The Inequality Gap

 From the RSA blog   Matthew Taylor

When doyen of conservative columnists Charles Moore writes a column entitled ‘I’m starting the think the Left might actually be right’ it’s time to sit up and take notice. His article contains this paragraph:


‘ The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.’

Moore’s analysis is confirmed by a report published today but the excellent Resolution Foundation. The report’s headline finding is this:

‘ The share of national income going to the bottom half of earners in Britain has fallen dramatically over the last 30 years…..These ordinary workers have seen their share of GDP fall by a quarter, at the same time as the share going to the top 1% of earners increased by half.’

Not only does gross inequality seem endemic to modern ‘free market’ capitalism but from the work of Picket and Wilkinson and others it seems at least very likely that among rich countries more unequal societies are also more unhappy societies with greater social problems.

Failing Before School

The clear links between early child development and later adult outcomes do not bode well for children of the poorest families, who, as new research has shown, are much more likely to exhibit clinically relevant social and emotional problems than their wealthier peers, writes Yvonne Kelly.

From the LSE Blog

A Real Human Being

What a strange day yesterday was.  A dear friend of mine came round, someone who is entirely trustworthy and straightforward, a person who has over the years become friends with his GP and barber and house sits for them and their friends from time to time.

My friend, lets call him Jonathan, brought round some vegetables that a one-time employer of his had been unable to sell and needed to get shot of. Jonathon doesn’t like courgettes or lettuce all that much so he brought them to me. We sat, enthusing about how our small networks function, how kind people can be and the basic generosity of the world. We drank elderflower cordial that I’d made from the late spring abundance of the wasteland up the road enjoying the warm feeling of relaxation, company and having enough.

In fact, Jonathon doesn’t have enough and never has. He lives from dole cheque to dole cheque with small bits of occasional cash in hand work on the side, around £30 a month. He has kept it together sufficiently so that he doesn’t have to pay the highest possible utility charges by being on the wretched pay-as-you-go gas and electricity and his standing orders consume his entire – his entire – dole payments. Which is to say that he has no money for food.

Once every 7 years or so he’ll pack up his minute council bedsit saying that he just knows someone will want to exchange this time and if he prepares for it, offering change no resistance, then it’s all the more likely. When he unpacks he rationalises his lack of movement to something entirely reasonable: Christmas being so close that no one wants to move, or the school holidays or an economic downturn or upturn. Yesterday we spoke about this phenomenon again and I believe I saw the first small cracks in Jonathon’s’ belief. 

He’s nearing 60 now and has been waiting 40 years for an exchange. Jonathon has never been to a counsellor; he’s never felt the need for one. His way of being in the world has always been positive and optimistic and I have no sense of him wanting or needing to explore his life in the kind of depth that many counsellors work with. There’s no searching for meaning, he’s logical and charitable when differences between him and others happen – which is by no means often – he’s busy, productive and talented. What’s more he follows his talent and produces very beautiful paintings which, like so many artists, he finds he just can’t bring himself to sell.

To all intents and purposes, Jonathon is a terrible failure. He’s not married and has no children. He sponges off the state as a lifestyle choice as well as defrauding it and lives in a fantasy world while freeloading off his friends. And I love him and so do his other friends who respect his way of being as authentic and valuable. Jonathon isn’t some winsome halfwit, he speaks several languages, can turn his hand to most practical jobs and his mind to philosophical problems. But he just can’t do the 9 – 5 or sit in a packed train for 2 hours a day or phone people up out of the blue to try and sell them something they don’t want and be resilient to being endlessly told to fuck off. He’s a fully functioning human being, one of the few I know, and because of that he can’t do the same meaningless thing, endlessly.

Yesterday afternoon, perhaps I saw Jonathon look to the future. To be sure, it’s grim for the majority of us whether we’ve paid into a pension or not, and Jonathon won’t be able to escape the possibility of losing his very meager and therefore very precious possessions to submit to the terrible endurance that is an old peoples home.

I believe I saw Jonathon just begin to give up on a dream and face, very briefly, the possibility of an old age eating dog food and sitting in the dark. We’ve known people for whom this has been an absolute reality, people who had no family, whose support networks had also grown old and moved or died.

