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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 181 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 181, December 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
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How far have we come in eradicating poverty? Not very far, says Dave Beecham. He compares today with a study published at the beginning of this century and argues that the causes of poverty are still there |
Cold statistics show that more than 13 million people in the UK live in poverty. Over 400,000 are officially homeless. The poorest children in Britain are twice as likely to die from respiratory illness as the richest. In cities such as Sheffield and Glasgow the rich can expect to live eight years longer than those in the most deprived areas. Four out of ten pensioners survive on the state pension alone – £57.60 for a single person, £92.10 for a couple. A quarter of those with a company pension receive only £5 or £10 a week more.
The new report from Labour’s ‘independent’ Commission on Social justice states that ‘the gap between rich and poor is greater than at any time since the 1930s ... Once pollution, traffic congestion and ill health are taken into account, Britain’s welfare in 1990 was no greater than it was 40 years earlier.’ But, the report argues, ‘almost everyone living in the United Kingdom is better off than their parents and grandparents were’.
In some ways this is obviously true: many fewer babies die today; nearly every home has a bath; almost all children attend school till the age of 16. But many of the evils which confronted our parents and grandparents (and their parents too) have grown and festered under years of Tory government.
In 1913 the National Committee for the Prevention of Destitution, the Commission on Social justice of its day, produced a short book called The Case for the National Minimum. Even a glance at its chapter headings shows how the fundamental problems which faced the poor and the unemployed have not really changed that much. They identified the key issues as: a legal minimum wage; shorter working hours; children’s health and education; the need for healthy homes; prevention of unemployment; abolition of the Poor Law.
True, today we have the health service – and the principle of equal healthcare for all remains intact despite ferocious attacks, because of working class resistance. The Poor Law has gone but the government has done much to restore many of its iniquities – slashing benefits, imposing means tests and now transforming the unemployed into Jobseekers’.
As for the rest of the 1913 agenda, it has not really altered in
80 years. An exaggeration? Let’s look at some facts.
In 1913 as in 1994 low pay and sweated labour were the chief cause of poverty. In 1913 the National Committee estimated that there were more than 4 million men earning less than 30 shillings a week (£1.50), which was the minimum needed to keep a wife and three kids and have a few pleasures in life: a smoke, a drink, the music hall, football on Saturday. The 4 million women wage earners were far worse off: ‘probably nine tenths earn less than a pound a week’.
What’s the position today? More than one in three full time workers in Britain earn less than ‘decency threshold’, defined by the Council of Europe as £5.88 an hour for 1993. One in five people earn less than £4 an hour – 700,000 in the NHS and local councils alone. In 1991 it was estimated that a minimum wage of £3.40 would have made some 4 million families better off. In 1992 the gap between the earnings of the lowest and highest paid employees was wider than in 1886, when the first figures were recorded.
In 1913 most workers did not have to pay income tax. Today even those on very low pay lose 10 to 20 percent of their earnings in taxation. And the means tests on social security punish the poor: over half a million full time workers are taxed at more than 50 percent on part of their income.
In 1913 the law offered some minimal protection to the low paid. The Fair Wages Resolution adopted by parliament said that workers employed in firms with government or municipal contracts had to be paid the standard rates of pay agreed in their industry. The Trade Boards, established in 1909, set a legal minimum wage for the worst industries such as lace finishing and chain making (by 1921 the Trade-Boards covered 3 million workers).
Today all legal protection has been scrapped (except for farm
workers). The Fair Wages Resolution was abolished in 1983. Last year
the Tories abolished the modern equivalent of Trade Boards, the Wages
Councils, removing wage protection from 2.5 million workers. A Low
Pay Unit survey of Job Centres in Manchester reveals that 40 percent
of jobs are now being advertised below the old minimum levels.
‘The immense development of labour saving machinery during the 19th century has not lightened the toil of a single worker. Industrial innovations have been applied to increase profits and keep down wages rather than to reduce the hours of labour.’
What was said in 1913 is even more true today. On average working hours have fallen, but the intensity of work is far greater. Shiftwork patterns which were considered impossible in those days are now considered normal: split shifts, alternating days and nights, 12 or 15 hours at a stretch. In 1913 the call was for an eight-hour day – a maximum working week of 48 hours spread over six days.
‘A time limit must be fixed at the end of which the hours of labour of all wage earners must be reduced to limits based on a maximum of 48 hours per week. Elasticity in applying this maximum ... must be permitted. Overtime must be strictly and rigidly limited to those occasions when the supply of labour is inadequate.’
