Overcoming poverty is not a task of charity, it is an act of justice. Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is manmade and can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.
Nelson Mandela
The health and well-being of human beings and the planet is still being pitted against an out of control capitalism defined by excessive consumption and unbridled growth compounded by the lie of balanced budgets and future tax burdens.
In this week’s news, the plight of many poor families struggling to feed their children has yet again come into the spotlight, in what has hitherto been one of the richest countries in the world. The increase in poverty and hunger demonstrated over a decade with the growing number of food banks and other charities has been noted on many occasions in previous MMT Lens blogs.
Covid-19 has exacerbated what was already a rising concern and has left many families stressed and under pressure. Back in July whilst Boris Johnson invited people to spend and spend some more, and Rishi Sunak offered his ‘eat out to help out scheme’ financed from the public purse, those already on limited incomes made worse by the current crisis had no such opportunity.
In the same month, the footballer Marcus Rashford raised public awareness of the plight of families struggling to feed their children and ran a successful campaign to force the government to provide funding for school meals during the summer holidays.
Following the government’s rejection of Rashford’s proposal this week to extend free school meals to holiday breaks including Christmas and Easter, he has pledged to continue his campaign.
He tweeted on 15th October:
It’s … not for food banks to feed millions of British children but here we are. 250% increase in food poverty and rising. […] For too long this conversation has been delayed. Child food poverty in the UK is not a result of Covid-19. We must act with urgency to stabilise the households of our vulnerable children.
His stark comments clearly point to government policies which have directly impacted on the lives of some of the poorest people in our communities, prior to and post-Covid and which, in the future, will affect a broader section of the working population as jobs are lost and the economy destabilises.
It has been estimated by the Food Foundation think tank that as many as 900,000 more children have applied for free school meals, adding to 1.4 million who have already claimed. This will most certainly be the tip of the iceberg over the coming months.
The picture that is increasingly emerging as the economy slows and with the prospect of more business closures and redundancies, should be a serious cause for concern in relation to the consequences for families and their children.
Earlier this week Channel 4 News covered a disturbing report about the rise in child poverty in the Midlands and the North of England where it is, according to figures just published, rising the fastest. Magic Breakfast, a national charity which shockingly provides 48,000 breakfasts nationally, says that demand has increased as a result of the pandemic.
With a particular focus on a breakfast club in a Birmingham school which is handing out breakfast parcels to children to take home, the headteacher said some struggling families had been unable to claim free school meals because they were not eligible for social security benefits and that others who had suffered cuts to household income could still not meet the threshold for free school meals. Commenting that school meals cost £45 a month per child which for many was a great deal of money she said that she had had cases where parents had come to the school with their household bills and bank statements to show that they can’t pay.
As the Channel 4 news reporter commented ‘Child poverty shamed Britain even before the pandemic.’
To highlight growing concerns in political circles a former advisor to the government on homelessness warned that the UK faces a ‘period of destitution’ in which ‘families can’t put shoes on children’. Dame Louise Casey indicated that the proposed reduced level of support would compound the problems faced by growing numbers of families. She criticised the government’s claim that its priority was to protect jobs and incomes saying that many people still risked ‘falling into poverty’.
Along with the threat that the uplift to Universal Credit and Working Tax Credit would not be extended beyond April 2020, the prospects for many families is potentially dire as many more people not able to cover essential bills fall into debt, thus putting further strain on their finances.
The question we should be posing is how has this situation arisen and what can be done to alleviate it? The trail leads always back to government.
While the government propaganda machine promotes Rishi Sunak’s generosity from an ivory tower of ministerial plenty and lauds its additional spending, it is in reality, a fraction of what it needs to do to protect citizens. Not just in the coming months but in the coming years, as the fallout from Covid-19 continues to play out on the economy and the lives of those affected not just by the pandemic but by the compounded consequences of years of austerity and employment policies which have allowed incomes and living standards to fall.
Whilst the government is certainly right to suggest that it should not be for schools to provide pupils with food during the school holidays, it has nothing to do, as the government keeps claiming, with its monetary generosity during these last few months (which one can most certainly take issue with).
The policymakers in Westminster have chosen not to acknowledge the impact of the political decisions which have led to this situation in the first place and well before the pandemic hit and indeed have tried to dress them up as successful outcomes.
Yes, we certainly need a long-term plan to combat hunger, but one that does not involve charitable organisations to fill the gap left by a deliberately negligent government or making people feel as if somehow it is their fault for the situation they find themselves in.
We must firmly reject the implied judgement on people who have fallen on bad times, not of their own making. For too long the blame game has allowed the government to divide the nation when the truth of the matter is that it is government itself which has failed citizens through its policy actions and spending decisions.
The cuts to public spending, the devastating consequences of reforms to social security, government’s ideological adherence to employment policies which allow business to exploit working people through controlling wages and insecure working practices have all played a role.
