Nature vs Nurture, Private Life vs Government Policy

I went to a very lovely Baptism a month or so ago and the experience has remained with me. What struck me was how well behaved, intelligent and involved the children were, particularly in doing the readings. I arrived a little early and watched them rehearsing with the clergy but this was simply a matter of getting used to the microphones. During the service they left their pews at the correct time without being herded, stood in front of a large congregation and read with an educated and social ease, then returned to their pews without running or being overwhelmed. These were kids between 6 and 10. I was amazed.

This church is the Sunday morning home of London Protestant socialite bankers and a few members of the Cabinet tag along. The clergy are amongst the kindest, most caring and robust people I’ve ever met and this attitude is brought to the way they run the church. They’re not dependant on or starstruck by their illustrious congregation, evidenced by this inclusion in their newsletter

RECEIVING AN OBSCENE ANNUAL BONUS?

Salve your miserable conscience by donating a considerable sum to your parish church.

After the baptism we decanted to the church school for refreshments and I watched as again the children behaved impeccably, not as if they’d been frightened into good behaviour, this is just the way they are. For me, the banal and smug adult conversation was painful but there was no denying that these parents were doing something very right with their children.

Being around them I felt a kind of blissful relaxation after my amazement subsided. I hadn’t realized that I feel stressed when watching the children from my own streets perform in schools or when I’m with them on our shared streets or buses or in the pub, but I do. What will they do next? Am I allowed to make eye contact? Will they allow me to ask them to turn their music down? Over the years I’ve learned to behave counter-intuitively, I relax, draw my energy right in and treat them as if they’re my equals. Actually, being decades younger than me they’re not my equals and I demand – and get - the respect of children that I have anything to do with personally, but the rage and lack of control demonstrated by too many young people is dangerous and so I avoid the issue entirely when I’m confronted by it.

Nature, Nurture. Would bloody horrible children be better able to cope with life if they’d been brought up in the same circumstances as their London banker counterparts? Would well-behaved and socially relaxed children become wild if they grew up in the same circumstances as their dangerous peers? I suspect there are many answers and so many variables that we can only make best guesses.

Like my daughter, I was brought up in poverty and in social housing yet both of us have avoided repeating the worst behaviours that we endured in overcrowded communities and ill-run schools. It’s possible to have a conversation with all of the children in my block of flats on our estate and they’re all doing well at school. In our block of 8 families there is one man: does that make a difference? Not in my experience. Poverty makes a difference, we can’t take our children on holiday – I didn’t go on holiday in the UK or abroad until I was 25 – and very ordinary experiences like recreational shopping or going to the cinema or taking a picnic on a bus to the park were closed to us. We grow bored and resentful. Some of us give up trying because poverty truly is largely inescapable: why strive and be endlessly disappointed?

So when she had the chance to leave Britain we grabbed it with both hands. She’s in Australia where overcrowding is unknown; poverty exists but the economy and a personal sense of status isn’t dependant on some people living in poverty forever; where what you can do and what you know is as useful as who you know; where a great many more children can breath deep and look at horizons. I wish all this for all our over-stimulated, frantic children (who will spit in your face if you call them children) who, as well as seldom experiencing meaningful boundaries, are unlikely to experience sustained good teaching, open spaces and being rewarded for their skills rather than for their dads income or who their mum socialises with. I wish that it were possible for all children to be comfortable reading complex texts out loud, in public, but I’m not holding my breath.

It's a cliche that Britain is one of the most class-ridden country on earth. We can legitimately point to other countries where maintaining an underclass is based on religion or simple elitist bullying, and all fair minded people dislike and want to alter the conditions that keep dalits living in dungheaps or Saudi people routinely abusing foreign workers. Foreign aid is is moral and proper, and at the same time we need to look at our own country and engage with complex facts and figures. These figures seem to be saying that a British underclass supports the economy (a pool of unemployed people keeps wages and inflation low and the stigma of being on benefits ensures that a great many people will take a low paid job when they'd be better off being on benefits, keeping prices down)  and that as a nation we're more than content to have a proportion of our children die or be brought up in unending poverty and die young. Are you content with that? Look deep.

