No Dogs No Blacks No Irish

So today the changes in housing benefit come into force.

Since the government proposed this saving they’ve been told by various charities, Opposition and their own committees, working parties and anyone else with an interest in fairness, that this will force poor people out of their homes and communities, so it’ll be interesting to see what actually happens.

Which is to say that it’ll be interesting to see just how many families are made homeless, are shoved into hostels, how many children are forced to leave their friends and schools and how many people are forced to move away from their local support networks (used to be known as ‘friends and family’.)

Take a look at this

[Paragraph 59] It is difficult to predict the precise impacts of the LHA changes in London given the number of factors involved. Nonetheless it is clear that the changes in London will result, as they are intended to, in substantial levels of household movement. The Government has acknowledged this and has increased funding for Discretionary Housing Payments, in order to provide local authorities with the means to assist with the transition.  [My emphasis]

It’s fairly obvious where my political sympathies lie but I suggest that it takes a certain kind of person to consider it appropriate to bodily remove people from their home on the sole basis of their income. And yet this issue is being discussed quite openly by apparently civilized people. “Why should poor people live in nice areas? Why should poor people live in decent homes?” or as Shaun Bailey asks, "

"You can talk about your right to live in the community where you grew up, but where do you get the right to spend other people's money?”

We hear a great deal about the politics of envy and that charge is always leveled against people who object to gross inequality, but it seems that it is partly envy that motivates what passes for discourse on this subject. “I don’t get my home paid for, why should They? I can’t afford to live in a pleasant area, why should They?” The question I have never heard asked is: Why don't more people live in good rented homes that don't cost more than a quarter of their income, in pleasant areas?


That's a book unto itself, but it's interesting that Germany, with a strong economy similar to our own has a home ownership rate of around 40%. Most Singaporeans live in public housing and there's no social stigma at all. There's a real link in Europe between poverty and home ownership. Supply and demand are obvious first principals here, and in the UK we're told that one of the primary signs of being a successful adult is the possession of a morgage.


Which is what caused the financial meltdown in the US and which will cause, as it did in the 90's, huge numbers of repossessions as interest rates rise, as they must.

Another question that no one at all seems to ask is, why did councils build social housing in or close to affluent areas in the first place?

The life of Octavia Hill is a textbook example of the Big Society. She left school at 14, her father blew the family money and within 8 years she’d created 15 housing schemes with 3,000 very low paid or occasionally paid tenants. She was also a martinette and was only really interested in the Deserving Poor, making whole families homeless because the children weren’t sent to school, but she was amongst a group of social reformers who shamed society into caring for the very poorest people.   

Two decades before Hill, the destitution, disease and despair of slums had become too much too ignore and, more pointedly, an exhausted workforce was not productive, which prompted reformers and Government to address the issue. The Quakers, with a solid foundation in basic fairness, created factories with communities built around them – decent homes and schools that recognized the need for and allowed people, families and communities some dignity.

Although decent homes were originally built for workers the concept that The Poor ™ could be made better by emulating The Good (no irony intended, to be rich was to be good, with a plain opposite) but there’s always been unease about having The Poor too close. Garden Cities were a way of moving whole communities into new homes in decent surroundings, promoting self-sufficiency. I wonder what all those philanthropists, most of them steeped in the Protestant Work Ethic, would think the new housing benefit scheme shifting familes wholesale into effective slums and flophouses?

During both wars, it was noticed that poor people were simply too ill to fight and more rounds of social reform were undertaken. The Minister for Health & Housing, Aneurin Bevan, created new estates where ". . . the working man, the doctor and the clergyman will live in close proximity to each other,” because of its basic humanizing effect for all concerned, and as a measure of the standards of building and environment. 

In Europe, we look to Paris to see what happens when we shunt poor people into miserable, low employment, low income dumps. In South America it's the favela. It’s been called Apartheid, and has a particular resonance with post-Colonial immigrant groups in France, but it’s much the same in the UK, and today’s changes make that absolutely, unequivocally clear.

The internalized self-hatred of so many low earners is depressing. I know Shaun Bailey, the Conservative ex-candidate who speaks so forcefully and endlessly about his deprived background – in Notting Hill. He now works towards dismantling the support and help his mother and he got throughout his childhood so that it can’t be afforded to anyone else. I mention Mr Bailey in particular because he’s a very public figure who seems to believe that everyone should be like him, something that so many of us seem to believe too. If you’re ill, then just get better. If you’re unlucky, well you should be optimistic and Make It Happen. If you just can’t work a 40 hour week, then you should stop being a lazy scrounger and join the rest of the Soylent Green masses. But to pull oneself up by the bootstraps, one has to have boots. 

