I received Families and Poverty for review in early May 2015 towards the end of a general election campaign; a campaign within which politicians attempted to use the phrase ‘hardworking families’ seemingly as often as they could. This phrase was used by all those attempting to get elected regardless of their party loyalties. Meanwhile the media was still confidently predicting a hung parliament which would inevitably lead to some form of coalition government.
As I sit writing this in late July 2015 the morning after the first reading of a Tory majority government’s latest welfare reform bill, things look very, very different to early May.
In an astounding example of what Orwell termed ‘double think’ (the ability to hold two contradictory positions at the same time and believe them), ‘the hardworking families’ who politicians lauded only a few short months ago have gone from the spotlight. The first Tory budget since 1996 has targeted and hit the working poor hard, with those with children to be hit the hardest.
It seems that having no pay or a low-paid job is little more than proof that your family is not hardworking enough. The further implication, as ever in British social policy, is that for every deserving and virtuous ‘hardworking family’ there is at least one household of ‘undeserving’ scroungers abusing the system who need to be rooted out by ever stricter conditionality. The family is both lauded and condemned in equal measure.
This Janus-faced and inconsistent attitude to family has no place in Daly and Kelly’s work; it provides instead a considered well-structured and thoughtful analysis.
Based on field work conducted with 51 families in Northern Ireland between 2011 and 2012, of which 21 were single-parent families, this book achieves two important tasks: firstly, it asks how we can attempt to understand the complex relationship between poverty and family; and secondly, it presents us with insights into this relationship as a lived experience.
For many of us, any sociological approach to family conjures up memories of Young and Wilmot’s Family and Kinship in East London and other works which sought to understand the structures, practices and meanings of family. Daly and Kelly instead try to present us with an understanding of where family meets poverty and how they intertwine.
This is an explicit aim; early in the book the authors introduce us to the theoretical framework which structured both their research and the book. In their words, this was to view ‘the relationship between family and poverty or low income in terms of four elements’ (17):
| • | Family structure and mode of organisation. | ||||
| • | Cultural specificity, meaning and identity. | ||||
| • | Relationships, activities and processes. | ||||
| • | Family as an object of public representation and local life. | ||||
This theoretical framework is welcome because it anchors the book and differentiates it from many of the recent texts on austerity which, whilst they have been able to provide vivid accounts of the lives of those in poverty and at the sharp end of ‘welfare reform’, have been long on moral outrage but lack a grounded analysis of the mechanisms at work within the process. The interviews covered a wide range of themes exploring resources, income, family practices, coping strategies, wider family ties and support, and also local life and reputation. What emerges is unsurprisingly a highly complex picture within which relationships with family are essential as support mechanisms, provide a rationale for behaviour and also produce pressure upon individuals.
The book is about poor families in a specific place, Northern Ireland, which is arguably the British region with the most specific issues due to sectarianism, segregation of communities, variations in welfare delivery and the limited impact of welfare reform in the region due to its devolved government. However, whilst acknowledging these issues, the book does not seem to be limited by them. Not having enough money to live on, having to constantly say ‘no’ to your children, relying on extended family for short-term loans and support, and feeling embarrassed when refusing invitations from friends are common experiences for those on low incomes and occur regardless of region.
Daly and Kelly’s Families and Poverty will be of interest to all who are interested in how family both adds to and mitigates some of the pressure of poverty. The book is well informed and gives an excellent if pessimistic appraisal of the likely impact of further welfare cuts and extensions of conditionality.
Above all else, this book reminds us of the sheer monotony and the amount of labour that living in poverty entails. Politicians should take note and appreciate that many of the UK’s ‘hardworking families’ do not have a paid job.
Department of Geography, University of Durham, UK
[email protected]
© 2016 Jon Warren
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2015.1129127