What do I want to say to Jonathon? Nothing, really. He is well past being able to do a nice little part time job; though he can work regularly and well routine is death to him. He’s old and wise enough to look some sweet 35 year old coach/mentor/advisor in the eye and wonder why she needs to be so driven, and possibly remind her of her own dreams of authenticity, lost to presumed material need and status anxiety.

Richard Carr Gomm walked across Europe at the end of WW2 and came to live in London where he saw his elderly neighbours in need and helped them out. In time, four of them moved in together and Richard looked after them. He repeated this with a number of other elderly people, setting them up with housekeepers and creating the Carr Gomm charity. 50+ years on they’re now very well organized and professional. Amongst other things

We also offer opportunities for people to improve their fitness and diet.

Which is nice.

The impulse to offer un-CRB checked, unprofessional, un-audited, unregulated and heartfelt attention to people as they are rather than as we think they should be is what begins the journey of caring for others. Jonathon has always offered people, has always offered me, that. I hope we can continue to reciprocate.

* Identifying details have been changed.

Don't worry, it's only an unemployed person who was killed.

Charles Bunyasi, a public service worker who needed another job to pay the bills, was horribly killed when his delivery van was stolen and driven into him. He suffered terrible head injuries and was left for dead. The language used by the police and media demonstrate just how far we've come in demonising the unemployed.


Detective Chief Inspector Cliff Lyons said:
"Charles was an honest man making an honest living. "He was a working man who had two jobs to supplement his income and to support his family. It is a tragedy."

Remember the women who were killed by Peter Sutcliffe? Some were prostitutes. Those that weren't prostitutes were 'innocent.' This language was repeated during the Ipswich murders.

On my way to work this morning, two men were chatting at the bus stop, reading the coverage of the Ipswich case. "My sister lives in Ipswich," said one. "Yeah, but don't worry - he's only doing tarts," came the reply.

It's hard to avoid the hard wired and sanctioned misogyny in almost every area of public life. And racism. And now - what shall we call it? otiosaeism? Let's just call it what it is - the sanctioned hatred of the unemployed.

Poor Mr Bunyasi, and his family. His life was precious, whatever his employment status.

Sharing the Pain: The emotional politics of austerity

A degree of paranoia clearly motivated the very production of the poster in the first place, intended as it was for use only in a moment of national defeat, the very possibility of which more optimistic minds would have refused to countenance. But the imagined scene which it conjures up is simply infused with paranoia on every level: an invaded people maintains its stoicism even while surrounded by the forces of an advancing, potentially victorious enemy. Just think what is really implied in this imaginary scenario: a national community is sustained in the face of its possible destruction only by a wilful denial of the reality of its defeat, carrying on as if nothing has changed, as if to admit to the reality of the situation and to respond with appropriate emotion were to invite destruction.

Jeremy Gilbert,

Evidence Based Practice

I don’t know whether it’s worth writing this piece.

This is the week when yet another report is churned out about how awful nursing care for the elderly is, an occurrence so regular that there’s no shock value to it any more. It’s the week in which PC Harwood is being charged with manslaughter two years after he was seen to belt a man who was walking away from him, and the week in which the Met cleared officers of any wrongdoing after they tipped a protestor out of his wheelchair and dragged him across the road “ . . . in his own interests.” 

It’s the week in which the abuses at a home for people with learning disabilities has finally been brought to light and the week in which the BACP has printed a three-page article in the guise of a letter denouncing the ‘wilding’ of psychotherapy as proposed by Nick Totten the previous month. Using words like ‘chaos,’ ‘unfounded,’ ‘unresearched,’ ‘mass destruction,’; so thoroughly demonstrating a complete lack of awareness – let alone understanding - of systems theory or even of basic  archaeological propositions while critiquing them without references; and coming too close to calling tribal people primitive exploitative slave keeping savages in comparison to the peaceful Utopia that we ordered, civilised people live in that the purpose for its publication is baffling, to me at any rate.

