CATHOLIC PICTORIAL – FOOD FOR THOUGHT for 15.9.91

Fr Francis Marsden

A social worker bad gone round to interview one of her clients. The terraced council house was scruffy, the fence broken down, the garden a mass of weeds. Broken bricks and glass littcred the road outside. The unmarried mother-of-three sat on the settee in the living-room smoking and complaining bow difficult she found it to feed and clothe her children. Weren’t there any other grants she could get? Beer cans from the night before with her latest boyfriend filled the waste bin.

One of the kids suddenly arrived back from the shop with the groceries: frozen chips, tinned vegetables, frozen ready-to-cook meals. Ignoring the visitor, the lad threw himself down in an armchair and started playing with the video remote control, flashing on and off between TV channels and the film he wanted to find.

Next door the garden was neat. Two elderly sisters lived on their pensions. They could have requested a home help but they managed to keep the house neat and tidy themselves. Their main problem wasn’t their income, but the behaviour of the neighbours: loud music keeping them awake until 3 or 14 in the morning, different men and girls calling at all times. And if you dared to ask the children to stop kicking the football against your fence, all you got was a mouthful of abuse - and that from 6 to 8 year olds. If you told the parents, you got the same abuse. One of the sisters had a bad heart and couldn’t get out much. The tension with the neighbours and their brats just made things worse.

The street used to be a nice and peaceful community. Many of the old neighbours had died off now, and with the new crowd the council was giving houses to, things had gone steadily downhill.

A couple of doors away lived a married couple in their early forties with two children. The husband used to be a security guard: long hours and not very well paid - until one night a gang of thugs jumped on him and beat him up badly. He had severe head injuries, and had been very bad with his nerves since. They had to scrape by on invalidity and his wife’s few hours’ cleaning job. They’d like to give the children a decent holiday, but they’d be lucky just to manage a day in Southport this year.

They tried to bring the children up well, but they inevitably picked up some cheek and swear words from the other kids in the street. It was galling to see so many of those around them living together unmarried, having several partners, claiming social security benefits as if single and unemployed whilst cohabiting and working, and having their houses well equipped with “knock-off” videos, microwaves, mountain bikes and computer games for the kids. What reward did they get for their own honesty and trying to live as good Catholics? It was difficult not to get bitter sometimes.

In looking at poverty, we should not look just at level of income, but at the whole quality of life in a neighbourhood. We cannot blame all of that on the Government or the Council. People themselves ruin their own areas for everyone: vandalism, car thefts, burglary, abusive neighbours, women’s fears for their children and fear to be out alone. Hooligans and anti-social elements mock the police, who feel betrayed by the leniency and ineffectiveness of the magistrates and the courts. What is the purpose of making efforts to catch and run in the thieves and the vandals, if the courts just let them off?

The social security system tries to distinguish between the honest poor who need help, and the scroungers who need a kick up the backside - but they are overwhelmed. I asked one pensioner who had a lovely neat flat on the 6th floor of a 114-storey block of flats, did she know of many other Catholics in the block? “There’s not many people live up there, Father”, she said. “You see, they’re all giro-drops.” I was puzzled. I didn’t know what a giro-drop was.

She explained: they were all addressee for the sake of drawing Social Security benefit. Men officially lived in the flats, but actually lived with their girlfriends or even their officially divorced wives. You get more benefit living separately than together. Moreover the DHSS paid the rent to the Council, so the Council were quite happy not to have to worry about arrears or non-payment. The tenants only called at the flats once a week to collect the giro-cheque. In quite a few the gas and electric had actually been cut off, but that didn’t worry them. If they wanted a drugs party they could bring candles or torches.

That particular block of flats were repeatedly vandalised, the lifts put out of action, light—bulbs stolen off the landings, flats broken into -  because the Council wouldn’t pay to employ anyone on security in the ground-floor office by the door. They couldn’t afford to. They had too many burnt-down schools to rebuild.

A great deal of poverty is the result of crime, vandalism and anti-social behaviour. The socialist solution of pumping more and more money in will not work. There is an evil in the heart of man. People have to respect the law and each other. Youngsters at present do not see that crime is punished and good rewarded. Instead they see the criminals get away with it, and the good suffer. That is one of the main causes of injustice in our society — the crisis in personal morality.
A certain degree of poverty is self-inflicted. Some is a result of incompetence and poor education — like the woman who whinges while sending the child out to buy expensive frozen chips and convenience foods. Her grandmother who probably had to bring up 6 or 8 children on half the income back in the 1930’s, and by thrift and ingenuity managed it, would be horrified.

Smoking and drinking, for example, are very expensive. 20 cigarettes per day for both husband and wife will burn up £1300 per year. And if the husband goes out three times a week and drinks 14-5 pints - that’s £800 per year. No wonder some families cry poverty if they are spending £140 per week on beer and ciggies alone. There are plenty of youngsters walking round in trainers priced at £140 upwards, and tracksuits at £70 or £80. It is expensive to be a slave to fashion. We can all claim poverty relative to what we might like to have. But I notice that the alehouses are full, the video-shops thriving (except when they get robbed) and the off-licences open all evening. The poorest streets seem to have most satellite dishes. Parish clubs in the most socially deprived areas can take £300,000 or more per year over the bar. There’s money somewhere!

Unemployment is one cause of poverty. It is a soul-destroying evil, and we hear much about it. Man has both the right to work, and the duty to work if he can. However I suspect that the real unemployment figures on Merseyside are far, far lower than the official figures, because so many people do jobs ‘on the side’. Rather like Italy, there is a vast black economy.

Let us not forget, however, that some people are unemployed because they are unemployable: no employer in his right mind is going to pay an idler and a waster with poor timekeeping, poor workmanship, who is lazy, work-shy, thieves from work and is uncooperative and aggressive towards the management.

Schools which have poor discipline and punctuality do their pupils an immense disservice. They get them into the habit of wasting time, not getting down to work, turning up late, absenteeism and lack of skills. Then the ex-pupils go to work, behave the same way and get their cards three weeks later. One builder who runs his own small business told me of a 17-year old he took on. The lad only ever turned up for four days out of the five each week. After six weeks he asked for two weeks’ holiday with pay: the boss found out he was planning to do some work for someone else for the fortnight. He got his cards.

Lack of discipline, lack of respect, lack of hard work - it all leads to unemployment, petty crime, and (after 8 or 10 convictions on average) detention in one of Her Majesty’s Residences for which society has to pay an average of £260 per prisoner per week. They should be in labour camps working to repay society for the damage they have done -  not banged up for 23 hours per day in the universities of crime.

Much modern-day poverty results from the collapse of personal morality and the drift away from Christianity. Just take for example the divorce rate: every divorce is very expensive. It means running two homes rather than one. Usually the mother ends up trying to bring up the children single-handed, having to go out to work to make ends meet, and perhaps ultimately suffering angina from the strain of it all. Sexual infidelity and the breakdown in family life is a major cause of poverty.

We keep looking for economic answers to our problems. Many of the root issues are spiritual and moral.