Such is the poverty of Tory ideas that they deny poverty even exists
The people of Taunton Deane, according to their MP, Rebecca Pow, have never had it better, thanks to Conservative policies. A combination of the higher minimum wage, the higher personal threshold for paying income tax and the frozen fuel duty meant people had “thousands more in their pockets”.
In real life, the raising of the minimum wage was better than nothing, and better than being a public sector worker and going seven years without a pay rise. But in eradicating poverty it will have “very little effect”, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The higher personal tax allowance was more than offset, at the lower end of the income scale, by reductions to in-work benefits, so it mainly boosted higher earners. For anyone to be “thousands of pounds” better off as a result of Conservative policies, they would need to have been well off already, or to be using a hell of a lot of fuel (again, back in real life, the frozen fuel duty saves the average family £70 a year).
The shadow chancellor, Labour’s John McDonnell, responded in parliament that his colleague was “well intentioned” but ignorant. In fact, the opposite is true: good intentions would manifest in curiosity about the lived experience of one’s policies, which would in turn entail figuring out what those policies amounted to in the aggregate. Failure to ask such questions is not born out of ignorance: it is critical to the Conservative narrative to deny, forcefully and sometimes gleefully, that anyone in the country is struggling.
The smart ones do this with “economicky” words – David Freud explained the surge in food banks as a simple issue of supply and demand. “Food from a food bank – the supply – is a free good, and by definition there is an almost infinite demand for a free good,” he triumphantly declared. Because who would go to a shop when they could scam limitless free tinned tomatoes out of their community?
The confident ones simply deny the premise. There aren’t any unemployed people, according to Philip Hammond. Theresa May thinks nurses use food banks for “many complex reasons”. Nothing as simple as wages relative to prices – more like string theory.
And the dumb ones are preeningly innumerate: Iain Duncan Smith thinks £53 is an amount of money it’s easy to live on for a week. Howard Flight, a former shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, thinks unemployment benefit is £250 a week, and the reason young people can’t buy houses is that they spend all their money on minibreaks.
This is a necessary fiction in a worldview that casts wealth and hardship alike as spiritual issues, the former a reward for virtue, the latter a punishment for laziness. A struggling nurse would break the formula: what if individual qualities can’t explain every individual’s circumstances? Maybe that nurse is feckless, but she can’t be – she’s a nurse. Ergo, we cannot discuss her because she is simply too complex.
That necessity is particularly pressing for this Conservative government at this time. It has no project, no account of a better future except one that more closely resembles the past. Margaret Thatcher’s austerity was billed as a necessary transformation to take us to a better place; Theresa May’s makes no such promise. Hers is the end state. To acknowledge any significant hardship would mean completely upending the “strong and stable” offer.
That a Conservative government would deny hardship, and that a particularly directionless and incompetent one would deny it particularly hard, is predictable. More fluid and interesting is the response of the social and civic institutions around the government.
There is no shortage of evidence of poverty in the UK. Food bank usage has gone up dramatically, sometimes by over 100%, year on year since 2010: over just six months of 2014, half a million people received a food package from the Trussell Trust, and the all-party parliamentary group on food poverty estimated that at least as many independent food banks again were in operation. Other indicators of poverty surface here and there – 14% of children didn’t have a winter coat in 2013, one in five families couldn’t afford a trip to the beach in 2014, and by 2017 the average basic weekly wage was £15 lower than it had been eight years before, the longest wage stagnation since the 1800s. The extreme deprivation caused by benefit sanctions was common knowledge by 2015.
Yet none of this became the spine of the national conversation: rather, poverty was separated into silos, with the working poor in one place (unfortunate – maybe they could budget better); the workless for generations in another (it’s good for them to be struggling, and it might shock them out of their indolence); and food bank users a different category altogether (people who couldn’t fill in forms properly, or who weren’t as disabled as they claimed).
There was no shortage of campaigning and grassroots activism, but if you wanted to be perceived as mainstream and impartial, with all the maturity and credibility that goes with that, you had to maintain the Chinese walls between one kind of poverty and another. You had to guard against making the obvious connection that when wages stagnated, benefits plummeted and housing costs and inflation soared, a huge number of people were left fighting to survive. Call it the BBC riddle: when the government says there’s no such thing as poverty, to talk about it at all becomes a political act.
Charities, whether silenced by the Lobbying Act or themselves, owing to their reliance on government contracts, have broadly failed to campaign on UK poverty. That work was picked up instead by Red Cross International, offering a food aid programme that David Cameron rejected, or the UN, delivering a chilling analysis of the way British disabled people have had their rights violated. Those that have taken risks – the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Child Poverty Action Group, Citizens Advice – have found themselves portrayed as ideological for ideas no more radical than the one that, in a civilised nation, children should not return from school holidays thinner because their families couldn’t afford lunch.
Call that the do-gooder conundrum: when a government shows contempt for a group of people, it is hard to advocate for those people without showing contempt for the government. And then you’re not a charity: you’re a campaigner.
Just as it’s amazing how long a nonsensical consensus can survive, it’s incredible, once it starts to disintegrate, how fast it goes. Pow’s speech sounded different to the Tory delusions that went before it: no longer arrogant but absurd, no longer trenchant but flailing. For this era of carelessness, the jig is almost up.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
It is critical to the Tory narrative to deny, forcefully and sometimes gleefully, that anyone in the UK is struggling