"There is no longer primary poverty in this country," Margaret Thatcher told the Catholic Herald in 1978, five months before she became British prime minister. "There is poverty caused by not knowing how to manage the household budget, people do not know how to spend their earnings", but such poverty is not a product of social policy but a "personality defect". In her 1996 speech, six years after her party's MPs drove her out of office, Thatcher again pointed out that "poverty is not a question of wealth, but of behaviour".
Between those two statements, during her 11 years in power, the reality of Margaret Thatcher's policies - cutting the top tax rate while cutting social benefits, destroying manufacturing industry and trade unions - led to a huge increase in both poverty and inequality in Britain.
The mantra that poverty is "not a matter of wealth, but of behavior" is not specifically Thatcherian. The belief that responsibility for poverty lies with those who are poor and deprived, and that poverty and inequality are moral, not political issues, has deep historical roots and influences public policies even today.
There is a long history of blaming and even punishing the poor for their misery: from the Victorian notion of the 'undeserving poor', through the 'culture of poverty' thesis of the 1960s and New Labour's crusade against 'problem families', to Ian Duncan Smith's limit allocations for parents with more than two children to teach the poor that "children cost money", as if they didn't already know that.
In recent years, as the Tories have tried to present themselves as allies of the working class, an open conversation about class has been pushed to the background in British society. But the explosion of strikes over the past year and the fall in support for the Conservative government have brought many old themes back into circulation.
It seems as if there are two Britains: one is the one most of us live in, and the other is the one of the Tory imagination. There is Britain where last year the income of the poorest fifth of the population fell by 3,8 percent, while the income of the richest fifth increased by 1,6 percent. In that country, the former finance minister "carelessly" failed to pay more money in taxes than most nurses earn in a lifetime. In it, people die of hypothermia because they cannot afford heating.
And then there is Britain, where, as the Daily Mail writes referring to the report on "dependence on the state" by the conservative organization Civitas, more than half of the population gets "something for nothing". In that country, the income tax is supposedly a "hidden tax", forcing the richest to pay more. In it, Lee Anderson, the Tory MP for Ashfield, shares lessons for nurses on how to spend their money more wisely.
The question is whether the Daily Mail realizes that the richest 10% of citizens pay half the total income tax because they own half the wealth in this country. One might also wonder whether an MP from a party whose former leader had to take out an £800.000 loan because he couldn't survive on the Prime Minister's salary of £164.080 is in a position to lecture nurses - who earn £30.000 a year - about why they should be grateful for what they get.
The greater individuation of society in the years after Margaret Thatcher and the erosion of class as an expression of collective consciousness, enabled poverty to be presented as a product of moral failure, rather than social problems, as a consequence of individual action rather than structural inequalities.
If the long-standing belief that individual blame has distorted the debate on poverty, the debate on inequality has been influenced by a more contemporary trend: the growing tendency to see equality within the framework of "diversity". "When you ask for more equality, they give you more diversity," notes American professor Walter Ben Michaels. "But a diverse elite does not cease to be an elite because it is diverse."
Michaels' observation is part of a new collection of essays provocatively titled Every Politics Is Class Politics. He and his colleague, professor and activist Adolph Reed Jr., have written texts over the past 20 years, criticizing the shift from equality to diversity and erasing class from the analysis of inequality. Reid and Michaels do not deny the importance of racism or discrimination against women, but they insist on the centrality of class in any discussion of social inequalities.
The moral force of the demand for diversity stems from the fact that many groups—racial minorities, women, gays, and others—have historically faced discrimination and been excluded from positions of power and privilege. Striving for greater diversity is therefore understood as striving for greater equality and an attempt to remove barriers of exclusion.
Equality and diversity are not synonymous. Even as societies and institutions become more diverse, inequalities are deepening in many of them. As Reed sarcastically observes, a "moral economy" has been created where "a society in which 1% of the population controls 90% of the resources can be considered fair provided that of that 1%, about 12% are black, 12% Latino, 50% female, with appropriate the proportion of LGBT+ persons".
In other words, diversity policies do not necessarily lead to a reconsideration of inequality, but only make it "fairer". Most of those who advocate diversity policies do so because they abhor inequality. But in the transition from "equality" to "diversity" the most marginalized often remain forgotten. The focus shifted from addressing the needs of minority workers to providing better opportunities for middle-class professionals. "Just because some minorities are rich and powerful is not a victory for all black people," notes Michaels.
All the important issues of today are shaped by class divisions. And when we moralize by addressing poverty and when we address equality through the notion of diversity, we only obscure the impact of class on people's real lives.
(The Guardian; Peščanik.net; translation: M. Jovanović)
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