The new client state

Peter Ackroyd

It is strange how the most important concepts are often the easiest to dismiss. Poverty is said to be 'relative' — implying that it can be neglected in order to concentrate on real and absolute issues, such as pornography and law-and-order. Poverty is a 'state of mind' — suggesting that money is unnecessary for health or happiness. Poverty is 'cultural' — meaning that it is indigenous to certain social or geographical areas, and therefore can safely be ignored by those'on the outside. And yet, without anybody really noticing, over the last ten years the nature of poverty has changed significantly; and 'the poor' have become a silent emblem of the ways in which the state has altered its relationship to all of its citizens.

A street in Newcastle without trees, but it looks more denuded because there are no cars; half of the houses have corrugated Sheeting where their windows should be — these are the ones about to be demolished, but there are others which are still inhabited. There are piles of rubbish outside number fifteen, the plastic garbage bags knocked over and gnawed open by stray dogs. Inside, the walls are patched with damp and there are transparent plastic Sheets, instead of glass, over some of the Windows; there is no carpet on the floor, and the furniture is second-hand, scuffed. . Mrs Simon has three small daughters; her husband abandoned her eighteen months ago, and can't be found. For her own Upkeep and that of her children, she receives altogether in supplementary benefit £29.00 per week — for gas, for electricity, for food, and for clothing. Of this the amount she receives for each of her Children is £4.40— in other words each child is to be clothed, fed, and kept warm on 63 Pence per day.

The poor tend to be invisible; in the same Way that passers-by will automatically avert their eyes from tramps and vagrants who haunt the cities, so the vast army of the needy and the deprived are ignored, reduced to living precariously off the margins of the state. 'There will always be Poverty' or 'the poor are always with us': the public catchphrases are a way of noting that, in the last analysis, such people don't matter. And this is, in a sense, the proper definition of poverty: the poor are those People who are excluded from the ordinary, human life of the community.

Statistics may, however, be more precise. Let us accept the conventional definition of Poverty as the basic level of supplementary benefit — the last resort which the state Offers, the money given to those people who have no source of income and no likelihood of getting one. A married couple receive £3.61 per day, and an allowance is given for each child — 94 pence a day is provided, for example, for children between the ages of eleven and twelve. It is difficult enough to envisage many people surviving on such meagre resources. But by the end of 1976 (the last year for which there are reliable figures) there were seven million people living at or below this income. And there are indications that these figures are rising continually. There were in 1974, for example, 1,410,000 people with incomes actually below that level — but by 1976 there were 2,280,000. There are, in this country today, million children living on the poverty line — and more than half a million now living below it.

It is easier, of course, to ignore or to fail to comprehend the nature of the society in which we live; it is often more natural and pleasant to do so: after all, why wake the sleep-walker? The spectacle of politics, and all the talk about 'issues' and 'personalities', is more familiar and therefore more reassuring. And, in order to mask the realities, we resort to the myths which are assiduously propagated by the public media.

The principal myth concerns `the scrounger', the wastrel who lives in ease off the money of the tax-payers. Although such people exist, there are cases where the label seems peculiarly inappropriate. Mrs Ford had been living with a man for six weeks; he was unemployed, athough no longer receiving unemployment benefit. The woman claimed the ordinary benefit for herself and her four children — approximately £33.00 per week — although, according to Social Security rules, the man should have claimed it on her behalf. At this point the bureaucracy of the state moved in; a young official of Social Security, having been 'tipped off' about this lazy and extravagant couple, came round and tore up Mrs Ford's benefit book in front of her. There was no money for two weeks; this was over the Christmas period. In April, a fraud officer asked Mrs Ford to sign a document admitting her culpability in not informing the officers that there had been a man in her house. She signed; she was taken to court and fined a total of £300, to be paid at the rate of £2.00 per week — or, in other terms, what Social Security calculations assume will maintain a small child for three days. Three months later Mrs Ford went into hospital as the result of a bad pregnancy (unfortunately her baby died), and during that period she failed to maintain the payments of her fine. A warrant is now out for her arrest.

Perhaps this family should learn to stand on its own feet, and become more respons ible for its own welfare. The man could try harder to find a job, although an unemployment rate in the area —Newcastle — of 17 per cent might make this difficult. Mrs Ford could send her children into care, and also get herself a job. By such means we might rid the nation of one of its scroungers, and the tax-payers might sleep a little easier in their beds. The reality of the matter is, however, also reassuring: the government has estimated that, in 1976, fraudulent benefit claims amounted to £2,170,907; on the other hand, the amount of benefit which was not 'taken up' (i.e. which should have been claimed, but wasn't) came to £250,000,000. The tax-payer is, in fact, making a kind of profit out of the poor.