Bailey was used this week to attempt to counter another Estate born-and-bred person, Zadie Smith and here’s his thoughtful philosophy on loneliness: 

“Say Hi. It transforms people’s worlds.”

Forget Maslow and his ridiculous hierarchy of needs. Forget the well-researched and documented causes of isolation, alienation and disenfranchisement, Just Say Hi.  

I’m deeply disheartened at how quickly our societies degrade into Social Darwinism. Advertisements for rented housing already include a long list of “No DSS” which is the equivalent of ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish’ and which hasn’t been objected to by anyone in anything like power, ever. Never mind that the DSS was renamed in 2001, we all know what it means. It means a great many landlords won’t touch poor people, despite the fact that they’ll be paid regular as clockwork. The majority of those that still offer people on housing benefit a roof object to having their rental income cut to £250 a week for a single bedroom and shared toilet and kitchen.

Shaun Bailey and his mum would today risk being moved anywhere where house prices, standards of living and wages are low where they’d be as welcome as any other refugee. And so could you, if you get ill or unlucky. Caring for the poor is, as well as a moral and ethical concern, ultimately a matter of watching our own back. There but for the grace of God and meaningful Housing Benefit go we.

Budget Day, March on Saturday

So the budget was neutral, eh?

Not if you're a child growing up in poverty, or if you're on benefits and need a bed or a cooker, or if you're a poor, elderly cold person. Sadly, the media would rather report on arcane fiscal detail rather than on very basic poverty being turned into grinding punishment.

"These reductions will not save great sums of money and are therefore more about punishing vulnerable people than balancing the books."

Sally Copley, Save the Children's head of UK policy, said: "These cuts to the crisis loans will be a huge blow to those families who can't afford basic necessities such as beds and cookers.

"Families living in poverty have no savings and many are scraping by just to put food on the table.

"The crisis loan was the one place people in severe poverty could borrow money to pay for essentials they can't afford, without having to pay interest.

"Sadly they will be left with little alternative but to borrow money from high-interest lenders and loan sharks."

The Misery Index is at a two decade high which the BACP might welcome as an "Opportunity for counsellors" - until we realise that it's only people who can afford it who will approach us privately and student-led counselling agencies are already overbooked.

Our country has already factionalised: trust between different income groups has always been very tentative but when the poor become destitute while the rich pour into London because of the financial welcome we offer (and treat the poor with contempt) riots ensue.  It might be argued that rioting is the only way in which people who are totally marginalised can get any positive change for their communities, which even then is often handled hopelessly.

The cultural aspirations of the rich developers, housing trust and local council upper management,  and people whose lives and homes are perceived as units by these ideological bean counters are very different. Until the desires and lifestyles of the poor are respected rather than manipulated by the middle classes - whether they're architects or counsellors - and until a modicum of empathy is brought into the mix the problems are simply going to continue to cycle.

I know this blog gets quite a few hits and it would be great to know if anyone reading this will be at The March for the Alternative. 

You can comment anonymously.

Here's why you should go. See you there!

Only Connect

via Johann Hari . . .

We call our schools “comprehensive”, but in fact – under both political parties – they are ruthlessly socially segregated. Across much of the country, the wealthy kids are bunched together in “good” schools, and the poor kids are penned off in “bad” schools. British kids are segregated by their parents’ house prices – the “catchment area” – and this is then made even worse by the grammar schools and private schools Starkey champions. So the left-over schools are made up of left-out kids like Jamie’s, or my Trocadero friends, and they have to climb a mountain every day to do the basics. Where there is a concentration of chaotic kids, the school will be chaotic.

There is an alternative – and it has been demonstrated best in, of all places, the city of Raleigh, North Carolina. Ten years ago, their school system was in a familiar mess, and they passed a simple law to try to solve it. No school could have more than 40 percent of its kids on free school meals, or 25 percent of who were a grade or more below their expected level in reading or maths. Suddenly, the kids who needed most help wouldn’t be lumped together. Kids like Connor and Angelique would be broken up and spread out across the school system, where schools could give them the attention they needed.

