Frances Ryan’s opinion piece made me weep with despair at the attitudes revealed in the YouGov poll (Britons have become so mean that many of us think poor people don’t deserve leisure time, 8 August). She asks: “How did we get here?” The answer lies in decades of peddling the myth that wealth and success flow from personal endeavour and skill, and that poverty and failure are due to personal shortcomings.
No political party (with the possible short-lived exception of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell) has dared draw attention to the reality that most wealth and success stems from a mix of good fortune and the appropriation of other people’s resources and labour over centuries.
The current distribution of wealth and success is a consequence of political decisions, and of a determination by those benefiting from the system to hold on to what they’ve got. Yes, a handful of individuals with exceptional talents can make a quantum leap from poverty to fortune, but most are constrained by the realities of an economic system that has, for decades, seen a reduction in the share of national wealth going to those reliant on their own labour for income.
I don’t know how the YouGov questions were framed. I’d be interested to see what responses would be to questions such as this: “If you lost your job and income due to illness or accident, would you expect to give up your TV, socialising, hobbies and festive celebrations?” I fear that there is a tendency to believe that you yourself “deserve” things, and that other people don’t.
Jane Mardell
Little Bealings, Suffolk
• Frances Ryan’s excellent article on the YouGov poll makes a strong argument for the importance of leisure. However, she takes the poll at face value. It set out to find divisions in people’s attitudes to what people in different income groups (wealthiest, average salary or above, minimum income and on out-of-work benefits) should be able to afford and, of course, found them. If you ask people to make a choice in a survey, they will tend to do so even if that choice is false. In reality, most people on “out-of-work benefits” at any one time move between those benefits and being on a minimum wage or above.
More importantly, YouGov asked participants to judge what people “should be able to afford” by their income categorisation, rather than as being part of UK society. Over the last 50 years, we have developed an approach to measuring poverty that has asked people to distinguish for a wide range of aspects of living between items that are “necessary” – those that everyone should be able to afford and no one should have to do without – and those that might be “desirable” but are not “necessary”.
Nationally, these poverty and social exclusion surveys have been run in 1983, 1990, 1999 and 2012, and have found that, while there is almost universal support for core basic items, such as sufficient and healthy food, adequate clothing and a warm, dry home, people’s views on what constitutes the necessities of life also includes leisure items and social activities, and that these views vary over time as society changes.
This approach has now been widely adopted in many countries across the world, including low- as well as high-income countries, and we have found that, while the precise items will vary, in all countries there is widespread agreement on a minimum living standard that enables people to be part of the society in which they live – irrespective of their income group or whether they are receiving benefits.
The YouGov survey tells us more about the aims and attitudes of YouGov than it does about the long-term trends in people’s attitudes to what constitutes a minimum acceptable standard of living.
Joanna Mack Co-editor, Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, David Gordon Professor of social justice, University of Bristol, Shailen Nandy Professor of international social policy, Cardiff University, Christina Pantazis Professor of zemiology, Bristol University
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