This is more or less the formula recently adopted as a minimum standard by the rest of Europe. But the Tories fought tooth and nail against it, using precisely the same rhetoric about the ‘liberty of the individual’ as they did 80 years ago. Eventually they used their infamous ‘opt out’ from social policy to reject the idea that all work in excess of 48 hours a week should be voluntary.
From the 1860s to the 1970s working hours fell steadily and in the
rest of Europe this trend has continued. In Britain, however, working
time has increased over the past two decades. Among manual workers
about four in ten men work more than 46 hours a week, three times the
European average. More than one in seven work both shifts and nights.
Child labour is the very image of 19th century exploitation. It is with us again today. In 1913 there were still 30,000 children aged between 12 and 14 employed as ‘half timers’ in the Yorkshire and Lancashire textile mills, attending school in the morning and work in the afternoon. Outside these areas there were:
‘vast numbers of school children employed before and after school hours (and sometimes when they were supposed to be in school) in shops, or as messengers or errand boys and girls ... or in street trading’.
A parliamentary committee estimated in 1903 that 200,000 children were employed as wage earners. Among other things the committee recommended ‘complete statutory prohibition of street trading by boys below 17 and girls below 18’.
In theory, of course, all this should be history. The 1961 Factories Act makes it illegal to employ anyone under 16 on factory premises. It’s illegal for anyone under 13 to work at all, even on a paper round.
The reality is quite different. Regional studies of child labour suggest that six out of ten children work, 90 percent of them illegally. Most jobs are milk and paper rounds, babysitting and street trading. But the occasional raids on factories and warehouses by Trading Standards and Health and Safety officials reveal children as young as 13 employed in packing clothes, collating stationery, assembling lamps – usually in appalling conditions. Throughout the late 1980s the official figures showed more than 50 children a year were killed or seriously injured at work in factories and farms.
When it comes to children’s health, scientific advances and the success of the NHS mean that many of the worst horrors have gone. In 1913 more than 120,000 babies died before they were one year old. But the contrast between the rich and poor remains.
As for the welfare of children at school, the problems of 1913 echo those of today. Just as now the poorest children received free school meals, but ‘many education authorities do not provide food of an appetising and proper nutritional value ... Some merely send the children with dinner tickets to coffee shops and restaurants.’ As for the rest, many received dinners ‘merely of bread and butter or bread and tea’.
Health at school was a major concern. About one in 12 children in
elementary school suffered from infected adenoids. In 1994 about one
in seven children suffers from asthma.
‘The ideal at which a housing policy should aim is healthy homes for all; what it should seek to abolish and avoid in future is the slum area and overcrowding.’
There was tremendous optimism 80 years ago that the evils of overcrowding and disease could be overcome. A whole range of laws had been passed enabling local authorities to build new homes for workers, force the owners of slum properties to repair them and plan development for people’s needs. No longer would private landlords be able to exploit tenants and fleece councils by neglecting overcrowded properties and selling them at a profit.
Sadly this was an illusion. Exactly the same story repeated itself in the 1930s and the 1960s. Today the years of neglect and run down council housing have created huge new problems. Council estates are becoming ghettoes for the poor, the old, the unemployed, the single parent family. Two thirds of council tenants are now on some benefit, on some estates it’s 90 percent. Letting the market rip has created a massive need for housing benefit (estimated at £11 billion next year) now under threat from the government. Many tenants face exactly the same evils as in the early years of the century: decaying run down blocks, infested with vermin.
Meanwhile, the private sector is a disaster. One in 13 homes in Britain is unfit to live in and one in six needs urgent repairs costing more than £1,000. Yet nearly two thirds of those who own their own homes had an income of less than £150 a week in 1993. By far the worst conditions are in private rented houses in multiple occupation. The problems of cold and damp alone are estimated to cost the NHS £800 million a year in treatment for related illnesses.
During the 1980s well over a million households were registered as homeless by local authorities. Over the last three years 145,000 families have been thrown out of their homes because they could no longer afford the mortgage.
In 1992 the private sector built only 144,000 homes, the public
sector less than 3,000. Meanwhile 800,000 homes stand empty. The
National Housing Forum estimates the immediate public investment
required for urgent repairs as £7 billion – ten times that
sum could be required to reverse the years of cuts and decay. The
report suggests that the current pace of urban renewal is so slow
that it implies that the house built today will have to last for over
4,000 years – the age of Stonehenge.
