Morning:
6°c
The poor, wrote John Clare before his incarceration in Epping asylum, have been “so long remembered as to be entirely forgotten”.
He would recognise the amnesia in today's London all too well. Thousands of fine words have emoted about those at the bottom of the income pile over the past 15 years, to the point where people barely hear. Deluges of official statistics chronicle the dispossessed, while turning their vivid daily struggles into lifeless numbers.
And while everyone in London's unique urban patchwork of want and wealth knows that squalor lurks between the stitches, most of us feel reassured that record amounts of taxpayers' money are being poured into Labour's tax credits, state-sector jobs and housing renovations, so it can't be too bad, can it?
There has never been a better moment, therefore, to shine daylight again into the darker seams of the capital and ask the questions: why does so much misery still exist and why have the billions spent by Labour failed to achieve the improvements expected?
In 1995, at the tail-end of the Thatcher-Major years, Labour feasted on the sense of unease and guilt provoked by the Evening Standard's exposé of poverty in London at that time. A few months later Tony Blair promised: “If the Labour government has not raised the living standards of the poorest by the end of its time in office, it will have failed.”
Immediately after winning power, Mr Blair chose south London's run-down Aylesbury Estate for his first speech. His promise of “no more no-hope areas” raised expectations dizzyingly higher and yet, after umpteen planning rethinks, the bleak concrete ramparts of the Aylesbury are still there, earmarked for demolition but still home to 7,500 people.
It is not as though Blair, and particularly Gordon Brown, have not tried to make a difference. Colossal sums have been quietly redistributed towards low-income working families in a desperate, but failed, attempt to meet their pledge to halve child poverty in this very year, 2010. At present, 2.9 million children live in households on incomes below the official poverty line (which currently stands at £361 per week for a couple with two children aged five and 14). That represents a modest reduction of half a million in a decade, less than a third of the target.
Having barely dented the problem in a decade, the Prime Minister is still pretending he can meet Labour's pledge to eradicate child poverty entirely by 2020. Indeed, the Child Poverty Bill commits this and future governments to meet the deadline without actually saying how.
Other official figures make uncomfortable reading. Pensioner poverty is down sharply but 2.5 million elderly live on incomes below 60 per cent of the median level, the official poverty threshold. The number of working-age adults has actually gone up by 600,000 to 5.6 million.
What rings alarm bells loudest is that the number of very, very poor people — on 40 per cent of median earnings or less — has risen almost every year. It seems that Mr Brown's crafty reworking of the tax and benefit system targets not the worst off but families with children who can be cheaply levered up from just below the poverty line to just above it. In other words, it is constructed to hit a target without necessarily curing the problem.
Tax credits and welfare-into-work remain the bedrock of Labour's anti-poverty policy, along with a focus on getting parents (including non-working spouses) into jobs and making sink estates more bearable with environmental improvements and more reliable policing.
On the Conservative side, there has been a revolution in thinking but precious few hard promises. In 1995, most Tories were still wedded to the “trickle-down” theory that whenever a banker blew his annual bonus on an extension, the money would eventually feed into the pockets of his poor neighbours.
In 2006 David Cameron declared a new era by admitting: “Trickle-down economics is not working.” He embraced the concept of relative poverty and invited Polly Toynbee to Tory conference, to the bemusement of his old guard.
“We must think in terms of an escalator, always moving upwards, lifting people out of poverty,” said Mr Cameron. “And crucially, an escalator that lifts everyone together.”
There are critical differences between him and Brown. Cameron says Labour is too caught up with money and targets, while he prefers to focus on other routes out of poverty like tackling family breakdown, poor education and low aspiration. Labour retorts that he is avoiding the vital money question altogether and possibly planning welfare cuts that would send poverty rates surging.
