Pauperland: Poverty and the Poor in Britain

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‘Pauperland: Poverty and the Poor in 

Britain’ 

by Jeremy Seabrook (Hurst, 2013) RRP ￡20, Housmans price ￡16 (in-store only)

‘Pauperland’ is Jeremy Seabrook’s account of the mutations of poverty over time, historical attitudes to the poor, and the lives of the impoverished themselves, from early Poor Laws till today. How did it become the fate of the poor to be condemned to perpetual punishment and public opprobrium, the useful scapegoat of politicians and the media? This book charts how such attitudes were shaped by ill-conceived and ill-executed private and state intervention, and how these are likely to frame ongoing discussions of and responses to poverty in Britain.

Jeremy Seabrook will be giving a talk on his book at Housmans on 22nd January.

‘The Village Against the World’ by Dan Hancox (Verso, 2013) ￡14.99

Pauperland

Book Review by Eileen Short

Jeremy Seabrook, Hurst, 20.00

This book is a strange mix. By looking at how Britain's rulers have tried to manage the poor over centuries, and relating this to current official and popular attitudes, Pauperland does a real service.

Seabrook shows how fear of poverty has been used to keep the working poor in their place, the shifts back and forth between charitable concern and vicious demonising, and how the rich fear the angry and not the passive poor.

He describes current welfare debates as a "cosmic seance" with voices from beyond the grave, as every ministerial proposal has "already been tested and tried and usually failed in the past, even the distant past".

The book includes real gems, such as how the "mad" label has been used used to lock up the poor over centuries; and how attacks on the "idle and undeserving", as opposed to widows and orphans, were used in power struggles against the monasteries in the 16th century.

I even found the 19th century source of current myths about families having "three generations of workless" - no longer true, as Joseph Rowntree research showed last year. But if you're a government minister, facts don't stop you recycling old arguments as ideological cover.

The book makes it clear that our rulers create and need poverty, and their wealth comes at our expense. It lashes the rich and rages against capitalism and its dehumanising, planet-wrecking impact.

Pauperland provides good insights about riots, and how capitalism tries to redefine life as "consuming". There are some great turns of phrase and thought-provoking ideas.

So I was surprised by the book's sudden shift in stance.

Seabrook believes that in the advanced capitalist countries poverty is mainly social and cultural. The poor today live in a "a world of surviving and scavenging, for affection as well as for material things...an existence nourished by cheap alcohol, drugs, speed, dreams of escape, heroism and an iconography of luxury borrowed from a different class".

He seems to regard today's working class only in comparison to a mythologised version of our great-grandparents who knew how to "make do". That people in Britain today are hungry, their homes unheated, is not to do with lack of means, but due to dependency and a "failure of community spirit".

Seabrook says, with no facts or references in support, that the post-1945 welfare state undermined our "self-reliance", and that the "death of socialism", sometime in the 20th century, means the end of any collective ability to fight back.

As it progresses the book becomes more muddled. Seabrook says the potential of working class people to change society is an "illusion". If you think workers and the poor cannot organise, and have no power, then you end up talking about us, not with us. If you don't think we can organise to change things, you are left with moral arguments alone.

Rejecting what capitalism has become, Seabrook seems to reject economic development altogether. His conclusion is that we need a change of perception, so that wealth and exploitation are seen as shameful. By "rejecting" capitalism we can make it "wither away".

Seabrook has written some great articles nailing government welfare policies. But this book is not any kind of call to action.

http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=12526

Pauperland

by Jeremy Seabrook

FRIDAY, 20TH DECEMBER 2013

by Dawn Foster 

This article is a preview from the Winter 2013 issue of New Humanist magazine. You can subscribe here.

In Pauperland Jeremy Seabrook sensitively chronicles attitudes towards the poor from the Elizabethan Poor Laws onwards. Worries that women birthed children purely to profit from handouts, and obsessive categorisation of the poor as deserving or undeserving, live on to the modern day.

The historical backgrounding is solid, but where Pauperland comes into its own is through its refusal to disregard oral history: the sidelining of the voices of the poor is an intrinsic tool in the perpetuation of inequality. Seabrook’s examination of the 20th century and beyond comes alive with these oral histories, as well as through personal recollection and insight that never descends into mawkishness.

Seabrook’s discussion of how we measure poverty is instructive: much of the argument against state action to reduce inequality rests on the contention that the idea of relative poverty is nonsense. When people in Africa starve, how can we claim people are in poverty in Britain? (An argument that might suggest benefits ought to be withdrawn until we see children and pensioners starving and freezing to death.) By contrast Seabrook argues, in the tradition of Amartya Sen, that poverty means people are denied that which enables them to function and fully participate in society.

After the horrors of the Great Depression and World Wars, it seemed British society agreed “never again” to such suffering at home and abroad, working to alleviate slums by building social housing, and birthing the NHS. While the previous centuries depict a struggle to deal with the enduring problem of poverty, this era briefly promised a softening in attitudes towards the poor, and a promise of a better society for all.

