Right to reply: The truth behind the poverty figures

Sally Chatterjee

Of course the measure matters. Fraser wrote precisely that the government targets those at the margins to achieve flattering statistics. This is easy work and it implies those in real difficulty at the bottom get ignored.

I do worry that people like Julia Unwin are part of the "poverty industry", making a living out of this.

Alan Douglas

Not to trivialise this lady's argument, but she would say that, wouldn't she.

Lousy or no education failing to teach even perhaps the basics of household management, and an emphasis on the "me" culture, will lead people to mismanage what little they have. As a minicab driver many years ago I was shocked at the priorities of the "clients" (paid for by social services) who would have smoking, beer, and buying their children bribes - sweets, tacky stuff, expensive comics, takeaway rubbish - rather than proper food home-cooked food. Perhaps one tenths of that money could have bought some eggs, potatoes, and a frying pan, who knows, even some veg. Nowadays I suspect they would have takeaways in front of a huge plasma TV, and X-boxes, Play-stations and ares of games for them, and these people would then register on the "poverty" indexes.

Their main poverty would be lack of any useful knowledge, drive, purpose, backed by state money extracted from those who do have those basic needs to get on and better themselves.

For heavens' sake, you PAY people to be helpless and indolent, then wonder WHY you have so many ?

None of what I have said should be taken to mean I do not have huge sympathy for the genuine hardship cases, who must be and should be supported. I merely dispute where that "poverty line" should be drawn.

Alan Douglas

BigAl

Dismissing out of hand someone else's argument and trashing their sense of 'fairness' is a classic Labour tool which has been used to stifle debate on immigration, education and other issues of the day.

Without the politically motivated IFS interventions, I think all would agree that poverty is rising as a result of the parlous state this country was left in (along with the eurozone). I am less concerned about what measure is used but rather what concrete and sustainable actions are going to be employed to reduce poverty.

Perhaps the IFS can contribute to this debate and propose some new ideas. Increasing the deficit even further is surely no solution as it has already failed miserably over the current and last government.

denis cooper

Oh look, somebody has a right to reply - lucky them!

denis cooper

So can I reply to Korski's article here, as I'm not allowed to reply there?

Haldane

Perhaps now you can write an article answering the points Fraser made? Please tell us if he is wrong that we have we been misled on the definition of poverty, and whether or not he accurately defames the previous Labour government with his claim that they deliberately manipulated the figures - not to improve the lot of the poor but for party advantage.I've looked closely at your "reply" but I can't see any reference to these and the other issues he raised. Your exhortations are laudable but not really germane to Fraser's posting.

noelly

but surely that's frasers point - there was very little "clear and unambiguous" about the figures produced by the IFS - the whole thing was an arbitrary cherry picking, designed to ressurect Browns use of partucularly narrowly defined targets, designed to obfuscate and obscure the real issues

Gawain

Unfortunately, this doesn't really reply to the point that I understood Fraser to be making. By pretending that poverty can be accurately measured actually makes the problem worse. It inflates the egos of corporatist politicians into thinking that they can solve the problem by throwing money at those defined as "poor" or that they can "design jobs" to suit the poor. If thirteen years of Labour government proved anything it proved the poverty of the type of thinking exposed by Ms Unwin. Until poor people have the incentive, the freedom, the education and the belief in themselves the problem will remain. Instead of burdening people with these labels perhaps the IFS and the Rowntree Foundation would be better employed explaining to people how much talent they have and campaigning to remove the state generated impediments that prevent them using these talents.

Alex

This article utterly fails to address the central point which is that the fictitious malady called ‘relative poverty’ distracts from the more serious and worrying matter that is real poverty. So long as respected sources continue to peddle in the meaningless concept of relative poverty, there will be no genuine progress in helping those who are affected by the real variety. It is those organisations like the IFS and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation who use the term in an attempt to exaggerate the issue that are creating the ‘distraction’ from their own cause.

cg

Why are so many Coffee Housers like to ignore things like poverty and unemployment? Do they think it will never happen to them?

