The ever-widening poverty gap

NEWS ANALYSIS
Carey
Oppenheim, research
information officer at the Child Poverty Action Group looks at the plight of the poor and the plenty of the rich.
EVERY Saturday evening at around five o'clock a queue begins to form outside a Manchester shop. Within an hour it is 30 deep. Young people, women with children, pensioners jostle for places. The bargain on offer? Stale bread.
No — this is not the depression of the thirties, but the reality in Britain in 1986. Close to 11 million people are living on or below the poverty line. Yet Britain is among the 20 richest nations in the world.
In Child Poverty Action Group's 21st year the "Divided Britain" campaign highlights the growing chasms in our society. We are not alone in our concern. A MORI poll found that three out of four people think that the gap between rich and poor is too wide.
Events around "Divided Britain" are taking place throughout the summer from Peterborough to Port Talbot. One hundred celebrities from church leaders including the Archbishop of Glasgow, politicians, trade unionists to stars of film, theatre and television have pledged their support in a "Divided Britain" declaration to fight poverty and the growing divisions in British society.
The "Divided Britain Declaration" was launched last week in the piazza of London's Covent Garden. Some 2,000 balloons floated heavenwards, each representing 1,000 children in poverty, and carrying the message "Divided Britain — bursting for change".
"Into Focus", a photographic exhibition describing women's experiences of poverty through the eyes of ten particular individuals was opened. Using pictures and words, the women talk about their lives as carers, lone parents, home workers, pensioners, struggling to make ends meet on the bread line.
For those who think of London as the seat of the affluent south east, "Divided London — a tale of two cities" will shatter their illusions.
Throughout the country facts and figures, pictures, photographs focusing on peoples experiences of poverty went on show in an attempt to make this a nationwide issue.
Full details of each of these exhibitions is available from CPAG, I Macklin Street, London WC2B 5NH.
Transferring the one-off events of the campaign into something more than a media hype on poverty is a task that awaits and challenges us all.
"Divided Britain" means that a banker can spend as much on wine in one night as a poor family gets for its children in a week. It means that the Duke of Westminster was £600 million better off the day after the last budget, while proposals are going through parliament to stop helping the unemployed with their mortgage interest payments. It means that the top 2 per cent of taxpayers (earning £30,000 plus a year) have netted over £2 billion more in 1986/7 as a result of tax cuts since 1979,
while over I billion has been cut from the social security budget.
It is not only money which divides rich from poor. But also housing, health, education and more fundamentally freedoms and choices. In 1985 94,000 people were officially homeless in England. Some one million people are waiting for a council house.
Yet public spending on housing has fallen by 59 per cent in real terms since 1978/9 and the Audit Commission estimates that £30-40 billion is needed to put public and private housing into a reasonable state of repair.
The double standards of cuts for the poor and subsidies for the rich are sharply illustrated by the £4.75 billion spent on mortgage tax relief. This benefits the highest earners most — those on £30,000 a year or more gain 14 times the subsidy as the lowest earners on £4,000 a year.
Almost every type of illness, from childhood accidents to heart disease occurs more frequently among poorer people than the better off.
A university lecturer is three times more likely to live to enjoy retirement than a factory worker. Some would contend that half of the 29,000 babies born handicapped each year, would not have disabilities if their mothers had been able to afford decent diets and lead less stressful lives.
And so the story goes on. The inequalities which begin at childhood (over two million children are living in poverty today) accumulate as those children grow older.
But Britain is not only divided between rich and poor, but also between women and men, black and white, the wageless and the employed. Unemployment rates are much higher for the black population than for the white — Bangladeshi women, for instance, are four times as likely to be unemployed as white women.
Asian families are over 10 times as likely to be in overcrowded housing than white families. Women make up seven in ten of the low paid workers in this country and unemployment has increased faster for women than men since 1979.
This catalogue of facts only begins to demonstrate the two different worlds inhabited by the wealthy and the poor. As Faith in the City said "Poverty is not only about shortage of money. It is about rights and relationships; about how people are treated and how they regard themselves; about powerlessness, exclusion, and loss of dignity. Yet lack of an income is at its heart".