A letter to the Guardian with signatories from across the country calls for people who have been poor to be consulted in figuring out solutions;  [Give poor people a say in policy making]

Holistic political economy wholly endorses this appeal and would go further. The principle of engagement should apply in all areas. 

First, I make the general case for people to be involved, then I illustrate it with the example of the food industry - I have chosen food because it is so bound up with poverty. People have very little meaningful power, this is a major issue if you are poor but also effects people in general. Being powerless is a democratic deficit.

Politicians like to say there are responsibilities as well as rights. But they seldom spell out what those responsibilities are beyond paying tax and abiding by the law. The public still get treated as people to whom things are done, not as citizens acting in partnership with their government. When things go wrong we have years of public enquiries looking backwards and pouring over the details; reports pile up , the guilty wriggle free, a hapless scapegoat from low down may be punished and little real change occurs (see, And another thing, Enquiries and Reports and Scapegoats)

Outsourcing removes public administered services from democratic scrutiny for the simple reason that companies are not themselves democracies and shield what they do behind commercial sensitivity (see, And another thing, Secrecy about contracts)

In a holistic political economy citizens would be engaged, as of right, on the boards of all bodies creating, delivering, administering or regulating public services or providing any goods and services with potential societal impacts. What we have now is an out-of-control lobby and an over centralised state. Parliamentary access is used to bend society to business’s wishes in the service of maximising profit. Let me be clear; profit is OK if it delivers a “right livelihood” and is the by-product of doing something well or providing something useful, but too often we simply have price gouging, rent seeking, and asset stripping because profit is the prime objective rather than the secondary effect. Corporate governance must also be reformed to force companies to take their impact on society into account - a 180-degree reversal from the situation we have now (see And another thing, How some comanies behave)

Take food; consider how business fiercely lobbies to protect the right of companies to produce and sell stuff, labelled as food, but what may more accurately be referred to as industrially formulated edible chemical substances, as well as Ultra Processed Foods  [Ultra Processed Food] . These contains combinations of sugar, fat and salt that do not occur naturally but which we crave, UPFs are therefore addictive and have many dangers one of which is the massive increase in type 2 diabetis – this isnt just bad for the individual it loading costs onto the NHS.  

Martha Gill notes that some known dangers are being ignored “As with cigarettes in the 70s, much of the evidence is in. Junk food is linked to cancer. Two landmark studies last year showed UPFs caused heart disease and strokes. It is also beyond question that these kinds of foods cause obesity, a condition linked to 30,000 deaths a year in England alone. One in five children are obese by the final year of primary school and levels of obesity are spiralling upwards. Unhealthy diets are, worldwide, now killing more people than tobacco.” And she argues that UPFs should come with a Health Warning  [Health Warning]

A review of Henry Dimbleby’s book Ravenous  notes “It is shocking to read that there are 3.3 million people in the UK “who live in an area where there are no shops selling fresh ingredients within 15 minutes by public transport”  [Ravenous]  

And Tim Spectre in Spoon Fed points out that “a fat is not just one thing but “a vague umbrella term for anything made up of building blocks of three fatty acids joined together”….so we switch from butter to “cheap highly processed items with multiple additives and new industrial fats that we know little about”.   [Spoon Fed]  

However you look at it the politics of food is stacked against poor people. Long hours make us time poor and it is often cheaper (money poor) to eat badly. We should not forget that the origins of the cooperative movement go back to campaigns against food adulteration in the nineteenth century. 

Poverty exposes people to the worst aspects of society, excludes them from public discourse and reduces freedom of choice - we’d all hate rationing but access to money is fulfilling exactly that role. No money, no decent goods or services. This applies across the board; you are disproportionately  subject to indirect taxes if you cannot save, you pay more for small items if you cannot buy in larger quantities, you pay more if you have a pay as you go meter, you are more subject to differential pricing if you cannot buy in advance, a bereaved son gets a notice to quit 3 days after a parent dies because the house is now deemed too big, a council threatens to dispose of a parents few possessions because the only relatives have not got probate, if you go £1 over on carers allowance you lose it all (and get chased for the debt) and so it goes on, and on.

Treating people as consumers (or nuisances, or stupid, or inconvenient) rather than citizens helps perpetuate these social dysfunctions. This amounts to a massive con trick, we are told we live in a democracy but it can amount to a sleight of hand. Everything is turned into a personal responsibility whilst in reality we have, and the poor especially, little meaningful agency. We can choose between 10 types of crap but only the rich can buy the 1 quality item. Though we are targeted as consumers we are all excluded from the inception, design, and delivery of goods and services made for us to use. What we do do is reap the consequences; the first order consequences of obesity, and if not simple malnutrition, certainly poor health and reduced life expectancy and the second order consequences we are expected to pick up as taxpayers - to pay the costs to society that come along later (smoking, lead in petrol, air pollution etc. etc.). These costs can be considerable, business need to avoid them, they are what economists euphemistically call externalities, for if they had to factor them in it might eliminate profit, and we couldn’t have that could we.

The answer to these problems is not tecnhocratic management to create growth, it is likely to exacerbate problems of accountability and externalities, let alone its impact (symbolic and real) on activity that exacerbates global heating (see And another thing, Growth when global Heating should be changing everything)

A holistic political economy would seek to empower its citizens and make the right way the easy way. In our society we make life easy for those with money and difficult for those without. I am not saying this change of outlook and increased accountability would solve all problems overnight, nor am I saying that all businesses are bad, but the reasonable voices are mute, they tolerated Osborne, Johnson, Truss and Trump, they steal the lefts’ approach (that an attack on one is an attack on all), and brand even modest changes as an attack on business; well no it isn’t (See And another thing, Good Process).

There is nothing easy about being poor, why should we tolerate having poor fellow citizens and why won’t we ask them what would actually help?

As the letter closes by saying; nothing about us, without us, is for us. 

No comments