Talking the talk……

I’ve done a guest blog for VONNE (Voluntary Organisations Network North East) on why charities really should be paying the Living Wage. The blog can be found here: http://blog.vonne.org.uk/2013/05/21/guest-blog-talking-the-talk/

Best wishes,

Steve 

Researching Relationships: Family, Friendship and Community in Cullercoats

Guest post by Professor Alison Stenning

Both academic and more popular narratives suggest that the apparently individualising impulses of neoliberalism, together with increasing geographical mobility and connectivity, erode the value of local, personal relationships (with, for example, family, friends and neighbours). Yet relationships remain at the heart of our everyday lives. They create an environment that ‘contains’ us, allows us to keep going and to tolerate stresses of various kinds, and the value of such relationships is increased, not decreased, at a time of economic crisis. Insecurity, vulnerability, loss and anxiety are experienced by many as they face the considerable economic, social and emotional challenges of austerity, and the contribution that local, personal relationships might make to weathering these challenges is a critical concern.

 The effects of over four years of economic crisis have been widely felt but they have also been uneven, socially and geographically.  Socially, the so-called ‘squeezed middle’ has been identified as being particularly susceptible to ongoing crisis and cuts. Although definitions of this class are vague, the Resolution Foundation suggests that it consists nationally of some 6 million working, home-owning households with a gross income of something like £12-40,000. These households are not living in poverty but are increasingly insecure and vulnerable to the threat of labour market, cost-of-living, and tax and benefit changes. Geographically, the UK’s northern regions, and in particular the North East, have been disproportionately affected by job loss, public sector cuts and pay squeezes.

This new research project seeks to explore how, in the contemporary context of crisis and austerity, the personal relationships that shape communities (between families, friends, neighbours etc.) enable so-called ‘squeezed middle’ households in Cullercoats, North Tyneside to negotiate social and economic challenges and achieve material and emotional security. This might be through the moral support they offer, or because they give time, or money, or other kinds of help that make it easier for families to get by. An innovative psycho-social approach is being developed, placing emphasis on and exploring the intertwining of social and emotional dynamics in everyday life.

This focus on relationships has developed out of previous research. In a project on households and neoliberalism in Poland and Slovakia (with colleagues Adrian Smith, Darek Swiatek and Alena Rochovska), we concluded that the families that struggled most with tough economic circumstances were those without good relationships with family, friends and neighbours, who found themselves isolated from all sorts of support networks, through which information, money, and love, amongst other things, might flow.

This idea led me to the work of the British object relations school. As far as I understand, the British object relations school of psychoanalysts (including Melanie Klein, Ronald Fairbairn, Donald Winnicott, John Bowlby, Wilfrid Bion and others) argued that the primary human motivation is relationship-building (not sex or death, as Freud would have it). They argued that humans need important others and seek relationships to build a sense of self and identity and to feel secure, ‘contained’, or ‘held’ and to fend off anxiety. For these psychoanalysts, our relationships create a ‘holding’ or, later, ‘facilitating’　environment that, hopefully, is good enough to enable our well-being, within which we can be and be ourselves. Our ‘natural’ state is one of (inter)dependence. This idea is linked primarily to our earliest intimate relationships, with our mother, and then our father, and then our other close family and friends. But the idea of　a holding or facilitating environment might be extended, to the community, our friendship networks, clubs and teams, workplaces and, even, the social world of the state.　This is an idea that other social scientists (such as Martha Nussbaum and Valerie Walkerdine) have developed in different ways and, in this project, I’m interested in exploring it further, both conceptually and empirically.

