I was concerned to read some articles here whose titles and opening sentences felt extremely negative about a very emotive and potentially depressing topic. I want to reverse that.
I noted that there's not a suitable category on Lodpost for this popular topic, and that previous articles on poverty have been filed across history, health, geography, education, finance and 'make money'. The topic touches all those. I changed this several times.
I am writing as one, not merely observing and reporting, but who has been in the position. I have read these kinds of articles elsewhere, often laced with bitterness. The author's own despair is passed on as advice an fact to the reader. Headlines such as "why YOU will never get out of this trap" are utterly demoralising. They give a heavy sense of hopelessness to those already in a short supply of hope, perhaps striking on a particularly bad day, or sucking out the joy on a positive one.
That is not what I intend to do.
I am writing to state that we can and must leave that trap, and to give hope.
Yes, I am aware of 'the poverty trap' - it's there in sociology textbooks, not that I needed to hear the phrase to understand it. What I am interested in is how to break it. I am among those who believe that the trap is not entirely incidental, not merely the result of bad planning by those who really don't get the system that they design, but never use.
I think we have to look at what work is more carefully, and at our systems - yes starting with welfare, but also more broadly. This poverty trap seems to be a phenonmenon in multiple countries; in the West, in Africa.... It strikes me that making a support system for poorer people that keeps them poor and stressed, but worse off for working, lacks common sense. When it is oft pointed out, one would think that work would be done to change it - for surely it doesn't need to be thus?
I don't believe that it does.
Some of my issue comes from those who are in poverty looking to those who are not poor but who seem to have power to steer the poor: to those in government and academia, or the supposed caring professions. We both speak of the poor helping themselves - the homeless' Big Issue magazine's motto is a hand up, not a hand out - but of those needing support losing their own agency and looking to another.
I think this is much of the problem. We both blame those with little money, and yet expect them to be the means of their own salvation, and yet for them to look to outside saviours. The policies and benefit systems are created by those who we may see as socially above them - perhaps those who themselves see themselves as superior. Researchers collect information about and from those in poverty without doing anything direct to alleviate it, nor involving the people this affects to be able to steer their own courses.
I am tired of policy makers and ministers and charities speaking of 'the poor' as some distant, de-personalised phenomenon. I was once in a meeting that showed graphs about our surrounding area, displaying statistics of local poverty. I pointed out that we cannot assume that the statistics - all real people, not numbers and lines - are not among them. In fact, I knew they were. I did not like the assumption that poorer people were 'out there' - in those identified, if not designated areas - and not in the room.
People in poverty are not easy to spot always. You can't tell from their profession or home or car or clothes - unless perhaps you look carefully. But I'm not inviting Sherlock Holmes style scrunity and safeguarding rope pulls over the ripped garment that belies a financial struggle.
I'm much more into turning round our systems, empowering the disempowered, having our voices heard, and losing the condesension and middle people.
We need to stop the idea of the deserving poor, or other needy, and to sit on the notion that only those who work - that is, who earn money gifted by another in return for contracted and recognisable activity, termed 'work' - are deserving of ease and leisure and respect. I especially wish to overturn those who use their faith to justify such a mindset - as a person of faith, I see it as an aberration of God's message to state that we need to decide who is worthy and for those persons to continue to prove themselves in order to receive.
We need to stop welfare officers and offices being stressful. I am sure they are designed and trained to be thus. Wouldn't it be better if staff helped encourage those on a quest for work, rather than berate them for their efforts and pressure them? And for staff to have an enjoyable job, chosen for their caring and positivity, not their jobsworth qualities, and to stop pressuring them to push claimants off the books.
I am wondering about the whole means tested system, where indeed one can lose for gaining a little. I support a notion of citizen's inome of some kind, although I'm dismayed by the expensive pilot studies, which involved watching the spending of recipients, and in some cases, limiting what it could be on. I have always understood universal or basic income to be...universal, and inalienable, and unconditional.
I do wonder where the funds may come from...higher taxes? That concerns me. I can think of several aspects of government spending that in my view, could be curtailed or axed. The wastage on the pilot studies is angering - how many more could have benefitted from the consultancy costs?!
Although I am also wary that it's something given centrally, meaning that the state knows who everyone is and their current details, I feel that a UB/CI does allow the freedom for all people to engage in all kinds of activity, whether that which is generally considered and rewarded as work. Some feel more called to a service, and those are not easily understood by the welfare office. I want to abolish any system which penalises and decides that some occupations are better than others.
I also want to see power taken from those in wealthy, higher status roles and given to those who most need empowering and are affected by financial and other hardship, to steer their own circumstances rather than look 'above' to have them changed by others. We need to question the rising prices of ulitities, rather than submit to them, and also to any government cuts. I believe that the resources are there, but are wrongly being funnelled elsewhere.
And finally, for now (I may have more to say on this matter) to lose the stigma and the disapproval expressed by others that one knows....for they are doing the work of the welfare office too. I wish to erase the Big Issue's motto - which is not a positive or empowering statement. I want to question why 'a hand out' is seen as negative, and the underlying assumptions. Perhaps if we try to understand rather than judge and chastise; and help practically. Perhaps most of all, we need to be free to question the ties that bind, so we can loose them, and hold those who did the tying to account.
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