The right-wing moral hobby horse: thrift and self-help, but only for the poor.
Reblogged from kittysjones:
What is it with this seemingly
never ending queue of very wealthy people and celebrities, without a shred of
shame, self-awareness or knowledge of socio-economics, that they nonetheless
feel it’s quite okay “to
have dispensed with generosity in order to practice ‘charity’”, to pinch a phrase from Albert
Camus.
Jamie Oliver claimed that he couldn’t
quite grasp poverty in the UK, where people made choices between “massive TVs”
and nutritious food. I can’t help wondering how many poor people Oliver has
taken the time and trouble to visit, but I concluded he prefers to deal in
hand-me-down, shabby clichés rather than homespun truths. More recently, Michael Gove suggested that the rise in
people accessing food banks was a result of poor financial management, rather
than it being due to “genuine need” because of a massive hike in the cost of
living and subsequent plummeting living standards, rising unemployment, low
wages, savage benefit cuts, and brutal, targeted benefit sanctions.
The very wealthy Lord Freud claimed that families using food
banks were simply looking for “free meals”, and this was not “causally
connected” to increased poverty due to austerity cuts. Conservative Environment
Minister Richard Ponsonby – and hereditary peer – the 7th Baron De Mauley – has
advised the poor to reconsider their buying
habits and resist the temptation to spend more money on the latest electronic
gadgets, clothes and “food that they will not eat” in efforts to recapture the
war-time spirit of “make, do and mend”.
So, the poor are being handed cognitive behaviour strategies and
instructions from the wealthy, dressed up as common sense, with the emphasis
being on self-management – there is an implicit assumption here that poor people
require a psychotherapeutic approach to material hardship that is usually
reserved for addressing dysfunctional emotions, maladaptive behaviours and
cognitive processes. The solution to poverty, according to these socially inept
rich people is behaviour modification for the poor, and not coincidently, the
philosophical origins of cognitive therapy can be traced back to the Stoic
philosophers. The subtext of this raft of advice for the alienated poor from the
aloof wealthy is: endure your pain and penury without a display of feelings and
without complaint. Because we really don’t want to hear about it.
However, a central theme in Stoicism is that humans possess a unique
capacity to be rational and self-autonomous and this remains a powerful defence
of democracy, equality and human rights. The Stoics directed us to think clearly
and rationally about the idea of living in harmony with the way the universe is,
but they didn’t say anything about accepting social inequalities as a
fundamental part of that universe or conflating what is with
what ought to be.
The idea of stoic “self-help” is a useful reference point in any discussion
of Victorian culture and values. As a moral crusader and proponent of that idea,
Samuel Smiles has become something of right wing icon: any mention of him is
commonly taken to imply a well-known and easily identified set of values.
In Thrift , which was published in 1875, Samuel Smiles declared:
“riches do not constitute any claim to distinction. It is only the vulgar
who admire riches as riches”.
I think it’s the rich that admire riches as riches. And being poor is a
dismal experience. Regarding those that have all of the wealth as vulgar offers
no comfort at all from material hardship, hunger and destitution.
Smiles was a very popular Victoria moralist. He claimed that the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834, which
punished the poor in order to cure them of their poverty habits, was “one of
the most valuable that has been placed on the statute-book in modern
times”. In Self-Help, which I read as an apology for
Victorian middle class values, he said:
“No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the
thriftless provident, or the drunken sober. Such reforms can only be effected by
means of individual action, economy and self-denial; by better habits, rather
than by greater rights”.
Thrift and Self-Help were Victorian bibles, and although
Smiles was a critic of many conventional’ middle class values, what an irony it
is that the man who argued in favour of nationalising the railways in 1868,
should get sufficiently warped by history to emerge as the champion and
much admired historical figure for the Tories during the 1980s. This said,
Smiles did have conservative credentials, with his liking for the Poor Law
Reform Act, and his intrusive advice to the poor about how to manage poverty
their better and with some “character”, whilst practising self-denial. Smiles
basically argued that individuals could and should improve themselves through
hard work, thrift, self-discipline, education, and “moral improvement” and
should not seek the help of Government. He was Thatcher’s darling and is
Cameron’s formative hero.
The idea of distinguishing between different categories of the poor,
dividing them up into discrete and manageable groups, is almost as old as the
British state. The paternalistic Elizabethan poor laws were originally
designed to keep the poor at home – to stop them from becoming vagrants.
However, the insistent Utilitarians of the day decided that a great deal
of poverty was not inevitable as a by-product of socio-economic and political
conditions, but rather, it was a product of fecklessness. Thomas Malthus,
Herbert Spencer and others argued from a social Darwinist perspective, claiming
that the Elizabethan poor law encouraged irresponsibly large families, idleness
and personal fecklessness.
