What’s a child in poverty for? Talking about, that’s what a child in poverty is for. Here’s how it goes; you take power and you want to exhibit your morality. You need a subject which is emotive, speaks to your morality and universally agreed to be something ‘we should do something about’.
Then you talk about doing something, create an action plan and set targets.Then straight back to giving corporations bungs, privatising our national assets and creating lucrative new subsidies for wealthy landlords.
It’s that time again. Last week Shirley Ann Somerville had an unconvincing shot at being Europe’s greatest politician, the only one about to be on track to ‘eradicate’ child poverty. Swinney is going to do the same. Which is fair enough because there has been no point since Swinney and Sturgeon took power when they’ve not been on track to eradicate poverty (they say).
I get pained by this. There is absolutely no way whatsoever to eradicate child poverty in our economy as it stands. It is a poverty economy, trumpeting itself as having a ‘flexible labour market’. The Scottish Government continually funds low-pay employers like Amazon. Poverty is a structural issue, so unless you change the structure you don’t eradicate child poverty.
But talk is cheap and creating action plans and commissions and doing graphics and gathering statistics is lucrative for the governing class. So let us quickly run over yet again the sad, sorry history of performative poverty eradication in recent Scottish history.
To really get a sense of the futility of this debate, Nicola Sturgeon is the minister responsible for the anti-poverty strategy from early 2014 which was going to eradicate poverty. Nothing happens at all, it’s all just noise.
So having failed to eradicate poverty, in 2016 Nicola Sturgeon announces she’s going to eradicate poverty again. She makes speeches and gets her photo taken and the media swoons. She had also done this the previous year when she was eradicating poverty by announcing that she’s bringing in some kind of Poverty Tsar, Naomi Eisenstadt, an English-based academic. The media swoons.
At this point Sturgeon is already ‘preventing Brexit from happening’ and that’s what she spends the next year and bit ‘doing’ until Eisenstadt publishes her report. Except is it her report? It has been edited quite a bit under pressure from Sturgeon, removing and watering down strong criticisms.
For example, it points out that the Council Tax freeze was in effect a pro-poverty measure, transferring wealth from poor people to wealthy people. That was reworded to claim that the Council Tax freeze actually did help poor people (which is not what the report said). Likewise she was critical in areas such as underfunding of colleges which are particularly important to many coming from poverty. That was effectively removed too.
I can give you a list of things to do if you are serious about child poverty, but Mr Swinney isn’t going to like them one little bit
A year later she complains that nothing in her action plan was done. And that’s it for Eisenstadt. She disappears. There is no announcement that she’s been canned, or replaced, or moved on for ‘personal reasons’, she simply disappears from Scottish public life overnight. Scotland’s media is still swooning and doesn’t notice this, doesn’t challenge the government on why she’s disappeared, doesn’t even record the fact she’s disappeared.
Sturgeon moves on. She’s no longer eradicating poverty, she now shifts to ‘closing the attainment gap in schools’ – for a couple of years until that fails and she gets bored and starts a National Energy Company…
What the media doesn’t know (and to be fair they really didn’t know) is that the government minister then directly responsible for child poverty (Alex Neil) had written up a detailed, realistic proposal for actually making a dent in poverty. Having taken Sturgeon at her word his team had worked for months on putting a plan together. It is basically a proposal for the Scottish Child Payment in 2016.
This is sent to Sturgeon’s office. Less than half an hour later a message comes to Mr Neil from one of the chief Sturgeon advisers. He is told the report is already in the bin because Team Sturgeon does not look at ‘unrealistic funding requests’.
But this is Scotland; where there is a problem there is always legislation, a set of targets, an action plan and a commission. The legislation sets up the commission and sets the targets, the commission writes reports for the Scottish Government, the Scottish Government ignores them and produces an action plan based on things it is already doing, and then mostly it tries to find ways to present data which indicates failure as if it isn’t a failure.
And then, when Sturgeon is running out the door and realises she has no policy legacy whatsoever she uses emergency Covid funding to introduce Alex Neil’s Scottish Child Payment proposal six years late, takes a lap of honour (the media swoons) and then fucks off into the sunset before any budget decisions have to be made about how to afford it.