The rise in charitable food banks, community meal provision, homelessness and increasing private indebtedness is symptomatic of a government which has allowed this unnecessary and damaging state of affairs to exist.
The government’s justification for this truly repugnant state of affairs which has led the government to rule out giving more support to workers and businesses hit by this week’s new lockdowns in the north is because it claims it would cost too much. So once again we are in a situation where government ministers cynically use false narratives to explain their decisions.
The Communities secretary Robert Jenrick said earlier this week that the nation is in a ‘deep recession’, that the ‘the national debt is rising’ and therefore the government is limited in what it can do to protect jobs.
Once again this is a clear demonstration of the abdication of government responsibility for employment, social cohesion and economic well-being. People have become a secondary consideration to the corporate interests, politicians serve and benefit from through the revolving door.
It is regrettable, but understandable, that over a decade and more the nation has accepted the presence of food banks and other charitable organisations as an unavoidable and normal feature of British life, as if somehow the government had no other choice but to cut its spending. The public has up until now accepted the narrative that difficult decisions must be made to get the public finances in order.
After the huge rounds of public spending which challenge the ingrained public preconceptions of how the government spends, the shine of these fairy tale narratives is hopefully beginning to wear off – even as Rishi Sunak promises at the Conservatives virtual conference that the government can always be relied upon the ‘balance the books.’
It cannot be emphasised too strongly that the tragedy of hunger and poverty is one that is avoidable. The government could avert it with a simple instruction to the central bank to spend sufficient money into existence to alleviate that hunger and struggle at such a critical time. That it has been a choice not to, should be the point at which we stand up and argue for real change.
And yet, instead, the monetary reality of the government as the monopoly currency issuer is hidden behind a screen of smoke and mirrors which continued this week when the IFS (Institute of Fiscal Studies) suggested that taxes may have to rise at some point in the future given the huge spike in government ‘borrowing’ this year to deal with the economic fallout of the pandemic. Saying clearly and quite rightly that tax increases would be the wrong action at the moment, it then went on to reinforce the message that once the economy had been restored to health the government would have to get the public finances back on track with a round of ‘fiscal tightening’.
And so, the active and deliberate reinforcement of a lie sets the scene at some time in the future for more unnecessary and damaging punishment which will not, in reality, be linked to whether it is monetarily affordable but the government’s political agenda in creating a flow of public money into private profit and the further destabilisation of public services.
After 10 years of fiscal tightening following the Global Financial Crash which has left our public infrastructure in tatters, have we learned nothing?
While the likes of the IFS and the IMF accept that we need to limit the economic damage caused by the virus and address poverty, unemployment and inequality through higher public spending, they always do so with false ‘borrowing cheaply’ narratives, pumping the belief that we are at the mercy of money lenders and the implication that with the exponential growth of public debt there will be a price to pay … but not quite yet.
Whilst there may be a sea change in economic thought occurring as governments spend to keep economies afloat, it is important that the work to raise public awareness of the real choices governments face continues. These are not linked to balance sheets they are ones related to real resources. In the words of the economist Ellis Winningham ‘, we will always have the ‘money’ to do whatever our real resources will allow us to do.’ That is the only constraint. And the challenge is both to match spending to available resources and determine how those resources will be distributed within the nation and for whose benefit.
Deborah Harrington, a member of GIMMS’ advisory board, also made it absolutely clear this week to those on the left who continue to tout the lie about taxpayers’ money on various social media sites that:
“Covid has demonstrated that the government does not need one penny of taxes to ‘pay for’ what it needs. It has neither raised taxes nor sold bonds to ‘finance’ its spending. The money has been created pure and simple. It wasn’t borrowed and it wasn’t collected in extra taxes – in fact, tax receipts have fallen, obviously, as incomes have dropped.
The whole story of tax and borrowing disguises this power at the heart of government. It makes people believe there’s a limited pot to dip into. That to pay Peter you have to rob Paul. It’s the driving argument behind austerity and if you continue to support it as an argument ‘we need tax rises/future generations will pay for it’ then you – yes, YOU, reading this – are giving your support to an agenda that destroys public services and leaves people in poverty and homelessness.
What we build society with and what we create goods and services with is our work. Government simply chooses how much money it will use in any given year to divert those resources, through its taxation and spending policies, to public purposes.”
Whilst we seem a long way from it at the moment, creating a more equable, fair and environmentally sustainable world should be at the top of the political agenda. The only way of achieving those aims is a long-overdue public conversation about our political, economic and societal priorities, examined within the context of the constraints that exist to deliver them and how the share of finite resources should or could be redistributed to serve the public purpose.
The question always returns to what sort of society do we want to live in? One where excessive wealth in few hands dominates, where charity becomes the norm for delivery of services to a ‘deserving’ population and growth and consumption is the drug which drives the economy?
Or alternatively, a different but better world where people have the wherewithal to live comfortably and sustainably with hope for the future?
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