‘A man who…cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is. At nature’s mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him.’ (Reverend Thomas Malthus, 1798)
The vote on 21 October 2020 by 321 Conservative MPs to deny free school meals to Britain’s poorest children during the half-term and Christmas holidays tells you all you need to know about the viciousness of the ruling class, its indifference to the needs of ordinary people and its visceral contempt for the poor, at a time when at least 4.5 million children are living in poverty and more than a third of all households in Britain which include a child are struggling to put food on the table.
Food vouchers for children in receipt of free school meals were only extended from the lockdown period to cover the summer school holidays because of a relentless campaign by the footballer Marcus Rashford. Following the October vote, this young, black working class man once again tapped into a powerful groundswell of popular decency and humanity. Around the country individuals, cafes, and restaurants began offering free meals to local families who needed them over half term. Barely two weeks later, on 7 November, a government that had thought nothing of bunging £3bn worth of NHS contracts to its mates in the private sector, or splurging £250m on the short-lived Eat Out to Help Out programme, was shamed into conceding £170m to extend the Holiday Activities and Food Programme to the Easter, summer and winter school holidays next year. As Rashford pointed out, this grudging concession still leaves ‘1.7 million children who miss out on free school meals, holiday provision and Healthy Start vouchers because their family income isn’t quite low enough’. The modest demand of his campaign to end child food poverty remains that all under-16s should receive free school meals if their parents receive Universal Credit or an equivalent benefit.
The most telling feature of the whole debacle was the language used by politicians to justify their shameful votes. Asked if he was happy to let children go hungry, government minister Paul Scully retorted that ‘children have been going hungry for years’. Brendan Clarke Smith MP accused Rashford of ‘celebrity virtue signalling on Twitter’, adding ‘I do not wish to nationalise our children’. Mansfield MP Ben Bradley described the food vouchers scheme as ‘£20 cash direct to a crack den and a brothel’, tweeting ‘Extending FSM to sch hols passes responsibility for feeding kids away from parents, to the State. It increases dependency.’
These are the spokesmen for the ruling class, determined that capitalism should take no responsibility for the welfare of the working class, seeing it simply as a drain on profits, dressing up their reactionary ideology with a fake morality. They are the true descendants of the proponents of the New Poor Law, which more than 200 years ago corralled the working class in workhouses, making access to relief from the state so horrific that only the most destitute would avail themselves of it, a threat to force labourers to accept any attack on their working conditions and wages.
The New Poor Law
The New Poor Law of 1834 replaced the previous system of local welfare that had existed since Elizabethan times, where the sick, the old and the unemployed had recourse to so-called ‘outdoor relief’, paid for by the poor rates – a form of progressive taxation. But the 19th century banking crisis –the ‘panic of 1825’ – just ten years after the end of the Napoleonic War, had severe economic repercussions; the rising bourgeoisie was increasingly resentful of paying the poor rates and many labourers were finding themselves unemployed or underemployed as industrialisation of factories and workshops increased. The response of the ruling class was to clamp down on the poor. The new law ensured that those who required state aid needed to enter prison-like, segregated workhouses and labour for the most basic food and shelter. Vagrants were criminalised and refused support outside their home boroughs.
Thomas Malthus – an ideological driver of reform of the Old Poor Law who saw the unemployed as a drain on limited resources – opined that relief only made the poor dependent and lazy; hunger disciplined them and forced them to work. If they were feckless enough to have more children than they could afford to feed, that was their problem. Likewise, in 1786 Doctor Joseph Townsend declared that hunger taught ‘decency and civility, obedience and subjection, to the most brutish, the most obstinate, and the most perverse’. Two centuries on, hunger, poverty and insecurity are still the default measures used to control the working class.
Winter is coming
The coronavirus crisis comes hot on the heels of the decade of austerity that followed the financial crisis of 2008/09. Cuts to essential services and a series of punitive attacks on benefits, in particular the rolling out of Universal Credit, the freeze on housing benefits, the cap on overall benefits and the truly Malthusian ‘two child’ restriction on claims had, by 2019, wrought such devastation that Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty, described it as akin to living through the aftermath of a civil war. In 2017, Britain already had one of the worst figures for child poverty of any developed nation, with one in ten children experiencing ‘severe food insecurity’ – that is, regularly going hungry.
Now the IPPR thinktank says 1.1 million more people in Britain will face poverty this year as a result of the pandemic. 800,000 of the newly poor are households with children. In October, End Child Poverty published figures showing that in many parts of London and Birmingham, half of all children now live below the poverty line, with rates soaring in the Midlands and the north of England. 46% of children from black and minority ethnic backgrounds live in poverty, compared to 26% in white families. A YouGov poll found that more than eight million people – 16% of the population – experienced food insecurity because of the coronavirus crisis. Britain’s main food bank organisation, the Trussell Trust, expects demand to rise 61%, with six parcels of emergency supplies being distributed every minute by the end of December. It warns that ‘with mass unemployment predicted on a scale not seen since the early nineties, there will be further rises in poverty with 670,000 additional people classed as destitute by the end of 2020, meaning they cannot afford essentials like housing, energy and food.’
These figures are driven by soaring unemployment, which rose to 4.8% in the three months to September. It is predicted to rise even further in the new year. Redundancies reached a record high of 314,000 in the same period, with young people and black people disproportionately affected. Record numbers have been forced onto Universal Credit, with 5.7 million claiming the benefit by October – a 90% rise from the three million already signing on at the beginning of March. Those with savings of over £16,000 are not eligible to claim.
Universal Credit, first rolled out in 2013, is designed to drive the greatest number of people into debt and destitution. The minimum wait of five weeks – often far longer – forces many into debt. People surveyed by the TUC spoke of being left with just £35 a week to cover food and bills; others of scraping by on 500 calories a day. One in ten needed emergency supplies from a food bank. 6.5 million households in Britain have no savings at all to fall back on. Faced with two million new claimants in March, many of whom had enjoyed the relative privilege of secure jobs until the lockdown, the government raised UC payments by £20 a week – a lifeline to many. Now that vital payment looks like being cut in April 2020, with no provision for its extension in the chancellor’s autumn Spending Review. At the same time, official figures show that up to 160,000 more households will fall victim to the Overall Benefit Cap (which restricts total annual benefits to £20,000 outside London and £23,000 in the capital) shortly before Christmas, as the nine-month ‘grace period’ ends for many who started claiming at the start of the pandemic. Families – the vast majority with children – will lose an average of £250 a month. Tens of thousands more are expected to be capped in January.
Meanwhile, housing benefits fall short of market rents, even in the cheapest accommodation, sometimes by hundreds of pounds a month. 350,000 households are at imminent risk of eviction. Housing benefits have been frozen again for 2021/22.
The pandemic has exacerbated the crisis faced by British capitalism to an unprecedented degree. The ruling class will try to resolve it by forcing down the living standards of the poor. At the same time it fears the potential for social unrest as wider sections of the working class are driven into destitution. So poverty and hunger are deployed to discipline the workforce and punish the poor. But the New Poor Law of 1834 provided impetus for the rise of the Chartists – a revolutionary, working class movement that inspired Marx and Engels, demanding justice for the poor with the slogan ‘Peacefully if we may, forcibly if we must’. Working class resistance is still the only path.
Cat Wiener
