The tinderbox of poverty continues to spark social unrest

The riots a few weeks ago told a big story. That the state cannot acquiesce to disorder. That you will get sent down if you are caught. And it will put a deep hole in your life for a few years to come. Perhaps forever. I saw the rogues’ gallery of people sentenced and it showed a social uniformity of depressing scale. All without exception were not from the same social class as even that supposed working-class boy, Sir Keir Starmer.

They had the marks of labour but not of the Labour Party. Their gaunt pictures were frightening; they seemed like the lost generation of the inheritors of poverty. They had precious little skin in the game, if the game is the continuing motley of poverty here, prosperity there and never the means of crossing from one to the other. The game being that if you all buckle down and get on with it you’ll get your rewards. 

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There was a time when most of the men paraded before our eyes a few weeks back for public scrutiny would have worked in big state-sponsored businesses like the mines and shipbuilding. The vast car-building industry that even I worked in – me, the recipient of sheltered employment, as the car industry seldom made money.

Along with steel and heavy engineering they were heavily subsidised. But that was a lifetime ago, back when rather than have people on social security the state believed in creative accounting: they thought it was cheaper to keep the basic industries functioning, with state aid. For the alternative was social ruination in the festering pool of poverty support, rather than a reason to get up in the morning and get out to work. 

Time, a great killer if you’ve got lots of it spare, was then gifted to a whole generation – especially in the North, in the rough-hewn world of former industrial and mining towns. If you worked, it was not leading to prosperity but often away from it. And social security was willingly given as an alternative to skilling you up and away from need. 

The biggest lump of money ever spent by government in peacetime has been on trying to make the trauma of poverty marginally bearable. From Thatcher’s regime forward, we have seen a growing class of people who are bereft of that which will make them a well-behaved citizen, one of those who tend to live beyond the spoilage of modern life, a life that promotes nothing other than the misery of cheap jobs and broken social promises that are dressed up as barely liveable social security. 

It’s poverty. It’s need. It’s great holes in education. It’s wasting money to the tune of billions of pounds on simply warehousing people whose forefathers had some working purpose. 

I urge you to watch a great film called Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, starring the late and great Albert Finney. A working-class young man makes bike parts in Nottingham in a factory and is belligerent and likely to get drunk and into fights. Back in 1960 when it was made, even this truculent 20-year-old will settle down, because he’ll be in council housing that’s newly constructed and in semi-skilled, reasonably paid work in the years to come. But his son, or grandson, could be one of the troubled faces in the papers and on screens a few weeks back. 

Immigration has added to the pluses and minuses of this cocktail of a lost generation of men with no purpose. The poorest of areas have been magnets to the poorest coming in from the former empire. Poor with poor is not a recipe for social co-operation when serious investment in helping the old poor and the newly arriving poor to become communities, through the power of better education and better work, does not happen. There has been no investment in eradicating the poverty that breeds pernicious ignorance between people. 

To some the UK is seen as a social sponge that draws in the destitute from elsewhere, without addressing the problems that exist here. The cack-handed policy of sticking arrivers in hostels and hotels and not trying to use their skills to become wage earners is perverse. 

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Porous borders, without having a policy of addressing displacement as a new phenomenon, is hitting Europe. Prejudice is rising in all economies because this can be an economic, poverty-increasing issue. 

We never straightened out poverty after the creation of the Welfare State in 1948. We never addressed the impact of growing immigration, where the people arriving were simply added to the poor of the UK; the rewards of opportunity were never shared round. Poor people helped supply an increasing middle class with access to cheap food and transport, and underpaid NHS staff. Social peace was kept not by addressing the social and class discrepancies but by relying on the exhaustion of just being poor and hardly able to make ends meet. 

Now refugees who seek refuge in the UK, who many welcome, have to fit into this social jigsaw of deprivation, lack of opportunity and poor social conditions. For too long the exporter of people to foreign parts, the tide is turned and Europe becomes an escape route for people seeking prosperity and safety. 

How we get the message out to the people on the front line of the new arrivals is a challenge to us all. How do we explain an ever-changing world to all people who are affected by it? It took the tragic killing of three children to bring this all to a boiling point. Understanding how this groundswell of hatred came about is for us all to understand. 

We are in a poor place because we wasted money and time on trying to eradicate poverty so inefficiently; preferring to hand out relief rather than a hand up. The tinderbox of poverty has to be addressed and that will take more than “more of the same”. A call for the creation of a Ministry of Poverty Prevention is my own contribution to this ongoing need.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Big Issue. Read more of his words here.

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