money collected by charities in general. As only the wealthiest 2% of estates pay any inheritance tax at the moment, it is the charities preferred by the wealthiest that will benefit – we know these disproportionately relate to arts and education (usually universities and individual public schools).

The government raises around £550Bn a year in taxes; it spends around £350Bn on services which directly help the poorest and most vulnerable (e.g. welfare, health and social services). The charitable sector raises around £10Bn in donations from the public each year but because the charitable sector includes things ranging from medical research, through churches, arts and culture, and on to public schools the proportion of money that goes to the poorest in society is considerably less.

The figures for the proportion of charitable giving going to particular causes are very difficult to get hold of, but it is clear that services to the poor and the vulnerable form less than 10% of donations; not surprisingly animal charities appear to receive more. The majority of expenditure by charities providing services to the poorest in the UK comes in the form of government grants. Last year these totalled £12bn which was more than public donations. This year such grants have been slashed dramatically by hard-hit local authorities.

In short charities providing help to the poor have been devastated by the cuts from the last budget. The charitable giving tax breaks will over a long time benefit the poor a little and the arts, private education and animals more.

It has long been true that should you want UK public sympathy in the form of cash you are better off being a sick donkey than mentally ill – it appears the Chancellor may yet be a man of the people!

Poverty, the Credit Trap and Legal Loan Sharks

Church Action on Poverty (CAP) launched its Close the Gap campaign on Monday 31 Jan. Running for three years, this campaign is calling on participants to Give, Act and Pray, to bring about a more equal society.

Representatives of churches and charities involved in Close the Gap delivered CAP’s new report based on a survey of local Christians’ concerns to 10 Downing Street, as well as over 1500 postcards capturing respondents’ messages for the Prime Minister on poverty and social justice, collected by CAP, and by the Joint Public Issues Team at Greenbelt 2010. The Methodist Church was represented by current Youth President Christy-Anna Errington and President Designate of Conference Leo Osborn (second from right and far right in the front row) and the Baptist Union by Sivakumar Rajagopalan, Regional Minister (Racial Justice) at the London Baptist Association.

One of the first calls to action was to email MPs and invite them to participate in this morning’s parliamentary debate on credit, one of two significant debates on debt and lending that took place in Parliament this morning. Labour MP Stella Creasy (pictured) and Conservative Justin Tomlinson are initiating the discussion of Consumer Credit Regulation in the Commons. In the Lords, Lord Kennedy of Southwark raises the question of interest charged by loan and credit companies.

Unusually for an industrialised economy, the UK sets no legal limit to the total cost of credit. In the wake of the Government’s spending cuts, there is widespread concern that increasing poverty may lead the vulnerable into an ever greater spiral of borrowing and unsustainable debt, and tempt lenders to exploit the increasing need for funds.

The Methodist Church has urged all MP’s to turn up and support Thursday’s motion to cap the cost of credit to consumers. Revd Alison Tomlin, President of the Methodist Conference, said: “One phone app offers to pay an urgent heating bill within the hour at a rate of 4214% APR. We have welcomed government proposals to regulate “excessive” store card interest rates, which David Cameron estimated would be any charging around 25% and over. It would be ludicrous and unfair to call 25% ‘excessive’ for one set of customers while allowing more vulnerable customers to pay 4214%.”

Deacon Eunice Attwood, Vice President of the Methodist Conference has also said “Working in Newcastle I have seen the damage debt and especially debt at high interest rates can do. The sight of people legally exploiting vulnerable families year after year, cannot be allowed to go on”.

Politicians and the poor. A sliding scale of respect?

I listened to the proposals for Welfare reform last Thursday seething with anger. A one stage my heated discussion with the BBC Parliament Channel was loud enough to wake my 6 month-old baby in the next room – something any sleep deprived parent will avoid in all but the most extreme circumstances.
The announcement talked again and again of those who refuse to work, while refusing to address the question of where that work will come from. A Spending Review that leads to between 1 million and 1.5 million job losses has just been announced and welfare proposals talk of threats to the work-shy and preparing the willing for the job-market. How can this circle be squared?
More importantly as Job Seekers Allowance is less than £3500pa to cover every expense but rent, who can seriously think that people on this standard of living are not already well motivated to seek additional income?
Church groups from Joint Public Issues Team to Rowan Williams (possibly a greater authority – I will ask Faith and Order) are clear that forcing the long term unemployed people to do “manual work” for the equivalent of £1.73 per hour on pain of losing all their income is not a serious way forward. The proposals will unhelpfully merge the worker employed to do the valuable job of cleaning our public spaces, the enforced worker who is doing this to keep his/her benefits - working for 1/3rd of the minimum wage, and the person doing community service who has committed an offence.
Recent government announcements would lead the casual observer to believe that the coalition values people a similar sliding scale - Private Sector wealth creator, Public Sector worker, unemployed and then offender. The government’s repeated exaggeration of benefit fraud statistics is just one example of this stigmatisation of the least well off.
For the avoidance of doubt the Church’s position is simple: - all are equally valuable, all do not suffer the same level of need and assistance should be provided on the basis of need. And to my surprise in a meeting with Phillipa Stroud, Ian Duncan-Smith’s special adviser, last week it would appear to be her position too.
While I personally disagree with her and the Government’s position on Welfare Reform, and I believe the Church will take a negative view of many of the proposals, it was clear she is a concerned, intelligent and committed Christian working to do what she feels will improve the lives of the poorest. The lesson for me is to listen even when I don’t want to, to respect the views of those I disagree with and to avoid personalising arguments about policy. The people who do not agree with me, the Methodist Church or even Rowan Williams about an issue central to social holiness as welfare reform are still as worthy of respect and consideration as the poorest who we should all be fighting for.

