The Archbishop of Canterbury has forgotten the contract between ordinary working people and the jobless poor, argues Graeme Archer.
Dr Williams: still no sign of the undeserving poor? Photo: Clara Molden
7:26PM BST 10 Jun 2011
93 Comments It’s not so bad in the summer: even at 6.30 in the morning, when I go for the bus, it’s daylight. It’s the winter I can’t stand, when the sun has failed to rise even by the end of the 90-minute commute. Oh yes, I take the bus, and I’m well past 40, so I must be some sort of failure, as the saying goes. As must all these other people sat around me on the upper deck of the 254.
Not having been introduced, I have to surmise what these “failures” are doing. There’s a sprinkling of salarymen and salarywomen like me, brows creased in irritation, anticipating the office politics ahead. There’s a fair number of black women on their way to keep basic infrastructures running in our schools, hospitals and offices. Most, however, are eastern European men, travelling to the building sites they moved across a continent to work on, building a new London with their bare hands. The majority of us (including my Scottish self) are called “immigrants”. But we have something in common, we “failures”: we are up early, and we are going to work.
Actually, we do have something else in common: our hopes and fears are not those that keep the Archbishop of Canterbury awake at night. As guest editor of New Statesman this week, he wrote an editorial in which he told the Government to try to “understand how scared people are” by the implementation of policies “for which no one voted”. The people most scared, apparently, are those affected by Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms – reforms designed to ensure that anyone who takes a job is better off than someone who chooses not to, and that no family on benefits should receive more money than a working household on the average income. Scary stuff, indeed.
In October last year, Jon Cruddas MP, tribune of Dagenham, who obviously through some bizarre accident owns a house in Notting Hill as well as in his constituency, described government plans to restrict the amount of housing benefit as “an exercise in social and economic cleansing”. His use of the word “cleansing” is not only unmistakable, it’s breathtaking. The proposed “cleansing” amounted to a mild restriction on total housing benefit payable.
The Archbishop is not in the same linguistic league as Mr Cruddas, but he may be even less worldly. He seems convinced that fairness means opposing any change that would leave anyone worse off: he argues against using the “seductive language” of the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. But fairness isn’t about protecting us from the consequences of our life choices. It is about making sure that people on barely adequate incomes – that is: most of us – don’t get done over by governments who prefer to tuck worklessness under the carpet by ignoring the moral concept of personal choice when determining how to assist the poor. It is obscene, Dr Williams, that some people choose not to work, and are better off as a consequence than those who do not make such a choice. Such people are less deserving than others. If there are no jobs available, what are all these Polish men doing on this bus, at 6.30am? They deserve more than to be viewed as taxable cart-horses.
And you? On an average salary? Trying to raise a child and thinking about having another? Coming to the conclusion that you might be able to balance commuting against mortgage costs, if you moved to an unpopular area farther out than you’d like? It must be hard for multiple houseowners such as Mr Cruddas, or the Archbishop in his palace, to understand: this is life, for most of us. And we’re not fascists because we make a distinction between the deserving and the undeserving when we see where our tax is spent.
Polly Toynbee, Dr Williams’s anguished secular equivalent, described IDS’s welfare reform as the Tories’ “final solution” for the poor. She believes that poverty can be cured through the act of gluing oneself to a Topshop window, and that if only Philip Green, its owner, would pay more tax, all our problems would be solved. But most tax is not raised from the few Philip Greens of this world. It comes from us on the 254 bus.
The Archbishop has forgotten the contract between the 254 and the jobless poor. We work to pay tax to help our fellow citizens. But if he refuses to condemn those who take our money with no intention of working, one day we might all decide to stay in bed. Who would judge us undeserving of a rest?
Polly Toynbee, Dr Williams’s anguished secular equivalent, described IDS’s welfare reform as the Tories’ “final solution” for the poor. She believes that poverty can be cured through the act of gluing oneself to a Topshop window, and that if only Philip Green, its owner, would pay more tax, all our problems would be solved. But most tax is not raised from the few Philip Greens of this world. It comes from us on the 254 bus.
The Archbishop has forgotten the contract between the 254 and the jobless poor. We work to pay tax to help our fellow citizens. But if he refuses to condemn those who take our money with no intention of working, one day we might all decide to stay in bed. Who would judge us undeserving of a rest?