To do this, I’m exploring psycho-social methodologies (such as those developed by Wendy Hollway, Simon Clarke, Paul Hoggett and Valerie Walkerdine) with the hope that they might allow me to think about the conscious and unconscious dynamics at play in the everyday lives of my interviewees, to think about their hopes, desires, anxieties and identities and how these are shaped by the interplay of their experiences of austerity and their relationships. At the moment, this means I’m setting up narrative interviews with ‘squeezed middle’ households in Cullercoats, aiming to achieve something approaching free association around the theme of relationships and austerity, coupled with personal community mapping (following Liz Spencer and Ray Pahl) and a relationship diary exercise. And I’m also trying to think more about my place in the research process, scrutinising what I bring to the research and what I have invested in it.

This is very much pilot research at this stage. I’m trying out new methodologies and pushing myself in new ways, and I’m also beginning to think through new ways of representing my research in new places (hence my blog and my first foray into Twitter). I’m very keen for feedback, for contacts and for suggestions about this research: this is just the beginning….

Alison Stenning

“Brainwashing under freedom”

Yesterday, Nick Pearce from IPPR suggested in a Guardian blog that Labour should ‘drop its child poverty target’ and new measures should ‘take into account the fiscal realities we now face.‘ One of his proposals included ‘freezing child benefit in cash terms for a decade’ to ‘free up £2.5bn a year to invest in quality childcare services’ which is quite staggering, coming as it does from ‘the UK’s leading progressive think-tank’.

We blogged a couple of weeks ago about what the economic – or in this case fiscal – reality actually is and we have also highlighted the role of other think tanks (usually the CSJ) in developing policies – or ‘trailing them’ as part of a ‘market testing exercise’ - for political parties. Ruth Levitas called this ‘the privatization of policy making’ in her book The Inclusive Society? and suggested that think-tanks, including IPPR:

‘enable public response to policy options to be tested without directly implicating – or at least without committing – the party itself….Moreover think-tanks and their staff are neither elected nor accountable, and Labour’s think-tanks and the networks around them, while sometimes claiming openness, in fact, had at their core a small, self-selected, largely metropolitan and disproportionately male elite.’ (p30, 1998)

Whenever, I hear about the fiscal or economic ‘constraints’ we have to accept or that ‘we now face’ I am always reminded of Bourdieu’s concept of doxa (‘the naturalization of arbitrariness’ or ‘the world of tradition experienced as a “natural world” and taken for granted’) and how ‘the specifically symbolic power to impose the principles of the construction of reality – in particular, social reality – is a major dimension of political power‘ (pp164-165, 2002). Similarly, whenever I hear someone from a think-tank, supported by the media, discussing these issues and supporting the thesis that we don’t have any alternative, I am reminded of his idea of doxosophers, ‘intellectuals of the political-administrative establishment’ (Pearce is ‘a former No 10 adviser under Gordon Brown, (who) remains highly influential in the Labour party’ according to an accompanying article in The Guardian) who

Locked in the narrow, short-term economism of the IMF worldview which is also causing havoc, and will continue to do so, in North-South relations, all these half-wise economists fail, of course, to take account of the real costs, in the short and more especially the long term, of the material and psychological wretchedness which is the only certain outcome of the economically legitimate Realpolitik

Referring to the centre of the state apparatus as the right hand and front line worker as the left hand, Bourdieu goes on to argue that ‘the right hand, obsessed by the question of financial equilibrium, knows nothing of the problems of the left hand, confronted with the often very costly social consequences of ‘budgetary restrictions’.

Drawing on the work of Bourdieu, and of particular relevance to the comments made by Nick Pearce, Stabile and Morooka discuss doxosophers as ‘those intellectuals – academic and non-academic alike – who traffic only in the most superficial of debates and whose primary function is to comment on representations as if they were real‘ (original emphasis).

and ‘these intellectuals provide justifications for neo-liberal policies by dressing them up as scientific, progressive and even inevitable’ (my emphasis)(pp328-329, 2010)

Chomsky highlighted how, through ‘brainwashing under freedom’, ‘the critics, or at least, the “responsible critics” make a major contribution to the cause by bounding the debate within certain limits’ and that by presenting a range of debate within a narrow framework, ‘the debate only enhances the strength of assumptions, ingraining them in people’s minds as the entire possible spectrum of opinion that there is.’ (p13, 2003)

