Stealing Food

You steal food when you are desperate. This is not the action of a professional criminal. He or she goes after much bigger fish, if you will excuse the pun.

I stole food once, years ago in Tarbert, Loch Fyne. I had arrived there late ready to start a new job the following day across the loch in Portavadie. I had missed the last ferry. It was a new job, so I would be waiting till Friday for the pay packet. I had next to nothing, and I slept that night in the heather above the wee town. That afternoon I stole a pasty from a corner shop.

And that is the nearest I ever got to stealing for food - for I am one of the lucky ones from a comfortable, well-fed background in middle class Scotland.

Yesterday's The National reports that Glasgow police and Maryhill Foodbank are working together to develop a scheme so that people accused of stealing food can be fed. That's good news.

But it's shocking.

We are a nation that produces oil, for goodness' sake! Why do we have people on our streets who are so desperate that they must steal food? What is going on? Don't we have a benefits system that is meant to ensure that no one starves?

Well yes, but of course real life is not how the Westminster politicians would paint it. Because we do have a benefits system but it includes a draconian and unaccountable punishments regime that means that people, already with nothing, can have their benefits stopped for a variety of petty reasons. Or they have signed on but have to wait a fortnight for the money. Or they've had to pay a bill, and it's a dreich Thursday night and there is nothing, not a penny, in the wee jar in the kitchen. Or they are one of the 4,750 young people aged 16-24 who were homeless in Scotland during 2012-3.

So they nip round to the corner store (the owner is little better off than they are) and steal a loaf of bread.

With luck they get caught in Maryhill. There they might get some sort of humanity shown to them, someone who listens to their story and who provides what they need; a food parcel, and a friendly ear. Place the same story somewhere else and the treatment might be rougher, more legal than social.

None of this should be happening. If Scotland held the economic reins - income and spend - then it could share its wealth much more fairly across its population than do the neoliberals in Westminster.

To understand how far the neoliberals have fallen consider an announcement also from yesterday: Mr Cameron proposes to introduce a scheme for unemployed young people under which they would be paid £1.91 per hour for a 30 hour week, working for 'voluntary' organisations. I hope that the charity sector, en masse, rejects this criminal abuse of the poor.

On £1.91 per hour, our young people would be justified in stealing all the food from chubby Cameron's table.

A new map for Scotland

This is the change that people are talking about. A new political map for Scotland, that is SNP-coloured, not Red Tory coloured:

Chris Hanretty, Reader in Politics at the University of East Anglia and one of the team behind Election Forecast UK, is interviewed in today's Financial Times blog. He reminds us that "party identification" ('I was born a Labour voter, and always will vote Labour') is still the strongest prediction of voting patterns. 

It appears that the SNP have broken that pattern in Scotland, but Hanretty is urging caution.

We still have to get every door chapped, every vote in.

The Theory of Change

How do we change the lives of people in Scotland, for the better?

The Theory of Change is a way of describing how change will happen. Viewed as a road map for change, it starts from where we are  now, aims at a better place in the future, and lays out the routes for getting there.

Where we are now is not good.

Whether you prefer the statistics and maps of the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation, or to walk the streets of Glasgow, you'll see poverty, and increasing poverty.

So how do we make change, for the better?

The model provided by the Theory of Change starts with a series of data and assumptions about how things are now. It then lays out different routes - "interventions" - that lead to a better place. So we start with the data in the Scottish Government's Policy Briefing that there were 880,000 people living in absolute poverty in Scotland in 2012/3, and then work out what we are going to do about it.

Charities in Scotland are each applying their own Theory of  Change. Last Thursday's report from the Poverty Alliance showed charities such as the Trussell Trust are intervening with food banks. Their rationale is that we can relieve the most desperate effects of poverty by providing food, and while you are doing that, providing nutrition advice, cookery classes and emotional support. Seventy percent of Scotland's 167 food banks are providing emotional support for their clients.

Meanwhile, Save the Children in Scotland has a different Theory of Change. Their "Eat, Sleep, Learn, Play!" programme, launched in 2012, provides essential household items such as beds, cookers and pushchairs, to families with young children living on a low income. The rationale of Save the Children is that by meeting families needs during the important early stages of development, families can improve the quality of their children's' lives and help them fulfil their potential.

Save the Children also campaigns. So does the Child Poverty Action Group in Scotland, whose principal rationale is to "work to get a better life for low-income families in Scotland through campaigning and lobbying."

Risk is implicit in a Theory of Change. If your rationale for ending or at least reducing poverty is to provide food banks and emotional support then your downside risk of failure is going to be linked to delivery; how many people can we reach from our food bank? Upside, you know that if you get a package of food into the hands of a poor family then you have fed them for the day, or the week. 

If you campaign and lobby then your risk of failure is high. You are trying to get the system to change - to get politicians to listen to your message and to translate it into policy. That is very hard to achieve. Despite years of campaigning and lobbying, poverty is still endemic in Scotland. The Scottish Poverty Briefing shows that one in six families in Scotland lives on less than 60% of the average wage. There is a substantial, in fact demonstrable, risk that campaigning does not work - it does not translate into Government action.