You Are A Bloody Moron

The media is entirely consumed with people who claim benefits, with people who make claiming benefits a lifestyle choice, with benefits scroungers and benefit thieves. The benefits bill is indeed enormous, and more money is lost through DWP incompetence than through fraudulent claims. Note that what little information is available comes under the banner ‘Fraud and error.’ They are two separate issues but linking them feeds a useful prejudice.

Ian Duncan Smith meanwhile, describes the issue succinctly:

"The present benefits system is so complex and unfair that no one understands it. It leads at the bottom end to one of the most regressive tax and benefit withdrawal rates that it is possible to imagine.

"We ask people to go to work for the first time and then tell them to pay back 70%, 80% and 90% back to the state. These are levels none of the wealthiest bankers are asked to pay – they are moaning at 50%.

"If you are unemployed, and you come from a family that is unemployed, all you can see when you think about work is risk. It is a real risk because for all the efforts you make the rewards are very minimal and in some cases none at all.

"Socially, everyone says: 'You are a bloody moron – why are you doing this? You don't have to do this.' So taking responsibility is a real risk for you."

That he misses the single most important aspect of this mindset is testament to how deep our Hard Working Families rhetoric goes. If you’re a poor person and unemployed you keep a roof over your own and your family’s head. If you’re a poor person and you swallow propaganda you are very likely to become homeless.

Which person is taking responsibility?


What can we say about the messages being sent to the very poor?

How might this affect an external locus of evaluation?
Of the person on benefits?
On the working person who earns less than a person on benefits?

On you?

External Locus Of Evaluation

Everyone knows that a person on state benefits is a bit shifty. Spongers, parasites, lazy, untrustworthy. Probably fraudsters. Everyone knows someone – or knows someone who knows someone – on benefits who has a huge television, buys designer clothes, has children littered about, has many children with different fathers, and who goes on international holidays at least once a year.

This is the overwhelmingly dominant paradigm in the discussion of people on benefits, and this group is treated in ways which, were they black or gay, would be simply illegal. It’s illegal to offer a flat for rent with the proviso of ‘No Blacks, no Dogs, No Irish.’ But it’s normal for a landlord to have the proviso ‘No DSS’. It’s absolutely acceptable to discuss people on benefits with as much hatred as you like, in the media, in the pub, at dinner parties, and in coded terms within education, medicine, social services, at the hairdressers, in a bus queue.

It’s acceptable to put a person on benefits under surveillance. Anyone, without the need for proof and anonymously can call the Benefit Fraud Hotline to report a ‘benefit thief.’ (How often is this done after an argument or relationship breakdown, spite being the motivation? The DWP keeps no figures on malicious reporting but the internet is full of anecdote.) DWP officers can put a person on benefits under covert surveillance taking long lens photographs of them, their children, their friends and their home life. They’re allowed to gain access to your bank account. Even if there’s no proof of fraud, a permanent note will be made on their records. People who have never had anything to do with the legal or judicial system or read a history book pompously reiterate the inane cliché ‘You’ve got nothing to fear if you’ve done nothing wrong,’

Imagine other groups under the same conditions: University lecturers’ bank accounts are accessed. Journalists are put under surveillance. The children of doctors are covertly photographed. The neighbours of Polish people are encouraged via advertisements on bus stops and on the television, to keep an eye on them. Just in case. It’s unconscionable. But counselors live and function in a society where we know that people on benefits are treated in this way and we don’t really care, even though most of us will work with people on benefits from the beginning of our training. 

How does living with the knowledge that you should be ashamed of yourself, that other people detest you simply because of your income, and that you are at threat of surveillance if you annoy someone, affect a persons self-concept and loci of evaluation?