Thursday, 02 January 2014

Libraries to accept food bank donations as fines

Food bankTrust ordinary people in the north to have worked this out: library users in St Helens are being given the option of paying any overdue fines with donations to food banks instead of cash. Since each library is now necessarily a collection and forwarding point, it follows that food donations, irrespective of loans and overdues, will come to them. I applaud that.

If this practice becomes widespread, as I hope it does (guess which councils won't touch it?) it means that at last the public library sector is playing a part in confronting the government over its wretched anti-public policies.

We have a government that regards the public library network as superfluous and food banks as unnecessary. It’s time for both of these ideological sugar-puffs to be not just subjected to occasional half-hearted challenge but forcefully confronted.

There’s a savage class war going on in this country. It was started, not by people in poverty or those experiencing exclusion, but by the Haves, on 31 March 2010. We can but hope that this year will see some deft and deep incisions like that proposed by St Helens Council into the repulsive flab (literal and metaphorical) that these people of wealth and power are so fond of flaunting.

 

2 Jan 2014 20:08:58 | Social exclusion, Social policy

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'What kind of neighbour are you?' I heard this story from a neighbour the other day. It goes back about 30 years, to just before my time in this neighbourhood. Apparently one of the residents had been knocked down, elsewhere, by a car. A policeman appeared at my neighbour’s door, asking ‘Do you know Mrs N?’ He hesitated - ‘No I don’t think so’ – only to be dealt a stream of invective: ‘Don’t you know your neighbours? What kind of effing neighbour are you?’ He protested: ‘I do know my neighbours but I don’t know that name…’ ‘She lives two doors away. You say you don’t know her? How long have you lived here? You’re a disgrace.’ He told the copper that he’s lived here since the houses were built. And of course, it transpired that he knew the lady who had had the accident, by her first name. As he told me this story I could tell that the police officer’s attitude still rankled with my neighbour. The officer was part of the dominant authoritarian culture that used surnames – and other techniques of course, especially ritual – to contain the risk of personality. I went to a school that tried to do the same. The pompous and superior attitude is not the only thing that’s changed since then: we don’t submit so readily to the arrogance of people in positions of authority. If I had an official speak to me like that I’d report them. And blog about it. Previously: Naming neighbours' names
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More weddings won't reduce poverty There’s a peculiar argument that because there is a statistical association between single parenthood and poverty, the policy response should be to promote marriage (e.g.). Some influential folk on the right (e.g.) seem to relish this line of thinking because it gives them a sense of moral superiority coupled with a reason not to have to address the realities of poverty. People in poverty are so much easier to blame. But it’s actually not that difficult to work out, as this Atlantic article by Emily Badger puts it: ‘Fractured family structures don't cause poverty. Poverty causes these family structures. Reduce poverty through more direct means, and we might actually reverse the retreat of marriage along the way.’ As she says, the basic logic ‘casts poverty as the result of a collapse in family values, not as the product of complex structural economic and social factors.’ Badger based her material on this article from the Council on Contemporary Families and quotes the Council’s researcher Kristi Williams: ‘We know marriage has a wide range of benefits, particularly for raising children. And it's not unreasonable to think that it would be nice if all children could enjoy these benefits. The problem is that there’s no evidence that the kind of marriages that poor, single parents enter into will have these same benefits.’ The article points to a range of research that helps explain why so many policy attempts to reassert traditional family structures have failed. I accept that right wing policy makers in the UK today will struggle with the possibility that there might be a direction of causality contrary to the one they favour. But it’s just possible some light might penetrate the blinkers. Even Conservative Home thinks the minister for welfare and pensions should meet the Trussell Trust to discuss food banks. Poverty is actually quite an important issue, and to have povertyism practised consistently at a high level in policy thinking is disgraceful.

Kevin Harris

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