Author James Bartholomew says we 'care too much' about inequality
The Daily Telegaph has run a piece today which we can safely file under: ‘You know you have a Tory government when…’
And you know you have a Tory government when the newspapers start telling you to stop worrying about poverty.
Today’s article by James Bartholomew, author of The Welfare of Nations, notes that ‘Labour politicians, columnists for the Guardian and the Independent, representatives of charities such as Oxfam’ and so on, say poverty in Britain is ‘a major and even growing problem’: ‘Very rarely does anyone on radio or television dare challenge this idea.’ So he daringly challenges it.
Mr Bartholomew, (who said his shares received a 7 per cent boost after the Tory election win), argues that what we now call poverty is not the same as what we called poverty in the 19th century. He adds that the modern usage of the term was invented by left-wing academics in the 1960s (ah yes) and picked up by Leftists ever since for its ’emotive power’.
Now, it’s probably no surprise to readers of the Telegraph that poverty is a relative term (as it was in the past, incidentally), and is distinct from ‘absolute poverty‘. As Bartholomew notes, the most common definition of poverty has the line at 60 per cent of median income, with adjustment for family size. And since the median income in 2011/12 was £23,000, he continues, this means to be living in poverty in Britain, you have to earn less than £14,000 a year.
Even someone as daring as Mr Bartholomew has to admit this is ‘certainly a low income indeed’. But he notes that most households have televisions, mobile phones and use the internet daily, so they can’t be all that poor.
However this is a weak and superficial measure as compared to, say, how much money people have to spend after tax and bills. There are also indirect indicators such as reliance on emergency food (over a million visits last year) or malnutrition (up 19 per cent in 2014, with increased hospital visits for the Victorian blight of Rickets) and general health.
Simply pointing to possession of certain prized consumer goods doesn’t cut it, and is more likely an indicator of the low price of those consumer goods. (Mobile phones are quite cheap nowadays, and internet access is free at schools, workplaces and public libraries.)
Still, Bartholomew trudges on:
“Overall, the typical person in modern poverty has access to a mobile phone and lives in a household with a television, an inside lavatory, electricity and probably access to the internet.
By all means, observers can call this poverty. But it would have been unrecognisable to [19th century novelist] Flora Thompson. It is riches beyond their dreams for those I have met in a Masai Mara village in Kenya who live in mud huts with not a single one of the above.”
‘An inside lavatory’! Aren’t you lucky? And electricity too! It comes to something when a columnist in the Telegraph has the chutzpah to tell the poor that if they don’t live in a ‘mud hut’ they’ve never had it so good.
In fact, 19.3 million people – a third of the UK population – lived below the poverty line at some point between 2010 and 2013, according to the Office for National Statistics. 4.6 million people lived in persistent income poverty in 2013, a proportion of 7.8 percent of the population. More than two million children are living with families who are struggling to pay for food, clothing and heating.
This is obviously embarrassing for a government claiming to represent ‘working people’. So we can expect more columns along these lines.
Bartholomew shows his cards as he concludes:
“The redefinition of poverty was a bit of a con-trick by the Left. It has led us to care far too much about inequality and not enough about rising prosperity.”
This cuts with the post-election grain, whereby a defeat for Ed Miliband consigns any talk of inequality to a figurative Siberian labour camp. Ironically for the likes of Bartholomew, inequality will matter so long as ‘rising prosperity’ for some is at the expense of relative poverty for others, and fails (as it always does) to ‘trickle down’.
The real con-trick is is trying to tell people they aren’t as hungry as they feel.
Adam Barnett is a staff writer at Left Foot Forward. Follow MediaWatch on Twitter
Read more:
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42 Responses to “Telegraph columnist says British poverty isn’t so bad – we have indoor toilets!”
Bosun Higgs
….which is usually the successful.
Bosun Higgs
The economy should not be designed at all. That idea is fatuous and leads only to corruption, poverty and violence. I don’t decide what you wear, what music you listen to or who your friends are, and I don’t want you to decide what sort of job I have or what my net income should be.
There is no reason to suppose that when an economy grows, it only benefits the wealthy. Indeed, that would be impossible, since money is no use until spent, and one person’s spending is another’s income. It used to be thought that economic growth tended to benefit the rich first, but that the poor caught up later; but in fact that only happens in closed, oppressive societies (those with designed economies)
As for the subsidies, you are still assuming that if benefits were withdrawn, low-paid workers would refuse to work at all.
Dark_Heart_of_Toryland
The economy has been very deliberately re-designed over the past 35 years. The idea that it somehow naturally evolves, independent of human input – now that really is fatuous. The sorts of jobs that people have and their net incomes – and yes, to an extent, the sort of music they listen to – are increasingly determined by corporate interests, who are not subject to any democratic accountability. Or do you imagine that rapidly increasing numbers of people actually prefer low-paid jobs with no security, or zero-hour contracts? And corruption and poverty are endemic in the UK. The corruption may not be quite so blatant as brown envelopes full of cash, but the swinging door between government and business, the all-pervading influence of lobbyists, and corporate donations to political parties are fundamentally corrupt.
Average wages have stagnated since at least the turn of the Millenium, whereas the wealthiest have got steadily wealthier. How does this bear your contention that economic growth does not benefit the wealthy disproportionately? The self-serving myth of trickle-down economics is palpably false. In fact, wealth is increasingly being leached upwards. The economy is being run for the benefit for wealthy.
And if actually bothered to read what I said, you’ll notice that I did not assume that low-paid workers would actually refuse to work – rather, their productivity will fall.
Bosun Higgs
“The economy has been very deliberately re-designed over the past 35 years.” Well, that explains to crash of 2008. I do not see evidence of Intelligent Design in the progress of the economy. I think it evolves. Most of the things that change the economy have been the result of human actions, indeed, but in such fields as inventing things (computers, the internet, smartphones), changing political systems (the fall of communism), fighting or refraining from fighting wars and allowing or forbidding the free movement of goods, services and people. There is no Unseen Hand directing all this. When governments do try to design an economy (Venezuela, Zimbabwe, North Korea) they goof it up big-time.
If you took a job with a ‘corporate interest’, they would have to pay whatever salary your skills and experience, compared with other peoples’, demanded. (Unless of course you were a main-board director of a FTSE100 company). They could no more determine that salary unilaterally than they could charge what they liked for their product. This is the ultimate form of democratic control; prices and salaries determined by the market, i.e. the people, rather than by, say, a government functionary with a PPE degree and some demanding friends amongst the producer organisations or trade unions.
I thought you were implying that low-paid workers without benefits might slow down because they were demotivated. Actually you meant that they would become faint with hunger. Unlikely when the minimum wage would put them at about the 17th decile in terms of average income worldwide?
Falling average wages: please see figure 7 here: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lmac/uk-wages-over-the-past-four-decades/2014/rep—uk-wages-over-the-past-four-decades.html#tab-UK-Wages-Over-the-Past-Four-Decades
Figure 5 is interesting too!
Dark_Heart_of_Toryland
I never said that the economy had been well-designed; it certainly was goofed up big-time.
And just where is the democratic control in CEOs and financiers helping each other to wodges of cash? What say do the people have over that? I’ve certainly never been consulted.