What do children do to make themselves poor? And how we can we stop them doing it? It looks very bad having to announce that their numbers are growing (a 200,000 increase to 2.5 million children, the first rise in 10 years) so something should be done. About the figures, not the children or the poverty, you understand. The current definition of child poverty pertains to a child who lives in a household with an income below 60% of the national average. David Cameron does not like this way of measuring poverty and wants to redefine it. Of course he does: globalisation and technology have driven wages down while we are being asked to swallow the political narrative of a fast-growing economy.
The notion of a government’s success, competence even, does not sit well with growing numbers of children living in poverty or people using foodbanks. To ramp up the recovery, ways need to be found to measure poverty that don’t, you know, include a lack of money. Although money is the absolute measure of success for the rich, for the poor – who are not only always with us, but also utterly defined by us – money is somehow abstract. The poor are poor in multiple ways, many of which are self-inflicted. Otherwise, how can we explain such a level of child poverty in a rich country without being embarrassed?
In 1999, Gordon Brown said: “Let us be remembered as the generation that won the war against child poverty that has shamed Britain.” This, clearly, is not the war New Labour is remembered for. It set a target to halve child poverty by 2010 and end it by 2020. Neither happened, or will happen. Instead, the party’s 2015 manifesto said: “… the commitment to ending child poverty by 2020 is very unlikely to be met. However, we will never forget how important a decent basic income is to a child’s prospects and wellbeing. That is why we will keep the child poverty targets …” The targets were retained, but with no end-date in sight. This is also a new definition of target.
But surely the key part of the 2010 Child Poverty Act, passed at the fag-end of the Brown premiership to commit to the 2020 target, arose because we all accept that children have no choice about poverty. It is incumbent on all of us to help. Poor children will cost all of us eventually, say campaign groups (£29bn a year is one figure the Child Poverty Action Group cites from the cost of services, lost tax and benefits). Lives hobbled by poverty are a drag on the rest of us.
They are also a drag to live. To be poor is to live with the apprehension that nothing much can change except for the worse. Time drags on enlivened by the odd thing you want but cannot afford. Fear is the monotonous drone in your ear that tells you that the imminent collapse of one part of your life will probably bring down the whole structure. There is no safe space when you are poor. None. No wonder those who get away from poverty worry about money for the rest of their lives or gate themselves in. This idea of security, of weathering storms – this is wealth. This is health. For poor adults and their children, anxiety is a noxious gas. You breathe it in, gulping it as if it were air, and the only air you know.
Aspiration then – the wanting of more, the very thing so many are said to lack – is also this process of drawing breath. Aspiration is both a natural process and something that must be encouraged by punitive measures.
As Cameron is set to cut tax credits, the thinking is that the working poor will aspire to higher-waged jobs. As the children of low-wage households will now be further impoverished, it is no wonder Cameron seeks a redefinition of poverty. This redefinition is ongoing and purposeful. Poverty becomes about a number of things: life chances, social exclusion, bad parenting, debt, low educational attainment, family breakdown, addiction and abuse. It is no longer about a measurable amount of money. Resources in this context are whatever someone such as Iain Duncan Smith says they are.
Having been on school trips where some lunchboxes are overflowing and others contain just a bag of crisps, poverty does not feel to me to do with participation in the community; it is do with having a proper lunch. Or having broadband, or a space to work.
Stamping on the working poor by taking tax credits, by making it harder for single parents to change their circumstances, all the while protecting elderly voters, is exactly what this government said it would do. It cannot, though, deny that these new figures are shameful. Instead, it tacitly insists that inequality is the price we pay for growth.
Child poverty does not exist in some vacuum filled only with hard-done-by urchins; it is a direct consequence of policies that encourage a low-wage economy. This is a callous squandering of the social capital that is so many children’s lives.
The effective rebranding of the poor, not as people with less money than us, but as people who are less than us, is fully complete. When we are asked to believe that the root cause of poverty is not somehow to do with money, it becomes just another lifestyle choice. A poor choice indeed. The one no child ever makes.
This article war originally published in the Guardian on 24 June 2015 – http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/24/child-poverty-direct-consequence-of-david-camerons-policies