It is, in my view, unseemly that a supposedly progressive think-tank should consider freezing child benefit for 10 years (see this report by CPAG who spoke to people living on low-incomes about how they used Child Benefit - did IPPR do this before formulating their policy ?) and suggest that the child poverty target should be moved back and is ‘now all but impossible to meet’. There are plenty of alternative ways to end child poverty without ‘dropping the target’ (which, it should be remembered, is a legally binding commitment, although you wouldn’t think it) or moving the date back, but politicians and their ‘reassuring entourage of young technocrats’, as Bourdieu called them, are not prepared to discuss them, producing a doxic society.

It appears that the ‘truce on inequality’ that Peter Townsend wrote about over fifty years ago is still holding very firm indeed.

Best wishes,

Steve

*If anyone would like the full references for the quoatations used above, please let me know.*

“Setting the record straight”?

Earlier this week the Centre for Social Justice published its response to the Joint Public Issues Team report about poverty myths, ‘The lies we tell ourselves’. Called ‘Setting the record straight’, the first page states that the much of the JPIT report ‘is based on serious misinformation and fails to give an accurate representation of life ‘on the breadline’ today’.

It is a really interesting read, for all kinds of reasons. The first myth tackled includes the issue of ‘dependency’ and ‘worklessness’. The CSJ report states that:

The report disputes the idea of ‘dependency’ as a serious issue. This is despite the latest available data showing that more than 20 million families are now dependent on some kind of benefit

which, as Tracy Shildrick pointed out on Twitter, starts with the very big assumption that everyone receiving benefits is ‘dependent’ on them. And is the idea that we can be independent of each other not an ‘insipid illusion’, as Marx suggested. Surely there are many people whose wealth is dependent on lots of low paid workers continuing to generate profits for them. My children depend on me. I depend on my employer for my income. Is the welfare state not supposed to be something which we can depend on when opportunities to secure other sources of income are not available to us?

Anyway, moving on to the issue of worklessness, Shildrick et al’s study of the idea of ‘cultures of worklessness’ was published by JRF last year (and didn’t get an individual CSJ repsonse interestingly) and it highlighted on a couple of occasions the belief amongst some practitioners that families where 3 generations of unemployed people existed:

In our own earlier research we have found that such views are popular amongst practitioners who work with the unemployed. In numerous interviews with ‘welfare-to-work’ professionals in Teesside, carried out over many years, the cultures of worklessness thesis has frequently been offered up to us as one of the main barriers to helping the unemployed into work (Webster, et al., 2004; MacDonald and Marsh, 2005; Shildrick, et al., 2010). (p13)

During eight months of ethnographic, community-based fieldwork, many strategies were used to recruit an appropriate sample (see Appendix 1). This included a set of meetings with local practitioners to help us locate families for interview. The idea of intergenerational cultures of worklessness was well-known to them. It was one that they often drew on in trying to understand the situations of the families with which they worked. For instance, a regeneration manager in Glasgow stated that he had heard, anecdotally, of families where three generations had never worked but stated that his organisation did not record such information. Similarly, a Job Centre Plus manager told us she did not know of any directly but she had also ‘certainly heard’ of families where three generations had never worked. It became apparent that most of these practitioner interviewees operated with a loose definition of the term ‘never worked’. They often meant families who experienced longer-term unemployment in different generations or families that were known to them because of their ‘multiple problems’, which might include periods out of the labour market. We met with more than 30 practitioners but none was able to direct us to potential recruits for the study (confidentiality of client records only accounted for this to a small extent). We believe this to be an interesting finding in itself; when pushed to identify families where ‘three generations had never worked’ these practitioners were unable to do so, despite their apparent belief in the existence of such families and their close engagement with local communities. (p18)

The CSJ report, however, presents statements from two practitioners as evidence that ‘intergenerational worklessness’ does exist:

At the charity we have worked for 11 years now with second and third generation unemployed…I can assure you that we do have/had clients whose grandparents became unemployed in the early 70s…and haven’t worked since. Indeed their children and grandchildren have suffered the same inactivity’.

