On the BBC website today is a story about poverty. Whenever the word is mentioned, the word "children" always comes up with it - we, or maybe the BBC, have a fixation on what poverty means for children, rather than what it means for adults.
In any case I learned that "poverty" is officially measured as 60% of the median household income. In 2012, the median household income in the UK was £427 per week (£22,200 a year), and so poverty means anywhere below £256 per week (£13,300 a year). I should also add that includes housing costs, in case you were wondering as I was.
So having been in a position a lot better than that for many years, it's kind of difficult to imagine those numbers and what they would mean to me.
I'll start by taking those two numbers and going back thirty years to 1982. In 1982, I was 22 years old and married, with a year-old son. I was living in a tied cottage in Hertfordshire (tied because I had to carry out various caretaker duties in the village in return for the cottage, which came out at maybe six hours a week). I was working as a clerk in a bank in London, and getting paid £5,600 a year for that, and also playing in a band four nights a week which brought in about another £50 a week net of my expenses. All in all, I guess I was earning £8,200 plus the rent-free house, so guessing on what that would be worth back then that's probably £9,500 a year in total. The 1982 equivalent of the median would be £7,416 and the poverty-line would have been £4,443, so I guess that at 22 years old I was doing OK. Having said that though, I was working 37.5 hours in the bank, around 24 hours a week in the band and 6 hours in the village, so a total of 67.5 hours a week. From what I remember, I was pretty tired most of the time.
Going back further, I'll rewind another ten years to when I was 12 and my brother Tim and I were living with my parents. Back in 1972, the median would have been £1,984 a year and the poverty-line £1,189. So how far were we from that? I've always felt very proud of my parents for bringing the two of us up on very limited means, and it seemed to me that we were pretty close to that borderline, when I looked at us relative to others. Having said that though, our friends tended to be among the better-off - when your father is an ex-naval officer, that tends to be the way of things.
It's worth saying that by that time, my mum and dad had paid off their mortgage, with a bit of help from my spinster aunt. Just as well, because my father was already 72 and had been retired for a few years. We lived on a mixture of the state pension and my father's naval pension. His state pension, from what I remember, came to about £70 a month, but the saver was his naval pension, which was worth around £160 a month. So with that lot together, he had about £2,760 a year, which was well above the median and more than double the poverty line, even if it maybe didn't feel like that at the time.
Apart from my very first job, as an assistant woodsman for the National Trust on a 17 year-old's agricultural wage, I don't think I have ever been at or below that poverty line, or as I have been calculating here, the historical equivalent of today's poverty line number, adjusted for inflation.
But wait - in a few years, I'll be retired. Granted, the house will (fingers crossed) be paid for, so that takes the housing costs out of the equation, but we are planning on getting by on £16,000 a year to start with - that's £1,330 a month. That is not far above the poverty line, which is at £1,100 a month, but I won't have any work-related expenses, and we'll be growing a lot of our own food. It's still a very long way from the current state of affairs though.
One of the biggest areas of impact of poverty on children, of course, is that it hurts social mobility, the holy grail of Guardian readers everywhere. Don't get me wrong, social mobility is a Very Good Thing, and something which is still badly lacking in the UK. Why is that?
I reckon that it's more than 50% down to accent. I believe that the majority of people's chances are limited by the way they talk. That's probably a very un-politically-correct thing to say in 2013, but I'm pretty sure it's true. And then there is staying in your comfort zone, peer pressure, a lack of parental guidance or drive. Top that off with a lack of self-belief and you're probably about there. It takes a very strong-minded person to break out of the poverty trap. I guess that the huge increases in the number of people going to university was meant to change that. The trouble is that most of the people who are going to uni and who wouldn't previously have gone "when I was a lad" are now going to the ones which were previously polytechnics, and they're doing courses that are as much vocational as anything, and getting degrees in things that weren't degree level courses thirty years ago.
So what's changed? What social mobility has that brought? The "leading" universities still take in the same people from the same feeder schools, to do the same academic subjects as if nothing had changed. The main difference is that now, the students don't get helped with grants to go there, because there are now so many people going to university that it is no longer affordable for the state and everyone has to pay their own way.
The sad fact is that, if you're in poverty, the chances are your kids will still be fighting against it in twenty or twenty-five years' time, and nothing much will have been achieved. Sadly, with the state of the economy and what I believe is going to be a very long period of no more growth, it is only going to get worse.
That puts me in mind of the old Les Dawson classic: "We may have been poor, but by God we were miserable."
So - poverty - what did I think thirty or forty years ago? I thought that I'd grown up pretty close to it. In retrospect, I think that was just because my perspective was coloured by the circumstances of my friends, who mostly had big houses and a lot more money that we did. When I think about it, I can remember houses in the village where I grew up where there was real poverty, and no, it wasn't like that in our house. But it's not that there was more money necessarily, just that there was a different attitude. I knew that, despite the difficult economic background at the time, I was going to get my chance to do something with my life, that it was up to me. I don't think that view was familiar to a lot of the others in our village. What did I have? It wasn't money, that's for sure, but I had a voice that sounded middle class, and I had parents who breathed potential into me, and gave me all the support that they could to go and realise it. It's not money, it's hope and belief that spring the trap.
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