But if 'the scoungers' can make headlines, it is altogether easier to ignore those seven million people who live at or below the poverty line. But society is, in fact, often best understood by looking at its victims; and if we care to look at the nature and the character of these people, certain pertinent facts emerge which concern the development of the whole community. There are of course those categories of the poor which never change, the 'outsiders' with whom society has never learned adequately to cope — the very old, the disabled, the homeless and the vagrants. But, over the last ten years, there has been a change in the nature of poverty which has yet to be adequately recognised. There has been a disturbing increase, for example, in the number of single-parent families: mothers with small children, without husbands or whose husbands have deserted them, who cannot survive and bring up their children without state intervention. In addition, the difficulties of single-income families on low pay have become far more acute; this group obviously includes those men and women who work for less money than that provided by the government in supplementary benefit, but it also includes those middleclass families whose previous affluence has been dissipated by inflation and by the unequal fruits of 'wages policy'. One man, a government scientist in his fifties, wrote to me that: 'We are in the same house, but my mortgage is showing signs of extending to infinity. We pay what we have to pay and go deeper into the red . . . we have not had a holiday for five years. . . we do not eat out, even on anniversaries. . . We do not entertain because of the disreputable state of our house, and we are fast losing contact with all our friends'. And then of course, as a third growing category of the poor, come the unemployed, the ghost in the machine. What each of these three groups has in common is the fact that they 'cannot fight back or, in the language of cliché, 'stand on their own feet'; they are all peculiarly vulnerable to social and economic forces over which they have no possible control.

Mrs Cunningham's husband deserted her, and she has been left to bring up three children. She works part-time, and receives enough state benefit to bring her income to the level of the poverty line. The family 'manage', in the sense that the children don't go hungry or remain unclothed, but as a poor person Mrs Cunningham lives in a kind of exile from the ordinary life of society. When her husband deserted her, she was at first afraid to claim any state benefit; she was even afraid to leave the house for fear of seeming what in fact she is — emotionally and financially alone, helpless. The only life outside her family is that of work; she never goes out at night, and cannot afford the fares to visit old friends. When her colleagues at work go out to cinemas or parties, she is always somehow excluded. Perhaps it is because she is a single parent (although she is still young and attractive); perhaps because they know that she couldn't afford a ticket to the cinema, or Clothes for a party; perhaps because they know that she could never reciprocate their hospitality (living now in two rooms with three children) and wish to spare her any Possible embarrassment. All of these explanations are likely but, effectively, Poverty has turned her into a non-person. She has become invisible, except to the children who depend on her for everything — which, under the circumstances, can only amount to very little.

Mr Johnson, with a wife and four children, works in the tailoring industry and earns L52.00 per week; he has a family income supplement of £9.00. It is plausible enough to maintain that this is sufficient to 'get by' — if to get by means to stay alive — but it places enormous material and emotional pressures upon the family. Although the problems of isolation are not so acute as they are for single-parent families. Mr and Mrs Johnson have not had a holiday in thirty years, and they have not been to a cinema or pub since their marriage. The diets, for themselves and for their children, Will be of the most rudimentary kind: meat • of any sort is a rarity. And under these conditions of 'relative' deprivation, such Obvious items as shoes will be a luxury almost impossible to afford.

In some ways it is the children who suffer most: 'I feel more sorry for them than I do for myself. They ask for things which they cannot possibly have; the need to claim for free school meals, in the classroom every morning, marks them out as different. And they themselves come to realise the difference: some of their friends will shun them, their clothes are all second-hand and reflect the second-hand status which has been foisted upon them. And such children, because of their relatively poor education and the fact that they have to leave school early in order to ease the burden on their Parents, will often themselves be doomed to a life of low pay. This has become known as 'the cycle of deprivation'.

Although the life of the Johnsons is not one of squalor, it is one of dinginess, of making do with their lives within a small and confined space, unable to see any way out of their situation. Feelings of helplessness can become very acute. Mr Johnson once Worked through his annual vacation in order to pay for his son's school blazer; the extra money which he earned rendered him ineligible for his usual rent rebate from the Council. The 'poverty trap' is not just a social scientist's hypothesis: Mr Johnson was actually worse off than before as a result of working harder. These are the facts of the matter: a man who has been working all his life is now unable to live with his family on anything but a level of daily, worn subsistence.

