by Mark Easton
The undeserving poor were the equivalent of today’s ‘skivers’: people deemed able to work but who chose not to. Rather than blaming poor policies for extra taxes and social strife, citizens were encouraged to blame poor people. The Poor Law of 1572, for instance, justified itself by stating that ‘all parts of this Realm of England and Wales be presently with rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars exceedingly pestered.’
Cast as enemies of the state, they were accused of ‘horrible murders, thefts, and other great outrages, to the high displeasure of Almighty God, and to the great annoy of the common weal’. For this group, therefore, poverty was not a grace but a sin requiring punishment. Those convicted of a roguish or vagabond trade of life were liable to be ‘grievously whipped and burnt through the gristle of the right ear with a hot iron’, branded as identifiable scapegoats for what were arguably the political and economic failings of others.
This was the birth of the underclass, the detached and dangerous group the Victorians referred to as the ‘residuum’, whose fecklessness and criminality threatened the law-abiding and hardworking majority. Culpability for every social ill would be routinely pinned upon this subset of humanity, a cultural group whose pathological behaviour was said to pass down through the generations.
For centuries, politicians would argue they were supporting the impotent and deserving in society while pointing an accusatory finger into the shadows. The outbreaks of looting and arson across parts of urban England in the summer of 2011 were widely blamed on an idle and immoral ‘underclass’. The warnings going back to the Poor Laws of how the undeserving might rise up in a tempest of flame and greed appeared to have come to pass.
It is this historical narrative that has shaped our attitudes to the poor, framing the debate in terms of ‘them’ and ‘us’. As Britain got richer in the late twentieth century, so the argument shifted: from deserving and undeserving poor as to whether true poverty even existed at all. On 11 May 1989, John Moore, then Secretary of State for Social Security, stood up to make a speech in the refined opulence of a Conservative private members’ club in Westminster. ‘We reject their claims about poverty in the UK,’ he said of his government’s critics, arguing that the word was being used to describe what was in reality simply inequality. His sentiments echoed the words of a senior civil servant who had told a parliamentary committee the previous year: ‘The word “poor” is one the government actually disputes.’
With campaigners claiming that a third of the British population were living on or under the breadline, the definition of the word ‘poverty’ had become the subject of intense political debate. It was obvious that the UK did not suffer from the squalor and starvation associated with poverty in previous centuries or less developed countries. Absolute poverty in Britain was rare. But the demands for social reform had seen the development of the concept of relative poverty.
One of the loudest voices in the movement to redefine the word for the twentieth century was Professor Peter Townsend, a left-wing academic who founded the Child Poverty Action Group in 1965. He argued that people were in poverty when they were excluded from the ordinary living patterns, customs and activities of the average family. To Conservative thinkers including John Moore, the true motive for redefining poverty was ‘so they can call Western capitalism a failure’. However, the idea that poverty was a measure of social exclusion had been taking hold.
In 1975, the Council of Europe had described the poor as those ‘whose resources (material, cultural and social) are so small as to exclude them from the minimum acceptable way of life of the Member State in which they live’. Eight years later, with UK unemployment approaching 3 million for the first time for half a century, London Weekend Television commissioned a survey to test public opinion on what a minimum acceptable standard of living looked like.
Entitled Breadline Britain, the researchers asked what items people regarded as essential for an acceptable living standard in 1983. Almost everyone agreed that ‘heating to warm the living areas of the home’ was a necessity, two thirds regarded a washing machine as essential, half the population thought a television was an essential item, while less than a quarter included a car on the list. The survey also asked respondents whether they lacked these items, allowing the programme to manufacture some shocking headlines. Applying the findings to the whole population, Breadline Britain claimed that approximately 3 million people in Britain today couldn’t afford to heat the living areas of their homes and around 6 million people went without some essential aspect of clothing — such as a warm waterproof coat — because of lack of money.
