- On Sunday she wore blue stockings, a yellow skirt and a bright red blouse;
- On Monday she wore the same.
- On Tuesday she wore a bright red blouse, blue stockings and a yellow skirt;
- On Wednesday she dressed the same;
- On Thursday again the red, the yellow and the blue;
- On Friday again the same.
- On Saturday she didn’t come out.
- On Sunday she wore blue stockings, a yellow skirt and a bright red blouse.
Kathleen is 9 and is one of a, too large, minority living in poverty. She lives in the old
Lancashire town of
Blackmills, with its population of 33,000. The declining cotton industry of Blackmills has been supplemented by a large nearby engineering industry and arms factory, together with entry into textiles. Unlike many of the surrounding towns, Blackmills cannot be described as a depressed area where unemployment is disturbingly acute. The housing is predominantly old and the red brick terraced rows of houses, 2 up, 2 down, built for the cotton workers towards the end of the 19th century, were not erected with an eye to
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design. The majority were built without bathrooms and are still without them where no Local Authority grant has been obtained for installation. Most still have the lavatory outside in the back yard (no gardens). The main road, one of Lancashire’s main highways, is full of flashy, newly-
built supermarkets which compete with the two market places which open three times a week. A view of Blackmills from the hills on the edge of the
Pennines is generally unpleasant. Dozens of factory chimneys incessantly belch out palls of black smoke which mingle with the smoke of the smaller coal fires which everyone burns throughout the year. The view is always hazy, summer and winter, and the houses, even the
post-war council houses, are blackened and dirty. Compared to many of the surrounding towns Blackmills is good and clean, as any of the older citizens will tell you.
There are few facilities for the children and teenagers in Blackmills. The children play in the small parks and on the streets, going up the hill on fine days. Only one primary school has its own football pitch attached to the school. There is one poorly-attended youth centre. The most popular beat-club-coffee-bar recently closed down when the lease expired and the rent went up. There are two cinemas struggling for survival. For the adults there is Bingo, the cinema, and one pub per 150 head of population.
Although there is no definitive slum area in Blackmills and one cannot walk through the streets seeing overt poverty, there is poverty here—hidden behind the skirts of the Welfare State—as indeed there is throughout the country.
The work of Professors
Townsend,
Abel Smith and
Titmuss have shown us that poverty exists on a vast scale in this country and hits hardest those who are most helpless—
the children. Peter Townsend points out (letter,
Guardian,
8.7.67) that the
Ministry of Social Security (MSS) drew a very severe poverty line when it arrived at its, already high, poverty figure. He accuses the Ministry of not asking the right questions and comments “… instead of 280,000 families (with 910,000 children) having been found in the summer of 1966 to have resources less than requirements, there would probably have been, judging from the report (MSS) and other sources, at least 450,000 (with over 1,400,000 children).” These revelations about the level of poverty become more alarming when one realises that in this age of affluence where the standard of living is rising (for some) and the cost of living rising (for all), the amount of real poverty has risen sharply, e.g. since 1954. Poverty can rise while standards rise and now (not a new phenomenon), many families, whose breadwinner is in full-
time employment, are living in poverty, well below the MSS basic subsistence level. Poverty cannot be seen solely as the result of unemployment and sickness (physical, mental or social) but also as a result of a hopelessly inadequate Welfare State and straight capitalist profiteering and exploitation. The majority of families
44
living in poverty have at least one person in employment which means that their poverty is hidden from the bureaucrats at the
Labour Exchange and Social Security as they may never have recourse to draw benefits that the Welfare State has to offer.
In Blackmills the wages for unskilled workers are low. Unskilled labourers in textiles only earn between £8 to £11 per week. Women workers in textiles earn the same. Building labourers can earn up to £25 to £30 per week by breaking their backs seven days every week, weather permitting, but this is very uncertain money and all too frequently they receive an insulting wage. There is very little construction work in Blackmills and building workers go far afield to find the well-paid jobs. Where these low paid workers are the “honest poor” always trying to make the best of it, budgeting their money as wisely as possible, never wasting a farthing, and just managing week by week, they will rarely see the man at the Dole office and no one will officially hear of their plight. It is easy to discover that unemployment has risen in Blackmills from 318 to 479 in one year (how many children are dependent on these 479 breadwinners we are not told) and that about 125 of these unemployed are receiving supplementary benefit, but it is almost impossible to discover the families in need who are on very low incomes, often supporting large families. These families would once have been called “the deserving poor” who are often too proud or ignorant to admit their poverty.
The proposals made by the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) would help these families where they have numerous children (and poor families are usually large families). One of the ways CPAG propose to alleviate family poverty is by greatly increasing family allowances and abolishing income tax relief for children. “This would leave the net income of well-to-do families unchanged, except for those in the surtax class; the whole of the increased expenditure would be concentrated on the poorer families, without the need for a means test” (Poverty, No. 3, Summer ’67). There is no indication that the Labour Government have any intention of carrying out these proposals or any others which would make even their own alleged concept of the Welfare State a reality.