The results were startling. Within a decade, Raleigh went from one of the worst-performing districts in America to one of the best. The test scores of poor kids doubled, while those of wealthier children also saw a slight increase. Teenage pregnancies, crime and high school drop-out rates fell substantially.

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.

Book Review: Understanding the interpersonal dimension of gender and poverty

 There are many minds in the international development field that will switch off at the sight of the word gender in the title of this book. They may say they are concerned with more important, big-picture ideas about aid, governance, trade policy, etc. This is a problem, because those very same big ideas that dominate the field keep breaking down at the seams because their thinkers overlook exactly the kinds of nuance and detailed policy thinking that fill this book. So let me assure such thinkers that this is not a feminist text, nor does it fetishise the issue of gender. Rather it is about the interpersonal dimension of development—how women and men relate with each other, how children relate to adults, the old to the young, employers to workers, households to agencies. It is about how these relationships shape individuals’ struggles with poverty, and how these struggles aggregate to become wider narratives of poverty across whole societies.

Please read the entirety of this review which deconstructs the Protestant Work Ethic thus:

In one scheme in Dar es Salaam, analysed by Fauzia Mohamed, Lecturer in Sociology in the Open University of Tanzania, the credit agency seems eager to promote a Protestant work ethic, which presumably they find lacking in Tanzanian society. One official states that:

“We try to enlighten our clients that those who are serious in their businesses are the ones who escape the vicious cycle of poverty, since the harder they work, the faster they make their repayments. This gives them more money to invest in their businesses causing their businesses to expand faster, giving these women more money which will eventually reduce their poverty.”

Firstly, the statement shows that the agency prioritises recovering its funds ahead of real poverty alleviation, since women are taught that repaying the agency is a precondition for escaping poverty, a strange and artificial claim. Secondly, for Mohamed, it showed no understanding of Tanzanian women’s lives.

In the absence of other available criteria, the agency assessed individuals’ capacity to borrow based on their apparent industriousness and devotion to income-earning activities. But this directs loans only at those women who have the luxury of time and resources to devote themselves to income-earning, and writes off the neediest women where they don’t demonstrate the appropriate work ethic.

But the neediest Tanzanian women are not lazy, merely sensible. They are already industriously juggling children, domestic chores, and favours for neighbours. They may neglect repayments not out of incapacity but out of rational preference to maintain good relations with their community instead of credit agencies. Women may default to help their neighbours, causing agencies to refuse them further funds, but these women know that their neighbours are more likely to be of real assistance than the agencies in times of crisis, and will happily divert their repayments to help each other.

Little England

The media has been alive with opinion today about giving prisoners the vote.

Instinctively, I feel that prisoners should have the vote but until today I didn’t know what principals informing that feeling might have been. I spent much of this morning listening to radio and TV debates and was struck at how uninformed much of the reaction was.


'It's disgusting that Rose West be able to vote!' (She won't.) 'How can the Yorkshire Ripper be trusted to make laws?' (He won't.) What about the hundreds of people who were sent down for not having television license? Do they fall into the same category as Ian Huntley? What about the huge numbers of people who are imprisoned for under a year for minor, non-violent crimes? What about therapists who enjoy a spliff now and again, or don’t declare all their clients to HMRC – if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime!

 “Never mind prisoner rights, what about victims rights?” is a common refrain and whilst some of the sentences that some prisoners get can be surprisingly short, the impulse for this argument doesn't seem to have it's genesis in social justice. If I attack you then indeed I forfeit my right to liberty and free association, that’s part of the social contract. But I pay my debt to society, not to my victim. Society condemns certain acts and demands certain penalties. The ‘victims rights’ argument seems to want to replace our current legislation with systems of vendetta and feud, or Lex talionis that is, laws based on retribution, but I guarantee that the majority of people advocating this route would be horrified at the concept of living under Sharia.

 

It’s a given that poor people have more to do with the criminal justice system than do the rich and it’s also a given that societal debate makes and changed laws. That’s why people were imprisoned for not having a TV licence in the first place (Conservative rhetoric hated single mothers) and why that law changed, why we hanged children for stealing food and then stopped that barbarity.

