Social exclusion - it's the poor what gets the blame

On Tuesday 29 November I listened to Phil Woolas, standing in for a sick David
Milliband speak at LSE about the government's progress in reducing social
exclusion. We discovered that the progress can be exactly quantified because
the Government is defining social exclusion as suffering from 5 or more of
10 indicators. The indicators themselves are not irrelevant, they include
low qualifications, joblessness and living alone; but they have gutted the
idea of social exclusion of any experiential/existential dimension, reducing
this rich and perplexing concept to a set of tick boxes.

He drew attention to the persistent nature of social exclusion, but did not
reflect on how this may defeat the attempt to address social exclusion through
ameliorative measures (not to deny the importance of ameliorative measures
in improving many individuals' conditions of life). In systems terms we have
homeostasis or stability, where the system reconfigures itself to reduce
or obliterate the effect of change in any one component through negative
feedback: like a thermostat keeping a room at a steady temperature.

The address overwhelmingly saw the issue of social exclusion in individual terms,
rather than a group/collective/community experience, the only excursion beyond
the individual was to the geographic neighbourhood. Enabling individuals
to move from exclusion to inclusion is desirable for the individual but 'solving'
the problem for a few does not change the texture of experience for the community.
The individuation of the problem and the remedies puts the onus on the excluded
individual not the excluding society - the question of what it is in majority
society that excludes the non-conforming was never approached, let alone
addressed - we were left with a patchwork of deficit models where the individual
has to change (albeit with the assistance of interventionist agencies) not
the society.

It also remorselessly concentrated on assisting the 'deprived'. Unsurprisingly
he made no reference to growing inequality at the top of the income and resources
scale. He lambasted, correctly, the Tory governments for refusing to talk
about poverty and hiding behind social exclusion. However he identified the
root of Labour's interest in John Smith's Commission on Social Justice, but
failed to note that the transition from social justice to social exclusion
as the defining concept left important elements lying dead on the ground
behind them.

As usual for a New Labour minister, he praised the efforts of the third sector
in allowing people engagement - but of course could not reflect that the
most powerful voluntary organizations that had given the powerless a collective
voice, the trade unions, had been denuded of influence by this government
(and the previous one) and that the traditional vehicle for expressing the
aspirations of the powerless, the Labour Party, was now an empty and irrelevant
shell in self-organizational and policy terms.

This is not to ignore the real progress that has been made on child poverty and
other fronts; it is to say that if you wish to fly under a social exclusion
banner you have to be open to transformational changes that New Labour proscribes
both because they do not enhance 'choice' and also because they would have
to address the increasingly disproportionate rewards given to those in the
most favoured situations. The government affects that extravagant payments
to financial traders and footballers do not affect the life chances of the
majority and the poor. This is true to the extent that most of us are not
in competition with them for supplies of Porsches, Rolexes and caviar. However
their ability to bid up the price of a limited resource like land drives
up housing costs for the rest and partly accounts for the inability of many
London workers to live anywhere near their place of work. Further the damage
done by the ability of the wealthy to command and sequester the services
of scarce doctors and teachers through private purchase of services far exceeds
the public benefit of their payment for public services they do not consume.

Social withdrawal by the rich is as much a threat to social order and cohesion as
social exclusion of the poor; the issues are the two sides of the same coin.
Political exclusion of aspirations of equality means that social exclusion
will continue to haunt us.

It's the same the whole world over
It's the poor what gets the blame
It's the rich what gets the gravy
Ain't it all a bleeding shame.

I leave it to you to ponder who ate all the pies - with or without the gravy.