So why bother with the politicians?

Because while the risk of failure is high, the outcome if you succeed is enormous. If you could persuade a future Government to give up Trident and spend the money on the poor, or, better, increase taxation on those on higher incomes to provide greater shares for those on low or no income, then you would dramatically transform the lives of almost a million people in Scotland. This,in Theory of Change, is "system change."

Politicians are just the pawns in this Theory of Change chess-game. We need them to move across the board in the right direction (not just to protect the Kings, Queens and Knights of our society.) So when you vote in May, vote for system  change. Vote for the party that will change the system in Scotland, for the better.

1.James, Cathy. Theory of Change Review. London: Comic Relief, September 2011. http://www.actknowledge.org/resources/documents/James_ToC.pdf.
2 Image from http://www.relativ.co.za/relativ-impact/theory-of-change-workshop/
3 Scottish Government, St Andrew’s House. “Poverty Briefing.” Website Section, December 18, 2014. http://www.scotland.gov.uk//Topics/Statistics/Browse/Social-Welfare/IncomePoverty/povertybrief.

A Poor Choice

In today’s FT Nick Pearce, director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, makes the parallel between the “most successful minority government in modern British history”, and this year’s election.

In 1910 Herbert Asquith, a Liberal, led a minority government with support from a progressive alliance of Irish nationalists and a nascent Labour Party.  The Liberals won 272 seats, the Conservatives 271, and it was thus the Irish Parliamentary Party, with 74 seats and Labour (42) who could balance the powers of the two main parties. There are lots of Scottish connections - Asquith was MP for East Fife, and Labour was led by George Nicoll Barnes, MP for Glasgow Blackfriars and Hutchesontown. Nick Pearce notes that this reforming government created the national insurance system that was the basis of the modern welfare state, passed constitutional reforms that established the power of elected MPs over the House of Lords, reformed trade union law and passed an Irish Home Rule Act.

“Some…will seize the crisis of the established party system as an opportunity for realignment…” concludes Nick Pearce.

And that will be a healthy outcome for England as well as for Scotland. Especially for the poor of both countries because they – of all people – are the ones who suffer most from “the established party system.”

That’s what Jamie Livingstone, head of Oxfam Scotland argues: with 820,000 people living in poverty in Scotland in 2012-13 he says that "…we have a major opportunity - with the leaders of the two largest parties at the Scottish Parliament sharing a single objective - to seriously challenge inequality in Scotland."

And Child Poverty Action Group in Scotland lays out what a new Government – one that did not have to toe the Party line – could do: adequate social security benefits, affordable childcare, free school meals – the list is simple and well argued.

We thought that the September 2014 Referendum was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Now we have a second chance to make a good choice; a poor choice.

For Richer, for Poorer. And a Tartan Trident.

If you take a bus down Ferry Road in Edinburgh you will move from wealth to poverty as you head west. Or you can just stand in Stewart's Melville (private) College's playing fields and chuck a stone west to Pilton. You will be throwing your stone from an area ranked as amongst the least deprived into an area that is the most deprived, according to the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation.

Edinburgh, deprived

This week two reports have talked about poverty.

What Do We Know about In-Work Poverty? [1] shows that most poor people (52%) in Scotland live in homes where at least one person has a job.  Worse, the proportion of poor children in homes with an adult in work has increased from 40% in 1999 to almost two thirds today.

What is going on? Doesn't a job give you an income? Well yes, and poverty is of course related to work (the rate of poverty amongst households where no-one is in paid work is of course higher.) But people in low-paid jobs - earning less than £7.40 an hour - have double the poverty risk of all workers. Low-paid women are especially vulnerable; mothers returning to work are more likely to end up in low-paid jobs, says the report, which highlights the almost 20% difference in wages paid to men versus women in the private sector.

Scotland comes off badly in the low-pay stakes compared to other countries: 19.5% of employees in Scotland were low-paid in 2011 compared to say 14% in New Zealand or 15% in Spain.

Low-wage work is a dead end - workers are less likely to be offered training, and more low-paid workers become unemployed than their better paid colleagues. So families are juggling low-pay, no-pay and benefits and it is, above all, the children who suffer.

Meanwhile, Oxfam has shown in Wealth: Having It All and Wanting More [2] - published this week in time for Davos - the link between wealth, business and tax. The richest 1% own 48% of global wealth - and the trend is upwards, for the rich. The pyramid is skewed so the richest fifth of the population own more than nine-tenths of the wealth, meaning that the rest of humanity, the 80%, scrabble over just 5.5% of global wealth.

Cleverly, Oxfam shows that the businesses that our wealthiest people invest in are the same businesses that spend the most on lobbying on budget issues, particularly lobbying to reduce taxation. Thus there is a vicious circle in which wealth is held by a very few, who ensure via their businesses that taxes…for those few rich…remain low. This explains why David Cameron and Giddy Gordon Osborne have been so reluctant to do the obvious thing - tax wealth, to reduce the poverty gap.