The Joint Resolution of URC and Methodist Councils on Poverty

Earlier this month the Councils of the United Reformed Church and the Methodist Church held a unique joint meeting. Among other business, the two Councils had a lively debate on poverty and inequality, and agreed the following resolution as a joint basis for further work in each denomination.

The Methodist Council and URC Mission Council meeting together note that:

• despite being the 5th wealthiest country in the world, in the UK almost 1 in 4 adults and 1 in 3 Children live in poverty
• income inequality in the UK has risen to its highest level since the Second World War
• all are created to experience life in all its fullness, and that for those in poverty lack of resource is an often insurmountable obstacle to this
• relative poverty impacts on life chances, in terms of lower educational attainment, health, and life expectancy
• inequality is increasingly a barrier to the relationships within society and it is clear that the impact of inequality makes us all poorer economically, socially and spiritually
• 20th October 2010 the government will announce reductions in spending expected to have lasting effects on the poorest and most vulnerable in society.

The Methodist Council and URC Mission Council meeting together resolve:

• to promote just distribution of income by confirming our commitment to the Living Wage and by calling for benefit and wage policies that provide the opportunity for all to live and work in dignity
• through the work of the Joint Public Issues Team and others, to challenge the causes of poverty and inequality inherent in our society
• to stand alongside those worst affected by the government spending review and to demand that the burdens of the current economic situation are not unfairly put on the poor and the vulnerable
• to challenge those who would stigmatise the poor and portray those in poverty as “lazy”, or “having made a lifestyle choice”, or being “scroungers”
• to listen to and tell the real stories of those who struggle on low incomes.

Addressing poverty and inequality is one of the Joint Public Issues Team’s core priorities for the year ahead. It will form a key theme at the Public Issues Conference on 22 January 2011. More information about the Conference will appear in later postings.

Can Churches Help Put the Heart back into British Politics?

Much of what is good in British politics, both on the Left and Right wings, was originally inspired by Christianity. But following the New Labour project of 1997-2010, the old definitions of Left and Right have become confused: is there any fundamental difference between political parties apart from the financial incentives they offer varying voter groups? And does that matter?

One way of analysing the Coalition victory is that Labour lost the election, but neither the Lib Dems nor the Conservatives quite won it. Now may be the time for the Church to speak to those who feel that political parties don’t speak to them or for them; who regret the lack of idealism in a political reality often characterised by sterile adversarial stances and lobbying for special interests; or who feel the political class are a breed apart, out of touch purveyors of ideology.

As the saying goes “without vision, the people perish” – and no quantity of Government strategies, targets or mission statements can remedy a lack of true vision.

Why Church? Politics is bound up with concern for others in our own and other communities, but political and economic systems on their own can never generate community and compassionate concern. At best, they can attempt to prevent discrimination and injustice by legal definitions and enforcement, or engineer social change, but that is the negative side of progress. Churches have an opportunity to speak of and contribute to the positive that has still not been tried – a social ethos truly grounded in love and kindness.

Tony Blair had an unprecedented mandate from the British public in 1997; many had high hopes for the fusion of progressive leftist values of inclusion and fairness with a traditionally right wing approach to economics. In implementing this ‘Third Way’, New Labour combined typical process elements of Right and Left: hard-nosed internationalist capitalism friendly to banks and big businesses, alongside statism, a love of centralised bureaucracy, mass legislation and moral authoritarianism. Like it or loathe it, this was an effective formula for power, the logical successor to the Thatcherite revolution of the 1980s.

In this new, quasi-European Centrism, which the Coalition hasn’t fundamentally changed, politics risks being reduced to a machine for distributing and redistributing wealth according to different people’s lists of the deserving and undeserving. This may be a good world for career politicians, banks, international businesses and lawyers. But is it the best that Britain can do for itself and other nations? Has what was good in the traditional Right and Left evaporated into a vapid Centrism that combines the worst of each?