What links the first 3 events is that they are are massively regulated. It’s illegal to impersonate a nurse or a police officer. Police officers and nurses go through rigorous training and have to attend professional development events to maintain their registration. 

The Care Quality Commission

“Regulate, inspect and review all adult social care services in the public, private and voluntary sectors in England.”

are paid for with public money, is staffed by professionals who have passed many exams and who ignored what vulnerable people told them.

Regulation, registration, post-training education, writing essays, being in the job for many years, being valued with a publicly paid wage and being employed by a service that is respected and valued and as mainstream as it's possible to be is no guarentee of good practice.

This is also the week when a respectable, successful, accredited psychotherapist attached to GP’s surgeries was sanctioned by the BACP because an undercover reporter blew her cover. Not an ordinary client, not a GP, not her peers – and hey, she passed the Accreditation process, having

“ . . . achieved a substantial level of training and experience approved by the Association.”

which, despite its emphasis on inclusivity, totally missed the fact that she is a homophobic nightmare.

(It's worth noting the beurocratic/shambolic BACP response to the complaint:

"Without being well educated and having free legal help to interpret the BACP's jargon-dense literature and legal letters, I would have found the process incomprehensible and intimidating.")

I’m not sure it’s worth writing this piece because I’ve come to believe, more strongly than ever before, that psychotherapy and psychotherapists are just part of the problem, the problem being institutionalised fear and ignorance which leads to banal evil.

Speak with most individual counsellors and the conversation almost always goes along the lines of “Yeah, we know there are too many counsellors being churned out; we know accreditation means nothing other than that a person can tell the BACP what it wants to hear; we know we have to compromise ourselves beyond what we believe is ethical if we want a paid job.” And still, counselling organisations demand their counselling staff be BACP accredited: I can understand non-counselling employers wanting what they’ve been told is the best, but counselling organisations?

Psychotherapy and counselling are based on philosophical understandings about what it is to be human, fulfilled and unfulfilled, to have a life that has meaning and purpose or otherwise, what it is to be in genuinely therapeutic relationships. Our years of training are spent doing what exactly? Questioning ourselves, questioning our assumptions about the ways the world might be, learning some of the foundational beliefs and values – all of them complex and multifaceted – of people like Buber, Gendlin, Freud, Husserl, Satre, Foucault? Presumably this takes some intelligence and the ability to learn. And then what? Do we pass the test and carry on just as before but with a nice bit of paper, an increased sense of personal status and a language that allows us to believe we're capable of independent thought? With all this incredible knowledge, do we begin to wonder if we might choose to think even minutely differently from people who haven't had access to this privilege? Or do we totally succumb to the overculture?

Where are Therapy Today news pieces about the DWP receiving guidelines on how to deal with the increased risk of suicide in some claimants? Or the on going collapse of so much of the voluntary sector that counselling depends on? Or what happens to people who used to access those charities? Or the psychological impact of cuts to public services for users, or workers who are made redundant or who live in fear of redundancy? Or the well researched psychological fallout  of our bottomless pit of inequality? Or the overwhelming emotional changes in the national zeitgeist in an age of austerity? Or that "One in 20, or 340,800, British families live in "severe housing deprivation" – in overcrowded homes in poor condition, without a bath, shower or indoor toilet."

It's much easier to have a nice piece about how the tango is like therapy, to look inward and inward and inward, becoming more and more sterile. Or is it that counselling and psychotherapy actually have no relationship to the world of the client?

Who is asking why there are four times as many CDP pages in Therapy Today than there are jobs, and what that might mean? Who is asking why we do therapy at all, for whom and for what purpose and to what ends? And how are we – you, and you and you and I – demonstrating that?

Who is asking, “Who has the power here? Where does power lie in British psychotherapy and counselling?”

I hear a sound in the distance and fear it’s just an echo.

Professionalism Does Not Equal Care or Good Practice.

‘The urge toward professionalism builds up a rigid bureaucracy… Bureaucratic rules become a substitute for sound judgment… the bureaucrat is beginning to dominate the scene.’

Rogers C. A way of being. Boston: Houghton Mifflin; 1980.