This was the “responsibilisation” of poverty that resulted in the
introduction of the punitive workhouse, as we know – a place where paupers would
be incarcerated and forced to labour. At the core of the Poor Law Reform Act was
the notion of less eligibility: reducing the number of people entitled to
support, so that only those who could not work (rather than those who “would
not” work) would receive support.
It’s here that the distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving”
poor became a legal one. Nowadays, savage cuts, sanctions and benefit
“conditionality” may be seen as a parallel of the principle of less eligibility.
The Poor Law reform also “made work pay”. Those who could not work were deterred
from applying for poor law support, as workhouses were made deliberately so
unpleasant, often resembling a prison more than a refuge. Many critics of the
day condemned them as “the new Bastilles”. As we passed the celebration
the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens, we are witnessing a return of
precisely the sort of language about the poor that he did so much to expose as
cruel and inhuman.
Narratives of “welfare
dependency” have once again become much more common place and increasingly assertive under
the coalition Government – embedded in
narratives driven by the the so-called Skivers and Strivers dichotomy. Poverty, according to
this distinctly Tory perspective, is caused by a culture of deviance, idleness
and dependency. The poor are responsible for their poverty. They cannot be
trusted to be responsible, or make the right choices for themselves – or society
more generally – and so are in need of “paternalistic guidelines” and cognitive
behaviour therapy. Poverty re-responsiblised.
In The Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber argued
that Puritan ethics and ideas influenced
the development of capitalism. Ideas that work is “virtuous” can be
traced back to the Reformation, when even the most humble professions were
regarded as adding to the common good and thus blessed by God, as much as any
“sacred” calling. A common illustration of the time is that of a cobbler,
hunched over his work, who devotes his entire effort to the praise of God. To
explain the work
ethic, Weber shows that
certain branches of Protestantism had supported worldly activities dedicated to
deferred gratification and economic gain, seeing them as being endowed with
moral and spiritual significance.
This recognition was not a goal in itself, but rather a by-product or
unintended consequence of other doctrines of faith that encouraged planning,
hard work and self-denial in the pursuit of worldly wealth. For the Tories, the
competitive pursuit of economic gain is the only freedom worth having. And only
those that have gained substantially have freedoms worth having. Let’s not lose
sight of the fact that this social Darwinist approach to socio-economics means
unbridled private business, insidious systematic indoctrination,
gross exploitation of the masses and political extortion.
Ayn
Rand, another Tory idol, who endorsed minarchism
and laissez-faire capitalism and gave her full approval to selfishness, used a
moral syntax that has been linked with fascism. She advocated rational and
ethical egoism and rejected ethical altruism. She was derisory and wrong because
there is a “moral and political obligation of the individual to
sacrifice at least some of his/her own interests for the sake of a
greater social good.” The alternative, as Rand would have it, is most people
being regimented into a slave caste to serve a handful of self-seeking , power
hungry greedy psychopaths. Alas, for it seems we will always have the despotic
wealthy with us – a lofty, discrete and detached class of tyrants, loudly
dismissing inconvenient truths, and not just about the poor.
The social, economical and psychological distance between those with great
amounts of money, power and a voice would span cosmological distances when compared to the
poor. A prerequisite to empathy is simply paying attention to a
person who is suffering. We always have the opportunity to help the poorest and
most vulnerable. But the rich are not getting richer whilst the poor get poorer:
the rich are getting richer by the poor getting poorer. There’s
a chasmic conflict of interest between the rich persons’ selfish, individual
goals and collective societal values.
There is a clear lack of compassionate thought and action amongst the
anti-social wealthy elitist Government, and their policies are dogmatic, brutal
and tipped heavily towards supporting the powerful, whilst punishing the
poor. Homo economicus is a self-serving and wretched, mythologising
miser.
The UN’s 2013 Human Development Report has also noted that the “gap between
rich and poor in UK society has risen sharply” since the Coalition government
took power. The UN reports that there is greater inequality in the UK than in
other countries in Western Europe. It is also noted that the market has not
stepped in where institutions have failed: “Markets are very bad at ensuring
the provision of public goods, such as security, stability, health and
education”, the report reads. I don’t think we ought to be stoically
accepting any of this as simply “the way things are”.