What the programme makers inadvertently did, however, was reveal that while nearly 3.5 million people didn’t have consumer durables such as carpets, a washing machine or a fridge, virtually no one lacked a television. Breadline Britain stoked the debate as to whether the poor themselves, through misplaced priorities, were to blame for their own misfortune.
Shortly after the programme was aired, a letter appeared in The Sunday Times from S. Turner of Wolverhampton: ‘Anyone who visits low-income families has experience of homes which are lacking in carpets, furniture, or decent clothing for children, but contain a large colour TV.’ If they can afford a telly, beer and fags, the cry went up, they are not poor — they are taking the rest of society for a ride. The undeserving poor were at it again!
In 1997, two sociologists working at Bristol University — David Gordon and Christina Pantazis — decided to challenge this folk wisdom. They looked for the evidence of an ‘underclass’ blighted by some pathological culture of poverty. They went back to the Pauper Pedigree Project of the Eugenics Society, which ran from 1910 to 1933. They scoured the pages of the Problem Families Project of 1947. They looked at the multi-million-pound government funded Transmitted Deprivation Programme of the 1970s. The conclusion: ‘Despite 150 years of scientific investigation, often by extremely partisan investigators, not a single study has ever found any large group of people/households with any behaviours that could be ascribed to a culture or genetics of poverty.’
The idea of an impoverished underclass feeding on wider society implied a distinct and stable group, culturally at odds with mainstream values. What the evidence actually showed was that most people had experienced at least a brief spell of living in poverty, but there were only a very few ‘whose poverty could be ascribed to fecklessness’. Official figures from the Department for Work and Pensions would later estimate that about three in five British households experienced income poverty for at least one year during the 1990s and the early years of the new millennium.
What about the packets of twenty and the pints of lager? Gordon and Pantazis found that in 1992, for example, the least well-off families spent £3.00 a week on alcohol (3.2 per cent of total expenditure), compared to the average family, which spent £11.06 (4.1 per cent). Poorer families spent £3.51 a week on tobacco, compared to an average spend of £5.38. ‘This is unsurprising,’ Gordon and Pantazis pointed out. ‘The poorest households spend less on everything than all other households as they have less money to spend.’
The politics of poverty have moved markedly in the past fifteen years, with both Labour and the Conservatives now considering it a real and debilitating consequence of social inequality. Tony Blair walked into Number Ten in 1997 promising to eliminate child poverty by 2020. David Cameron walked into Number Ten in 2010 promising his party was ‘best placed to fight poverty in our country’. Gone are the days when senior British politicians argue whether relative poverty exists.
Public attitudes, however, remain deeply sceptical. An Ipsos MORI focus group in 2007 was presented with evidence of severe deprivation in some of Britain’s poorest communities. ‘They probably don’t wear coats because it’s fashionable not to’, was one participant’s explanation. ‘People in Cornwall don’t need so much money — they can go out and cut trees down for fuel’, said another. The researchers concluded that people were reaching for outlandish explanations as to why the evidenc
e didn’t match their opinions.
Poverty denial remains a significant barrier for those organisations campaigning on behalf of the poorest in Britain. Numerous academic papers have been written, trying to explain why people simply refuse to believe there is real deprivation in the UK — research which has led some back to a book written in 1980 by the American social psychologist Melvin Lerner. The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion identified a relatively common tendency to assume that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get: that the good get rewarded and the bad get punished. Professor Lerner argued that ‘people are very reluctant to give up this belief, and they can be greatly troubled if they encounter evidence that suggests that the world is not really just or orderly after all.’
Since the book’s publication researchers have tried to see whether those who have a belief in a just world (BJW) react differently to poverty than those who don’t. In one experiment conducted at Columbia University in 2003, volunteers were asked how strongly they agreed or disagreed with a long list of statements, including: people who get ‘lucky breaks’ have usually earned their good fortune; careful drivers are just as likely to get hurt in traffic accidents as careless ones; in almost any business or profession, people who do their job well rise to the top; the political candidate who sticks up for his principles rarely gets elected.