As they said in 1913: ‘Involuntary unemployment is a normal incident in the life of nearly every workman at one time or another.’ Then they estimated that a quarter of the 16 million strong working population experienced some sort of unemployment each year, if only for a few days. This is much the same number as today. But an age of mass unemployment, with millions out of work for months and years, would have been a shock to the social reformers of 80 years ago. Mass unemployment became permanent in the 1920s and 1930s – and then once again in the 1980s and 1990s.
Help for the unemployed before the First World War was pitiful: unemployment insurance (where it existed) was restricted to 6 or 7 shillings a week for up to 15 weeks. This was less than a quarter of the amount needed to keep a family. Occasionally a local council would provide work for wages. Otherwise it was the Poor Law Guardians and the workhouse.
At least today people who lose their livelihood do not immediately face the loss of their home and their family. But in other respects the provision for the unemployed has been driven steadily backwards towards the bad old days.
Basic benefit is currently £45.45. Benefit averages less than a
quarter of previous earnings, less than anywhere else in Western
Europe. The Job Seekers’ Allowance, due in April 1996, would reduce
entitlement from 12 months to 6 months, after which benefit will be
means tested. The government intends to reduce benefits for 150,000
people as a result, and exclude 90,000 from any benefits at all. The
Job Seekers’ Agreement – in reality not an agreement at all, but
a condition imposed by the state – will force unemployed people to
choose between accepting work at lower rates of pay or losing their dole.
In 1913 the Old Age Pensions Act had been in operation for three years, producing a dramatic improvement in the welfare of the old. The number of ‘paupers’ over the age of 70 fell from 196,000 in 1910 to 59,000 in 1912. There were just over 940,000 OAPs.
State benefits remain by far the most important source of income for retired people. Two thirds of single pensioners and nearly half of pensioner couples have less than £20 a week from savings or an occupational pension. State pensions were cut drastically from 1980, when in one of their most insidious acts, the Tories linked pensions to increases in prices rather than pay. If pensions were still paid on the old basis, they would be £19.25 higher for a single person, £30.55 higher for a couple.
As a result the state pension condemns people to poverty. Women are especially badly affected as they often don’t have the necessary National Insurance contributions. Nearly 4 million pensioners have to rely on a means tested benefit for part of their income.
In the future a minority of pensioners will be reasonably well off
in retirement. The majority face either poverty in the state scheme
or the insecurity of private pension schemes which the government has
busily promoted to undermine the state earnings related scheme.
Low wages ... long hours ... bad housing ... poverty ... insecurity. The issues haven’t changed. The poor are no longer confined to the workhouse: they are imprisoned in tower blocks. The patronage of the Poor Law Guardians has been replaced by the blank face of the DSS.
Some of the worst evils have gone. Health and education services have been transformed. Why? Partly because a fit and educated working population is essential for British capitalism to compete with its rivals. But fundamentally because workers have fought for these services, and fought to defend them.
The latest annual survey of British Social Attitudes shows how the years of recession and attacks on our services have strengthened commitment to the ideals of the welfare state. Ordinary people are far more committed to these ideals than the mealy mouthed apologists for the ‘social market on Labour’s Commission on Social Justice.
The 1993 survey shows that the number of people wanting tax cuts and lower social spending has fallen to less than five percent. The number supporting higher taxes to pay for increased spending on health, education and social benefits has doubled since 1983, to 63 percent.
But, say the cynics, opinions are different from hard facts. Where will the money come from? There is a deafening silence from the Labour Party which is not committed to eradicating these problems. As for the Commission on Social justice, its logic is quite clear – workers will have to pay. A more ‘competitive’ economy means that ‘average money earnings should rise in line with productivity across the whole economy’. More toil, more sacrifice – and you might get back some of your social services.
Just two words are missing from the equation: profits and dividends. While poverty has been ingrained in the lives of one quarter of the population, the tiny group at the top has hardly ever had it so good. Not since the golden era of the rich – the years before the First World War – have the truly wealthy enjoyed such prosperity. The cost of providing decent homes, hospitals, pensions and social security seems astronomic – until you see the wealth the capitalists keep for themselves. Since 1980 the dividends paid out to shareholders come to well over £150 billion. That’s a fair pot to start from. The poor are not always with us – provided we deal with the rich.
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