So what went wrong? Rapid deindustrialisation, pursued by Thatcher, and an exuberant embrace of orthodox economics. Seabrook points out that while conditions in many mines, steelworks and factories could be grim, they offered an occupation that garnered respect, and shutting them without putting in place any labour alternative meant a loss of “the solidarities, the consciousness of a shared destiny” that made working-class life bearable.

In its place we have an increasingly atomised society, with loneliness booming, and low pay leaving even those in work often relying on state benefits. The poor feel what they lack more keenly because capitalist society increasingly values a life’s worth in purely economic terms, and pleasure and sensation are rooted in consumption.

But instead of looking at how Britain can work to stamp out these problems, the press and the politicians further demonise the poor. Just as the Poor Law Commissioner published a “catalogue of abuses” of the system in 1834, critics today whip up fury about “skivers” versus “strivers”, with tabloids pouncing on rare instances of large families on benefits as proof that the welfare state is a sham.

With the advent of late capitalism, the cognitive link that the rich succeed at the expense of the poor seems to have been severed. “The claim by Mrs Thatcher that ‘there is no alternative’,” writes Seabrook, “has taken on the allure of common sense, the common sense has been elevated into wisdom, and that wisdom into truth.”

Poverty is, Seabrook argues, merely a symptom of wealth. One enduring trope of attitudes towards poverty is that the rich never admit their part in its perpetuation. In the years following the financial crash, where bankers and financiers have felt little effect, while food-bank dependency has exploded, that couldn’t feel more true.

Pauperland by Jeremy Seabrook is out now (Hurst, ￡20)

http://rationalist.org.uk/articles/4510/book-review-pauperland-by-jeremy-seabrook

Pauper management by G4S, Serco and Atos is inspired by a punitive past

The coaltion's use of private companies to manage the most vulnerable amongst us is inspired by half a millennium of Poor Laws

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'The prescriptions today's warriors against the poor offer have been tendered at least since the Poor Law of 1601.' Photograph: Hulton Archive

When the powerful invoke "fairness", and represent the privileged as victims of exploitation by the powerless, it is usually the prelude to some spectacular act of injustice towards minorities, the excluded and the poor.

The singular achievement of the present government has been to appoint new "overseers of the poor", although it forbears from using this term, which dates from the 16th century, when it designated the administrators and distributors of poor relief. These new overseers are far from the flinty and ignorant officials of the Old Poor Law, as they are – and not for the first time – commercial entities. The poor have often been eyed covetously by enterprise, as they represent an apparently enduring group in society, out of whom it must surely be possible, in one way or another, to make a profit, the word David Cameron has cleansed of any association with dirt – perhaps prematurely, as G4S and Serco demonstrated, when they charged the government for tagging prisoners who did not exist. Atos, tasked with the judgment of whether individuals are fit for employment, finds itself the inheritor of an ancient debate about the "deserving" and "undeserving".

The fate of the most vulnerable people – in children's homes, prisons, care homes, rehabilitation centres, adult care homes and probation services – is increasingly in the hands of private providers, just as they were when known as orphans, felons, the lame and the halt, and the aged, who have "borne the heat and burthen of the day". This government's use of private companies – a policy re-affirmed last week by Francis Maude – in the improvement of pauper management has its antecedents in the 18th century, when the task was widely outsourced to willing providers. Far from being an "innovative" approach to poverty, the present government looks deep into a punitive past for inspiration.

Perhaps these modern Conservatives hark back to the Poor Law Relief Act of 1723, when local justices of the peace were allowed to contract the administration of relief out to those who would feed, clothe and house the poor. Relief was given according to a prescribed quantity of labour, and was calculated to put an end to the "false and frivolous pretences" under which many people were believed to have found relief. The poor were to be managed by the contractor at so much a head, or maintained for a lump sum agreed in advance. In the first case, it served the contractor to cram as many people into the workhouse as possible; in the second, it was in his interest to keep them out. This was achieved by the payment of pensions that cost less than the paupers' upkeep in the workhouse. The standard inside was so low that people willingly accepted miserable payments as "out-relief". The poor rates duly declined. Everything that could be was contracted out – physicians for medical services, carpenters for making coffins, shifts for living paupers and shrouds for dead ones.

Of course, the rhetoric has changed: the oratory of the 18th century has decayed, and is now inflected by a show of caring: we shall not neglect you or abandon you to worklessness, says George Osborne, but his embrace of the excluded is as uncharitable as it ever was, as he also declares that the "something-for-nothing culture" is at an end. The indolent and the workshy, identified during half a millennium of Poor Laws, are impervious to threats and exhortations. Those who suffer will be people whose lives have already been blighted, and many of whom were born to an inheritance, not of "hard-working strivers", but of despair. They are, for the most part, highly vulnerable and, if among them foxy cheats dissimulate themselves, these should not be used to inspire terror in the weak and wounded of society.