Heartless Perry

There is NO poverty!

There IS a contrived RELATIVE deficiency of non-essential stuff.

Go away and drivel elsewhere.

Keith

I think the giveaway phrase here is "educational inequality ... condemns people to a life of poverty." What condemns people to poverty is not unequal eduction, but bad education. This is just the usual Lefty drivel. She hasn't addressed Nelson's points at all.

perdix

As Cameron correctly said, the causes of poverty are lack of education, worklessness and family breakdown. If everyone in the nation took responsibility to try to eliminate these causes in their own lives there would be very much less poverty.
Of course by definition, as currently defined mathematically, some relative poverty will always be with us.

Red Rag

Strange how Dave and his pal Fraser were quoting the IFS ad-hoc when Labour were in power to attack the government. Suddenly his best mate is in power and the goalposts have not just been moved but been taken out of the stadium. Politics... the home of liars, charlatans and goal post removers.

Rhoda Klapp

Yes Julia, yopu want to control things and interfere with things on behalf of people whose main problem is that they do not do anything for themselves, for a selection of reasons not excluding the perverse notion that we actually pay them to be poor. All the effort expended on their behalf does no good, while a little well-directed effort by them (if allowed, encouraged and enabled) would fix the problem a lot quicker.

The Engineer

First - there no 'right of reply' it is a privilege accorded from time to time to some special interest groups.

After reading this article and carefully re-reading Fraser's piece I am much more persuaded by Fraser's argument.

It seems obvious that any increase in the income of those above the 'poverty line' [sic], which is greater (in cash terms) than those below the line will increase the number of those below the 'new' line.

This relative 'poverty line' is simply an artefact of the method by which it is calculated and has no real meaning.

daniel maris

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, once a force for good, is now promoting the concept of Islamophobia. Look at their site - you'll find 24 references to Islamophobia all treating it as a real and reprehensible phenomenon akin to racism, rather than boo-word for genuine concern about threats to our way of life in a liberal democracy.

daniel maris

To assess real poverty, you really need a measure of disposable income after outgoings for housing, fuel and other fixed costs and you need to relate that to prices in that region. Plus I think you need to factor in living space and garden space (if you have children).

You can live like a king on £20,000 in a council house in some parts of the country. You could be poor on that in central London.

I think more detailed surveys need to be undertaken to assess poverty.

Max

While watching BBC News this morning reported that poverty was a family living on less than £1300 per month. If that is the case then my children have lived their whole lives in poverty-What Rubbish we have a roof over our heads pay the bills and go to Spain for our holidays

We don't claim benefits and do not consider our selves poor.

Robert Eve

Who even cares?

Peter From Maidstone

Why is the right to reply only and always given to socialists? Why can it not be given to a conservative? This supposedly being a conservative publication.

Dimoto

Alan Douglas says it all: the main poverty is in culture, education and aspiration.

But Ms Julia Unwin, fussing over her "figures" like a natural-born think-tank wonk, won't hear.

AliC

Poor ok, I'm poor, but real poverty - go to Sudan or Somalia, that's poverty. It comes with insects in your eyes, malnutrition etc.

Sitting watching Jeremy Kyle and blaming everyone else, feeding your kids takeout and taking hard working folk's tax money without thought, that's poverty of thought and ignorance. We pay people to be under dole house arrest, and guess what that's where they end up. There's no incentive, positive or negative, to do anything else.

Unless demonstrably trying to break free of this, and some folk are, these 'communities' need help and a kick to get back to work and to understand that work is HARD and you get knocked back. But you must.

David Lindsay

Growing poorer? No change there.

Far from our having grown richer since 1979, we have in fact grown vastly poorer: only a generation ago, a single manual wage provided the wage-earner, his wife and their several children with a quality of life unimaginable even on two professional salaries today.

This impoverishment has been so rapid and so extreme that most people, including almost all politicians and commentators, simply refuse to acknowledge that it has happened. But it has indeed happened.

And it is still going on.

nonny mouse

>>I wonder what it says about us as a country: why do we spend so much effort thinking about definitions of poverty, and so little responding to the reality?

