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'More than 14 million people, including 4.5 million children, are living below the breadline, with more than half trapped in poverty for years, according to a new measure aimed at providing the most sophisticated analysis yet of material disadvantage in the UK.'
New study finds 4.5 million UK children living in poverty
Alison Michalska: ‘In Britain, we don’t seem to really like children’
By Patrick Butler. This article was first published in the Guardian on Wednesday 11 October 2017
‘Not only does poverty blight youngsters’ lives says Alison Michalska, president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, but it’s getting worse’
‘We have children in the city who don’t have warmth, they don’t have food, they don’t have that security that every child would want to have.’ -Alison Michalska
‘Michalska qualified as a social worker four decades ago, and reckons that her younger self would be shocked that more children live in poverty – just surviving – now than then. Four million children currently live below the poverty line, and two-thirds of those are in households where someone works. “A growing number of children in poverty is a disgrace. It’s heartbreaking. When my colleagues and I started out as youth workers in the early 1980s I don’t think we ever thought that 30 years on there would be more children in poverty. That’s a scandal.”
In the face of so much poverty and injustice , the big question of our time is: Where has our humanity gone?
“Overcoming poverty is not a task of charity, it is an act of justice….Poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. Sometimes it falls on a generation to be great. YOU can be that great generation.”-Nelson Mandela
After the best part of an hour spent discussing rising child poverty, the staggering pressures placed on young people to achieve academically at school, and the negative impact of austerity on children’s mental wellbeing and life chances, Alison Michalska reaches, with the sudden force of revelation, for a root cause of all this seemingly anti-youth policy: “The really big thing that strikes me is that as a country we don’t seem to really like children. We don’t value them. We don’t see them as a citizens of the future. We really don’t like them very much.”
On the face it, Michalska, 56, argues, there is a big policy focus on children by government, but this is all too often in effect about controlling youngsters, forcing them to conform to norms and stereotypes. You can see that cultural dislike, she says, in the continuing presence on housing estates of “no ball game” signs, or rising school exclusion rates, or the hardwired suspicion that loitering groups of teenagers are up to no good. “Teenagers like to hang around. As a teenager I hung around. Why does everyone think that is dangerous? Just because they have their hoods up, why are they dangerous?”
'Five million children across the UK face a lifetime of poverty under the new government rules'
Caption and photo: akashictimes.co.uk
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Too many youngsters, particularly those from poorer communities, are needlessly criminalised for petty misdemeanours, instantly diminishing their chances of going to college or getting a job, she believes. “I worked in a fairly affluent place where we had kids criminalised for riding the trolleys round a Tesco car park. People were complaining, the local police had to show they took it seriously; of course they caught the kids and they were cautioned or even worse, taken to court. Yes, that behaviour is stupid, but come on. The impact that has on young people’s life chances is just unbelievable.”
Michalska’s passion and directness neatly complement a policy paper published on Wednesday by the body she represents as president of the Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS). The paper is couched in more reserved language but amounts to a clear and forthright challenge to the government’s austerity programme. Cuts and welfare reforms are driving up child poverty rates, overloading child protection services and eroding youth mental health services, it points out. “ADCS members believe every child deserves a happy, safe childhood in which they can thrive not just survive,” the paper notes, adding pointedly, in a nod to the government: “We hope others do.”
A mother and son at the back of the council estate where they live
Photo:huffingtonpost.co.uk
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Michalska qualified as a social worker four decades ago, and reckons that her younger self would be shocked that more children live in poverty – just surviving – now than then. Four million children currently live below the poverty line, and two-thirds of those are in households where someone works. “A growing number of children in poverty is a disgrace. It’s heartbreaking. When my colleagues and I started out as youth workers in the early 1980s I don’t think we ever thought that 30 years on there would be more children in poverty. That’s a scandal.”
Welfare reform, Michalska says, conflicts with government rhetoric about improving children’s life chances. It punishes children indirectly, disrupting and impoverishing their lives through the strictures it imposes on their parents. In Nottingham, where she is corporate director for children and adults at the city council, an increasing number of families are finding it hard to cope: “We have children in the city who just don’t have warmth, they don’t have food, they don’t have that security that every child would want to have. Nottingham is a fabulous city with a lot going on but there are families and children who are excluded from it.”
The two-child limit on benefits is “punitive” and a “massive waste of time and money”, she says. Cuts to housing benefit force poorer families out of the area where they live: “The one thing children don’t need is having to move house every few months and change schools, having to make new friends, put down new roots. That instability damages children and it damages families.” The resulting poverty creates more children in need and directly drives up demand for expensive children’s social care services. “It’s why the [ADCS] paper focuses so much on poverty. We know that when families are in poverty and they are worried about money, if they are worried about feeding their children … the impact on children is so harmful and damaging.”
What keeps her awake at night, she says, is the impact of cuts to local government budgets. Although councils generally are not disinvesting in children’s social work, the level of cuts to other areas – youth services, family help, libraries, leisure centres, parks, “the kind of preventive services that keep social work manageable” – means the pressure on child protection will become unsustainable. The Local Government Association estimates there is a £2bn gap between funding and demand for children’s services. Michalska believes the crisis is reaching a tipping point.
Councils’ ability to cope with the demand rests on their ability to intervene and help families in need before their problems spiral to crisis point, she says. In Nottingham – an early intervention city since the early 2000s – this principle is well established. “We’ve spent a lot of money on edge-of-care services. They not only pay for themselves but they save money, and it results in better outcomes for the children.”
Photo:simplelivingwithkids.com
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Services continue to be hamstrung by funding and workforce problems. Nationally, 16% of children’s social work posts are unfilled. There is a lot you can do to retain social workers – smaller caseloads, better supervision and career development, she says. Brexit won’t help, potentially choking off a source of qualified social workers. However, better pay for social workers would help: “When I got my first social-work job I could actually afford to buy a house. Well, you are not going to do that on the average starting salary for a social worker now, of around £20k. Social workers themselves are struggling to cope, let alone the families they are working with.”
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How Labour could lead the global economy out of the 20th century
By George Monbiot. This article was first published in the Guardian on Wednesday 11 October 2017
‘The new approach could start with the idea of private sufficiency and public luxury. There is not enough physical or environmental space for everyone to enjoy private luxury: if everyone in London acquired a tennis court, a swimming pool, a garden and a private art collection, the city would cover England. Private luxury shuts down space, creating deprivation. But magnificent public amenities – wonderful parks and playgrounds, public sports centres and swimming pools, galleries, allotments and public transport networks – create more space for everyone at a fraction of the cost.’We are still living in the long 20th century. We are stuck with its redundant technologies: the internal combustion engine, thermal power plants, factory farms. We are stuck with its redundant politics: unfair electoral systems, their capture by funders and lobbyists, the failure to temper representation with real participation.'
And we are stuck with its redundant economics: neoliberalism, and the Keynesianism still proposed by its opponents. While the latter system worked very well for 30 years or more, it is hard to see how it can take us through this century, not least because the growth it seeks to sustain smacks headlong into the environmental crisis.
Sustained economic growth on a planet that is not growing means crashing through environmental limits: this is what we are witnessing, worldwide, today. A recent paper in Nature puts our current chances of keeping global heating to less than 1.5C at just 1%, and less than 2C at only 5%. Why? Because while the carbon intensity of economic activity is expected to decline by 1.9% a year, global per capita GDP is expected to grow by 1.8%. Almost all investment in renewables and efficiency is cancelled out. The index that was supposed to measure our prosperity, instead measures our progress towards ruin.
But the great rupture that began in 2008 offers a chance to change all this. The challenge now is to ensure that the new political movements threatening established power in Britain and elsewhere create the space not for old ideas (such as 20th-century Keynesianism) but for a new politics, built on new economic and social foundations.
There may be a case for one last hurrah for the old model: a technological shift that resembles the second world war’s military Keynesianism. In 1941 the US turned the entire civilian economy around on a dime: within months, car manufacturers were producing planes, tanks and ammunition. A determined government could do something similar in response to climate breakdown: a sudden transformation, replacing our fossil economy. But having effected such a conversion, it should, I believe, then begin the switch to a different economic model.
The new approach could start with the idea of private sufficiency and public luxury. There is not enough physical or environmental space for everyone to enjoy private luxury: if everyone in London acquired a tennis court, a swimming pool, a garden and a private art collection, the city would cover England. Private luxury shuts down space, creating deprivation. But magnificent public amenities – wonderful parks and playgrounds, public sports centres and swimming pools, galleries, allotments and public transport networks – create more space for everyone at a fraction of the cost.
It's time to revive public ownership and the common good
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Wherever possible, such assets should be owned and managed by neither state nor market, but by communities, in the form of commons. A commons in its true form is a non-capitalist system in which a resource is controlled in perpetuity by a community for the shared and equal benefit of its members. A possible model is the commons transition plan commissioned by the Flemish city of Ghent.
Land value taxation also has transformative potential. It can keep the income currently siphoned out of our pockets in the form of rent – then out of the country and into tax havens – within our hands. It can reduce land values, bringing down house prices. While local and national government should use some of the money to fund public services, the residue can be returned to communities.
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Couple this with a community right to buy, which enables communities to use this money to acquire their own land, with local commons trusts that possess powers to assemble building sites, and with a new right for prospective buyers and tenants to plan their own estates, and exciting things begin to happen. This could be a formula for meeting housing need, delivering public luxury and greatly enhancing the sense of community, self-reliance and taking back control. It helps to create what I call the politics of belonging.
But it doesn’t stop there. The rents accruing to commons trusts could be used to create a local version of the citizens’ wealth funds (modelled on the sovereign wealth funds in Alaska and Norway) proposed by Angela Cummine and Stewart Lansley. The gain from such funds could be distributed in the form of a local basic income.
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And the money the government still invests? To the greatest extent possible, I believe it should be controlled by participatory budgeting. In the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, the infrastructure budget is allocated by the people: around 50,000 citizens typically participate. The results – better water, sanitation, health, schools and nurseries – have been so spectacular that large numbers of people now lobby the city council to raise their taxes. When you control the budget, you can see the point of public investment.
In countries such as the UK, we could not only adopt this model, but extend it beyond the local infrastructure budget to other forms of local and even national spending. The principle of subsidiarity – devolving powers to the smallest political unit that can reasonably discharge them – makes such wider democratic control more feasible.
All this would be framed within a system such as Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics, which instead of seeking to maximise growth sets a lower threshold of wellbeing, below which no one should fall, and an upper threshold of environmental limits that economic life should not transgress. A participatory economics could be accompanied by participatory politics, involving radical devolution and a fine-grained democratic control over the decisions affecting our lives.
Who could lead this global shift? It could be the UK Labour party. It is actively seeking new ideas. It knows that the bigger the change it offers, the greater the commitment of the volunteers on which its insurgency relies: the “big organising” model that transformed Labour’s fortunes at the last election requires a big political offer.
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Could Labour be the party that brings the long 20th century to an end? I believe, despite its Keynesian heritage, it could. Now, more than at any other time in the past few decades, it has a chance to change the world.
*Read the original article: How Labour could lead the global economy out of the 20th century
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‘The truth about capitalism is out as Marx’s magic cap starts to slip’
By Giles Fraser. This article was first published in the Guardian on Thursday 5 October 2017
‘A century after the rise of the Bolsheviks, the young are reading Karl Marx again – and faith in the superstitious beliefs that underpin market economies is faltering’
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Wasn’t this supposed to be the party conference in which the Tories reminded everyone of the virtues of market capitalism? “Tories need to start explaining the unassailable truth that markets don’t just make us richer, they make us happier too,” urged the former chair of Northern Rock, Matt Ridley, in the Times. “Time for a full-throated Tory defence of enterprise and capitalism,” insisted Simon Heffer in the Telegraph. With Comrade Corbyn riding high, it has been quite some time since economic liberals have so felt so threatened to their ideological core. Next month it will be a hundred years since the Bolsheviks took power in Russia. Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the right have assumed that the argument against communism had been won, and won decisively. But the young are picking up their Karl Marx once again. And just at the point when the right seem to have forgotten their lines.
Viscount Ridley argues that capitalism makes us better people as well as richer. It is a morality driven by enlightened selfishness in which my own interests are only advanced if I look after yours as well. This is supposed to be the moral case for market capitalism: I only get to be extremely rich if you get to be a little bit richer too. This is the economy of the “invisible hand”, powered by greed, where my own desire for ever greater wealth drives ingenious new opportunities for this magical thing called growth, which in turn creates greater wealth for everyone else. Yes, capitalism is basically a superstition, a belief in the power of magic. I’m with David Attenborough: “We have a finite environment – the planet. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.”
Capitalism and Poverty in the USA. Photo: beliefnet.com
Of course, I am not the first person to argue that capitalism is based on a superstitious belief in the efficacy of magic. Marx’s Kapital, one of the great works of 19th-century atheism, is a genius attempt to disabuse us of this dangerous mystification. Of course, the god in Marx’s sights is not the one of the Bible but one celebrated by the philosophers of Enlightenment rationalism: the god of capital.
In the first chapters of Das Kapital, Marx explains how money makes money – or how, in the words of Matthew’s Gospel, “to everyone who has, more shall be given … but from the one who does not have, even what he does have shall be taken away”. Those with money are able to own the means of production and the labour needed to operate it. Throughout the whole cycle of making things and selling them on, the capitalist creates more money for themselves by getting employees to work longer and longer hours. This extra labour creates surplus value that results in profits for the capitalist.
Profit here is intrinsically exploitative – it does not exist without the extra hours worked by the capitalist’s employees. This is the source of the capitalist’s wealth, and when it is reinvested to capture an even greater share of the means of production and employ more workers, it grows off itself. Thus more and more is owned by fewer and fewer people. And money makes money, as if by magic.
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But when, with Marx, we begin to understand that money is a way of capturing a social relationship between those who own the means of production – whether factories or apps – and those who work in them or for them, we begin to recognise that capitalism is not magic but exploitative to its core. The magical quality of our faith in money and in economic growth is a deliberate mystification of the social exploitation that the capitalist – understandably – wants to cover up. And “we draw the magic cap down over eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters,” as Marx put it in the preface to Das Kapital.
All of this becomes more and more obvious as global capital seeks new and ever more ingenious forms of concentration. The generation who learned their politics through the Occupy movement have had the scales fall from their eyes. Since then the 1% has become the 0.1%. And the magic cap is beginning to slip.
Read the original article here
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Rethinking Capitalism: Is a Fairer and Moral Capitalism Possible?
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