Back in the last century when I trained as a nurse we worked full time on the wards as students with 2-week blocks in college. I bloody hated it, it was horrific hard graft, I spent a great deal of my first 6 months confused and at 18 part of me felt mildly outraged that I was mopping floors. I was deeply concerned about my status – me, with excellent A levels, washing old ladies: wasn’t I better than this? It took me some years to learn how important that intimate, thorough, routine act of care was; how vital it was to my understanding of the overall wellbeing of the patient; how it could be a tender and meaningful opportunity to touch and be touched in a world where touch usually involves pain.

When I qualified 3 years later and met some student nurses at the end of their first year I thought they were joking when they told me I’d need to show them how to take a blood pressure.

What had happened was Project 2000, a scheme to professionalise nursing.

The knock-on effect was enormous: care assistants, untrained or semi-trained people who are paid a pittance, took over the bulk of patient care, nurses changed from people intimately involved in and minutely informed about patient wellbeing to university trained academic professionals. There are never ending court cases and a growing debate about patients being neglected, positive cruelty and, if it didn’t happen in a hospital, manslaughter.

My daughter is moving into the world of work and wants to train as a midwife. In a haze of middle-aged nostalgia I got out my first wage packet from 1983 when I earned £65 for 3 weeks work after rent for my room in the nurses home was taken out. My girl is supposed to feel grateful that she doesn’t have to pay in order to become a member of a profession that serves the country, and she’ll have to get a paid job at the same time as training and living at home. But she’ll be a professional.

What’s all this got to do with counselling?

The discourse around the professionalization of counselling in modern times has been going on for at least 20 years and I note that so many of the names cited in this article – Anderson, House, Heron, Pilgrim, Thorne - have inevitably become older and distanced from the shaping of counselling. I note also, and with no satisfaction whatsoever, that everything that this article foresaw has come to pass other than the predicted ‘closed ranks’ of counsellors: instead we’ve atomised into individuals who work in fear of being featured on the back pages of Therapy Today, scrabbling about for a paid job.

There is an ebb and flow in all philosophy and the talking therapies over time have moved from elite private practices to institutionalised medical models, from a deep concern about the humanity of the individual to an objectification of the client as an ‘opportunity’ (as an illustration of the problem, this article which used to be free is now not available while the fee gathering service is being set up. You can find the reference to the independent research on a decades worth of counselling complaints here.)

For me, this is a central issue:

“The client will have access only to privileged, affluent and academically gifted counsellors. Not all clients would choose a counsellor with that general background. The cost of training and the tilting of the balance towards demand exceeding supply will drive counselling prices up - the client will have to pay more for counselling and it will become even less accessible to those on low incomes (House, 1995). The increase in counselling fees will be reflected in increased supervision fees and the combined effect of these increases may be cumulative in successive generations of practice.”

After all these years of debate my 18 year old can still legally set herself up as a counsellor tomorrow. After all the years of hoop jumping and box ticking, status-anxiety and portentous intoning about ‘protecting the public’, we still ignore the fact that clients make hardly any complaints that accreditation was quickly taken up by many counsellors most likely to be abusive and speaks volumes about our delusions of grandeur and fear of our own legitimate power – Protecting The Public From The Omnipotent, Dangerous Counsellor (that’s you, by the way.) Clients aren’t stupid and particularly vulnerable people are cared for by systems that are already massively regulated, and which still continue to fail, depressingly often.

The dynamic between status and money has always been complex. I’d go so far as to propose that in the absence of money, the desire for status becomes acute and we know that counsellors seldom make money from counselling. We are naïve if we don’t see the link between money and care at the most fundamental levels. The US, where the connections between money and care are brutally demonstrated, is now experiencing the extraordinary situation of pioneering practice and research running alongside a system that is moving steadily back into the medieval, as one in five hospitals is run by the very wealthy Catholic church.

Why? Because the system wants to save and to make money and will take it from the highest bidder, no matter their philosophy. In business hard cash comes before life or choice so relatedness and connection come way down the list of prioroties. Our NHS, schools and other public services are inexorably being groomed into this mindset. What would you chose for yourself? Have you made the same choice for the ‘profession’ of counselling?