OK, lets see what we can do about 'absolute poverty' then.

Here is an idea: http://mrnonnymouse.blogspot.com/2011/10/reducing-absolute-poverty.html

Somehow I don't think you will like it.

Kenny

Welfare dependency is a drug Julia Unwin and her ilk are pushers.

Kennybhoy

David Lindsay on October 11th, 2011

"...only a generation ago, a single manual wage provided the wage-earner, his wife and their several children with a quality of life unimaginable even on two professional salaries today."

How do you define "quality of life" young Maister L? If you are mean material such then you are talking bollocks.

Yam Yam

Once again, no mention from the Left about the biggest contributory factors towards poverty: marital breakdown, and the state-sponsored lifestyle choice of single parenthood for many teenage girls.

Instead, the Left's solution is, as always, to chuck bit more money at those familiar sticking plasters called benefit payments and Surestart centres.

Plus ca change.

Mad Numismatist

My children were born in the Philippines, I married their mother not because I loved her, (I do, very much) it was because I could not handle the thought of them living in poverty. A two story house with two rooms made from breeze blocks and plywood. Two grandparents, four children and their seven grandchildren- (not including mine). No water, no electricity and an open sewer running in front of the house.

That is poverty, and by Philippine standards they are actually lower middle class. My father in law worked at sea and received a very healthy wage, two or three times what a policeman or teacher earned.

If we want to fight real poverty why do we not focus on them? Obviously an accident of geography; much like somebody born in Surrey versus Hull, but that does not go down well with the left wing bleeding hearts, so best not look that direction.

John Staples

I share the general scepticism about this lady's article, particularly generalisms such as: "We can design jobs that help people to progress". I voted for Labour but found their objective of eliminating child poverty nonsensical because it was essentially meaningless.

As several commentators have said, what is being defined as poverty in this country bears no relationship to poverty in most countries in the world.

That is not to deny that there is huge (relative) social deprivation in this country. There are shameful inequalities. But glib solutions involving welfare agencies are patently not the answer. They've been tried and have failed.

Magnolia

I agree with everything that David Lindsay has said above!
However, he forgets to add a little bit about pre-1979 history though.
When Labour's James Callaghan was Prime Minister in the seventies, we had The Winter of Discontent, double digit inflation and rising unemployment.
Callaghan's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey, had to go to the IMF for a loan and the country was put under IMF supervision.
1979 saw the election of a courageous Prime Minister who had to clear up the mess that Labour had left both her and the population.
Her work remained unfinished when the socialist pro-EU wets and then New Labour's version of debt infused 'economic success' took over.

denis cooper

It's certainly curious that I can post a comment on just this article, when I've been unable to post a comment on any other article for days now and can't post a comment on any of three articles subsequent to this one; so I would like to take this route to say that if this blockage is the result of something that the editors have done, then I would politely request that they undo it in the interests of free speech.

tom jones

I completely agree about doing something meaningful to stop this rise in (any kind of) poverty, but the bit about designing jobs for people is what Labour's done for the last decade and we need more private sector jobs not public sector ones!

alexsandr

Levels of personal debt can make a real difference to poverty. If someone is on £1300 but is paying £900 a month on debt repayments (maybe mortgage and unsecured) then they are in poverty.

Stepney

'We can design jobs that help people to progress"

No. We can't. Jobs are created to supply the needs of a business or sustainable organisation. They are not 'designed'.

The concept of designing jobs is classic statism and is precisely the sort of economic suicide that got us into this mess in the first place.

Typical liberal think-thank wonkery.

Rhoda Klapp

Denis, what have you been trying to post? Obscenity? Bigotry? Incitement? Or the truth about the EU and the democratic deficit?

denis cooper

Only comments of the last kind, Rhoda; although after several failures I decided that it was less trouble to check first by just typing in something short, often only "test", and see if that got blocked, which it invariably did until this article came up.

Maybe the editors didn't like my constant harping on about that radical EU treaty change to which Cameron assented on March 25th, without asking for or getting any quid pro quo in the form of other EU treaty changes to protect our national interests.

