Abstract
The authors of ‘Community, Virtue and the White British Poor’ argue that poor White communities can still organize themselves to protect their interests and, therefore, produce ‘virtue’ – good and admirable qualities among their members. This response suggests that the argument is poorly founded both in terms of its understanding of the White British poor and in terms of its conceptualization of socio-spatial processes in poor communities and especially in the misleading conclusions drawn from examples of communities provided.
The thrust of ‘Community, Virtue and the White British Poor’ is that people who are White, British and poor are further damaged because the communities in the neighbourhoods where they live either fail to compensate for material disadvantage compared to other kinds of spatial communities, or compound it because they are insufficiently productive of ‘virtue’ (Merry, Harris and Manley, in press). Virtue is understood as ‘good and admirable qualities of persons’ achieved through socio-spatial practice. It is suggested that, in the current era, the difficulties of poor White people are accentuated by three things: by pervasive disparagement by (much of) the rest of society, by adverse labour market conditions for those who lack skills and credentials and by the UK government whose localism policies expect communities to organize themselves to deliver formerly public services that have been cut as a consequence of budget reductions. The authors argue that neither underclass-influenced moralism nor attempts to deconcentrate poverty are likely to be successful in enabling this virtue to emerge and also that common religious affiliation and trade unions are both badly faded forces for virtue and no longer effective. However, all may not be lost. Two examples of community activism are chosen to illustrate that poor White communities can organize to promote their interests and so there is (perhaps still) a potential for such communities to generate virtue in spite of their decline.
These are important themes, especially in an era when the United Kingdom is being subjected to a public spending austerity programme that has caused cuts to fall disproportionately on more deprived local authority areas, and where there is evidence of the negative impacts falling on the poorest households and communities, accentuated by welfare reform (Hastings et al., 2015). However, the article is ultimately unconvincing, rests on evidence of doubtful value, and its optimism seems both misplaced and misleading.
Who are the ‘White British poor’ and where do they live? The authors provide mainly assertion and insinuation – their poverty lies in them ‘facing some challenging economic conditions’ (p. 1); they are stigmatized (passim) and they have tended to ‘slide down the socioeconomic ladder’ (p. 8). There are a group, we are told, of ‘hundreds of thousands’ (p. 9). (So perhaps a very small group, then, out of a UK population of 64.6 million, and inconsistent with most estimates of poverty in the UK – among people of all ethnicities – which place it around a quarter of the population, Gordon, 2006). And, as long as they are not among those ‘pushed into shelters, foodbanks and onto the street’ (p. 1), they live within communities that exhibit a ‘pervasive social malaise’, specifically on ‘council estates’ (p. 9). All this does rather unfortunately tend to confirm the authors’ observations about stigmatizing narratives. But amid lively international debate about the impacts of neighbourhood composition on socio-economic outcomes and strong policy concerns within the United Kingdom about the impacts of uneven development and regional disparities, it is frustrating to encounter conceptual and empirical fuzz.
Many of the generalizations here about White communities are outdated and tend to caricature. A key point is that the majority of people who are poor do not live in poor neighbourhoods. Data from the Poverty and Social Exclusion (PSE) UK survey using the PSE’s own relatively intense measure of poverty, which combines low income and deprivation, shows under a quarter (24%) of poor people (of all ethnicities) live in areas within the bottom decile of the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), whilst exactly the same percentage live the least deprived 50% of UK neighbourhoods. Examining the bottom 20% of the IMD still shows less than half (42%) of the poor live there. 1
Council-built estates, especially those that were at the bottom end of the hierarchy of desirability, have been subject to 35 years of selective demolition and rebuilding, tenure change and migration. Few any longer much resemble the decaying relicts of the post-war mass housing boom that were so apparent in the 1980s and 1990s (Pawson and Mullins, 2010; Tunstall and Coulter, 2006). Perhaps surprisingly, improvements in crime levels, employment and overall resident satisfaction that became apparent in the most deprived areas in the 2000s have largely held up since 2010 (Lupton and Fitzgerald, 2015). The authors are also neglectful of the huge diversity that has emerged in the residential roles of disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Robson et al. (2008, table 1) identified four main types of disadvantaged neighbourhoods in England and showed that only a third were ‘isolate’ neighbourhoods, where people tended to move from and to similarly deprived areas and their status was fixed. The others showed either a tendency to improve their social status through population change or strong patterns of out migration to higher status areas.
