Thursday, 23 September 2010

It's the povertyism, stupid

I seem to recall Charles Dickens wrote in a letter, 'Oh for a world without an ism!' The extension does make for ugly language, but that's no excuse for not having a public debate about povertyism.

To pick up from my last post, I think it's time to make a lot more noise about disrimination against poor people.

I was far from being the only person incensed by Nick Clegg's recent remark that the welfare system should not be "a giant cheque written by the State to compensate the poor for their predicament". If I fix on that remark, it is because it is a blatant example of embedded prejudice at a high level, expressed by the wealthy and powerful towards those who are not.

And there's a widespread selective deafness at work here. More than 40% of adults claim that there is ‘very little poverty’ in Britain today, an Oxfam blog post tells us. And a recent Oxfam briefing paper points out:

'People living in poverty in the UK make a vital contribution to the economy and society through unpaid caring and community work. But public attitudes prevail that people on low incomes – and particularly those on benefits – are ‘scroungers’ who are to blame for their own poverty.'

The authoritative Damian Killeen describes it like this:

'Public attitude surveys... reveal a widespread resentment of people living in poverty. Better-off people may often disapprove of the fact that many poor people share the same tastes and consumerist aspirations as they do. This can extend to a denial that poverty exists and hostility towards the costs of providing people with opportunities to escape their poverty.'

This plays out painfully in people's experience of judgemental attitudes in public space and in the ways they get treated by agencies. One example Killeen gives illustrates how embedded povertyism has become in our systems:

'One mother of five was offered £36 per week to meet her family’s needs after leaving her job to protect her children from an abusive father. She said she thought she was being punished by the system when she believed she was putting the interest of her children first. She kept her family together by selling the children’s toys in order to buy food.'

Should we be talking about class discrimination? We've learned to identify racial discrimination at last and are supported legally in doing that. Even age discrimination has finally been recognised, if not yet brought to order. But I think we'll continue to struggle to identify class discrimination, partly because class is now so fractured and far fewer people self-classify in the established categories any more.

That's why I think it's right to talk about poverty discrimination and to make more noise about it in the run-up to the coalition government's spending review (20 October). JRF's report on Understanding attitudes to tackling economic inequality, Killeen's paper mentioned above, and Oxfam's more recent Something for nothing report seem to be the starting-points.

Does it matter that we don't have a term in widespread use for discrimination against poor people? We have a disability discrimination act and I'm not aware that the awkwardness of the term 'disablism' was a brake on that. Povertyism is an awkward word for a distasteful concept - straightforward nasty prejudice against a large class of people who, by inconsiderately not having much stuff, manage to make others uncomfortable about their own greed. I don't understand why more people are not bloody angry about this.

But there wasn't much of an outcry against Clegg's words, which shows how poverty discrimination is routine and acceptable in British society. Being unrecognised as an 'ism' in the political armoury (what were Labour doing all those years?) makes it all the more devastating.

23 Sep 2010 18:08:16 | Social exclusion

1 Comment

Kevin

A timely post,as we approach the Comprehensive spending review and see senior politicians making public comments about benefit claimants we wouldn't tolerate about other sections of society ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11490294 )

Yet it is not just those out of work and claiming benefit facing stigmatisation, we at Community Links are leading the UK Working Age Poverty strand of the European year for Tackling Poverty and Social Exclusion. The myths and stereotypes casually applied to people experiencing poverty - in work or out of work - has been a key element of our research. Early this year we carried out an investigation into media attitudes to poverty which we published on our blog
see http://www.community-links.org/linksuk/?tag=attitudes

