An extraordinary interview with the social science researcher, Tracy Shildrick. People who depend on others to provide them with food and clothes 'without exception' do not describe themselves as poor but blame each other for being 'feckless.' Ms Shildrick and her fellow researchers were surprised by the levels of poverty they found and with some of the attitudes of the people living in poverty, which for me describes the chasm between the poor and the not-poor.
Here's the report the interview is based on but I strongly urge you to listen to and hear the rather shocking conclusions.
If you do no other work on poverty this month, please listen to this.
Showing posts with label deserving poor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label deserving poor. Show all posts
Monday, 9 May 2011
Wednesday, 29 December 2010
Loan sharks, the DWP and others who prey on vulnerable people.
Job Centre staff are being trained, at a cost of £8+m, to spot people who may be being targeted by loan sharks.
Jobcentre staff have five minutes to process each ‘customer’ and are rarely positively interested in the lives of the people they manage.
Any intrusion by the DWP into a claimants life is perceived as a threat, because that is almost uniquely what it is. Have you done any work in the last two weeks? Do you have a boyfriend? Where does he live? Does your elderly mother who’s just moved into your already overcrowded home have savings over £2,000? These and other questions are about finding ways to reduce the amount of benefits paid to you not making sure that you’re receiving the correct ones.
Scambusters and Illegal Money Lending (IML) under the aegis of Trading Standards are already doing this important work pretty effectively resulting in loans being wiped out and imprisonment of the worst sharks (that they’ve caught.) The scheme sounds excellent and I hope it works to bring support and liberation to some of the most vulnerable people in our communities. But with the culture of contempt and abuse of power within the DWP I fear yet more money will be poured into another benefits project for no return and a quiet phasing out of the scheme, as happened with lie detectors being used when speaking with ‘customers’ on the phone.
Nothing would please me better than to be wrong.
In the meantime, here’s some information about Elizabeth Finn Care a charity that offers money to poor people, no strings attached.
Jobcentre staff have five minutes to process each ‘customer’ and are rarely positively interested in the lives of the people they manage.
“There’s a fat pig of a man works in the Jobcentre, he comes in the pub and he only has to get slightly pissed to start in on his favorite topic, how much he hates people on benefits. ‘I took her money off her,’ he said and the landlady said, ‘What, you took her money off her and her kids just before Christmas?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. You can't say anything to him, he's a shit of a bully and if you need to go to the Jobcentre he'll make your life hell."
“This nasty tiny little woman who’s been working at the Jobcentre for fucking ever. She owns the place. Some woman kicked off because the computers had broken down and she’d been waiting for half an hour and then she walked out. This woman yelled across the office, ‘See when she came in, let’s see if she was late so we can get her.’ Bitch. You don’t want to catch her eye.”
Any intrusion by the DWP into a claimants life is perceived as a threat, because that is almost uniquely what it is. Have you done any work in the last two weeks? Do you have a boyfriend? Where does he live? Does your elderly mother who’s just moved into your already overcrowded home have savings over £2,000? These and other questions are about finding ways to reduce the amount of benefits paid to you not making sure that you’re receiving the correct ones.
Scambusters and Illegal Money Lending (IML) under the aegis of Trading Standards are already doing this important work pretty effectively resulting in loans being wiped out and imprisonment of the worst sharks (that they’ve caught.) The scheme sounds excellent and I hope it works to bring support and liberation to some of the most vulnerable people in our communities. But with the culture of contempt and abuse of power within the DWP I fear yet more money will be poured into another benefits project for no return and a quiet phasing out of the scheme, as happened with lie detectors being used when speaking with ‘customers’ on the phone.
Nothing would please me better than to be wrong.
In the meantime, here’s some information about Elizabeth Finn Care a charity that offers money to poor people, no strings attached.
Monday, 8 November 2010
Empathy as an economic tool
The long-term unemployed are likely to be pushed into 4 weeks full time voluntary work or lose their entire income for 3 months. The Arch Bishop of Canterbury believes, "It can make people who start feeling vulnerable feel more vulnerable.”
Like so much of our public discourse the arguments are presented out of context and we’re encouraged to polarise, so it may be worth some analysis of this situation.
Many unemployed people already volunteer. This is recognised by the Department for Work and Pensions who limit the number of hours that an unemployed person can volunteer to 16 per week so that it doesn’t get in the way of job seeking. How this squares with 35 hours of full time voluntary work isn't addressed by the new proposal.
Those of us who are angry with people who live on benefits as a ‘lifestyle choice’ may be interested in the following and the comments afterwards.
