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 (An argument that might suggest benefits ought to be withdrawn until we see children and pensioners starving and freezing to death.)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)
