The Necessity Of Poverty by Bird John

Author:Bird, John
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978 0 7043 7306 8
Publisher: Quartet Books
Published: 2012-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

In 1998, the new prime minister Tony Blair proudly boasted that ‘we live in an age of giving’. He said this in his usual upbeat manner that radiated an apparent aura of goodness. There was always something devotional about Blair, suggesting that he had captured the mood of the country.

I was in an argumentative frame of mind because he contradicted all the work that I had been doing for the previous seven years. I had been working on getting poor people working, and it was difficult to keep the momentum up. So I asked the Guardian for space to reply to Blair’s giving claim. My message was simple: if we live in an age of giving would that not suggest that we also live in an age of taking? Had he tried being a taker? Did he know what kind of life a taker ends up with?

Well intentioned but damaging ‘giving’ can delay the flight from poverty. Helping the poor requires providing them with opportunity, not giving them hand outs.

The biggest piece of giving though was not from the church. As I shall describe later it was from the state. The state had turned into the biggest giver of ‘hand outs’ but not ‘hand ups’, through the benefit system. Institutional giving on such a vast scale that it dwarfed much of the work of people like me trying to create chances of moving people away from dependency. Blair’s legacy, hotly disputed by his followers, has an increasing trail of this cack-handed giving called ‘benefit’.

Christianity in its various forms operates a duality over the poverty: it expects the ‘giving class’ of people to be upright and independent and moral, but it never expects the same from the poor. The poor, God’s true children, the righteous inheritors in the next world, the truly true of the world, can be commiserated with and can be sentimentalised over. Depriving them of independent livelihood institutionalises them as a segregated and dependent sub-group.

As someone who has passed from one group to the other, from poverty into comfort with a disposable income, I object to this facile view of the poor. Seeing the poor, as I have said, as almost another species perpetuates their poverty.

So when Blair, a self-declared Christian prime minister, exults us to give, he is doing little more than what Christianity has done for so long. Never undermining the class divisions in society. Never fighting for the poor to get out of poverty. Forever weighing them down with the need of the ‘giver’ to give. And by that, they guarantee their own mission and their own redemption.

I am sure this sounds like crude shorthand to some people, because numerous Christians do not believe in giving hand outs. Some insist on hand ups. The great universities often have Christian intentions in giving bursaries and scholarships to bright children with no money. A famous TV historian I met once was most adamant about how he was lifted out of a working-class council estate by an endowment from a college that had been founded on Christian principles.

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