Posted by: Richard McKeever | Thursday, 07 October 2010 at 10:49

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It's the poverty, stupid Now, a word about the received wisdom that ethnic diversity at neighbourhood level gives rise to lack of cohesion and weakens social relations. There seems to be an assumption that directly relates diversity to perceptions of antisocial behaviour and disorder. It matters because I suspect the assumption influences many actions and decisions in a hidden way, in policy, practice and everyday behaviour. I recently mentioned a paper by John Hipp (Social networks, 32(2), 2010, subscription required) which hints at a little more complexity: perceptions of disorder are explained by general social distance between individuals, not simply social distance based on ethnicity. And last week the ESRC published some research on neighbourhood social heterogeneity. The researchers found 'little evidence' of a significant effect of ethnic diversity on people’s perceptions of a neighbourhood. Among the findings: Population turnover does not influence perceptions of antisocial behaviour but is associated with lower levels of social cohesion and trust. Living in a low density area is strongly associated with more trusting, supportive and cohesive communities. Deprivation has a negative impact on levels of cohesion, trust and informal social control. It also increases the chances of perceiving high levels of antisocial behaviour. While there was some evidence to suggest that ethnic diversity is associated with reduced levels of community cohesion, trust and informal social control, the impact is much smaller than that of neighbourhood deprivation. The ethnic make-up of an area, either in terms of mixing or dominance, was not significant in explaining perceptions of antisocial behaviour. Those living in the most ethnically diverse areas were the least pessimistic about the national crime trend. Ethnic diversity does not influence the significant associations between deprivation and negative perceptions of a local area. However the effect of ethnic diversity on levels of social cohesion and trust is dependent on the level of deprivation in the area. So, it's the poverty, stupid. And attitudes towards people who are poor. There have been people working their backsides off in the field of poverty alleviation and wealth equalities, ready to voice this message to those who would hear it. So one of my next posts I hope, Clegg inspired, will be about the nastiness of povertyism: I want to ask why there isn't any debate about disrimination against poor people?
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The first aid approach to community safety: views of a tourist in wonkdom Ben Rogers in yesterday's Guardian: 'Strengthening civility and neighbourhoods is important, but the police have only a minor role to play. Other things – the way places are designed, traffic is managed and the public realm is maintained; the character of shops and local public services, the provision of activities for young people – are just as important as anything the police can do.' (Most of these and more were covered in Respect in the neighbourhood) 'Some figures have a particularly important role to play in maintaining local social order – park keepers, estate managers, shop keepers. But the capacity of a community or neighbourhood as a whole to help police itself is also crucial.' The role played here by citzen-run neighbourhood websites should not be missed: our research suggests that where they exist they are greatly valued residents and agencies for the way they facilitate the maintenance of local order. He then goes on to talk about a first aid approach to community safety - 'training people beyond the police to deal with antisocial behaviour... People can be taught how to read a situation so they know when it is appropriate and safe to intervene, and when to call the police. They can be shown how to protect themselves and others from attack. And they can be given mediation and conflict resolution skills. As with first aid, this training should be available to anyone who wants it.' It's the next step in the logic of co-production. I can see benefits and attractions. But it would be the next step in the formalisation of informal neighbourhood life: like Neighbourhood Watch, it's formalising relations on a basis of distrust, rather than trust. Starting from trust of course is far harder. As some of the comments insist, there needs to be a better appreciation shown for the realities of living with the threat of the kind of anti-social behaviour that does require policing. Rogers leaves himself wide open to exactly this kind of reponse: 'Can someone arrange for the author to leave cloud-cuckoo land or whichever magical land of dreams he inhabits and demonstrate his idea on one of our estates? The last time I saw some yobs dismantling a bus shelter they had an overexcited pit bull with them. As I didn't know dogspeak for 'Calm down bro. Let's talk through the issues', I left them too it.' Or this: 'We need proper policing to deal with louts, and not some Big Society codswallop.' I know what Ben is trying to say, but that comment resonates with me because I have a strong sense of what people experience and their desperation at ever getting a response from policy. It's not good enough to say that ASB is not out of control, because the same people go on experiencing it and have done for a very long time. 'Not out of control' reads 'hasn't yet spread to middle class areas'. The intention behind the first aid approach to community safety is to...

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