The DWP’s own research offers some insight into unemployed people’s perception of voluntary work, one of the most important things to note is that people who are unemployed are also very bored.
http://research.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd5/71summ.asp
For some people this boredom is a spur to action, for others it is the beginning of a decent into depression, mental illness and crime. Being unemployed means that you can’t afford to do anything much. Things that employed people on a decent wage take for granted – taking public transport to a free gallery or museum or a beautiful park – become nearly impossible for the unemployed. Normal social life becomes restricted – you can’t buy a round in the pub, or go on shopping trips or other recreational events with friends. Holidays are out of the question. Children’s normal growth becomes a crisis – a £20 pair of shoes is a quarter of a week’s income for a single parent with one child. (Who are these families with 10 children rolling around in cash in a million pound house? No actual figures are available, which suggests they’re a useful aberration for the right wing media and people who need to whip up hatred.)
Young unemployed men in particular seem to be vulnerable to depression which may have something to do with their parallel poor achievement at school. Prisons are heaving with people who simply cannot read. Please read this report:
Those unemployed people who are not already doing some kind of formal or informal voluntary work are, I propose, unlikely to be able move instantly from a long term existence of extreme boredom to a 35 hour week. When they don’t they will lose all their income. Consider what that really means. I know we’re supposed to not think for ourselves and to absorb what we’re told about feckless spongers living a life that many of us envy but it’s not true. It’s not true. When you lose benefits you lose your home. There are not enough hostel places. Begging and street or hidden homelessness or prison will be obvious outcomes. Consider the effects of that on a person. If that's too wishy washy, consider the effects on the economy.
The premise behind these proposals is not a bad one. Getting into a positive daily rhythm, increased physical activity and social interaction are good for all of us. I trust that IDS has offered this proposal based on sound empirical evidence, but it lacks understanding and it lacks empathy. No one involved in this proposal has one pair of worn out trainers and one and a half tracksuits with some ancient underwear as their entire wardrobe. What is this persons self esteem likely to be like? What about their internal locus of evaluation? If this person is the best authority on their life, what might this suggest about their life? How is their self-concept expressed? How much denial and distortion are they indulging in and how much are we?
Rowan Williams is more likely to be correct in his analysis of how increasing compulsion and surveillance may affect the long term unemployed, simply because he starts from an attempt at empathy. Empathy doesn’t have a role in pubic policy and that's one reason why we have so many long-term unemployed people.
Like so much of our public discourse the arguments are presented out of context and we’re encouraged to polarise, so it may be worth some analysis of this situation.
Many unemployed people already volunteer. This is recognised by the Department for Work and Pensions who limit the number of hours that an unemployed person can volunteer to 16 per week so that it doesn’t get in the way of job seeking. How this squares with 35 hours of full time voluntary work isn't addressed by the new proposal.
Those of us who are angry with people who live on benefits as a ‘lifestyle choice’ may be interested in the following and the comments afterwards.
The DWP’s own research offers some insight into unemployed people’s perception of voluntary work, one of the most important things to note is that people who are unemployed are also very bored.
http://research.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd5/71summ.asp
For some people this boredom is a spur to action, for others it is the beginning of a decent into depression, mental illness and crime. Being unemployed means that you can’t afford to do anything much. Things that employed people on a decent wage take for granted – taking public transport to a free gallery or museum or a beautiful park – become nearly impossible for the unemployed. Normal social life becomes restricted – you can’t buy a round in the pub, or go on shopping trips or other recreational events with friends. Holidays are out of the question. Children’s normal growth becomes a crisis – a £20 pair of shoes is a quarter of a week’s income for a single parent with one child. (Who are these families with 10 children rolling around in cash in a million pound house? No actual figures are available, which suggests they’re a useful aberration for the right wing media and people who need to whip up hatred.)
Young unemployed men in particular seem to be vulnerable to depression which may have something to do with their parallel poor achievement at school. Prisons are heaving with people who simply cannot read. Please read this report:
Literacy problems in the prison population are often compounded by a wide range of emotional, learning, and/or attention deficits, including:
Child abuse and neglect, linguistic impoverishment in the childhood home, low verbal ability, uncorrected visual and hearing impairments in childhood, unskilled teaching in the junior school and the mistaken conjecture about literacy practice, closed head injury and substance misuse, low non-verbal ability, childhood hyperactivity-impulsivity and inattention, impairments in empathy and social cognition, current anxiety and depression, and – often as a default and catch-all explanation – developmental dyslexia (Rice and Brooks 2004:4).