The answers allowed the researchers to divide the group into strong BJW and weak BJW. Then all the volunteers were presented with the story of Lisa, a mother of two children having a difficult time making ends meet. More information about her circumstances was then given, and participants were asked whether they thought she was deserving of welfare or not. For example, they might be told that ‘Lisa was working last year and is still working at the same job’, or that ‘Lisa sometimes skips meals so that her children can eat’, ‘Lisa is going to school to improve her job skills’ or ‘Lisa is looking for a better job’. The difference between the two groups could hardly have been more marked.
Among those with a strong BJW, Lisa’s efforts to cope with her poverty made her less deserving of aid. The other group, with a weak BJW, saw Lisa’s actions as evidence that she was more deserving. Indeed, ‘the more indications given that Lisa was acting responsibly or making an effort to improve her situation, the more likely respondents with a strong general belief in a just world were to find her undeserving. Conversely, the more of these characteristics that Lisa possessed, the more likely respondents with a weak general belief in a just world were to find her deserving.’ To those with a strong BJW, the mythical Lisa’s struggles against poverty demonstrated she had the capacity to improve herself and was not, by definition, a member of the impotent (and therefore deserving) poor.
There is now a substantial body of evidence about the kind of people most likely to be found among the strong BJW group. According to research by Zick Rubin of Harvard University and Letitia Anne Peplau of UCLA, they tend to be ‘more religious, more authoritarian, more conservative, more likely to admire political leaders and existing social institutions, and more likely to have negative attitudes toward underprivileged groups’.
There are obvious links between the belief in a just world hypothesis and the German sociologist Max Weber’s concept of the Protestant work ethic (PWE). This defines the view of those who believe that hard work pays off and, unsurprisingly perhaps, such people tend to be highly judgemental of the poor. Recent research into British attitudes involved an experiment in which 109 working adults were divided up into those with high and low PWE. Volunteers were asked how much they agreed or disagreed with statements that included: ‘Most people who don’t succeed in life are just plain lazy’, ‘Life would have very little meaning if we never had to suffer’, and ‘I feel uneasy when there is little work for me to do’.
The psychologist behind the experiment, Professor Adrian Furnham at University College London, concluded that ‘a high PWE scorer is likely to explain poverty in terms of idleness and poor money management; wealth in terms of hard work, honesty and saving; unemployment in terms of laziness and lack of effort; and he or she is likely to be opposed to both taxation and social security.’ Max Weber’s influential ideas suggest the Reformation did not simply trigger an economic and political shift in attitudes to poverty and wealth — it also inspired a psychological change.
Catholic tradition stressed that individual thought, deviation from the status quo, might amount to heresy with all its unpleasant and painful consequences. Salvation was assured by the dutiful acceptance of church teaching and authority. Protestantism was based on the idea that each faithful Christian was responsible directly and immediately to God. It was a philosophy founded on individualism; no longer did the church determine piety — the decision lay with the common man or woman. They were free to judge the poor.
The difference in approach can still be seen today in people’s attitudes to begging. In Catholic countries, beggars are more likely to be tolerated, if not pitied and supported. In Protestant countries, begging is often an offence. In England and Wales, the Vagrancy Act of 1824 still applies: sleeping on the streets and begging is a criminal offence. By contrast, until recently there was no law against beggars in Italy. Venice became the first Italian city to make begging illegal in 2008, a response to the attitudes of tourists rather than Venetians. Ireland only introduced laws against aggressive begging in 2011 after its High Court had ruled that old British vagrancy laws were unconstitutional, conflicting with enshrined Irish rights on freedom of expression and communication.