‘There is no question that it doesn’t exist…in Portsmouth there are many families where there is unemployment through several generations. We need to be much more proactive about intervening early’

I won’t go into detail on the other myths that are addressed but there are some very interesting and, I would argue, confused points made in the report around issues such as poverty and addiction, benefit fraud and error (no mention of the scale of tax fraud or the scale of underclaiming of benefits – both much bigger issues that benefit fraud) and the role of social security or, as the CSJ prefer to call it, welfare.

We have blogged about the CSJ before (here and here) and we have highlighted the links between them and Iain Duncan Smith, who set them up. The CSJ like to call themsleves independent but if that isn’t itself a myth, it’s being a little bit economical with the truth. The current Director of the CSJ is Christian Guy who used to be Iain Duncan Smith’s speechwriter. The former Director of the CSJ, Philippa Stroud, is now Iain Duncan Smith’s Special Advisor, so there are some very strong connections there, at the very least. An interesting account of who knows who in relation to Duncan Smith can be found here, courtesy of Channel 4.

The role and influence of unelected, unaccountable think-tanks very close to (or even set up by) politicians was something that Bourdieu addressed on a number of occasions, including in the postscript to ‘The Weight of the World’. He states that ‘those who govern are prisoners of a reassuring entourage of young technocrats who often know almost nothing about the everyday lives of their fellow citizens and have no occasion to be reminded of their ignorance’. He then goes on to make the point that

‘social science today is up against anyone and everyone with a claim to interpret the most obvious signs of social malaise … It has to deal with all these people, too clever by half and armed with their “common sense” and their pretensions, who rush into print or to appear on television to tell us what is going on in  a social world that they have no effective means of either knowing or understanding.’

Finally, for one of the best critiques of the role of the Centre for Social Justice in debates around welfare reform, I would strongly recommend people read this paper by Tom Slater of Edinburgh University where he highlights the role they play in ‘manufacturing ignorance’ around the causes of poverty.

Best wishes,

Steve

Dadlessness or factlessness?

Chris Goulden from JRF has written previously about ‘the relentless rise of in-work poverty’ and it’s a phrase we use a lot when presenting to people about some of the issues to be addressed when tackling poverty.

Another issue which has seen an interesting increase since the turn of the century, and especially of late, is the percentage of couples with children who are living in poverty. Table 4.6ts on page 125 of the latest HBAI release (clicking on the table below helps to view it better) shows that the % of ‘coupled’ families accounted for 71% of all families with children living in poverty with lone parents accounting for just 29% of families with children living in poverty. In 1999/2000 the percentage of coupled families living in poverty was 57% and stayed around the figure for the next five years or so, rising steadily since then, with big increases seen in each of the last two HBAI releases. On the other hand, the percentage of  children living in poverty with lone parents has dropped from a high of around 43% in 1999/2000 to a current level of around 29%, again with sharp movements (downwards this time) in each of the last two releases.

Now, I don’t want to engage in any ‘spontaenous sociology’ here so I’m not going to make any grand claims about why this is. I’m not denying that Britain has a relatively high level of relationship breakdown when compared with some other countries, as this report shows. Nor am I suggesting that couples living together suffer some kind of financial ‘penalty’ which needs to be addressed and I’m also aware that relationship status, like poverty, is dynamic and not a static classification. I just think it’s interesting and worthy of more attention, especially in light of narratives about ‘dysfunctional families’, ‘family breakdown’ and ‘dadlessness’ that we hear so often when ‘root causes’ of poverty are discussed.