Child abuse and neglect, linguistic impoverishment in the childhood home, low verbal ability, uncorrected visual and hearing impairments in childhood, unskilled teaching in the junior school and the mistaken conjecture about literacy practice, closed head injury and substance misuse, low non-verbal ability, childhood hyperactivity-impulsivity and inattention, impairments in empathy and social cognition, current anxiety and depression, and – often as a default and catch-all explanation – developmental dyslexia (Rice and Brooks 2004:4).
Those unemployed people who are not already doing some kind of formal or informal voluntary work are, I propose, unlikely to be able move instantly from a long term existence of extreme boredom to a 35 hour week. When they don’t they will lose all their income. Consider what that really means. I know we’re supposed to not think for ourselves and to absorb what we’re told about feckless spongers living a life that many of us envy but it’s not true. It’s not true. When you lose benefits you lose your home. There are not enough hostel places. Begging and street or hidden homelessness or prison will be obvious outcomes. Consider the effects of that on a person. If that's too wishy washy, consider the effects on the economy.
The premise behind these proposals is not a bad one. Getting into a positive daily rhythm, increased physical activity and social interaction are good for all of us. I trust that IDS has offered this proposal based on sound empirical evidence, but it lacks understanding and it lacks empathy. No one involved in this proposal has one pair of worn out trainers and one and a half tracksuits with some ancient underwear as their entire wardrobe. What is this persons self esteem likely to be like? What about their internal locus of evaluation? If this person is the best authority on their life, what might this suggest about their life? How is their self-concept expressed? How much denial and distortion are they indulging in and how much are we?
Rowan Williams is more likely to be correct in his analysis of how increasing compulsion and surveillance may affect the long term unemployed, simply because he starts from an attempt at empathy. Empathy doesn’t have a role in pubic policy and that's one reason why we have so many long-term unemployed people.
Monday, 20 September 2010
A Short History of British Poverty
Historically, social responses to poverty tend to fall into two groups:
In 1563 the first Poor Laws were introduced which recognized for the first time that poor people were part of a community and that the community, in the form of the parish, must help support them. The system was funded by taxation and each parish was required to provide employment.
The poor were categorized into the deserving poor – infants, the very elderly, the very infirm and families who had temporarily fallen on difficult times; the undeserving poor who were considered a threat to society – beggars, travelers, migrant workers; the deserving unemployed – people who were able to work but unable to find employment.
It’s worth noting the political and social circumstances that preceded these laws. More people were simply remaining alive and there was less food. The Enclosures Act devastated the peasant farming tradition as private landowners found it more profitable to have sheep on their land rather than people, or to increase their personal area of farmland and decrease the number of individuals working it. Prior to the Enclosures Act individual family groups grew their own food in what we might call a smallholding, now they were simply turned out of their homes and made vagrant. Those that didn’t die of starvation or illness came to the city. The numbers of the very poor, the very weak, potential carriers of disease and the very angry increased and it was the fear of civil unrest that caused the Poor Laws to come into being rather than any inherent concern for individual welfare.
Laws altered over time, becoming more or less penalizing. Beggars could be whipped and have their earlobes burned through, be imprisoned and executed. They were returned to their own parishes, limiting where they could live. Houses of Correction, established prior to Elizabeth I and continued well after, were variously places where the poor were punished or rehabilitated: whatever the case, poverty is perceived as a fault that requires correction.
- ‘relief’ of beggars and paupers
- a profound mistrust and fear of the poor.
In 1563 the first Poor Laws were introduced which recognized for the first time that poor people were part of a community and that the community, in the form of the parish, must help support them. The system was funded by taxation and each parish was required to provide employment.
The poor were categorized into the deserving poor – infants, the very elderly, the very infirm and families who had temporarily fallen on difficult times; the undeserving poor who were considered a threat to society – beggars, travelers, migrant workers; the deserving unemployed – people who were able to work but unable to find employment.
It’s worth noting the political and social circumstances that preceded these laws. More people were simply remaining alive and there was less food. The Enclosures Act devastated the peasant farming tradition as private landowners found it more profitable to have sheep on their land rather than people, or to increase their personal area of farmland and decrease the number of individuals working it. Prior to the Enclosures Act individual family groups grew their own food in what we might call a smallholding, now they were simply turned out of their homes and made vagrant. Those that didn’t die of starvation or illness came to the city. The numbers of the very poor, the very weak, potential carriers of disease and the very angry increased and it was the fear of civil unrest that caused the Poor Laws to come into being rather than any inherent concern for individual welfare.
Laws altered over time, becoming more or less penalizing. Beggars could be whipped and have their earlobes burned through, be imprisoned and executed. They were returned to their own parishes, limiting where they could live. Houses of Correction, established prior to Elizabeth I and continued well after, were variously places where the poor were punished or rehabilitated: whatever the case, poverty is perceived as a fault that requires correction.
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