Is the UK welfare state keeping the poor poor?

In the UK, education -- formerly the path to social mobility -- is failing poor kids; and the welfare state is actually a jobs programme for middle class women

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I moved to Northern Ireland in 2013 with my life in ruins, and found a welcoming society with easy access to a good school for my son, and just enough in state benefits to allow me to get back on my feet. For that I will be eternally grateful. 

Here, education for middle-class kids is still a fairly solid proposition. At least parents here do not feel the need to sacrifice their children’s well-being on the altar of wokeness. But education’s old role as an engine of class mobility, which it was when my father used it to become the first person in his family to go to university, has sputtered out. The deeper fault line in British society is class, not race.

And in that regard, the situation is dismaying.  In Northern Ireland,  primary (elementary) schools rank among the best in the world, except for Protestant boys from working class areas, who a few generations ago would have been the ones to leave school and build the ships that Belfast was so famous for. Now, this formerly highly employable group languishes at the bottom of the league tables, with only Roma and Traveller  children (what we used to call gypsies) faring worse in education. While there are no doubt many factors causing this, (loss of livelihood first among them), the system that was set up as a safety net is letting these kids fall through.

Why did I not fall through that net? I can’t scientifically compare my individual and brief experience with the experience of an entire demographic over several generations — but I can say this with certainty: I was raised in a culture where ambition and expectations of professional success were simply part of the air I breathed. My expectations of myself were enough to push me forward through tough times.

In Northern Ireland, a place with a long legacy of violence, poverty and associated trauma, it feels like there is no economy outside the welfare state and the huge bureaucracy required to administer it. But that overweening bureaucracy can be felt in much more dynamic parts of the UK as well —  even where the economy and culture are most vibrant. And long before COVID, even London — that centre of global capital — had a strangely centralised, planned-economy feel to it. 

TEACHING THE POOR TO FAIL

And what has this costly bureaucracy delivered for the underprivileged children of Britain? 

A system designed to keep people at the bottom of the pile, according to a short documentary made by a young woman named Sophie Sandor, the daughter of a chip shop waitress. Her film, “Teaching the Poor to Fail,” points out that a huge rise in spending since the Blair government has not correlated to improved outcomes among working-class kids. 

 “It’s not about money. It’s about ideas. And the ideas that are in the education system are preventing real growth,” said Katherine Birbalsingh, a well-known education reformer and headmistress of a London free (charter) school.

Poor behaviour in schools, which is common in working class areas, and a culture of low expectations are keeping those kids from what they could otherwise achieve academically and in  life. This devastating dynamic follows children up and out of the school system and through their lives, according to many of those who have lived it.

The working class, a once economically mighty and socially cohesive group, has been eviscerated by global and local forces, made up of a mixture of economics, politics and culture. The once great welfare state, which my working-class father spoke so highly of and which gave him access to a life his father could never have imagined, is no longer fit for purpose. Its diminishment is not the only factor driving the working class into the ground, but it is one of them.

To put it bluntly, the welfare state has transmogrified into the poverty industry. The poverty industry just so happens to employ, not those working-class people who need access to decent jobs, but rather a lot of university educated, middle class people whose taxpayer-funded salaries depend on “caring” for these poorer people.   

KEEPING POOR PEOPLE POOR

If you really think about, it’s not in the interest of professional care bureaucrats to create a system that eliminates poverty (if that were even possible for a bureaucracy to do, and it is not.) Their interest lies in keeping poor people poor, otherwise there would be no way to justify their jobs.

Of course these university educated, middle class poverty industry employees sincerely believe they are helping. But are they?

According to Darren McGarvey, a Glaswegian poet and writer, they are not — or at least not always. McGarvey grew up in a rough part of a rough city, with an alcoholic for a mother, and as a result had a lot of interaction with the professional carers who make up the poverty industry.

“In Scotland, the poverty industry is dominated by a left-leaning, liberal, middle-class… They regard themselves as champions of the underclass and therefore, should any poor folk begin to get their own ideas or, God forbid, rebel against the poverty experts, the blame is laid at the door of the complainants for misunderstanding what is going on. In fact, these types are often so certain of their own insight and virtue that they won’t think twice before describing working class people they purport to represent, as engaging in self-harm if they vote for a right-wing political party.”

Darren was one of the lucky ones in that he was able to parlay his grim story and his gift with words into work as a rapper, social commentator and author. But that did not give him license to question the system.  

“I was learning that even the harshest childhood experience wouldn’t get you a free pass to cast a critical eye on the structures around you,” he writes. He learned that his personal story of deprivation was like a “window dressing that is required before the great and the good become willing to take lower class people seriously.” 

The basic but truthful statement — in order to fix the system you must first fix yourself — is just not an acceptable position to the professionals, McGarvey writes.

“An honest conversation … is too politically difficult to have… also because there is a certain level of personal responsibility involved that’s become taboo to acknowledge on the left.“

This is the same trap the well-meaning white anti-racists fall into in the US, especially the middle-class white women who are driven with an almost messianic fervour to stick their noses in the business of the struggle for black “liberation;” jumping into complex and multi-faceted problems that their limited and highly privileged experience gives them zero insight into.

Always question government “help”

Addiction and mental health are defining issues for deprived communities. And they are problems that must be overcome primarily on an individual level. A mother cannot “fix” an addict son or daughter, neither can a social worker, a teacher or god forbid a politician. While the road can be signposted by the folks that love or support the addict, ultimately it’s a journey the addict must walk alone.

Many working-class people are “trapped in a spin-cycle of stress and thoughtless consumption,” McGarvey writes.  

“Yet, rather than integrate this truth into our analysis, we have allowed right wing movements to monopolise the concept of personal agency and the notion of taking responsibility. Worse, we vilify anybody who implies that poor people may sometimes play a role in their own circumstances.” 

“The objective truth,” according to McGarvey, is “that many people will only recover from their mental health problems, physical illnesses and addictions when they, along with the correct support, accept a certain level of culpability for the choices they make. Yet, such an assertion has become offensive to our ears despite being undeniably true.”

Helplessness is taught and the teaching begins early.

HOW CAN WE FIX THIS? STOP TRYING TO FIX THIS

A healthy and fair economy is the one and only solution to poverty, and no single person can create that.

If you are asking yourself how can I fix poverty? Unless you are in a position to hire a low-skill, low-wage worker, then the answer is, you can’t. This is a difficult lesson to learn, especially if you are a certain type of caring, bright, educated and organised woman from a well-to-do background — full of emotional energy, a strong desire to alleviate suffering, and confidence in your own opinions. The kind of confidence that comes from being brought up in a comfortable, supportive and safe environment. 

I do have a very small, but at the same time quite radical, change to propose, to one’s mindset. Stop helping. Stop caring. Stop thinking that because you studied sociology at uni or read the Guardian every day you have the tools, the insight, the duty, the right to work actively to fulfil the needs of strangers. Make sure you don’t confuse “wise compassion” with “idiot compassion.” Make sure you do not confuse care with oppression.

Darren McGarvey said this about the damaging class dynamic between the carers and the cared for in the welfare state:

“We push the lie that trading one political or economic system for another its merely a painless formality. We set forth the proposition that it’s easier to redesign an entire society to suit our ever-evolving personal needs than it is to make some moderate adjustments to our own thinking and behaviour.”

But it’s not just those who are directly involved in the system who need to do that — it’s all of us.