Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Make UK Poverty History


Rough Sleeping, originally uploaded by seadipper.

I have just received the Columban Mission's quarterly news sheet Vocation for Justice. It is, as usual, an infuriating read. The latest issue deals with poverty in the UK, which, as anyone can see if they bother to look, is getting worse for some, with a widening gap between rich and poor.

But something that has been around since the late middle ages is not going to respond to an "initiative", nor to the indignation felt at this state of affairs. Sadly, organisations like Church Action on Poverty (CAP) have nothing more to offer, other than prayer and alleviative charity. These are essential, but if concerned people are not willing to get their heads around the problem at a more radical and intellectual level and start asking fundamental questions, nothing can change fundamentally, as it needs to.

Unjust Structures
The editorial talks about "unjust structures", which is a good start, but what precisely is their nature? Nowhere are they described, and the best explanation that can be given is that some people are poor because others are rich, which is far from the whole truth because it assumes, with no justification at all, that the size of the "cake" is fixed and the divisions are natural and inevitable.

Elsewhere in this issue, Niall Cooper of CAP refers to the Rowntree Foundation's report on the growing gap between rich and poor in the UK, and talks about solutions such as the Living Wage campaign. But this is no solution at all. It is nice if firms pay their cleaners and caretakers over the odds, but this begs the question of why it is that they can get away with paying the bare minimum in the first place. It also ignores the absurdity that people who earn the official minimum wage are already well over the Income Tax and National Insurance thresholds. A further difficulty is that if large numbers of people in menial jobs were paid substantially more, it would drive up housing costs and they would still be no better off. If everyone got a living wage it would not be a living wage any more! And attempting to deal with this by, for example, rent control, would lead to the large waiting lists and secondary market problems that plague the residential rental sector in Sweden.

It is impossible to get a grasp of what is happening without careful study, and "solutions" thought up in haste, in the absence of a proper understanding of the underlying economic processes have a tendency to aggravate the problems they are trying to solve.

Concerned people should move beyond the emotion of indignation and do some solid thinking on the subject. An obvious place for concerned Catholics to begin is the body of Catholic Social Teaching initiated with the publishing of Rerum Novarum in 1891. It leaves too much unsaid, but is a good starting point. If those who write for these Catholic publications are not promoting the social teachings of the church, who will?

Kommentarer

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

Importing people to sustain demand

I got involved in a discussion with a Youtuber called “Philosophy all along”. This was in connection with criticism of Trump’s policy of deporting illegal migrants, which he argued would be bad for the economy as it would reduce demand. This implies that there is a need to import people to sustain demand. There is no obvious reason why a population should not be able to consume everything that the same population produces. If it can not, then something else is going on. It is a basic principle that wages are the least that workers will accept to do a job. Wages are a share of the value added by workers through their wages. The remainder is distributed as economic rent, after government has taken its cut in taxes. Monopoly profit is a temporary surplus that after a delay gets absorbed into economic rent. Land values in Silicon Valley are an example of this; it's like a gold rush. The miners get little out of it. Rent and tax syphon purchasing power away from those who produce the g...

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...