This is stupid economics. As the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) has shown [3], a child growing up in a poor household is likely to have a poor outcome - to become a poor adult - because of a range of issues including stress and poor health. CPAG has calculated the cost - to all of us - of allowing poverty to take hold. The cost of allowing 110,000 children in Scotland to be affected by in-work poverty could be £1.1 billion. 

£1.1 billion! We could almost afford to buy our own Tartan Trident for that…

1 What Do We Know about In-Work Poverty? A Summary of the Evidence (Social Research Series. Edinburgh: The Scottish Government, January 21, 2015. http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2015/01/3233/downloads)

2 Hardoon, Deborah. Wealth: Having It All and Wanting More. Cowley, UK: Oxfam International, January 19, 2015. http://www.oxfam.org/en/research/wealth-having-it-all-and-wanting-more.

3  Farthing, Rys. Local Authorities and Child Poverty: Balancing Threats and Opportunities. London: Child Poverty Action Group, July 2013. http://www.cpag.org.uk/content/cpag-publishes-cost-child-poverty-every-local-authority-and-constituency.

It’s the economists, stupid

What is the cost of deploying 80,000 French police officers over two days? What is the cost of 17 lives cut short? When will economists include these costs in the balance sheet on poverty?

There are many, many reasons behind terror attacks, some of them delusions in the heads of the individuals who carry them out. But there is one clear reason behind the war that is currently being waged from Baghdad to the banlieue; poverty.  People with nothing, with nothing to lose, excluded from a society that appears wealthy and comfortable. Imagine if Afghanistan were a prosperous country, or if Syria were Norway, full of people engaged economically, emotionally, socially with their society, and whose growing prosperity depended on that society. In that world people would have no need to create terror.

But Afghanistan, Syria and the Levant, and most of North Africa are not like that. Nor is the banlieu. In all of these places there is poverty, defined as people having an income that is under 50% of the median income in the place they live. In all of these places people have emerged who are able to gather and organise the poor and the dispossessed and turn a few of them into bombers and fighters. A few, but enough to cause death and destruction in the rest of the world.

We, the rest of the world, have allowed these places to get poor or to stay poor. We have allowed some suburbs to rot while others, often only a few kilometres away, enjoy all the fruits of wealth. Through our trade rules and our geopolitics we have allowed North Africa to grind along in poverty while we sun ourselves across the water on the Riviera or the Costa del Sol.

According to normal economics, that’s all fine. We measure ourselves, economically, as having prosperous lives and economies. The World Bank says that Afghanistan has a GDP of $20 billion, while that of France is $2.8 trillion, more than 100 times greater. This is the wealth gap – and to underline that, the World Bank says that 35% of the Afghan population live in poverty.

But “normal economics” is wrong, stupid.

France is now paying the economic cost of allowing other parts of the world, including its own banlieue, to fall into poverty.  So are all of us in the rich countries.  These costs of poverty should feature in our accounts. From France’s GDP we should deduct some cost for the fact that she (alongside all of us in the West) has allowed other places to fall into poverty. Some cost reflecting the 80,000 police officers and the 17 lives lost. Some cost reflecting the hundreds of thousands of life-opportunities lost to the people who live in her banlieue. Some cost reflecting the ways we all pay for poverty.

That would be real-world economics. A world in which we could not balance our books without taxing ourselves heavily for the true cost of poverty.
 

Je suis Charlie

We appear to be at war. Al Qaeda, and ISIS in Iraq and the Levant, have sent their emissaries into our homes and offices – yesterday those of Charlie Hebdo in Paris – to kill, maim and frighten. We, or at least Washington, Westminster and to a lesser degree Paris, have sent back drones, planes and bombs that kill soldiers and civilians.

The newspapers here in Catalonia are predicting that yesterday’s killings in Paris will strengthen the extremists (Marine le Pen et ses plusieurs amies) in France, just as drone strikes must radicalise the populations of Pakistan, Afghanistan or the Yemen. UKIP and the slightly more barmy BNP in the UK are likely to benefit too.

This feels like war. 

There are deaths. There is the cry that these deaths, here, are wrong. There is propaganda, and the involvement of secret services, drones and a Fifth Column (a term devised in Spain).

How should Scotland react?

Scotland could join the war. Send troops, arms, bombs into the Levant.

No. That is not going to stop the killing. Our young men and women, and those living in the Levant, would all lose out from such a policy.

Scotland should do the reverse. We already have active, peaceful, friendly Muslim communities in our cities and towns. We should multiply our efforts to make friends in the Muslim world, to build bridges, to offer people a route out of the poverty and injustice that are part of the background to this stupid, tragic, murderous conflict. Each of us can do that.

We will resolve this conflict, like all conflicts, by listening to the other side, understanding her or him, and then learning that her struggle is our struggle – her call for justice, peace, and an end to poverty is ours too.

I hope that Scotland can do that before the barriers slam down.