Mr Cameron has made a point of praising (without actually adopting) the work of former leader Iain Duncan Smith, who had his own Damascene moment at Glasgow's Easterhouse estate in 2002 and is now a well-regarded expert on the causes of poverty. But while Cameron smiles upon IDS proposals like tax breaks for married couples and cash to encourage stay-at-home mothers, George Osborne's cheque book has stayed firmly in his pocket. The trouble with IDS's big bang solutions is that they are like double glazing — they cost a lot and won't pay for themselves for years. Is Mr Cameron willing to put cash behind his long-term solutions, or will he settle for a quick fix until the economy improves?
The Liberal Democrats say there are glaring holes in the Cameron approach and Labour's “tax and benefit tricks”. Education will break the poverty trap, they say.
More clarity is needed on all sides but, unfortunately, poverty has slid down the political agenda since the recession made both taxpayers and Whitehall departments feel the pinch. Neither Brown nor Cameron has much to boast about or spare money to throw around and it would probably suit them both if the poor were, as John Clare feared, “entirely forgotten” in the coming election campaign.
Fifteen years on, in this critical year of decision, it is time to make them remember once again.
London's dispossessed: what should be done?
Reader views (5)
Are you joking? When a single mother with 5 children who has never contributed anything into the national coffer can live on £100,000 paid for by the tax payers such an assumption is crass.
- Ram2009, Reading, 03/03/2010 15:19
Report abuse
Poverty will never be tackled or resolved until all the so - called politicians, experts, economists and obscenely rich people acknowledge the simple fact that to close the poverty gap they will have to give up some of their wealth.
Not spend fortunes evading tax, burying their money in foreign tax havens is not the answer. They will never change while they are still allowed to buy influence on the political parties that are supposed to solve the problem of poverty.
- John Worker, Islington, London., 02/03/2010 14:39
Report abuse
We need to consider demolishing all council estates south of the River of London, the disposed can be housed in tents in the desert. This will ensure only the middle, middle upper and rich can live in the City with the benefits of modern housing.
OK maybe not such a great idea……….
David Cameron is possible right in suggesting that poverty starts from ignorance; how can it be with standard education for all, why many children fall into the trap of their parents. Monday’s front page ES article on this subject again highlighted family breakdowns and single mothers fending for their children. This is an epidemic which underlies a part of our society which fails to grasp the importance of family values, have become incumbent on expecting the state to provide for their needs.
We must allow business to make the difference to these deprived areas to create industry with tax incentives, allowing less state intervention. London is still a tail of two cities, that has never changed, but with time less bureaucracy poverty in UK can be talked about in historical terms.
I think all Parties lack the vision for this area of our society; it is easier to please those who have a voice and hide away those who know no better.
- Richard Hamilton, London, 02/03/2010 12:53
Report abuse
I have been tracking the Great Divide now for some years: and writing on it.
The deprived post-industrial areas of the Midlands and North provide ready illustration of the root problems: Thatcher simply avoided any serious reconstruction of industry and left great swathes of Britain to face systemic unemployment, effective and sustained Economic Depression and a life on benefits: now we have the children of those socially excluded and in many cases, their children's children living on benefits with no hope, no prospects and no future.
Simply sweeping this reality under the carpet and increasing social taxes to meet the cost was no solution: it was Ostrich Syndrome.
Meanwhile the Great Divide between the Haves and the Have Nots continues accelerating at an evermore rapid rate.
Which course offers the increasing prospects of civil disorder and anarchy.
Silly political games such as The New Deal do not, of course, rectify educational and employability problems: anymore than they create real new jobs.
McJobs in superstores and fast food joints may massage official unemployment figures, yet leave a majority still benefit-dependent.
Hopefully, future scarcity of public funds will now compel real answers, as against political Sticking Plaster "Solutions" and sound bites.
Michael C Feltham
- Michael C Feltham, London UK, 02/03/2010 10:32
Report abuse
Endemic poverty is the consequence of an outdated fiscal system.
Author Fred Harrison spells out in his books what is wrong with our taxation and welfare system and how to remedy it.
Solutions exist, poverty is not an economic truth. But we have to look where privilege does not want us to look.
- Janos Abel, London, 01/03/2010 20:19
Report abuse
