John Veit-Wilson (Newcastle University)
Talking about life chances in the UK at present inevitably also means talking about the consequences of inequality and poverty and the possibilities of social mobility. There’s a lot to be said, and naturally scholars want to say it all, or as much of it as they’ve themselves grasped. Whether or not that makes for lively academic and professional conferences, it’s no use when snappy concision is what’s needed for public and media impact. When I was asked to comment at the end of the recent event Setting a course for life chances: a new direction, it seemed to me that instead of summaries or key points something which did have to be said was what had not been mentioned by other speakers. This isn’t a matter of proverbial unmentionable elephants but of ghost subjects which haunt all these discussions and which everyone’s a bit frightened of. Three of them floated around and need confrontation.
First, when we talk about life chances stunted by poverty, whose idea of poverty are we talking about? The stereotype of the family in poverty whose children are deprived of well-rounded socialisation and lack skills from an early age is one which has haunted discussions of poverty for well over a century. When I started working on poverty in the 1950s it was known as ‘the problem family’. While politicians changed the name in more recent years, for instance to ‘the troubled family’, John Welshman’s historical review (2007) and Stephen Crossley’s research (2016) into current approaches both show how for many decades families struggling to cope with combinations of low incomes, bad jobs, inadequate public resources and insufficient social networks have been victimised as social problems to others and blamed for their own misfortunes. Zombie arguments, another kind of ghost, are brought to life by politicians time and again, however often the stakes of empirical evidence (such as that of Tracy Shildrick and her colleagues, 2012; 2012) are hammered through them. It can’t be repeated too often that there’s no evidence of individually transmitted deprivation nor of generations of unemployed families; there are instead politically-controlled social institutions which maintain successive generations in poverty and low-demand labour markets which encourage cycles of low-pay-no pay experiences for low-skilled workers.
What’s rarely commented on is that this picture of deprived lives is framed by people, often politicians and professionals, who are not poor and whose life experiences have rarely if ever included the kinds of enforced deprivations and exclusions which they describe, criticise and intervene in. Even when done with sympathy the process is one described as ‘othering’ people (Lister 2004), or by the US politician Sargent Shriver, head of its War on Poverty programme, as seeing society divided into ‘We the People and They the Poor’. Hence the poverty which is so often unthinkingly portrayed is individualised, behavioural, pathological and a minority experience. Research into how the UK population talks about minimum acceptable living standards for everyone (Bradshaw et al. 2008; JRF 2016; MIS 2016] and minimum necessities characterising poverty (Fahmy et al. 2015) show judgemental differences between minimum standards for ‘us’ or for ‘them’. So whose poverty standards are we using when we talk about life chances, what we think of as enough for ‘Them’, or as appropriate for ‘Us’?
That leads to the second ghost in the discussion of life chances, and it’s well illustrated by the current arguments about grammar schools. They are described as improving the life chances of bright children growing up in poor families, sometimes identified as those entitled to claim free school meals which identifies only a very narrow range of households. But without even going into the questions of what ‘bright’ means and whether the evidence shows that such children do better in non-selective schools, the question remains, what about the life chances of those thus selected for education in secondary modern schools? Whatever the examples chosen, we have to explain whether we are concerned about the life chances of only some children (the weak version) or of all children (the strong version), and what the policy consequences of this profound difference are.
The third ghost is what is meant by the phrase ‘social mobility’ which ‘life chances’ are meant to improve. The fluctuations in occupational class mobility between generations and within careers are largely explained by changes in the labour market in the last half century, first demanding more educated employees for earlier decades of growth and then rejecting less skilled workers in the later de-industrialising ones. This isn’t something that can be explained or cured by focusing on the life chances of individual workers. As other countries show, higher education doesn’t guarantee jobs, let alone higher pay and status: those outcomes depend on sufficient labour market demand. Even the idea of zero-sum (i.e. one person’s gain is another’s loss, so they sum to zero) competitive social mobility is dubious when, the evidence richly suggests, the unskilled children of better-off parents fail to move to lower-status jobs. Instead of the weak notion of mobility to higher earnings of a few, shouldn’t all children be removed from poverty and enabled to find decent employment in a labour market offering openings to all kinds of skill and personality, the strong version in which income and status differentials are such that everyone can be respected in whatever position they are? What conceptions of social mobility are we furthering?
Each of these three ghosts raises neglected questions whose answers reflect conflicting models of society, on the one hand stratified but offering enhanced life chances to selected new entrants while leaving the structural rationing of opportunities for future decent lives largely unchanged, and the other offering similar opportunities to all children so that, whoever they are, their aspirations are not chances but guarantees. These are of course ideological questions and academics prefer to avoid them in scholarly contexts. But as soon as we prepare to show our engagement with social issues like these and want to make a policy impact on them, we have to confront and address them. It may be contentious, it’s often frustrating and unrewarding, but it is inevitable.
John Veit-Wilson is Emeritus Professor of Social Policy of Northumbria University and Guest Member of staff in Sociology at Newcastle University. He was also one of the founding members of the Child Poverty Action Group.
References
Bradshaw, Jonathan, Sue Middleton, Abigail Davis, Nina Oldfield, Noel Smith, Linda Cusworth, and Julie Williams (2008). A Minimum Income Standard for Britain: What people think. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
Crossley, Stephen (2016). “Realising the (troubled) family, crafting the neoliberal state.” Families, Relationships and Societies 5: 2, 263-279.
Fahmy, Eldin, Eileen Sutton, and Simon Pemberton (2015). “Are We All Agreed? Consensual methods and the ‘necessities for life’ in the UK today.” Journal of Social Policy 44: 3, 591-610.
JRF (2016). “UK Poverty: causes, costs and solutions.” York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
MIS (2016). “A Minimum Income Standard for the UK in 2016.” York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
Lister, Ruth (2004). Poverty. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Shildrick, Tracy, Robert MacDonald, Colin Webster, and Kayleigh Garthwaite (2012). Poverty and Insecurity. Life in low-pay, no-pay Britain. Bristol: Policy Press.
Shildrick, T, R MacDonald, A Furlong, J Roden, and R Crow (2012). Intergenerational Cultures of Worklessness? A qualitative exploration in Glasgow and Middlesbrough. York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
Welshman, John (2007). From Transmitted Deprivation to Social Exclusion. Policy, poverty, and parenting. Bristol: Policy Press.