Entire lives, human experiences are being reduced to cheap tabloidisms,
nasty political soundbites and wildly disgusting, politically convenient
stereotypical generalisations that don’t stand up to very much scrutiny. There
isn’t an ounce of genuine philanthropy to be had in these sanctimonious tirades,
just frank stereotyping, the frequent mention of plasma screen TVs, (something
that the bourgeoisie popularised when they rushed out to buy them when they
first hit the market: they were dubbed the new wall mounted “4 wheel drives” of
the living room, before they became sufficiently cheap for poorer members of
society to buy) and a lot of judgement about the perceived lifestyle choices of
the poor. We are told what to buy, what not to buy, how to eat, and how to mend,
make do, and go without.
Go without? Isn’t that what poverty is all about? The poor are experts in
“going without”, social exclusion and isolation. Nonetheless, the Government
have erected a media platform for the idle rich to moralise about what we should
and shouldn’t be spending our meagre finances on. Ladies and gentlemen, let me
introduce the new lifestyle police. The Government are telling us how we may and
may not live our private lives, and how we ought to “manage” our poverty
better.
Indoctrination.
And lies about poverty, its causes, effects and solutions, infects almost
everything Iain Duncan Smith says, as he formulates pseudo-moral justifications
for the hardship his Government’s own policies are causing. The media propaganda
machine oblige him very well with screaming misinformation about the feckless
poor. Poverty, he would have us believe, is down to individual faults and
personal deficits. Again.
Indoctrination.
Only a half-wit would believe that in order to “make work pay”, rather than
raise the lowest wages, we remove lifeline benefits from the very poorest.
Bearing in mind that those benefits were carefully calculated by previous
Governments to meet basic costs for survival needs: food, fuel and shelter: “the
amount the law says you need to live on”. Apparently, this protective law no
longer applies.
The Tories are constantly lowering public expectations and defending the
indefensible. Indoctrination.
And if there is one thing that melds Cameron’s sparse, ever shrinking and
handouts-for-the-boys highly privatised nightwatchman state brand of
victoriaphile conservatism together, it is the belief that poverty is best left
to wealthy individuals to remedy, rather than Government. His Big
Society approach to social provision can perhaps best be summed up with
the phrase: “you’re on your own, because we took your money and we don’t care”.
On your marks… it’s a race to the very bottom.
It has been too easy for
the Tory-led Government to sell the concept of welfare “reforms” (cuts) based
on a simple narrative about of “welfare scroungers” getting “something for
nothing” whilst the rest of us have to work hard to pay for it, to an apathetic
public. This kind of narrative is deliberately designed to stimulate a strong
sense of injustice, cause divisions and generate anger. The fact that benefit
fraud in reality represents a tiny fraction of the welfare system and that the
vast majority of claimants have pre-paid into the system via taxation before
becoming unemployed are carefully omitted in order to create the impression that
the “scrounger” problem is much worse than it actually is. 0.6% of all claims
were deemed to be “fraudulent”, and many of those were actually errors on the
part of the Department of Work and Pensions in dealing with legitimate
claims.
The real “culture of entitlement” is not to be found amongst the poor, the
unemployed, the sick and disabled, as this Government would have you believe. As
a matter of fact, most amongst this politically minoritized social group have
paid tax and paid for the provision that they ought to be able
to rely on when they/we have need of it, it’s ours, after all.
The real culture of entitlement comes from the very wealthy, and is well-fed and
sustained by our aristocratic and authoritarian Government.
Every time we have periods of high unemployment, growing inequalities,
substantial increases in poverty, and loss of protective rights, there is a
Conservative Administration behind this wilful destruction of people’s lives,
and the unravelling of many years of essential social progress and civilised
development that spans more than one century in development. And that
development was fought for and won.
We never see celebrities in the media questioning the fact that we only ever
see the rise of the welfare “scrounger” and a “culture of dependency” when we
have a Tory Government. And that it also coincides every time with a significant
increase in politically manufactured unemployment, a rise in the cost of living,
lower working conditions and wages. There’s a connection there somewhere, isn’t
there? It seems the likes of Jamie Oliver and Richard Ponsonsby don’t do joined
up thinking. And we know from history that the Tories never have.
Public understanding is
being purposefully distorted and the reality of society’s organisation is
concealed to serve the interests of an elite, through a process of ideological
hegemony – whereby existing political arrangements, ways of thinking and social
organisation are tacitly accepted as logical and “common sense”. The media serve
as ideological state apparatus that transmit this “common sense”. The truth is
that poor people are the victims of gross inequality and crass exploitation. Our
once progressive, civilised society is being savagely dismantled, and the Tories
are steadily and clumsily re-assembling it using identikit
Victoriana.
