POVERTY? OR JUST HARD UP

[Stanley]

POVERTY? OR JUST HARD UP

9 June 2004

I was triggered off this morning by reading that John Reid, the latest Health Minister, has at last said something sensible. In effect it was that the middle classes weren’t really doing anybody any good by nagging people in ‘sink estates’ to stop smoking. I have to add a corollary which is that I don’t like evasive shorthand like ‘sink estates’, far better to simply speak of the poor. Let’s tell the truth about the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots.
This reminded me of a wonderful book called ‘The Classic Slum’ by Robert Roberts, still available in Penguin paperback. Roberts wrote about his early life in a Salford slum and one of the most memorable lines in it was that the quickest way out of Salford was three pints of beer, a few pints with the lads could make everything look a bit better. The same could be said of the single mother and her fags. True, it isn’t the best thing she can do for her health but it might just give her a moment’s respite from the cares and pressures of the day. All the do-gooders are doing by continually peddling their anti-smoking rhetoric is increasing the stress on the poor woman by making it quite clear to her that she is killing herself and poisoning her child.
My own view is that smoking cigarettes and cigars is very bad for you but after 60 years ingesting nicotine, the last forty in the shape of my pipe and beloved tobacco, all I can say is that for some people at least it is a reasonable thing to do. I can’t say the same for breathing polluted air, eating highly processed food produced with nothing but profit in mind, drug-taking or binge drinking. If the rabid wing of the do-gooder society want a target, concentrate on one of these. As for government intervention in the shape of smoking bans and increased taxes on tobacco, why not do the same for drinking and unnecessary school runs in large Urban Assault Vehicles? Ask any delivery driver what the most significant factor is in town deliveries and they will tell you it is the absence of school run vehicles during the holidays.
Going back to Roberts and ‘The Classic Slum’, if you read this and enjoy it go on to read ‘Love on the Dole’ by Walter Greenwood. He covers the same ground as Roberts and paints a depressing picture of life in ‘Hankey Park’, a fictional slum in Salford. Greenwood knew all about this because that was where he was reared. His description of being thrown onto the dole when he reached the end of his apprenticeship because he then qualified for a higher wage is based on his own experience. The interesting thing about that is that it was redundancy which gave him the time to write and the incentive to seek a job as a journalist. He wrote ‘Love on the Dole’ and never looked back.
There is much truth in this possible benefit of redundancy. It was redundancy from Bancroft Shed that forced me into a different path, led me to university and changed my life completely. I remember being button-holed on the street one day by a friend who told me how much he admired my courage in doing this and I told him that courage had nothing to do with it, I was desperate and had nowhere else to go! The courageous ones are the people who give up a good job to do something that really attracts them even though it means less money, status and security.
There is another aspect to this subject and this is really what triggered me off. How many of the people who criticise the smokers understand the difference between ‘Standard of living’ and ‘Quality of life’? Does the ability to afford a subscription to a gym, a new car each year, a foreign holiday and God forbid, a ‘life style consultant’ guarantee happiness? Of course it doesn’t. It follows that many of the people who would be seen as living in poverty by the affluent could actually have happier lives. True, there are many that don’t but this isn’t their fault, they didn’t choose poverty, they were forced into it. The common counter-argument to this is that poverty is a sign that people are lazy, shiftless and have no redeeming qualities and therefore deserve their station in life. Tell this to all the skilled miners, ship-builders and steel workers thrown out of a job by the ‘rationalisation’ of industry and the global economy.
No, to go back to my title, poverty isn’t the same thing as being hard up. My definition of poverty is the stage where your income doesn’t match up to the cost of the necessities of life. You can be hard up and still have a good quality of life if you aren’t forced into expenditure like booze and fags to anaesthetise yourself against the stresses of your life. If you are in that situation it doesn’t really help to have a large woman in twin set and pearls wagging her finger at you and telling you what to do.
By modern standards, just about every worker in the cotton industry in Barlick between the wars was living in poverty. Despite that they seem to have managed quite nicely thank you. I’m not saying that there wasn’t poverty in the town, read Ernie Robert’s account of his early life, but the vast majority adjusted to their incomes and survived, some even prospered.
So, if the pressures of life are getting you down, read ‘The Classic Slum’ and reflect that perhaps there is a way to reduce the stress. Re-assess the priorities that govern your expenditure, cut your coat to suit your cloth as your grandmother would have said, the results might surprise you. Oh, and at the same time, forget the doom-mongers, if a bit of alcohol or nicotine eases your passage through life help yourself and damn the consequences. The amount your life will be shortened by the chemicals will be more than compensated by the gain from reducing the stress. The do-gooders never thought of that!

9 June 2004