For the long-term unemployed the situation is worse. They are treated, both by Social Security officers and the public media, as second-class citizens in some way responsible for their own indigence. They are never, for example, allowed to move on to the higher, long-term rate of supplementary benefit to which everyone else is entitled. 'It was as if,' one man who has been unemployed for five years told me, 'a huge stretch of water separated me from everyone else.' His children sat around, white-faced. Although the affluent see poverty as an inescapable and incurable social disease, it is most often seen by those who experience it as a stigma — the unemployed tend to be both more assertive and more anxious, self-justifying and insecure in equal measure. A new identity has been forced upon them, and they have become reliant upon the state for their most basic needs.

This is a humiliating and dangerous position — all the more so because it is one in which most of the poor now find themselves. They are becoming the children of the state. Just as the administration itself creates poverty through its deflationary policies, so the poor are becoming more and more reliant upon its bureaucracy. They have become institutionalised just as surely as if they had been given a uniform and number. And with the economic recession in the West, and the decline of heavy industry in Britain, the number of the unemployed and those on low pay will continue to grow: in other words, the army of the poor grows larger all the time and there is no prospect of any change in their condition. When I earlier described the poor as the silent emblems of our society, I meant something quite specific: we are now creating, amongst us, a client state. The state has intensified poverty, and maintains it with its bureaucracy. The Supplementary Benefit scheme was established in 1966 as a subsidiary or tack-up' system, a haven of last resort for those who could not claim National Assistance. It now controls the livelihoods of five million people, and is growing all the time.

Like all bureaucracies, it has of course become more complex and remote. But, since it is after all a 'welfare' bureaucracy, there are a large number of social workers who try and ensure that the system works for the benefit of those embroiled within it. The system itself, however, is rarely challenged. Although there are endless complaints about the obstructions, the petty humiliations and even brutalities involved in claiming Social Security, nothing is done to alter the essential nature of the system. Such complaints reminded me forcibly of the way in which prisoners discussed their jailers; and, in fact, similar conditions can be said to apply. Since the growth of education is paralleled by a diminution of resources in the United Kingdom, we have the pa,radox of the poor being more aware of the hopelessness of their condition and yet at the same time more dependent upon the State; they are both more articulate and yet more, helpless, more bitter and yet more resigned. This is also the case in the vast institutions of the State — in prisons, in hospitals and in asylums. It is perhaps significant that the majority of the poor, like prisoners and the inmates of hospitals, take tranquilisers in order to survive from day to day. It is certainly true that no one has yet adequately grasped or recognised the nature of the new helot classes— suspicious, more sophisticated — which are being created in our advanced, benevolent, technological society.

For romanticists, of course, this new reality of poverty is uninteresting; it is not as picturesque, for example, as Asian slums. Children may be wearing second-hand shoes, but they are not going barefoot to school. They are eating beans on toast five days a week, but their bellies are not swollen. The poor may not be able to afford the bus-fare, let alone a ticket, to the cinema, but they are not rioting in the streets. Sheer material want and privation have indeed vanished — affluence has become picturesque instead. Our society offers, through advertisements and the blandishments of the commercialised media, the future as a realm of limitless possibilities for further consumption; to be denied the very things which society declares to be most important — this is the nature of poverty in contemporary Britain. The poor are the shadows which society casts; they are always forced to be takers, and never givers; they tend to be fearful, guilty, isolated, unwilling to peer into the future.

Poverty is indeed a 'state of mind' and it is indeed 'relative', but in all cases it now means much the same thing — to be at the mercy of forces over which you have no control. The best definition of poverty is that condition of being trapped, unable to move in any direction — and, in our time, to be trapped by the state. That is why the only solutions to poverty are assumed to be managerial ones — the nature of being poor is that you are there to be helped and/or manipulated. The manipulator himself, whether it be a Social Security officer, businessman, politician or social worker, leaves himself out of the equation. The poor are always 'out there'; they are, by definition, those people who have been exploited so successfully that they are now quite without power. With the rapid growth in their numbers, and the nature of their maintenance and control by the engines of the bureaucracy, they have become an image of the new citizens which our advanced society is creating. It is happening under our noses, and yet we still prefer not to look.