The Welfare State allegedly exists so that people do not fall into poverty. Not only do successive Governments shield themselves from knowing the full extent of poverty amongst children, but this Government deliberately and callously makes sure that those families who are already poor, stay poor. The wage stop is one of their more insidious weapons. “This is the rule which enables the Ministry of Social Security to pay less than the basic supplementary benefit rate when a man is sick or unemployed, thus deliberately keeping the family in poverty. Some 30,000 families suffer under this vicious rule, including over 100,000 children” (
Poverty, No. 3). In effect, the wage stop means that a man can get no more from Social Security than his potential earnings
45
would be if he were in employment. The figure for potential future earnings seems to be arrived at in a rather random way. “The outcome of this combination of guesswork and rule of thumb is that normal earnings are assessed at astonishingly low levels—
mostly between £9 10s. and £11 10s. in the 52 cases investigated”
[*] (
New Society, 14.12.67).
The Government are under tremendous pressure to change the wage-stop rule, largely thanks to the CPAG and social workers dealing with poverty. Child Care Officers automatically assist wage-stopped families in getting their benefits increased. They have used their influence at all levels to exert tremendous pressure on the managers of the MSS to implement the wage stop in a liberal way. In Blackmills they have been largely instrumental in getting the number of wage-stop cases down to about 12 from many times that number.
The children’s department are in a particularly good position to exert their influence as they, more than any other agency, deal first-hand with poverty and its effect on children.
One of the special difficulties the children’s department has had to overcome is general lack of sympathy for the people who they try to help. These are more often than not “the undeserving poor”; problem families, perhaps better described as families with problems, which are often so insurmountable that the family breaks down. The breakdown of a family cannot be attributed to one single cause. There may be matrimonial difficulties; the parents may have unstable, inadequate personalities, or maybe mental illness. Large families, sickness and unemployment, and particularly poverty, where the children are suffering, will all bring the family to the attention of the children’s department. The family is usually referred to the department for some form of “anti-social” behaviour like non-payment of rent, juvenile delinquency, mental illness, mistreatment of children, and such like, but it is generally found that central to the problem of the family is inadequate personality, large families and poverty. It is easy to imagine how mothers of large families can be driven to distraction by the sheer physical effort of looking after large, perhaps unruly, families, let alone the mental anxiety of living on impossibly low wages. The children’s parents are often under-educated and inadequate. They have no idea how to help themselves and feel that their environment controls them as they have no apparent control over their environment. Why does a man go on having child after child when he is earning a mere £10 a week? It would seem that children are just part of the things which happen to him.
When pressure becomes too great for poeple they break down and display a variety of anti-
social behaviour. In Blackmills the young lorry driver, earning £12 a week, already with six children aged 1 to 8, tried to escape through gambling which became compulsive. He prob
46
ably gambled no more than many other families could tolerate but because he couldn’t pay his council house subsidised rent of 25/- per week his family was investigated. It was found that the children lacked many bare essentials, but the family, now at least, is receiving some help.
The woman of 30, husband left, who, as often as possible, gets out to the smart-set pub, looking pretty, leaves behind three children sleeping in the same bed with only one blanket and no sheets. They are poorly clothed and usually grubby. There is no furniture in the front room and the house is dirty. When she became ill and very weak she still had to cope with the children. So far, she gets no direct help from any source.
There are the fathers who drink most of the money away, perhaps because they cannot face the thought that even if they didn’t drink there still wouldn’t be enough money to feed the children properly. Child care officers are very pragmatic in such situations. There is no question of moralizing. The children need help and as far as possible they give it, realising that to split a family up is usually worse for the child than living with inadequate parents whose major crime, more often than not, is poverty. They tend to have a liberal—if not at times a libertarian—approach to their work.
In Blackmills there are various other organisations which work on the fringes of the problem of poverty. The NSPCC (who have also come to realize that prosecution is no answer to cruelty) work in close liaison with the children’s department. Many of their cases are caused by poverty and their help tends to be practical. The WVS gives clothes to the poor but only when they “bring a note from someone in authority, like a doctor or a vicar” (WVS worker). The church-run Moral Welfare Association tends to help unmarried mothers.
In effect, it is only the child welfare officers who really come to grips with the children in poverty in Blackmills, and attempt to nurse the problem families back into some kind of stability. Gone are the days when they saw their function as keeping the poor “happy in their misery”. They now see themselves as a professional body exerting influence on the Government to take real steps to alleviate poverty.
But it has taken a group like the CPAG to come up with a definite practical plan which could reform the present situation immediately in a way which would reduce some of the worst effects of poverty. They have really hit upon the crux of the problem. Whilst social workers and others see the problem families and offer what help they can, there are countless others involving over 1,000,000 children who are living in poverty with no one to help.
Perhaps the parents are not anti-social enough!
* Investigated by the Supplementary Benefits Commission.
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Some morning, after a star- Has hung over our house all night,
- We might walk forth and recognise things:
- This would be one miracle worth seeing—
- Energy working on our values
- To create something out of nothing.
- And what might we see?
- That boy with the twelve-month running nose,
- is not just a pillar of snot
- Trying to annoy us,
- But a person of flesh and blood
- With other things to see besides a nose—
- No shoes, no fruit, no underwear—
- These are the things his presence screams at us.
- The feeling that a surplus of food
- Gives us a well-earned condescension
- Over the ones whose children
- Sit and wait, and who, finally,
- Are destroyed by the great bitch, hope,
- Would be seen as our greatest shame.
- I’m not setting out a catalogue
- To gratify complacency:
- A star did shine over our house last night,
- But we, the strong, the good, the beautiful,
- Remained impregnable.