We are seeing a generation of our young people silenced at the margins of
society, they are being fed a steady drip of subliminal messages about the
worthlessness and steady bastardisation of their labour. Unemployment was
statistically eradicated among 16- and 17-year-olds in the 1980s when the Tories
changed the law so that school leavers could not claim unemployment benefit. Out
of sight and out of mind. This is now being mooted for all young people up to
the age of 25.
The Prime Minister began discussion of cutting housing benefits for
“feckless” under-25s last year. Consequently, following this Tory “logic”, the
UK could soon have the lowest youth unemployment rate in Europe. If we keep
moving in that direction we could have a rate as low as the one in India today,
or in Britain in the 1800′s, when there was no such thing as unemployment,
because we chose back then to call people with no jobs ”paupers”. And people
were paupers because they were idle and feckless, and incapable of helping
themselves. It’s common sense, right?
No. It’s indoctrination.
If we are prepared to even entertain any finger-pointing distraction and
discussion about the “undeserving poor”, let us also point back, and balance the
debate with a fair, realistic discussion of the “undeserving rich”, too.
It is the very rich that
need to manage their personal fortunes better in order to stop inflicting
poverty on thousands. They need to learn how to go without,
make do and mend. They need to stop greedily gathering and hoarding
our wealth and frittering tax payers money on extravagant,
selfish lifestyles. The wealthy need to
pay close attention to the steady destruction of our society, the removal of our
civilised and protective services – paid for via our taxes – and the subsequent
loss of a dignified future for so many. I resent the intrusion of hypocritical,
greedy rich “moral” crusaders with no scruples whatsoever, or restraint, when it
comes to stigmatising the poor, smugly telling poor people they must endure
their poverty better, manage their meagre incomes and lack of resources with
resilience and resourcefulness that they themselves lack, basically because rich
people want to avoid feeling any social responsibility whatsoever. These
indignant, self-legitimising, babbling psychopaths want to keep the wealth which
was gained at our expense.
The scrounging rich have had it far too good for far too long. It’s about
time these idle takers took some responsibility for the society they have taken
so much from. I want to hear about how they will repay their much greater debt.
I want to hear about their culture of entitlement, and why they believe that
they can have everything whilst increasingly, so many have nothing. And with
poverty and inequality on the increase, I want to hear about how the wealthy
intend to do something directly to remedy this. Because we know that poverty is
caused through a gross inequality in wealth distribution.
Lord Ponsonby is very rich because other people are poor. Yet he and others
like him had no problems accepting £107,000 per year via a tax break from this
Countries’ treasury, and he irresponsibly endorses a Government who take money
from the poor to give handouts to the rich. And tax break from what, exactly? It
wasn’t anything to do with social responsibility, that’s for sure.
No-one has the right to preach about responsible behaviour after
irresponsibly taking that amount of money from the poor, nor do they have any
right to intrude into the private lives of poor people. Lord Freud has got
nothing meaningful to say about living in poverty because he doesn’t and never
has. Our private lives and personal choices are not public property to be
discussed by people like him.
The feckless, something-for-nothing rich should be rejecting handouts in the
form of tax breaks, and they need to pay their taxes – they need to put
something back – contribute to the society from which they have insolently taken
so much, not least a hugely disproportionate amount of wealth, leaving so many
with nothing.
The last budget saw 25 billion pounds of our money handed out to big private
companies already worth millions via a tax cut – that’s FIVE times the amount
this Country spends on jobseekers allowance. Job centres no longer support
people to find work: the main purpose now is to remove state support from people
any way they can. Just like Atos – employed to cut lifeline benefits from the
disabled and ill. How is this grotesque imbalance in how rich and poor,
vulnerable people are treated by our Government acceptable?
Government minsters and the complicit media discuss the poor, and present
articles which vilify the poor and disabled in the same way that serial killers
do to objectify their victims. David Cameron has used his own disabled son in an
attempt to humanise himself in public, whilst his own policies and ministers’
rhetoric have systematically dehumanised and objectified sick and disabled
people in this country. That’s the psychopathic manipulation one would expect to
see of a mass murderer, not a prime minister of the UK.
David Cameron has deliberately and spitefully targeted the poorest and most
vulnerable to bear the brunt of the austerity cuts. When we actually look at
the relative targeting of the Tory-led cuts of different social groups, then we
see that:
-
People in poverty are targeted 5 times more than most
citizens
-
Disabled people are targeted 9 times more than most
citizens
-
People needing social care are targeted 19 times more than
most citizens.