 

Many talk radio programmes today debated this issue and I was struck by the almost total lack of ability or desire to hear any argument other than hang ‘em and flog ‘em and Sod Off Europe. In fact, the European Union came into being after WW2 urgently recognising the wisdom of that old saw, ‘United we stand, divided we fall.’ The European Court of Justice was part of this union, created to protect ordinary people from tyrannical governments and legislatures. Giving prisoners the vote, as all but we and the least developed of European countries already do, is a way of making sure that if any European government imprisons their opponents their opponents can still vote them out. Winston Churchill was an enthusiastic advocate for both the Union and the Court.

 

It’s a depressing fact that those people most likely to be imprisoned are also most likely to support a return to the death penalty. What is this about? How does it relate to Rogers’ understanding of the phenomenological field?

All individuals (organisms) exist in a continually changing world of experience (phenomenal field) of which they are the centre.
The organism reacts to the field as it is experienced and perceived. This perceptual field is "reality" for the individual.
The organism reacts as an organized whole to this phenomenal field.
A portion of the total perceptual field gradually becomes differentiated as the self.
As a result of interaction with the environment, and particularly as a result of evaluational interaction with others, the structure of the self is formed - an organised, fluid but consistent conceptual pattern of perceptions of characteristics and relationships of the "I" or the "me", together with values attached to these concepts.

The best vantage point for understanding behaviour is from the internal frame of reference of the individual.

And so on.  

 

There’s a particular kind of response from voters that politicians play to: “I’m not that cruel, I’m not that clever.” People on the Left are parodied as going into too much detail for too long ("Who cares about your stupid facts and figures, they bore and confuse me,")  people on the Right as callous thugs (US research is clear that Republicans give more financially and in time to charity than do Democrats. No such research exists in the UK.)  and voters find their place on that spectrum. Literacy is below the level expected of an eleven year old for one third of our adult population and poor academic achievement disproportionately affects people on low income. Cui Bono?

 

We had a learning moment earlier this year, when those people whose privileged education helps them bring together history, social policy, politics, economics and philosophy could have guided the nation, comfortably within their own political ideologies, to an informed decision about this European Court judgement. Instead, the Prime Minister summed up all their bombastic rhetoric and played to the gallery:

‘Being forced to give prisoners the vote makes me sick.’

David Cameron, 
November 2010

  “The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country.”

                                                                                                                              Winston Churchill, July 1910

The Law Is The Law Unless You're Poor.

Julie Baker and Stewart Evans, Directors of the Care Sector Trust, defrauded their company of £54,000 and this week received a 9 months sentence, suspended for 2 years, and must complete 300 hours of community service.

They received £337,000 public funding for supplying courses that would support homeless people and ex-offenders back into work, ordered staff to forge signatures and claimed funding for courses that never occurred.

Karen Clancy worked on and off as a cleaner cash in hand while on benefits. The total of her benefits, including housing and council tax benefit, child benefit and income support over some years came to £37,000. She went to prison for 14 months.

Judge Richard Bray said he could not overlook "such calculated fraud."

"I appreciate your home circumstances but it is no good blaming the judge. You brought this upon your own children."

Actually, it was Judge Richard Bray who deprived children of their only parent, put them into care and made them and their mother homeless.

Feelings of shame, shock, humiliation and loss of status might be common to both Karen Clancy and Julie Baker but I wonder if the intensity of those feelings might be greater for Ms Clancy? As well as being in prison, as well as worrying about her children and what's happening to her furniture, photo albums and cutlery when her house is cleared, when she comes out of prison she will also have to replay £37,000 on a weekly gross income of around £160. Returning to work  after her sentence will be very difficult indeed. What are the chances, do you think, of her defrauding once more? If she does won't this just prove how basically untrustworthy she is, a perpetual offender?

I’m genuinely interested to see how Julie Baker, Stuart Evans and those MP’s who’ve also been imprisoned for fraud get on in future. The DWP book ‘Barriers to employment for offenders and ex-offenders’ referenced above notes that ‘morality’ is one of the major concerns for prospective employers but I’m not sure this is totally accurate.

Jeffrey Archer, a millionaire who was imprisoned for fraud was made a Peer and is doing charity auctions. Jonathon Aitkin, another millionaire who was imprisoned for perjury still owes money to creditors and heads a Government task force on prison reform.

One of the major determinants of prospects after coming out of prison seems to be personal income. And another seems to be personal contacts. All of which reinforces the research that suggests that the poor are perceived to be more guilty than the rich simply by virtue of being poor.