And those budget decisions really did get made. There are a range of decisions made after the Scottish Child Payment was introduces that effectively clawed the money back from the same children – the cuts in the affordable housing budget, the cuts to local government (which provides a lot of frontline poverty services), cuts to further education again, cuts to alcohol and drug rehabilitation services, cuts to community health, the withdrawal of policing from communities, the dropping of the free school meals commitment and so on.
So here’s the legislation (the Child Poverty Scotland Act 2017). The targets are ten per cent in poverty by 2030. Here’s the Poverty and Inequality Commission. Check out its many reports, mostly being critical of the government. Here’s the latest action plan, same as the one before, a list of things that were already happening.
And somewhat importantly, here’s the real world data for a strategy which began in 2017 but which for pretty obvious reasons is graphed back to over two decades earlier. Why? Because if you just graphed 2017 to 2024 you’d cry. Progress? It’s gone backwards. Blame Covid? Why? Why is Covid still making people poor? Claim progress in the three years before Covid? There was none.
Targets? Well, they’ve got five years to all but halve poverty in Scotland. I mean, every target so far has been missed. There really is no chance at all that this target will be met. In fact the cynic in me wonders if Swinney is talking about poverty because if he really does stay on another full term, he’ll be the First Minister who failed.
And he will fail, or I’m virtually certain he will. I can give you a list of things to do if you are serious about child poverty, but Mr Swinney isn’t going to like them one little bit. I’m not even talking about big, radical acts like restructuring the economy or utterly redesigning the tax system to take out the massive amounts of middle class perks.
Poor people don’t vote enough, don’t buy newspapers, don’t get interviewed on Reporting Scotland, don’t have lobbyists and PR men
I’m talking about simple things. As a study this week showed, people on low incomes in Britain are far, far poorer than their equivalents in almost every other developed country. Why? Housing costs. Britain is a corrupt little cartel of housing developers and landlords who have become inordinately rich – a high proportion of Britain’s richest people made all their money on property speculation.
So let’s be super clear what’s going on here; we have a national housing policy the specific goal of which is to transfer larger and larger amounts of your money to landlords and property developers. We massively subsidise Council Tax on expensive housing to promote their cost inflation. We do everything we can to make land prices more expensive. We give insane subsidies to ‘first time buyers’ to sustain ever-rising prices. Those subsidies go straight to developers.
Obviously Common Weal has acres of proposals on how to really tackle poverty, but let me tell you the two that would indicate anyone is serious. First, you would have to abolish the Council Tax and replace it with a tax related either to a proportion of the value of a property or its land (a Proportional Property Tax or a Land Value Tax) or with a local income tax.
Then you would take an aggressive approach to housing, using Land Value Capture (buying land for housing not at the value with planning permission but on current use value – planning permission is almost another giant subsidy to developers) and you’d build lots of first rate housing for public rent.
This would substantially increase the tax bills for the most affluent Scots and it would seriously dent the profits of big housing developers and landowners. And since affluent Scots, landowners and big housing developers stand along with big energy companies, farmers, consultants, arms manufacturers and global corporations as the groups whose interests the Scottish Government actually cares about, I doubt we’ll see progress.
And I really do mean that. I’m sorry to write this, but I have genuinely no doubt that politicians as human beings really do care about children in poverty. But as politicians they do not care about poor people. They just don’t. Poor people don’t vote enough, don’t buy newspapers, don’t get interviewed on Reporting Scotland, don’t have lobbyists and PR men.
An oil and gas executive farts and the Scottish media clears its front pages. A poor person dies and no-one cares. That is the dynamic in which politicians exist. I pray one day I’m wrong. I pray one day a politician does what is right by children in poverty and not just what is expedient. If John Swinney proves me wrong I promise I’ll shower praise on him on this site.
But for now I’m going to watch that clip with the dinner lady who starts crying because poor children turn up for lunch and their payment card is empty and they’re hungry and they look at the dinner lady confused, not understanding, not capturing that they’re not going to get fed today, no adult anywhere that will help them.
Why? Because after what it took to piece together this whole fucking charade, I need to feel something real.