As we ponder last week’s Spending Review some of us are probably wondering whether the heralded Big Society marks a return to an empowered grassroots social engagement, or simply Government abandoning the poorest to the consequences of a recession they are suffering from the most and have done least to cause or deserve. The current economic troubles give us a unique opportunity to rediscover the politics of idealism and every single member of our society has an opportunity to revive and demonstrate the Christian call to unselfishness whether or not they have a religious commitment.

Individual Christians may or may not want to engineer a society of centrally-enforced ‘equality’. But whatever our view of the appropriate economic process, I hope we can stop thinking in as social scientists with rulers – whether Left or Right-wing rulers - who calculate in our offices who has too much and who has too little. Instead, is it time to downplay personal and political opinions and fill our hearts with compassion for the poor and needy, the homeless and destitute.

Poverty is not a party political issue; it is a Christian and moral outrage. I have suggested that politics based on economic self-interest can never ground true community: this opinion may speak to our conscience, but can it be backed up by rigorous thought? Can religion develop workable schemes where materialistic politics fails?

This post is the first of a series in which I will explore the possibilities for Churches to work increasingly with local communities and Government to engage British people more richly in issues – such as poverty and inequality - that affect us all. Let’s roll up our sleeves and, collectively, do some hard economic and theological work!

Penny Pinching or Really Hurting?

Photo by nogoodreason and used under Creative Commons (2) licence

Today the government announced the public will get a say in where and how cuts should happen.  After the release of the governments spending (the treasury's COINS data), this could be another welcome step towards an open style of government.

However, before we leap to our keyboards - calculator in hand - it is worth taking some time to think and reflect about where the money is spent and what it achieves.   As Christians we are called to be both defender and advocate for those who live in poverty based on God’s preferential option for the poor and within all of us - religious or not - there is a commitment to principles of justice and fairness which need to prevail in constructing this social contract. These principles need to be applied in our response to ensure that those least responsible for the financial crisis (which is largely to blame for the budget deficit) are not those required to pay the highest personal price.

Let us consider the  £102.10 billion work and pensions bill as an example of the thinking required. We may think that there is room for manoeuvre within this cost centre. Perhaps there is, but to make that move we need to ensure that what is cut doesn’t add to the difficulty of claimants transitioning from reliance on benefits to meaningful work and potentially renewed sense of dignity!

Do not forget the human impact of claiming benefits. It is not an uplifting experience as the claimant is put under immense scrutiny at a time when he or she could be feeling vulnerable and exposed.  Besides the trudge to the benefit office, there are perceptions about being a 'scrounger' or 'not taking a job when there are lots of jobs about'. 

This is when the lines between public perception and reality begin to blur.  Recent figures indicate there are 2.5million people unemployed and only half a million jobs available.  As a result, one area of change within employment has been with the significant increase in the number of people taking part-time jobs.  The increase is due to the fact that:

“The number of employees and self-employed people working part-time because they could not find a full-time job increased by 25,000 on the quarter to reach 1.07 million, the highest figure since comparable records began in 1992”. (Source Office of National statistics)

Oxfam's recent 'Something for Nothing' briefing report explored perceptions of poverty and benefit claimants within the media and the general public.  They found the difference between perception and reality (with particular reference to policy makers) centred around the transition period from benefits to work.   The transition can leave a person on a low income even more vulnerable.  The reason for this, is due to a problem within policy thinking regarding benefits and work.

"The problem with this (thinking) is twofold.  Firstly, work is generally paid in arrears, whereas the associated costs need to be paid for upfront.  This involves dipping into (generally non-existent) savings or, more realistically, going in to debt and bearing all the additional costs that this entails" (Source: Oxfam Something for Nothing Report)

If we are all to have a say in where and how cuts should happen it might be wise to start by looking at a passage of the bible regarding sheep and goats.   In the story in Matthew's gospel we are confronted with the sobering insight that our treatment of the destitute, sick and imprisoned ‘other’ equates to our treatment of Christ - who often comes to us in the distressing disguise of the poor (to quote Mother Teresa).   Under the cloak of 'an age of austerity' or 'helping people move off benefits' we could risk getting stuck in a number crunching exercise whilst forgetting that each benefit payment ends up in the hands of an individual endowed with human dignity with legitimate claims to the social goods of society .  The question we should be asking is not 'are we paying them too much' but ‘are we enabling decisions to be made that help claimants to realise their full human potential by meeting their basic needs whilst providing the opportunity for them to enhance their job prospects in an affordable and sustainable way. This is the path to human flourishing which we should all aspire to in the UK in the difficult months and years ahead!