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!”
Noel Darlow
The need for equality is not some kind of political ideology but a fundamental truth about the way human societies work. On just about every possible metric you care to measure, more equal societies come out on top: drug abuse, education, health outcomes, teenage pregnancies, crime, etc etc. Everyone does better – even the wealthiest, despite having less absolute wealth.
Bosun Higgs
Let us agree, then, that we need policies that enable growth and encourage the distribution of wealth. Neither is of much use without the other but both processes are, I suggest, natural.
Bosun Higgs
Sir or Madam, I thank you for your courtesy in an argument about matters where your heartfelt care and concern are evident, but I think we are now merely butting heads. I wish you well.
Dark_Heart_of_Toryland
Thank you very much! I enjoyed the exchange of views. All the best.
Noel Darlow
Accepting self-imposed conditions on growth is an incredibly important step. It changes us from a culture led by pirates and spivs dedicated to ruthless exploitation of people, resources and environment into a genuine civilisation.
I should say I’m basically arguing 2nd-hand Richard Wilkinson’s & Kate
Pickett’s The Spirit Level (you can google a short TED talk which gives
the outline).
I was a YES voter in Scotland’s recent referendum. As an independent country we could conceivably be a little better off or a little worse off but IMO the real opportunity was to create a more equal society. That wouldn’t be a given but definitely a possibility. Counter-intuitively, the research examined in The Spirit Level is telling us that ordinary people can see their lives improve despite a drop in GDP – if they start at a high level of inequality and move to a significantly lower one.
It’s not just a question of improvements in various measurable outcomes such as health, crime, education, drug use, low productivity etc. Given that lots of very expensive problems such as these map to levels of inequality, we might expect a significant economic dividend in the medium to long term.
So yes: I agree we need growth and distribution of wealth but I wouldn’t quite agree that moves to create greater equality aren’t of any use on their own.
Another important point about equality is the problem of sustainable economic activity. We’re at a crucial stage in the progress of our species where we’re running into global resource limits – AGW for example. It’s a statement of the obvious to say that, if we want to sustain an industrial civilisation, all growth will have to be sustainable.
Sustainable growth will be sporadic and relatively low compared to what we’re used to, largely based on occasional technological advances and on figuring out how to do more with less.
The big problem with low or no growth is that it really throws a spotlight on inequality. When there is a sense that society is moving forward you can get away with lies like “trickle down”. If everybody is getting a little richer it’s easier to hide exploitative economic activities which make a much smaller number of people fantastically rich but once growth stops, the wheels will come off that wagon. I believe that high levels of equality will be an essential feature of a sustainable economic system.
The future which is struggling to be born wants to talk to us about equality much more than growth.