British attitudes to poverty, shaped by our religious, political and economic history, appear paradoxical. Around 70 per cent of people think the gap between rich and poor in Britain is too wide, but there is no corresponding support for redistributive measures by government to reduce it. The British have led the way in ambitious campaigns to ‘Make Poverty History’ and to ‘Feed the World’, but government research recently found the public to be a long way from supporting an anti-poverty agenda in the UK.
When it comes to domestic poverty, the country is almost exactly split down the middle between the ‘liberal’ and the ‘sceptical’. Five hundred years of argument and uncertainty as to the duties of the state and the individual in supporting the needy still rage across Britain to this day.
Q is for Queen
My grubby taxi bounced through the streets of Old Tallinn, squeaking and complaining as its driver attempted to avoid puddles that might have hidden an axle-breaking pothole. The shower had cleared the air and a triumphant sun beamed onto the shiny cobbles, onyx-black stones twinkling as though encrusted with diamonds. It all made sense. I was on my way to meet a queen.
It was 1992 and I was indeed destined to shake hands with royalty — an assignment for BBC Newsnight had taken me to the Estonian capital, where we had arranged to interview Her Majesty Queen Margrethe II of Denmark. It seemed odd to have ended up on what was technically foreign soil for both of us, but while Tallinn would subsequently be invaded by countless British stag parties, my interviewee could claim that her ancestor had got the beers in first: King Valdemar II of Denmark had captured the place at the Battle of Lyndanisse in 1219. Indeed, it transpired the city’s very name meant Danish castle.
The cab door announced my arrival with a pained creak. Although I liked to imagine myself as a hard-bitten hack, blasé about rank, unimpressed by pomp and immune to institutional sycophancy, I couldn’t prevent my heart missing a beat as I stepped from the taxi. It is not every day that one is introduced to a real live queen.
Back home in the UK, the British Royal Family appeared to be in turmoil: the tabloids were gorging on courtly scandal as princes and princesses queued up to heap humiliation and disgrace upon the House of Windsor. ‘Squidgygate’, ‘Camillagate’, ‘Fergiegate’ — the Palace walls had been multiply breached and squalid, intimate details of collapsing marriages and suspect morals were tumbling out into the public domain. Rumblings of republicanism were encouraging some to b
elieve the kingdom itself was threatened, that we were witnessing something akin to the final chapter in the Wizard of Oz: the terriers of the British press pack had managed to enter the inner sanctum, rip the curtain aside and reveal the monarchy to be mundane.
The Danish queen breezed towards me with a matter-of-factness to her stride. She proffered a gloved hand, which I shook, grateful that I had not needed to commit myself to complying with deferential protocol. ‘Good morning,’ she said, in business-like tones.
The queen was charming and intelligent: her answers to my questions diplomatic and assured. Given the travails of her blood cousins in Britain and her own apparently unassailable popularity in Denmark, I asked what words of advice she had for her relatives. Her gracious reply revealed nothing unexpected, but the scoop was that she had agreed to be interrogated at all.
Something about the experience had left me troubled, though, and I couldn’t quite work out what. The interview had been fine, we had more than enough interesting material for our needs, but I was discomforted nevertheless. It was only as I sat back in London reviewing the tapes and writing my script that it dawned on me what was wrong.
In January 1776, a pamphlet simply signed ‘Written by an Englishman’ began to be passed around among the population of the colonies of the New World. Entitled Common Sense, the article’s radical ideas enjoyed an enthusiastic welcome: the paper sold more than 500,000 copies and was read aloud in taverns. The author, it emerged, was Thomas Paine, a former English taxman, tobacconist and radical who became, of course, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America.
As well as being a manifesto for independence from Britain, the pamphlet also offered a devastating critique of the English monarchy. ‘There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of Monarchy,’ Paine declared, arguing that nature frequently ridicules royal succession by ‘giving mankind an ass for a lion’. He contrasted the common sense of his pamphlet’s title with the absurdity and superstition that inspired the English prejudice for monarchy, arising ‘as much or more from national pride than reason’.