For example, Samatha Callan of the Centre for Social Justice argued in The Times last week that ‘Strong families should lead the war on poverty’ and she noted that:

Almost a decade of research at the Centre for Social Justice has confirmed beyond doubt that family breakdown lies at the heart of today’s poverty and  inequality. Most people working in schools, hospitals and other frontline  jobs don’t need to crunch the numbers, however. (my emphasis)

It would appear that the CSJ themselves felt no need to ‘crunch the numbers’ as she puts it – or indeed look at them. In short, the figures suggest that factors beyond the ‘strength’ of the family might be worth concentrating on a little bit more. Christian Guy, the Director of CSJ recently admitted that they had ‘missed in-work poverty’, for example.

Eleanor Rathbone, in 1913, suggested that “it is hard for a woman to be an efficient housewife and parent while she is living under conditions of extreme poverty … The astonishing thing to us is not that so many women fail to grapple with the problem successfully but that any succeed”. We could perhaps paraphrase this to reflect a similar view of families – it shouldn’t surprise us if some families do split up under the weight of poverty, but what is more surprising is the very high number who stick together through these times.

This view, supported by some evidence, might help to develop a more positive narrative around the role of families, parenting and poverty.

Best wishes,

Steve

 

“In search of the scrounger” Plus ca change…

A couple of days ago I got the book ‘In search of the scrounger’ by Alan Deacon out of the library and thought I would share a few of the paragraphs from the Introduction and Conclusions chapters. The book covers the inter-ward period and, more specificially, the 1920′s. Despite the near 100 year difference, the concerns of politicians and administrators in relation to social security sound all too familiar to current discussions around Jobcentre Plus targets, sanctions, tightened  conditionality and, of course, ‘scroungers’. All emphases are mine

“Throughout the 1920s discussion of unemployment insurance in Britain became increasingly dominated by the question of abuse. In particular, there developed a bitter controversy over the administration of a series of regulations which were collectively known as the genuinely seeking work test … Between March 1921 and March 1930 nearly three million claims for benefit were refused because the claimant had failed to meet this condition. By 1927, one claim in ten was being disallowed on the grounds that the claimant was not genuinely seeking work, and in some areas the proportion was over one third. At no time in these years did any prominent politician or government official seriously suggest that the work they were supposed to be genuinely seeking actually existed.” (p1)

” … the focus of attention must primarily be upon those who were directly responsible for the formulation of policy in this area: the Ministers and senior officials of the relevant government departments. It was they who demanded that the unemployed repeatedly demonstrate their willingness to work in a period of mass unemployment, and it is their perceptions which have to be understood and their decisions which have to be explained. Those explanations, of course, must be sought in terms of their wider economic and political aims, and the role which they perceived that the test could play in the realisation of those objectives.” (p1)

“Any assessment of the seeking work test must begin by acknowledging that its abolition in March 1930 did enable some claimants to draw benefit even though they were not looking for work at the time of their claim. It is argued, however, that such abuse was largely confined to married women and that even amongst this group the extent of the practice was considerably exaggerated by contemporaries. Certainly, there was no need to impose the test on all groups of claimants, and the campaign to ‘tighten-up’ the administration between 1925 and 1929 was totally unnecessary. The question remains, however, whether that campaign was the result of folly, malice, or both.” (p87)

“In short, the test was a sledgehammer to crack a relatiely small – and often exaggerated – nut. The use of this sledgehammer, moreover, had profound consequences for the administration of benefit, and affords a classic illustration of the impact of departmental pressure upon the ways in which local officers utilise their discretionary powers.” (p88)

“In the case of the test, the Ministry of Labour left its officers in no doubt as to what was expected of them. Their task was to detect and penalise malingering, and the accomplishment of this purpose was to override all other considerations. Olive Stevenson has recently observed that the “very existence” of powers to restrict the supplementary benefits paid to unemployed men or separated wives “tends to arouse suspicion in the minds of officers or to suggest to them that higher authority wants them to be suspicious”. In the 1920s that suspicion was deliberately fostered, and by the end of the decade the staffs of the Echanges were obsessed with the aspectre of abuse.” (pp88-89)

