Within a little less than a month, this pamphlet*by Professor Peter Townsend is the second Fabian broadside against the abandonment of fundamental socialist priorities by the present government, Read in conjunction with Professor Brian Abel-Smith's trenchant attack, reviewed in The Week on December 8th 1966, Peter Townsend's critique will provide a whole arsenal ef ammunition for those Labour Party and Trade Union activists who are coming round to the view that it is urgent to reverse the present trend of Mr. Wilson's policies, In their recent study "The Poor and the Poorest", Townsend and Abel-Smith calculated that some seven and a half millien people in Britain were living at or below the standards set by National Assistance. This startling and perturbing conclusion triggered off a great deal of discussion, and a whole host of new research projects, But in this Fabian pamphlet, Professer Townsend takes the whole discussion further, First, he argues that inequalities may well be widening in Britain: the average earnings of low paid workers are rising much slower than those of higher-paid workers, and up to now the incomes policy has done nothing whatever to reverse the trend, (Indeed the efficial suppression of some of the statistics on earnings, attacked in | ‘Tribune' recently by Clive Jenkins, may well indicate that piecerates in some sections of industry have been successfully beating the freeze, The farmworkers, on the other hand, have not), At the same time social security benefits have been lagging behind wages, while family allowances have been falling in their proportional value: a family with four children today receive family allowances making up some & of average family earnings, as opposed to 12% ten years ago. . All the while the percentage within the total population of elderly, retired, chronic sick people and of children has been rising, Large families have also become more and more numerous, All of these trends produce a situation in which the Gevernment neéde "like Alice, to run even faster to stay in the same place and to preserve, still less extend, existing human rights". Three million people, in the families of low-wage earners, live below the official subsistence minimum, Another 24 million old people are in the same predicament. But Alice, far from running faster, is immobile, caught in the Callaghan freeze, The significance of this is made very plain in some of the new data which Professor Townsend offers: he estimates that some 10% of the households of wage-earners with two or more children live below these same official minima, which indicates that there is a whole army of sadly deprived children in Britain, There are no less than three quarters of a million disabled or ill people who cannot work, About a third get National Assistance, but maybe 50,000 or 100,000 others would qualify for it, The regional variations in poverty are sinister, In the Northern region there is "a higher rate of sickness and incapacity, markedly lower average earnings and markedly fewer children staying on at school beyond -the age of 15",
The accumulation of neglect and complacent calleusness which these facts bespeak is the hidden side of neo-capitalist ‘affluence’, Here is another fact to cap them:
"the proportion of children living in households which consume
a diet which on average fails in at least two particulars to
reach the minimum levels recommended by the British Medical
Association increased between 1960 ard 1964 from 36% to 43%.
It is a public scandal that the National Food Survey Commit-
tee has as yet made no efforts to establish the numbers and
kinds of families markedly below the average". Many of Peter Townsend's suggested remedies for these ills will command widespread support. Family allowances must be trebled, and applied alse te the firstborn. Pension rights must be established and generalised to cover the long-term sick and civilian disabled. Fatherless families must be State-aided, The wage— stop must be abolished, A fierce programme of housing repair and modernisation is required, These and other remedial measures to "strengthen the threadbare sections of our Social Services” will require the rejection of the monstrous superstition of Governmental spokesmen that there can be no improvement in the social services until there has been economic growth to finance them, Growth before 1970 will be insufficient, so that the war on poverty cannot begin if there is net a serious effort towards redistribution of the existing social income. The problem herve, as in the wider field treated in ‘Labour's Social Plans' by Professor Abel-Smith, is a political one, The obstacle to redistribution of income on any meaningful scale is identical with the obstacle to explosive economic growth: to overcome it is to defeat the basic interests of neo-capitalism as a corporative structure. It will be impossible to generate the kind of pressure which can effectively sustain Peter Townsend's priorities without mobilising a really substantial campaign within the Labovr and Trade Union Movement. Only a mass movement can have the effective force to override the bankers' insistent and effective lobby, And to arouse such a: movement it is necessary to evolve a coherent strategy, a policy which will integrate the extremely valuable findings of these Fabian researchers with an overall plan for the socialist reorganisation of the economy, based on structural anti-capitalist reforms, and ar extensive development of Trade Union powers through workers' control, Unless labour's legions can be aroused to move, the voices of these honest and painstaking researchers will rest unheard, crying in the wilderness, It is better to cry in the wilderness than. to Kold silence in the face of iniquity. Some of us have been in that inclement place for a little time now, But we must not stay there, It is time for us to begin to group together, to make a serious bid for the ear of the Labour movement, and to werk, together with the growing trade union opposition, to elaborate an effective alternative policy for Labour, * "Poverty, Socialism & Labour in Power" by Peter Townsend. Fabian
Tract 371, 2/64.