Rhoda Klapp

Denis, how about a short article on the subject, submitted to Fraser as 'another voice'? Or maybe you haven't got the right kind of voice.

si4amish

throw more money at the problem. create 'poverty culture' so all future government are banded into paying much like 'war'

RichardH

"many of our fellow citizens are living in the sort of poverty that strangles their potential, and makes it impossible to contribute to society."

Rubbish. They either have potential or not. Throwing money at them (and not even for their benefit, but for the throwers' political vanity) pretty much ensures they'll never need to utilise any potential they may have had.

denis cooper

I'm afraid that's unlikely to work, Rhoda.

Either -

a) There's some extraordinary glitch in the comments system which means that even though it still always welcomes me:

"Hello, denis cooper ... you can leave your comment below:"

and assures me:

"Your comment will appear automatically"

that now only works if the article is by some outsider like Julian Unwin and not by one of the usual crew; or

b) The usual crew have decided that Cameron must be protected from any criticism of his gross betrayal on March 25th, and preferably the existence of that radical EU treaty change through European Council Decision 2011/199/EU:

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2011:091:0001:0002:EN:PDF

must as far as possible be kept from public view until Parliament has passed the forthcoming Bill to approve it and it's too late to object.

Did you notice John Major mentioning that already agreed EU treaty change during his interview with Andrew Marr on Sunday?

No, nor did I; it was all about advising us to raise our eyes to the distant horizon and look out for the next EU treaty change.

Rhoda Klapp

Well, a line to Pete H should establish whether this is deliberate and it is the editorial policy of the Spectator to suppress the truth in support of government deception. Which one might suppose to be unethical, but who knows nowadays?

neverundersold

Am I missing something? We're all in this together, aren't we? Does the biggest recession in living memory affect the poor? Yes they're in the same economy as the rest of us. In my industry sector, real incomes have tumbled over the last few years as wages have frozen and people accepted pay cuts to avoid redundancy - as inflation, fuel etc soared. I can't "afford" a 10% decline in my standard of living, but I have to deal with it - turn the heating down, drive fewer miles, think a bit harder about the supermarket shop. Everyone has discretionary spend, however small it is and that's where you have to make savings. Suggesting that because you earn less than 40% of the average wage, you shouldn't have to save a few quid a week like the rest of us is insane.

denis cooper

I might try that, Rhoda, although I doubt that it would do any good.

The editorial position of the Spectator is broadly pro-Tory, pro-EU and even pro-euro, and as it's their blog they're entitled to decide that they don't want to publish inconvenient truths about yet another Tory Prime Minister stabbing us in the back on behalf of the EU.

Just as the editorials of the Telegraph and the Mail studiously avoid any mention of that radical EU treaty change already agreed on March 25th, and instead tell us to look forward to the next EU treaty change, which may or may not materialise at some indeterminate point in the future.

Hannan's First Law doesn't just apply to political parties, but also to their supporters in the media.

denis cooper

I might try that, Rhoda, although I doubt that it would do any good.

The editorial position of the Spectator is broadly pro-Tory, pro-EU and even pro-euro, and as it's their blog they're entitled to decide that they don't want to publish inconvenient truths about yet another Tory Prime Minister stabbing us in the back on behalf of the EU.

Just as the editorials of the Telegraph and the Mail studiously avoid any mention of that radical EU treaty change already agreed on March 25th, and instead tell us to look forward to the next EU treaty change, which may or may not materialise at some indeterminate point in the future.

Hannan's First Law doesn't just apply to political parties, but also to their supporters in the media.

Angela Harding

May God forgive you all. A single person on minimum wage has NO DIGNITY I am not writing about one who lives at home and will get an intern-ship but one who has to manage alone and pay rent and pay the same 20% VAT on his toilet roll as all you commenter's do.Why should someone on£50,000 get a personal tax allowance anyway?.The poor in the UK are hammered if they don't accept minimum wage all your companies will import those who will. Wake up you rich before there is blood on the streets not just looted trainers