“(A report by John Hilton) found the interviewing officers convinced of their ability to spot a scounger – ‘a groundless and dnagerous faith’ – and often neglecting their duty to help claimants secure work. This, he believed, was a direct result of the pressures put upon them from above.” (p89)

“The seeking work test was as pernicious as it was unnecessary. It led to hundreds of thousands of unemployed men and women being arbitrarily deprived of benefits which they desperately needed, and forced many more to make repeated journeys in search of jobs they knew did not exist.” (p89)

“If the seeking work test was not prompted by malice, it was ‘tightened-up’ with a callous disregard of the hardships and injustices which resulted.” (p91)

We have previously blogged about the increase in ‘in-work conditionality’ here and the role of the DWP in arousing suspicion of benefit fraud with their ‘Benefit thieves’ campaign here

Best wishes,

Steve

What is the ‘economic reality’?

An interesting blog post from Shaun Rafferty at JRF last week suggested, in the byline to the post, that ‘Economic reality means the Living Wage can’t be compulsory’ and then went on to argue that lobbying to make the Living Wage compulsory was ‘self-defeating’ because ‘It’s an economic reality that in the current operating environment there are many employers who genuinely couldn’t afford to pay their staff the Living Wage.’

This got me thinking about what the economic ‘reality’ is and I guess my reality is slightly different from Shaun’s (more post-modernism later). My view of the economic situation is that many people in this country ‘have never had it so good’, so to speak, but that this affluence sits quite uncomfortably alongside poverty. There are huge inequalities in wealth, but still ots of wealth in the UK as the figures below help to demonstrate.

The ONS suggested last year that household wealth in the UK had hit £10.3 trillion in 2008/10. The ONS website states that

Mean household total wealth grew from £373,000 in 2006/08 to £418,000 in 2008/10; the region with the highest mean value in 2008/10 was the South East at £562,000; the lowest was the North East where mean household total wealth was £322,000

Ruth Levitas used the table recently to highlight how the top 10% of earners received 10% more of total net income in 2009/10 than they did in 1979 whereas the bottom 10% saw their proportion drop from 4% of total net income down to 1% over the same period. So, the put it quite bluntly, the rich have got richer and the poor have got poorer over the last 30 years.

More recently, the Sunday Time published its Rich List for this year which showed that ‘The wealth of the richest 1,000 has reached a record high – £450bn. The increase in wealth is significant, with 11 new billionaires being added to the list between 2012 and 2013.’

However, not all employers are in the top 10% of earners and Shaun’s point was about the operating environment, but last year it was reported in The Telegraph that business investment in the UK was slow ‘despite a corporate cash pile now worth more than £754bn’. The figure, taken from an Ernst & Young ITEM Club report, equates to 50% of gross domestic product and the report was expected to say that say that ‘while businesses are in a strong position, British households remain under intense pressure.’ (my emphasis)

And, of course, there is the issue of tax avoidance and evasion. HMRC conservatively estimate the tax gap as around £32 billion. Richard Murphy at Tax Justice UK has estimated it at potentially in excess of £120 billion. Put simply, if everyone paid the tax they were supposed and paid it on time, there would be more than enough for poverty to be eradicated in the UK and, if distributed differently, there is more than enough money to ensure that all employers could afford to pay the Living Wage to their staff.

There is almost blanket acceptance of the ‘need’ for austerity and the tough ‘operating environment’ that this creates, not least in social policy areas such as poverty and low-pay, where policy solutions have to ‘fiscally credible’. However, the figures above – from diverse sources – suggest that the economic reality might not be all it seems. Indeed, if we were to get all post-modern about it (and I said I would return to this) we might begin to think that the ‘economic reality’ was in fact a ‘hyperreality’ – a simulation or representation of reality that is difficult to distinguish from reality.