Frank Field - fill the whole world with a rainbow.
It looks like Labour’s Frank Field is to turn our coalition government all rainbowy when he heads up a Poverty Commission. Now I’ve no idea what powers he will have, what the Commission’s remit will be and how they’ll approach the issue, but what is clear to me is this: tackling poverty is not simply about making poor people a bit richer, it’s got to be about making rich people poorer too.
It’s deeply uncool to talk about re-distribution of wealth and the concept of social inequality makes some shuffle uncomfortably and talk of “de-incentivising” and other nonsense terms, but at some point we have to face up to the uncomfortable fact that poverty is a relative term. When everyone’s poor, nobody’s poor. When everyone’s rich, nobody’s rich. The very concept of poverty cannot exist without someone, somewhere being rich.
Whilst this may seem like a truism, it’s something that must be dealt with if we actually see poverty as a problem worth solving. Poor people can’t afford to buy houses (I know, I’m one of them) and it’s not because we don’t work, or don’t work enough, or don’t work hard enough. It’s not because we haven’t got access to easy credit (we’ve got access to too much a lot of the time), and it’s not even really because we don’t have enough money. The reason I can’t buy a house is because other people have a lot more money. The market place is competitive by design and definition and whilst I, despite working a full time and reasonably-paid job, cannot afford to buy a home there are many more around me who can. And they can buy more than one home, in fact they can afford to buy lots of homes, and then rent them to me.
The widening gap between the richest and the poorest is the real story of poverty. Whilst people on £25,000 a year and less compete in a marketplace with those who take home £1 million bonuses on top of wages that are 20 and 30 times higher than the people they work alongside, poverty will always be a problem.
Now it’s only a hop, skip and a jump from what I’m pointing out here to Communism, as I’m sure plenty would be keen to point out, but I’m not suggesting forced equality, or a totalitarian redistribution of wealth. I’m saying that the problem of poverty does not lie with the poor, it lies with the rich. I’m asking us to question the mechanisms of an economy that justifies a company director earning 20 times what a normal worker at the same company earns. There is something strange about those figures; they may make some kind of warped economic sense, but they make no ethical, moral or social sense.
Tax credits, benefits, higher employment figures, cheaper, more plentiful food and products: all these things can improve the lot of the poorest, but they will stay poor whilst other members of society are able to earn disproportionately higher salaries. The question is whether we want to improve the lives of the poor, but keep them poor, or actually deal with poverty, in which case, look to the rich.
We go live now to absolutely nothing.
Something that stood out for me from all the recent Election coverage (quite apart from the fascinating 24 hr footage of people waiting for things to happen) was the frequent mention of either the “voice of the electorate” or “listening to the voice of the people”. This came frequently from journalists and from the enormous variety of pundits that were on 24 hour rotation in those heady days when nobody really knew what was going on.
Now I’m more than willing to put such cliches down to the fact that with a Hung Parliament, few people alive that remembered the last one and coalition talks happening in secret, it was simply very difficult to find anything really worth talking about, and at such times 24 hour news is more than happy to resort to hackneyed catchphrases and soundbites, but it raises an interesting question. If the people had spoken, what had they actually said? Of course pundits of every political colour were ready to interpret what the people had said for us: for some the people had said that Labour had lost, others that the Conservatives hadn’t won, and still others that the people wanted a coalition or new type of politics, or to make their anger at politicians heard.
But of course, “the people” said nothing of the sort because “the people” are made up of individuals, each with their own motivations, their own prejudices and their own way of seeing the world. And all each individual did was put a cross on a piece of paper to indicate which candidate they wanted to represent them in Parliament. Sure, some people voted tactically, although as we saw on the night, the swings weren’t where everyone thought they’d be, predicted successes and failures didn’t pan out and the only accurate forecast came, for once, from the exit polls, but ultimately the “people” didn’t say anything. We didn’t all get together and decide we wanted radical change, or more of the same, or voice our anger. Each of us, individually (at least the 65% of eligible voters who could be bothered) went down and made our decisions alone.
Many of us didn’t get the result we wanted, at least 50% of votes cast were for losing candidates, so in terms of the people speaking, actually only 50% were heard, or at least, the other 50% were heard and subsequently ignored.
Now perhaps electoral reform of some kind could remedy this to some extent, and give greater representation proportionally, or at least allow people’s votes to count a little, even if their first choice is a “loser”, but I’m trying to make a wider point here: the “people” are not one homogeneous mass. We do not speak with one voice, actually we disagree with each other a lot of the time.
I live nextdoor to people who drive the most ridiculous cars imaginable. Huge 4×4s that are of no conceivable use in the urban environment in which we live. An old man a few doors away can often be heard complaining to the nearby Asian shopkeeper about the number of Eastern European immigrants in the area. I share a house with someone who voted Conservative. On all these issues I fundamentally disagree with all these people, but I still share a house, a street, a community with them.
In everyday life compromise is a perfectly normal thing, an essential thing, because individuals are all different. We don’t speak with one voice, we disagree, we argue, but in all but the most extreme and unusual circumstances we just get on with our lives as best we can, because we have little choice. And most of us realise that for all our differences and disagreements, the things we have in common are more numerous and more important.
So “the people” didn’t speak on May 6th. 30 million separate individuals put a cross on a piece of paper. That cross was a crude and inadequate representation of their hopes and fears, albeit one that has been long and hard fought for.
As another politician once said “democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time” – let’s not pretend it’s anything else.
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