Imagine: dynamising the act of giving so that the feeding of the multitude was a stage on the road to economically transforming the lives of the poor into independence. Unfortunately, we never did more than talk about it, perhaps nine years ago when I first entered the House of Lords.
But it did set me on a road that leads me to making the following plea: Let’s convert the handout to a hand-up. Let’s not just leave people stewing in need, eternally seeking the help of others.
Actually, what Welby and I were talking about was not just converting the handout to a hand-up. We were talking about getting rid of handouts and replacing them with hand-ups, something I had been going on about for the whole life of Big Issue.
It may sound like a subtle, barely distinguishable nuance, but in fact they are miles apart. For one says ‘change completely thousands of years of handouts and replace them with something totally different’. And the other asks ‘how do we convert what is into what could be?’
‘A hand-up not a handout’ was one of a cluster of slogans we launched the Big Issue with. ‘Coming up from the streets’ was another memorable one. We stole the words possibly, if I remember correctly, from president Bill Clinton; or certainly one of his team. Like Big Issue itself the idea came from America; a brash and bold endeavour to change lives in a dynamic way. But it did not always strike the right chord in the UK. Some activists were offended by the idea of calling what you gave someone – whether it was on the street or in the form of social security – a handout.
Yet it struck the right chord with others: being the only advocates of hand-ups not handouts, Big Issue found its slogan being utilised by Tony Blair in his campaign to become Britain’s prime minister. Blair seemed to want to be ‘real’ about poverty, and getting rid of dependency seemed a great possibility under his leadership.
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Alas the ‘real’ possibility under Blair came down to some good governmental housekeeping. But still we saw the increasing growth of social security – handouts – rather than the development of more hand-ups.
By the time Cameron came in, the growth of social security as the only real tool for helping people was likely to lead to cuts in support as austerity hit. As was the case. The growth of social security increased and now dominates government giving. The reformation of giving never took place and led to the current crisis in which so many people are dependent on state support. Support that, if given in a different way, could lead to work, not economic inactivity.
And of course, if anyone in government had invested in skilling people away from cheap jobs – another form of hand up – then there would not have been the need to give support to what is the ‘working poor’. One of the greatest shames of current times is the number of people needing government top-ups in order to survive. A kind of subsidy to employers in all but name.
But back to the subtleties of converting handouts into hand-ups: you can’t get rid of the desire, the human desire to give. Why would you want to?
Why not convert that natural and deeply human desire to assist into something more useful than a food parcel?
Give the food parcel and support the food parcel givers. But find a way of that becoming a step on the road to a hand-up. More thoughtfully, as far as possible convert social security into social opportunity. Don’t leave it as a warehousing, make it a precursor of change in the lives of people in need.
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Welby and I talked of replacing one with the other. Whereas the subtle and therefore clever thing is to recognise the need to give and the need to take. But turn such a process into a step on the road to independence.
That will take a lot of re-thinking. A lot of re-tooling governmental and civil service mechanisms of social delivery.
Yes, back when I started to throw around the ‘hand-up not a handout’ mantra I pissed off a lot of.
But asking ‘how do you convert the handout into a hand-up’, not getting rid of them but reshaping them? That’s more to the point.
All of these things could be sorted out, and we can learn how to do it, when government wakes up to the need for a Ministry of Poverty Prevention and Cure, rather than leaving eight government departments to continue with policy cock-ups. MOPPAC will come some day. Because poverty does crush all our efforts.
John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words here.
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