This should be an election at the heart of which are the issues of poverty, inequality, precarity and low pay. It is, after all, a campaign in which the cost of living, the state of public services, the price of austerity and the failure of politicians and institutions to listen to the public, dominate discussion. Yet Labour’s fear of dropping the Ming vase – its terror of slipping by giving the Tories any political ammunition – has led it to shadow Conservative tax and spend policies, and to row back on policy after policy, from workers’ rights to wealth taxes. That groan you can hear is public frustration.
The facts are stark. Twelve million people, more than one in five of the population, live in absolute poverty once housing costs are taken into account – the first rise for 30 years. More than seven million inhabit “food insecure” households. In two-thirds of parliamentary constituencies, at least one in four children live in relative poverty. There are more food banks in Britain than there are McDonald’s restaurants.
Beyond the facts lie the stories, which are starker still. Of people forced to work two or three jobs because pay is so low and costs so high. Of families constrained to live in houses disintegrating with mould. Of children fearful of getting bullied in school for being hungry or not having been able to bathe. Of teachers dipping into their own pockets to buy food or clothing for their pupils. Of a social worker observing of her own report on a child living “in a cold, dark house”, that “When I read this back it sounds like a story from the 1800s. It’s unbelievable that in the UK, in 2023, there are children living like this.”
“My most shocking discovery,” the historian Pat Thane wrote about her book Divided Kingdom, “was that the extent and causes of poverty were much the same now as in 1900.” In the late 19th century, casualised work, large-scale unemployment, slum housing and overcrowding created mass poverty and homelessness, mapped by social reformers such as Charles Booth and Joseph Rowntree.
It took the growth of trade unions, fierce working-class struggles, welfare policies and state intervention to transform that social landscape. Inequality fell steadily from the First World War till the end of the 1970s. Then, in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s assault on the unions and the removal of restraints on market forces created a sharp rise in both poverty and inequality to levels that have remained largely untouched this century.
Since the 1980s, the aim of successive governments, Labour and Tory, has been to create more “flexible” labour markets, a development seized on by employers to hire workers on temporary, part-time or zero-hours contracts, and often as ostensibly “self-employed”, even if they are expected to work as normal employees. The most visible expression of this is the “gig economy”. Insecurity, though, as a study for the thinktanks Autonomy and the Centre for Labour and Social Studies observes, has “become an endemic part of British working life”. A report last year by the Living Wage Foundation estimated that 6.1 million workers – one in five of the workforce – were in insecure jobs.
Housing policy, too, has helped entrench poverty. Again, the Thatcher years were a watershed. The “right to buy” policy for council housing was popular largely because of the appalling state of social housing and the stigma attached to council estates, viewed as the repositories of the poor and the deprived, of “bad design, identical front doors, windswept grass verges, and the kind of misplaced optimism which, in Britain especially, gives the individualistically inclined an easy way to kick social-democratic values”, as Lynsey Hanley observed in Estates, her history of council housing.
Shoddily built council housing was, however, a political choice, not the inevitable consequence of state management. Cities such as Vienna show how different it could have been. Nor has the policy of trusting in market forces provided most working-class people greater control of their lives. As housebuilding, especially of social and affordable housing, has declined, house prices have soared while wages have stagnated, pushing home ownership beyond the reach of more and more people. In the early 1990s, the average house cost about four times the average wage. By last year, it cost more than eight times as much. Meanwhile, private renting has become both unaffordable and of increasingly poor quality – nearly a quarter of privately rented dwellings are estimated to fail the government’s “decent homes standard”.
And then there is the question of the welfare state, which has become, even more than previously, a punitive and miserly system, one of “minimum pay-outs and frequent penalties”, in the geographer Danny Dorling’s words, the purpose of which is “to maintain control and a steep social hierarchy”. According to the Child Poverty Action Group, there were almost 550,000 sanctions imposed in the year to January 2024, more than double the figure from before the Covid pandemic.
The most contentious punitive measure in recent years has been the two-child limit, introduced in 2017, which denies low-income families benefits for their third and any subsequent children. The policy has driven up child poverty within larger families – more than half of all children in larger families are expected to be in poverty by 2028-29. Yet even this the Labour party will not commit to abolishing.
Given the degree of public anger about poverty, austerity and the state of public services, and the extent of disenchantment with Tory policies, the potential exists for the 2024 election to be as much a watershed as were 1945 and 1979; the potential for transforming the social landscape with radical policies on housing, health, welfare and workers’ rights. Yet Labour’s fear of facing criticism about its spending, its desire to lean close to the government’s unfeasible future spending plans and to shadow Tory policies on taxation, means that potential may never be realised.
The starting point for policy should be not “What policies can we pursue that can be protected from Tory criticism?” but rather “What policies do we need to transform people’s lives? And how can we go about making them real?”. In the obsession with protecting the Ming vase, it is too easy forget how to make vases in the first place. And how to remake them.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
