Justice

Let’s make money by regurgitating stuff about the poor

By Ron Ashford / 24 July 2007

Melanie Reid of the Times has just written the following article, which people might be interested in.

The article can also be found here.

“These days one can hardly get to eat one’s sandwiches, cucumber or otherwise, without being bothered by yet another stunningly patronising report on the state of the poor.

Today there’s one from Chicago, bearing the remarkable revelation that older people who cannot read or understand basic health information die younger than people who can. Researchers at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine interviewed 3,260 patients aged 65 or older in order to come up with the extraordinary conclusion that “more education tends to result in better job opportunities, a higher annual income and access to housing, food and health insurance”. Wow. Who would have thought it. All that work, all those interviews, all that precious time. And what a result.

Last week there was a similar example of the blindingly obvious from researchers at the University of Sheffield’s Department of Geography, working for the Rowntree Foundation, who found that inequality in Britain is at a record high, with the gap between the rich and the poor widening over the past 40 years.

On the life of your nearest private equity squillionaire, you would never have guessed it.

Another of the Rowntree Foundation’s breathtaking findings was that while the number of people living in extreme poverty had fallen, the number of people below the poverty line had increased. Subtext: which gives everyone lots more work to do.

Then, a few days ago, came an absolute cracker of a report from Glasgow, once second city of the empire, now first city of the poverty industry – or “sick man of Europe” as the cognoscenti affectionately call it. The Glasgow Centre for Population Health and the Medical Research Council came up with a study that, wait for it, found that if Glasgow had the same socioeconomic profile as the rest of the country, a lot of its health problems would disappear.

The researchers’ work, based on 25,000 participants in the Scottish Health Survey, also revealed a mystery worthy of Harry Potter: “Interestingly” – their choice of word in the précis – “some aspects of health and lifestyle are no different in the Glasgow area to elsewhere in Scotland, despite Glasgow’s relatively higher levels of poverty.” You want an even more searing insight? Try this: “Unfavourable health characteristics cluster in poor people living in the most deprived areas, especially among people with low levels of education, middle-aged men, and women out of work or in low-skills occupation.”

Now I am not among the ranks of the foaming-mouthed, who regard the poverty industry as a conspiracy to sting the rich in order to control the poor through welfare dependency. Nor do I believe that those working in social justice do so purely for their own benefit.

Rather, on behalf of the poor, I get frustrated at all the talk and lack of action. What exists does amount to an industry; and I do think it is time to question its rigour, its remit, its direction and perhaps even its whole point. Regardless of the fact that all the studies I have described above are the work of committed, serious people who would like to make the world a better place, I find myself marvelling at their remarkable ability a) to find absolutely nothing enlightening to say and b) to leave the door open to further research.

In other words, whether they like it or not, they are part of one of today’s most successful, sustainable sectors, one that provides thousands of educated people with houses, a life and a pension. All the things, in fact, that their subjects of study lack.

And that’s what offends me most. The poor, that huge, passive reservoir of research fodder, society’s lab mice, cannot escape them. Can only gaze with indifferent eyes at the toiling ants, at their dumb questions, their patronising warmth and their endless boxes to be ticked. All in order to be told what people in their circumstances have known for time immemorial: that they don’t do so well in life as the rich, nor live so long.

Huge numbers of people now work in the field of poverty. There are approximately 100,000 social workers in England, Scotland and Wales. The national UK voluntary sector has a paid workforce of 608,000. God knows how many the NHS, universities and local authorities cumulatively employ in various soft jobs in the same area, but enough for us safely to conclude that the equivalent of a small country’s GDP is spent monitoring and analysing the nation’s deprived.

One of the ironies of much current academic research of poverty is not just its intellectual flabbiness but also its elitism. Last February there was a big UK conference called Transcending Poverties, an event notable for its distinguished speakers. For six serious hours they rehearsed the same dilemmas, agonised over the same inevitabilities. Yet not one single new idea or insight was forthcoming from the day in Glasgow; nor was even one speaker drawn from the ranks of those spoken about: proof, in a sense, that we have stopped listening to the poor because there are now so many articulate advocates paid to speak for them.

If there are no answers to poverty, it is because we have ceased to pose hard enough questions. We need no more research, often parasitic, that reinforces what we already know. We need to divert money from servicing the poor into delivering jobs and enterprise, thereby empowering the people rather than institutionalising their victimhood.

Over the weekend, in an act of surreal symbolism, a high-wire artist set out to walk a tightrope strung between Glasgow’s Red Road flats, some of the most infamous high-rise housing in Europe. In a place where the poor struggle simply to survive, survival was turned into entertainment. Did the poor notice? How did it make them feel? Doubtless some academic will soon ask them.