======= At 2002-08-30, 15:29:00 Paul J. Maginn wrote: =======
>Dear all,
>
>In a brief follow-up to Paul Ashton's email:
>
>There has been quite a significant amount of media coverage, fuelled by
>recent academic/think-tank research, on poverty in the UK lately.
>
>What is particularly interesting is where this 'frenzied' interest in
>poverty has come from - is poverty (whatever that terms 'really' means)
>really that bad out there?
>
[ .............. ]
>It is important, therefore, that we seek to move beyond a simple
>income-based measurement of poverty/wealth - qualitative, abstract and other
>non-tangibles must also be added if we are to move towards a truer measure
>of poverty.
>
>Just some thoughts to get some debate going over the weekend.
>
Clearly, everyone's on holiday or their attentions are elsewhere!
The debate did continue over the weekend -- at least, in the Sunday Times.
Extracts from David Smith's article:
The Sunday Times - Review
September 01, 2002
Britain’s underclass is here to stay. A hard core of people wedded to
welfare and petty crime still exists and Labour is only adding to the
problem, writes David Smith
Does Britain have an “underclass” of people who live on welfare and the
proceeds of petty crime, are strangers to the world of work and for whom
family life consists of a series of temporary but child-producing
relationships? Or is this a myth put about by those who like to divide
society into neat compartments when the reality is a lot more complicated?
Last week the underclass rose to prominence with the publication of a
pamphlet by Catalyst, the left-leaning think tank. Poverty and the Welfare
State: Dispelling the Myths, by Professor Paul Spicker, dismissed the
notion of a permanent underclass and upbraided government ministers and
advisers for fashioning policies around it....
...[Charles] Murray, contacted last week about the Catalyst pamphlet,
responded as one who had seen it all before. “The debate is repeating the
US debate issue for issue,” he said. “In the mid-1980s the mobility claim
was, for a year or two, the mantra of the American left. When the dust
settled it turned out that a lot of people were mobile, but a significant
number of them — the underclass — weren’t.” ...
..There are two oddities about the Catalyst pamphlet. The first is that if
poverty is only temporary, this makes the argument for less, not more
intervention. Why bother with a huge welfare state, costing more than £100
billion a year, if there is natural movement in and out of poverty? Yet the
aim of the pamphlet is to argue for a more generous welfare state. Its
attempt to undermine the idea of the underclass is because its existence
might make the majority think the problem of poverty is not one that will
ever affect them...
..The second oddity is the idea that the government and its advisers
bought 100% into the underclass. Straw was not alone in his reluctance to
go along with Murray’s ideas... Gordon Brown('s)..tax credits ..is the
exact opposite of a strategy directed at the underclass. Brown has been
widening the welfare net, not targeting it...
..David Green, director of Civitas, a rival health and welfare think tank to
Catalyst, points out that in 1951, in the early years of the welfare state,
only 3.4% of people not of pensionable age received benefits. Last year the
figure was 24%, with 30% of households receiving at least half their income
in the form of benefits or tax credits.
“Not only have other countries shown how to reduce benefit dependency, our
own history warns us of the dangers,” he says. “The effect is to discourage
work effort. Labour studied American-style welfare reform, but failed to
implement it because it has a different agenda. Public policies are
subordinated to party political imperatives.”
(The full article is available online at:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-400044,00.html
However, you have to register to access it)
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2002-09-02
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