Britain Etc.

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 evidence 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