Under the bedroom tax rules, which violate basic human rights, more than
600,000 social tenants with spare rooms must either move or pay an average of
£14 a week penalty. However, members of parliament with a spare room in their
London homes can claim an additional allowance from the tax payer if a child or
children routinely resides with them. The Independent Parliamentary Standards
Authority has ruled that MPs will remain eligible for the additional allowance
if the child visits just once a month. 29 hypocritical MPs have claimed an
additional £64,000 and a further 20 who claimed £37,000, whilst at the same time
endorsing and supporting the bedroom tax.
Meanwhile, homelessness rose 21% in the last year, while rough
sleepers (those not eligible for Local Authority support) rose 31% in England and 62% in London. The Bedroom Tax has
negatively impacted on many people receiving Housing Benefit and their payments
have been cut for having “spare bedrooms”. Many cannot escape the growing rent
debts they are accumulating due to the cruel cut to their housing costs, because
there are no [Government defined] appropriate housing alternatives in existence.
So many will be evicted from homes, due to
rent arrears, to find themselves homeless, with no suitable accommodation
available. But wealthy private landlords are free to charge whatever they want
to, there are no rent controls or a decent social housing policy in place.
This is a Government that deliberately creates insecurity and scarcity for
many: income, employment opportunities, affordable housing, education
opportunities, access to justice, health, energy, for example, whilst private
companies make lots of money from these deliberately engineered circumstances,
such as by using workfare to boost their profits from the use of free labour (at
the expense of the tax payer).
The Governments’ economic decisions, policies and driving, incoherent
ideology has created high unemployment, devalued the worth of labour, excluded
those who are vulnerable from the labour market by withdrawing support from
them, and then has the vindictive gall to savagely blame the victims of its own
crimes, for those crimes, conducting character assassinations of the weakest,
demeaning people, stripping them of their dignity and LYING about them.
Our economy is being tailored by the Tories to serve 1% of the population
and this has a detrimental effect on everyone else.
The cumulative effects of the range of savage social security cuts designed
by the Tories, which have hit the working poor, the jobless, the elderly and
disabled people has been a massive rise in reliance on food banks. The number
of people relying on food charity rose by 300% between in the year between April
2012 and 2013. This was once a first world country. Once the rest of the welfare
“reforms” came into effect in April this year, the numbers relying on food aid
have shot up 200% in the three months following.
That means 150,000 more people have joined the
queues at food banks, in addition to the half a million people already needing
aid since 2010.
As Clement Attlee pointed out half a century ago:“Charity is a cold,
grey, loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his
taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim”.
No-one seems to have challenged the idea
that working to make someone else very wealthy is somehow virtuous, either. By
implication, those that cannot work are regarded as lesser citizens, and that
has become tacitly accepted. We have, once again, a Government that makes
labouring compulsory, regardless of a persons capability, yet the same
Government has devalued labour in terms of wages, rewards, and working
conditions, whilst handing out huge amounts of our money to those exploiting the
poor unemployed, the sick and disabled. And Tories are always about vicious and
divisive rhetoric. I’d recommend Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, only I know as a
social work practitioner that the success rate is very, very low, especially
when we are dealing with such entrenched and irrational systems of belief.
Most who don’t work have no choice about it due to circumstances, such as
poor health, disability, caring responsibilities, parenting responsibilities and
a lack of reliable, affordable childcare, being frail and elderly. These are
reasons that are completely out of a persons control. People forget that ill
health doesn’t discriminate: it can happen to anyone. And so can unemployment.
No-one is invulnerable, except for the very wealthy: the ones that won’t ever
need any state support.
The Government has removed support and services for the people who need them
most, whilst insisting that they must work. To regard the poorest and most
vulnerable members of our society as less valuable, and to constantly attack
them via the media is quite frankly disgusting conduct for a Government and
those that support these despicable and hideous political narratives and policy
actions. Such narratives say everything about the authors, and have nothing
meaningful at all to say about those left in the situations this Government
have contributed to manufacturing: those situations which none of them have ever
had to experience or face personally. When they diminish others, they diminish
us ALL.
Let’s hear some mention of facts in the media, instead of the usual Tory
mouth pieces sanctimoniously preaching at people, “advising” how to manage their
loss of lifeline support better, whilst endorsing the sadism of this Government.
Let’s hear a loud call for the halt to the current programme of cruel cuts,
which are disproportionately targeted at those with the very least, whilst this
Government rewards those with the very most with massive tax handouts. Let’s
hear the demand for decency, and a new and fair welfare system that is built on
a fundamental recognition of the equal worth of all human beings and the
guarantee of human rights for all.
Thanks to Robert Livingstone for his excellent
anti-indoctrination art work
Some further reading:
