Once you have been poor, you always fear it. Austerity will only create more hungry children
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Version 0 of 1. The world falls in. For some unlucky people, the ceiling cracks, mould appears and there is some kind of warning that something might be happening. For others, the roof comes crashing down. It’s sudden and unexpected until one is rooting through the rubble of an old life trying to find a new one. Accounts of what it is like to be poor mount up around us like unopened bills. Sometimes people spiral down because of benefit sanctions, a sudden rent increase, an illness. Things like a faulty boiler can tip someone from “managing” to “really not managing”. Once you have been poor, you always fear it. When people talk about their high-powered, high-stress jobs, I often wonder if they even know what stress is. To not have when others have is not just a material lack; it is to live with your children in constant anxiety. So, for the festive season, we hear a lot about food banks. They are necessary, but they also function as the most tangible symbol of the cognitive dissonance that passes for political discourse. We live in the sixth-richest country in the world, yet the poorest among us have to live on handouts from charities. The choice that this represents is seen as a fact of life – like all inequality these days. Some choose to be rich and some choose to be poor. The poor often make themselves worse off by poor choices, apparently. Then their worlds can fall in and things no longer work at all, just like the cheap fairy lights these kind of people buy. I am stuck on this phrase because it’s what Gideon said when challenged about the choices he was making, cuts that the Institute for Fiscal Studies say would mean cutting the size of the state to pre-war 30s levels. He said the BBC had been hyperbolic about spending cuts: “I had all that when I was interviewed four years ago, and has the world fallen in? No, it has not.” I will take him at his word and imagine that his imaginary world is still intact. Although he got nearly all the figures wrong and missed his own targets, although even impartial financial bodies are now saying that rising inequality is hampering growth, that the trickle-down theory is the bunkum we always knew it to be, that low pay and self-employment are not adding to tax revenues, that without deliberate redistribution there is less and less disposable income to fuel markets. All of this should mean it is easy to challenge the Tories. But the anti-cuts agenda is always seen as shrill and adolescent, with austerity the only appropriate activity for consenting adults to be engaged in. We have mostly not given our consent on the big issues, though. How far do we want to shrink the state? Ed Balls has talked of “the destruction of the consensus” about what kind of country this is. It is now the kind of country where charities feed hungry children and the only people who talk about moral responsibility are clergymen. Labour are still way too reticent here, basically agreeing to the same cuts over a longer period. For all the coy sentimentality about the NHS, the privatisation is already happening. Again we have more cognitive dissonance. We may be told continually that the market magically makes things run better and is always more efficient, but this is not true of most people’s experience of it, from trains to hospitals. We don’t have to imagine what it is like when medicine is privatised. Look at dentistry and look at teeth. We are becoming like Americans, where one’s lack of income is revealed by a smile. If you have been to the parts of the US that many fly over, you will know those faces full of decay, you will know what happens when there is no social housing. Is this what we want? Faces that have fallen in on themselves? For that is the outcome of stripping down what makes us vaguely civilised. Yes, it is called the state, but everyone is scared of talking about the state now. It exists only in our peripheral vision. The Tories have effectively made it stand for the things that separate us, when in truth it stands for the things that connect us – to each other and our best selves. This disconnection is absolutely ideological and is the fundamental goal of the austerity experiment. It has sanctioned cruelty aimed specifically at disabled people, women and children. This is done in the name of competence, but the fact remains that the welfare system is propping up a low-wage economy. The opposite of this, according to Osborne, is chaos. Really? Is expecting people to be paid a living wage some sort of communist madness? Surely this is what wealth means – it is a basic requirement of a social democratic party, as is refiguring the state. Is it sensible now that the poorest people cost us too much and should therefore be made poorer? Is this all the fault of Polish beauticians and Iranian surgeons? Is talking about food banks now part of our rich festive tradition? Strangely, it feels a lot like falling to me. |