Workers' Liberty

Of all the industrialised countries Britain is the poorest, unhealthiest and most depressing place to grow up in.

So said a recently published UNICEF report, ‘Child Poverty in Perspective’… They looked at life for children and young adults across a range of social indicators - wealth, health, education and so on - and found Britain came bottom out of the 21 richest countries, particularly on issues relating to family life and friendships, self-esteem and mental health.

Britain is a worse place to live than the US, with its vast gap between rich and poor; it is a worse place to live than ex-Stalinist states such as Poland whose citizens are in large numbers forced to leave in order to build a better life for themselves!

Some in the media doubted the veracity of the UNICEF report. The Government said that the report’s data was “out of date”. Yet nothing in this report - none of the shocking detail - is new. Many statistical analyses in recent years have told the same depressing story. But the UNICEF report has had more impact and it may yet stimulate a rational debate about why UK children fare so badly.

Though the UNICEF report identifies many of the objective symptoms of childhood distress it does not really examine root causes. This gave the politicians the chance come forward to spin the meaning of the report.

For the right everything nasty is an effect of family breakdown. This is indeed a distressing event in many children’s lives, but it is not a convincing explanation for all the childhood misery which UNICEF records. Sweden has nearly as many single parent families as the UK but it came second in the UNICEF’s league table.

The New Labour government reacted to the report with obscene self-satisfaction. They said that though they “still had a long way to go”, it was making great strides in tackling childhood poverty. Stick with us, we’ll succeed in the end. They were less convincing even than the overt right.

Plainly childhood poverty is the key to understanding childhood misery and a lot of its symptoms - including “anti-social behaviour”.

Poverty does and must lead to physical and mental illness, poor personal and family relationships, educational and other underachievement, in childhood and throughout life. This is obvious but it is continuously denied by the policy makers. Obesity, for instance, is seen to be the result of poor “lifestyle choices”, rather than what it in fact often is, an illness, something that is the result of socially-caused distress and self-abandoning despair.

By better understanding and politically explaining the link between poverty, inequality and ill health we can build a powerful social movement against poverty - and against the kind of society the Thatcherites and Thatcher’s sons, Blair and Brown have built.

The UNICEF report, and others like it, can help us do that. But first we have to demolish the fallacy that New Labour are at all serious about tackling childhood poverty.

The facts here are damning to the Blairite case for their own defence. Childhood poverty doubled between 1979 and the end of the 1990s. When New Labour came to power around a third of children lived in poverty - that is in homes where the income was less than 60% of median household income after housing costs. Credit where it is due, the government has managed to reduce some poverty - an estimated 700,000 children have benefited from policies such Tax Credits and now live above the breadline. Good. However something like the staggering figure of three million children still live in poverty (as it is defined above)!

The government said it wanted to halve childhood poverty by 2010. They will not do that. For New Labour to meet their targets they would have to radically alter their disagnosis and their remedies.

They would have to give more money to families living on benefits. But neo-liberal dogma says you cannot do that. The jobless poor must be kept poor - the better to “incentivise” them into taking low paid jobs. It is the age-old dogma that in the past led to the imprisonment of the poor in workhouses where life was deliberately made as nasty as possible for them so that anything outside would be better.

To eliminate, or even to seriously reduce childhood poverty, New Labour would have to increase the minimum wage, to a level on which a human being can live comfortably. And neo-liberal dogma says you can’t do that. That would eat into profits for the capitalists.

That is why the government have failed to do more than dent absolute poverty.

Yet absolute poverty is not the only cause of ill-health. Living just above the breadline is also a morale-breaking struggle. Under New Labour many people, many of them single parents, have swapped benefit poverty and absolute poverty, for struggling to survive on low and obscenely inadequate wages. Can such parents take their children on holiday, or afford a big party on birthdays? Probably not. Can they get out of temporary accommodation and have a proper home with, maybe, a garden, a room for each child, place to do homework? Almost certainly not.
If the government really wants to tackle childhood misery it has to do something about this relative poverty. It won’t.

But a government that really cared about children would more than anything tackle the general inequality in society and the conditions of life this generates, not only for those at the bottom but for the vast majority of working-class people.

The increase in inequality over the last thirty years (all over the western world) is - perhaps even more than poverty in the absolute sense - the key to the increase in child and adult ill-health.

New Labour has done nothing to reverse the income inequality that so spectacularly increased in the 80s and early 90s under Thatcher. 5% of people now own half the entire wealth in the UK. Under New Labour aspects of inequality have got worse. Wage inequality between skilled and unskilled workers has increased.

Huge inequalities in society reflect dog-eat-dog global capitalism, with its privatised services and neo-liberal welfare policies. It introduces a hundred competitive imperatives into all areas of everyday life. People are constantly forced to compare their own lives to unrealisable models.

They are presented - in advertisements for example - with an ever-expanding selection of manufactured wants. They are invited by a capitalist lifestyle and celebrity culture to compare themselves to people with better jobs, to those who can afford what is advertised.

Increased competition between people mirrors the brutal reality of the capitalist workplace. Are you a productive worker or a time-waster? Shape up or ship out!

Such pressures have been shown in scientific studies to cause stress, anxiety and ultimately ill-health in adults. And children have less capacity, are less hardened even than their parents, to resist this culture. Most working-class children, despite the best efforts of their parents, do not escape at least some feeling that they and theres are - as the playground taunt goes – “losers”.

They have pressures from their peers to be better looking, better dressed to “fit in”. They have pressure from schools to be an A star student, to be fodder in their schools battle to move up the “League Tables”. We repeat: all of these pressures are generated by the competitive winner-loser culture of capitalism.

So what has happened to British children over the last 30 years?

* 20% of children now suffer from a mental health problem. One million children under 16 have some kind of serious stress-related illness.
* 22% of 18-19 year olds have considered suicide.
* A quarter of girls aged 15-19 have wanted to self harm. 13% have actually self-harmed. Self harming was almost unheard of 30 years ago.
* 65% of 16 year olds are stressed about school work.
And so on.

The inequality of British capitalist society is brutal and brutalising. The absolute and relative poverty which so many children live with is a disgrace. For nearly ten years - ten years in which they have had the chance to do something adequate about this! - Blair and Brown and the rest have presided over a blight on children’s lives.

What is the answer?

First we have to recognise -Ñ which very few anti-poverty agencies do - that New LabourÕs child poverty policy has failed, and that it will continue to fail. They do nothing more than tinker with the system. Ulitimately they support the capitalist system that makes people miserable and ill.

As the UNICEF survey shows even a modest reformist programme of decent welfare benefits and services and a more redistributive tax system make a big difference. In Finland, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands, where such things exist in one form or another, life is much better for children. If the leaders of the trade union movement could summon up the energy to aspire even to a modest reformist programme that could have a big postive impact on the quality of everyone’s life.

We should use the opportunity of a public debate on childhood poverty to criticise the nature of capitalist society, its inequality, its built-in destruction of social solidarity and its lethal effects on millions of people’s health.

We should use the opportunity to advocate a radical alternative to New Labour’s grossly inadequate anti-poverty strategy.

That would involve such things as:
* Full employment; publicly funded job creation especially in the public services
* A much higher minimum wage, the same for all from 16 and upwards.
* An increase in benefits across the board, linked to average wages; restore benefit rights to 16-17 year olds!
* Abolish testing and league tables in schools; scrap the Academy school building programme; bring back community-based comprehensive schools,
* End all incarceration of children
* Rebuild and increase funding for social services, youth services, child protection and health services.