When I agreed to write the foreword to this book it seemed obvious how I should go about it. I would approach it with rigorous journalistic detachment, as if what it has to say has no direct impact on me or on my life. After thinking about it, though, I reached the conclusion that this would be dishonest. There is no way for me to read this book – or any others by the author for that matter – without it resonating on a personal level.
You see, I was born into that stratum of society many of the more privileged among us would refer to – without a hint of irony - as the “underclass”. Therefore, the lack of a level playing field that this book deconstructs is much more than an abstraction to me.
In the early 1980s, during the brutal years of Thatcherism, my father became unemployed. He would never work again. On many occasions my siblings and I were painfully aware of what it felt like to have no money for basic provisions. We were aware too of the fact that receiving free school meals placed us in a particular category of people somewhere towards the bottom of an already deprived community. And we were also conscious of the humiliation of borrowing money from the “tick man” who visited weekly to collect what he’d lent us at extortionate rates of interest. All so we would have some presents at Christmas.
We had no washing machine. We were often envious of our friends whose fathers had jobs and we were certainly envious of the middle class people we never got to meet because they lived in “better” areas and didn’t send their kids to the same schools as us.
There is more to being “poor” or “disadvantaged” than statistics alone can ever tell us. That is why Fair play, with its emphasis on marrying abstract ideas about social exclusion to the experience of it, and on laying bare the cultural manifestations of elitism that underpin contemporary Britain, matters.
Can’t you see that the poorest people in society only think they are poor? Compare them with the genuinely impoverished of decades past and really, they are pretty well off. So the argument of some people goes. Those who propagate this kind of reasoning tend to bolster their contentions with facts such as the number of so-called poor people who own mobile phones, or a television or any other kind of electronic luxury you might care to mention like – say – a washing machine. Within this perspective resides the attitude that the modern poor and marginalised should stop their whingeing, get off their pizza-gorging backsides and accrue multiple low-paying jobs, and grin and bear their fates in the face of abject exploitation. So the argument goes.
There are better people than I capable of demolishing this kind of logic and one of them is Danny Dorling. In book after book he manages to obliterate the specious arguments and entrenched prejudices that sustain elitism - and its apologists. Yet again, here is a book from Dorling that consummately dismantles what we think we know about poverty, social exclusion, mobility (or the lack of it) education and hierarchy, wellbeing, wealth inequalities and all their myriad corollaries.
Across a series of discrete chapters – mainly carefully edited extracts from previously published work in magazines, newspapers and elsewhere – you the reader are treated to the unravelling of the ideologies that sustain a society where the gap between rich and poor widens under the so-called “progressive” government that was New Labour. You are also guided through the (indisputably important) whys, hows and consequences of unrelenting momentous social changes and political hubris that have seen a country that, for all its problems in 1978, was more equal then than it is now.
Our politicians may talk the talk on social equality and “poverty of opportunity” as some like to refer to it, but they merely tinker. Under New Labour there were some encouraging developments of which the minimum wage, a calculable focus on child poverty, improved maternity rights, and progressive projects such as Sure Start are just a few. But to their great shame, their “progressive” era also shepherded in the conditions that cultivated a jump in wealth inequalities between the very top and very bottom of our society. If you were born poor under the New Labour government you can bet you are probably staying poor. In a decade’s time, who knows what your prospects will be thanks to the coalition government in power when this book is published.
Fair play is about chronicling what Dorling terms “the tenacity of unfairness”. It is about confronting that most stubborn of social norms: the idea that the poor are the architects of their own misfortune. For those of you reading this book that have known what it is like to live in poverty in modern Britain (despite its status as an extraordinarily wealthy country in global terms) the charts and numbers and analysis on offer will be much more than analytical aids or abstract rationale. The analysis will be a valuable and comprehensible framework within which you can place your own experience.
It is no coincidence that often the most vigorous defenders of the view that the poor should (as Norman Tebbit once put it so acidly) “get on their bikes” hail from low-income backgrounds. These are often the people who have clambered their way out of the social cesspit they were born into and who can’t for a moment contemplate why, for every one of them, there are thousands left behind: excluded, hopeless, shunned and ignored. I did it so why not the rest?
There are multiple studies – many of them referenced in this book – that document the social attitudes, structures and political forces, that have brought Britain to a place where it ranks high among wealthy nations on income and health inequalities and where there is scant evidence to suggest that this will change any time soon. As Dorling says,“The prejudice that preserves poverty remains stronger in Britain than in most of the rest of the rich world. […] Labour introduced and continued to extol a populist and punitive approach [to poverty], labelling benefit claimants as potentially feckless. […] Permitting rising inequality and stoking prejudices against the poor sets a precedent for the next government which heavily outweighs the many gains made.”
It takes sound reasoning and robust evidence to shed light on the reality of inequality, social injustice and any notions of ‘fairness’ we might have as a society. However, it also takes a singular ability to unpick and demystify the complex social forces and contradictory messages that swirl about us each and every day. This is exactly what Fair play does.
As America’s second president, John Adams so eloquently put it, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
Mary O’Hara
Journalist and Alistair Cooke Fulbright Scholar