What useful purpose is served by compelling the injured and humiliated of the world to sign on daily, to clear litter from the streets, to work for charities for nothing? Picking oakum looks, by contrast, like a positively purposeful activity. What triumph lies in compulsion intended for the defeated and the demoralised, the unloved and abused, the frightened and the mentally infirm, the under-endowed and the psychologically damaged (often with invisible handicaps), people immobilised by depression or detached, not from society, but from life itself? It is one thing to boast of hard work and achievement, but in the presence of the shut-ins and the frightened, the twilight world of the addict and the obsessive, these heroics are tainted. This is why it is ignoble to attack those predestined to lose all the rewards and prizes with which the rich and capable have so effortlessly made off.If there is a ghostly quality in the language of today's warriors against the poor, it is because the prescriptions they offer have been tendered at least since the consolidation of the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601. When Iain Duncan Smith, George Osborne, Frank Field and former archbishops give their prescriptions, it is like being at some cosmic seance, as they are enunciating a wisdom from beyond the grave.

In 1798, Jeremy Bentham published Pauper Management Improved. He proposed institutions for regulating the poor and, to facilitate this, he drew up a map of what he called Pauperland. This was an inventory of "that part of the natural livestock which has no feathers and walks on two legs". He meant those who labour. In his opinion, "Not one person in a hundred is incapable of all employment. Not the motion of a finger, not a step, not a wink, not a whisper, but ought to be turned to account in the way of profit."

Bentham's cheeseparing scheme for the poor inspired generations of administrators: he would make hats brimless so as not to waste material; bedcovers would be fastened by clips to save on superfluous fabric. What an inspiration to the tax on those in social housing with a spare room, even if it holds necessary aids that enable disabled people to participate in society.

Meanwhile, turning the "wink and the whisper" of the sick to profit is admirably pursued by Atos, which has deemed fit for work people with terminal illness, some of whom have indeed died within days of being declared employable. The 18th century would have approved of entrusting the disappearance from sight of the poor, the afflicted, the workless, the seeker of asylum and the criminal, to new superintendents of the poor, including A4E, Capita and Serco.

The charge is not one of parsimony, nor even of the elevation of efficiency over humanity. It is that the richest societies in the world are still ready to impose punitive sanctions upon the least defended. If anthropologists wish to examine life and labour in a savage society, they no longer need seek out rare, uncontacted peoples in the Amazon or Polynesia; all they require is an airline ticket to contemporary Britain.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/25/pauper-management-g4s-serco-atos-poor-laws

Cameron's attack on the 'feckless poor' has a very long history

26 Jun 2012: Jeremy Seabrook: The government's planned welfare cuts are the latest attempt by authorities to root out the idle and set them to work

Convenient myth of the elderly hedonist

12 Jan 2010: 

Jeremy Seabrook: The image of the fun-loving, elderly consumer alleviates our guilt about how the oldest people in our society are cared for

Stop capitalism defining human nature

24 Sep 2009: 

Jeremy Seabrook: To solve global problems such as climate change, we need to escape our market-driven definition as greedy individuals

Myths of Victorian squalor

12 Jul 2009: Jeremy Seabrook: To view slums as a modern manifestation of industrialising Britain is damaging, and prevents genuine, helpful analysis

The poor: a future foretold

10 Aug 2008: 

Jeremy Seabrook: Labour's disdain has its antecedents in Victorian, Elizabethan and even medieval strategies for controlling the 'worthless poor'

Disappearing the poor

9 Apr 2008: 

Some will obligingly efface themselves by consuming pesticide, others will join the doomed ranks of armed resistance

The poverty of nations

10 Feb 2008: 

The perpetual state of desire that we call 'human nature' is very particular, for it demands conformity with the nature of capitalism

A rich man's world

2 Sep 2007: 

Proposed remedies to cure our ailing society are vacuous because no one wants to admit the real problem: economic prosperity.

How laissez-unfair economics works

24 Aug 2007: 

The cult of violence is just one expression‎ of the wider cult of inequality.

The myth of civil society

16 Nov 2006: 

'The left' has become amorphous and ineffectual. Into this vacuum 'civil society' has poured, with all the tumultuous incoherence it implies.

In a world of wealth, poverty has become a necessity

27 Jul 2006: Jeremy Seabrook: Forget Doha - the existing development model robs the poor of a meaningful role in the relief of their own penury.

• Powder keg in the slums

  1 Sep 2004: Jeremy Seabrook: Global poverty is in flight. The UN estimates rural populations have reached their peak, but there will be a further 2 billion urban settlers in the next 30 years.

• Crash course on how to be poor

  21 Jul 2003: 

  Jeremy Seabrook: Poverty is now defined not by poor people themselves but by the most powerful actors in the global economy.

The language of labouring reveals its tortured roots

14 Jan 2013: Jeremy Seabrook: The origins of words for 'work' suggest coercion rather than the salvation promised by politicians