Current Affairs The General Election

[Bruce Wayne]

Next time I'm doing a shift at the Samaritans and someone's crying down the phone telling me they can't afford to pay their rent and feed their kids, I'll just tell them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and buy a cookbook.

A predictably trite response.

 

[zzr45]

It just feels like some people have a very black and white opinion on what poverty is and it's root causes without having experienced it first hand.

 

[Bruce Wayne]

They define poverty as 'not being able to heat your home, pay your rent, or buy the essentials for your children. It means waking up every day facing insecurity, uncertainty, and impossible decisions about money. It means facing marginalisation – and even discrimination – because of your financial circumstances. The constant stress it causes can lead to problems that deprive people of the chance to play a full part in society.'

What is poverty?

Poverty is when your resources are well below your minimum needs.

www.jrf.org.uk

They define 'relative poverty' as 'where households have less than 60% of contemporary median income'.

The median household income in the UK is £29,400.

If you are earning less than 60% of that, (£17,600) and trying to raise children then it is very likely that you encounter much of what they describe above.

And earning 60% of average income doesn't automatically mean that you're living in poverty. It's an incredibly crude metric that I would have fallen into at various stages of my adult life when I wouldn't have said I was poor whatsoever.

 

[Bruce Wayne]

Which is a bit of a misleading comparison - Attlee ran a country where the cost of living was much less, with a younger and fitter population that remained in family groups more and one where there was plenty of stable and secure (relative to now) work.

People could live on what they were paid, which although they’d be understood as dirt poor nowadays they would not have considered themselves as such.

Now on the other hand we have an older population, with more health and care issues, with families less able to look after them (because of work and other pressures), with much less stable and secure employment and a much higher cost of living. This means the state has to support them via WTCs, HB, CB, care packages and so on in ways that Attlee never had to.

To cope with that requires more money, more than Blair or governments since were able to supply. The result is that personal debt has skyrocketed, spending on welfare has gone up and the situation for those in receipt of it has gotten worse, because of all the pressures on what the money has to do.

This to me is one of the main reasons to support Labour - by reducing the cost of living (remember housing and transport costs are a big chunk of that) you should reduce the amount needed to keep that person afloat, which should eventually reduce the welfare bill.

So you're saying that because our understanding of what poverty supposedly is has changed, we can look back on the Atlee years with great fondness yet regard contemporary governments as Dickensian?

 

[Moomin]

View attachment 72932
Anyway, seems the party for me has just landed on my doorstep.

I'd vote for the Polar Bear.

Would be ace seeing him at PM's question time.

 

[abelard]

And earning 60% of average income doesn't automatically mean that you're living in poverty. It's an incredibly crude metric that I would have fallen into at various stages of my adult life when I wouldn't have said I was poor whatsoever.

And how many of the 4 million children in poverty are earning what you made at various stages of your adult life?

 

[Bruce Wayne]

You are horrendously out of touch.

I worked in welfare for two years. Universal credit was designed to put people into poverty and keep them there.

What good is teaching somebody too cook, when they have to wait six weeks for a first payment on UC and struggle to even buy food? Who would even teach this?

Go outside, have a look at what's around you instead of thinking the answer to everything is through numbers and articles in the economist.

You should tell the Trussell Trust that they're out of touch - https://southwark.foodbank.org.uk/get-help/more-than-food/eat-well-spend-less/. As for who would teach this. In our borough, and in my wife's team, they have dietitians, and they teach these courses.

What next? Is health visiting an abomination 'because women have always known how to raise kids...' so we needn't bother?

And for the record, I've no doubt whatsoever that the roll out of universal credit has been an absolute mess, and the disruption of welfare payments has caused significant problems to a great many people.

 

[zzr45]

I'd vote for the Polar Bear.

Would be ace seeing him at PM's question time.

Polar Bear has escaped the trappings of class and ideological differences. All are equal before him. All are meat.

All hail Emperor Polar Bear.

 

[tsubaki]

So you're saying that because our understanding of what poverty supposedly is has changed, we can look back on the Atlee years with great fondness yet regard contemporary governments as Dickensian?

No, I am saying that we should look at why Attlee’s government spent proportionally less on welfare and examine whether we might be able to do the same (spend less) and get better outcomes than we do now.

 

[Bruce Wayne]

And how many of the 4 million children in poverty are earning what you made at various stages of your adult life?

Err, yeah. Kids don't earn anything (they should be up a chimney or down a pit etc. etc.) so not sure what point you're making?

 

[Bruce Wayne]

No, I am saying that we should look at why Attlee’s government spent proportionally less on welfare and examine whether we might be able to do the same (spend less) and get better outcomes than we do now.

I would say that's likely to be the case in many areas of government, but we have a political culture whereby any reduction in spending is instantly jumped on by the other side and decried as a dereliction in their duty. Hence we have the attitudes we've seen on here whereby it's impossible to achieve anything without spending more money (and in Labour's case, doubling government expenditure).

 

[abelard]

Err, yeah. Kids don't earn anything (they should be up a chimney or down a pit etc. etc.) so not sure what point you're making?

That fact that your circumstances at various stages of your adult life don't negate the reality of 4 million children living in poverty, and it's silly to invoke the comparison

 

[Bruce Wayne]

That fact that your circumstances at various stages of your adult life don't negate the reality of 4 million children living in poverty, and it's silly to invoke the comparison

My niece is in Berlin at the moment. I'll tell her to stop enjoying herself, she's supposed to be living in poverty ffs. At various stages she was raised by people on zero hours contracts, in a single parent environment and with mental health issues. Labour poverty bingo agogo. Neither she nor her parents would have regarded themselves as living in poverty, but I'm sure they'll welcome being used to make a point nonetheless.

Maybe one day we can move beyond such blanket assessments of people and stop using them to score political points. In the meantime, I'll let the dietitian colleague of my wife know she's wasting her time when we catch up at the Christmas bash on Friday. She'll be pleased to know she's out of touch or something.

 

[abelard]

My niece is in Berlin at the moment. I'll tell her to stop enjoying herself, she's supposed to be living in poverty ffs. At various stages she was raised by people on zero hours contracts, in a single parent environment and with mental health issues. Labour poverty bingo agogo. Neither she nor her parents would have regarded themselves as living in poverty, but I'm sure they'll welcome being used to make a point nonetheless.

Maybe one day we can move beyond such blanket assessments of people and stop using them to score political points. In the meantime, I'll let the dietitian colleague of my wife know she's wasting her time when we catch up at the Christmas bash on Friday. She'll be pleased to know she's out of touch or something.

And we wouldn't be better off as a society if children were raised by people whose jobs paid them better and were more stable instead? Raising tax by 5% on income over £80k is the greater of those two evils?

It is always telling how you go after people for resorting to anecdotes (or in a particularly tortured instance, insisting that only the opinions of specific experts in a given field are admissible), but when you're pressed on the realities of austerity Britain, you can't actually produce evidence of your own beyond stories about your own immediate family, as though that somehow the negates the overwhelming volume of data on what a catastrophe the coalition and its legacy have been.

I mean, sure, hundreds of thousands of families would be going hungry were it not for charity, but so long as your niece is enjoying herself in Berlin and your brother has a sports car, everything is basically fine.

 

[larrygobfiend]

A predictably trite response.

A predictably arrogant response to my response.