However, using the PSE UK data and definition again, just over half of people who live in neighbourhoods within the bottom decile of the IMD (of all ethnicities) are poor. So the arguments about neighbourhood social capital and how it may develop in different forms, with more or fewer benefits in different neighbourhoods of different compositions, are still relevant. But the authors here appear to have missed the long-term investigation of these ideas in the extensive literature on ‘neighbourhood effects’ that, in its modern form, stretches back at least as far Wilson (1987) and has also been informed by Bourdieu and Putnam. Conceptual advances about how neighbourhood effects might ‘work’ (under what conditions, with what concentrations of poverty, with what exposure to neighbourhood poverty) have been made by Galster (e.g. 2001, 2012) and Joseph et al. (2007), among many others. The latter identify four mechanisms through which (using the authors’ term) virtue might arise in poor neighbourhoods: social networks, social control, role modelling and ‘the political economy of place’ (Joseph et al., 2007). This kind of conceptualization has in turn provided a framework for empirical research. Space precludes a review, but the recent edited volumes edited by van Ham and his colleagues (Manley et al., 2013; van Ham et al., 2012, 2013) illustrate the wealth of approaches and findings that have been product of an international research effort over 20 years. All this seems to have passed the present authors by. A closely related literature examines the supposed benefits of ‘mixed communities’ (Bridge et al., 2011; Kintrea, 2013), albeit with very mixed conclusions about their efficacy.
The positive argument in the article about how poor White communities might be able to organize themselves in the specific economic and political circumstances of the United Kingdom under ‘austerity’ rests on two lightly sketched examples. The identity of the first is hidden from the reader for reasons that are obscure, but it seems to be a fairly typical example of a village community trying to wrestle with the planning system to resist new housing development, a type of protest that is found across the United Kingdom, with recognizable protagonists (e.g. Pacione, 2014). But this seems the weakest possible illustration of how poor White communities might generate virtue, for this is not a poor but a mixed-income community and the role of poor White people in the struggle is not mentioned. So if the dialogue here is intended to explore how the disadvantages of a neighbourhood composed of a majority of poor White people might be overcome, it cannot succeed. This is lightweight material stretched beyond its credible limits leaving the authors’ imaginations to play.
The second example is identified as Aylesham, a rural village in Kent, in the south east corner of England. 2 As an illustration of a disadvantaged community organizing itself to fight public services cuts it is an idiosyncratic choice. According to the 2011 census, the population is 94% White and the IMD shows it lies within the bottom 20% of deprived areas in England. So there is a sense that it could be characterized as a ‘poor White community’, even though several parts of the nearby urban centre of Dover are more deprived. Dover District Council area, which includes Aylesham, is the 122nd most deprived local authority area in England (Department of Communities and Local Government, 2015) and therefore within the bottom half of the deprivation rank, but hardly in a depressed position. But as Hastings et al. (2015) show, it is the most deprived urban local authorities, predominately in the north, that have experienced the largest budget cuts in England, and it is also here, outside London, that the greatest number of areas experiencing poverty and of deprivation are found (Dorling et al., 2007; Wong et al., 2009). So it would have been much more convincing to argue a case from the heartlands of poverty and cuts than one from the south east of England. (see Lone and Silver, 2014, for an intense local case study of a northern White working-class community).
Further consideration of Aylesham also suggests it may be subject to misrepresentation in order to further the construction of the dialogue, or at least to misunderstanding.
3
Contrary to the claim that ‘there are no professionals working outside the neighbourhood’ (p. 22) that can bolster community activity, in fact 26% of men and 24% of women aged 16–74 in 2011 were in managerial, professional or associate professional occupations. And, considering all those who have a job, 40% work 10 km or more away from home. It is also worth noting in the context of the earlier characterization of council estates that Aylesham households are mainly homeowners (59%, albeit fewer than the English average of 68%). Other evidence about Aylesham (Aylesham Village, 2015) shows that it has long had a thriving community life: there are tens of community organizations including the Carnival Society that has had a continuous history since 1929, except for a few years at the end of the 1980s. Among the many community organizations, there is a brass band and a male voice choir, which perhaps gives clues to the former status of Aylsham as a mining centre on the Kent Coalfield, with all that implies for a (historical) sense of community. As Bulmer concluded after considering mining villages around the globe:
The traditional mining community is characterised by the prevalence of communal social relationships among miners and their families which are multiplex in form. The social ties of work, leisure, family, neighbourhood and friendship overlap to form close knit and interlocking locally based collectivities of actors. (1975: 87–88).
Here we get to the heart of the problem in trying to understand the impact of living in a poor neighbourhood on poor people’s lives. I follow Galster (2007) who reviewed extensive research output and concluded that it pointed, on balance, to the lives of poor people being further damaged where their neighbours were also poor. The authors of this piece argue that their (slight) examples show a latent potential for communities to overturn those disadvantaging processes and fight back from a depleted position, and that poor communities should not be written off. However, a different conclusion would be that poor communities have to be more closely understood and contextualized.
The forces of change in the deregulated ‘knowledge economy’ labour market, in the housing system and in public policy, have borne down heavily, but poor communities, even poor White communities, are contingent. Poor communities offer different opportunity structures through their spatial and economic contexts, they are various in their dynamic attachment to neighbouring areas, they are bounded and bonded individually, and they each come with their own cultural baggage. So they are each constitutive of live, evolving socio-spatial processes. In some communities, favourable circumstances may indeed afford the capacity to generate the virtue that is sought. However, to suggest that this provides reason to think that poor communities in general not only can provide solidarity but upward mobility is a sell-out that accepts the value of ‘localism’ as a substitute for social policy and all on the flimsiest of evidence.