Poverty's ghosts

Abstract

Very few of us realize with conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organization by which western Europe has lived for the last half century. We assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of our late advantages as natural, permanent and to be depended on, and we lay our plans accordingly. On this sandy and false foundation we scheme for social improvement and dress our political platforms, pursue our animosities and particular ambitions (Keynes 1920, p. 1).

Poverty cannot be ‘cured’, for it is not a symptom of the disease of capitalism. Quite the reverse: it is evidence of its robust good health, its spur to even greater accumulation and effort (Seabrook, quoted in Bauman 1998, p. 79).

Acknowledgements

This essay benefited from the research and critical input of Scarlett McCardle, and, in a companion article, we propose to look at the teaching of welfare law in UK University Law Schools. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2009 SLSA conference, De Montfort University, Leicester, and the Law, Poverty & Health Care Workshop at Liverpool Law School in November 2009, where I benefitted from the critical commentaries of John Harrington, Octavio Ferraz and Paul O'Connell. John Coggan and David Fraser have made perceptive criticisms of an earlier draft. Andrew Lewis provided additional research assistance.

Notes

 1. I take this and all the figures that follow from Pogue 2007, p. 11 et seq.

 2. Again, I must acknowledge that all of this data and these figures are drawn from Pogge (2007).

 3. In that report, the government distinguished absolute low income, relative low income and material deprivation and low income combined, which provides a wider measure of people's living standards. This indicator measures ‘the number of children living in households that are both materially deprived and have an income below 70 per cent of contemporary median equivalised household income’ (DWP 2003, para. 2.1).

 4. On 25 March 2010, Royal Assent was given to the Child Poverty Act 2010, enshrining a commitment to eradicate child poverty by 2020 and to take action to tackle the causes as well as the consequences of poverty.

 5. Those targets are further defined in ss. 3–6.

 6. ‘[W]e wear the last century rather lightly… such that it has already acquired the ‘disconcertingly alien character of the past…. A world just recently lost is already half forgotten’ (Judt 2008, p. 5).

 7. Of course, as Judt acknowledges, some twentieth-century states had more malevolent centralized manifestations; sometimes providential, always repressive.

 8. See Stevenson (1984), pp. 451–461.

 9. I owe this observation to Sarah Cracknell.

10. Among the plethora of analyses of the turning back of the welfare state in its post-Beveridge conception, a good, short and contemporary introduction remains Pete Alcock (1988).

11. Unreported, 6 January 1988 (available at Lexis), authoritatively discussed with companion cases in Mason Laurie (2006, pp. 412–440).

12. R v. Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority ex parte Blood [1997] 2 All ER 687.

13. R (on the application of Watts) v. Bedfordshire Primary Care Trust [2004] EWCA Civ 166, (2003) 77 BMLR 26.

14. [1998] ECR I-1931.

15. [2003] ECR I-4509. Again, for discussion see Mason and Laurie (2006, pp. 58–65).

16. Chaoulli v. Quebec (Attorney General), 2005 SCC 35. The appellants contested the validity of the prohibition on private health insurance provided for in s. 15 of the Health Insurance Act (HEIA) and s. 11 of the Hospital Insurance Act (HOIA) deprived them access to healthcare services that do not come with the waiting times inherent in the public system. The Supreme Court of Canada (McLachlin CJ Major, Bastarache, and Deschamps JJ; Binnie, LeBel and Fish JJ. dissenting) held that s. 15 HEIA and s. 11 HOIA were inconsistent with the Quebec Charter.

17. This paragraph and the references are owed to John Harrington in his paper, ‘Visions of utopia: Markets, medicine and the national health service’ I am grateful to Professor Harrington for sight of and permission to quote from this paper.

18. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, ‘… the focusing of so much attention and energy on debating, campaigning, litigating, and studying euthanasia and PAS is beginning to detract from the primary goal of improving end-of-life care’ (Emanuel, 1999, p. 642).

19. The text of the speech can be downloaded from http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org

20. I owe entirely to Tamara Hervey the observation that other Christian theologians, including Hans Küng (1977a, 1977b) and Jürgen Moltmann (1989), have called for a global social ethics based upon the increasing interdependence of humanity. A central plank of their vision involves solidarity with the poor, the oppressed and the excluded or marginalized.

21. What Hen ten Have has called ‘hypergoods’ (ten Have 1998, p. 203).

22. As Sacks points out, p. 115, his view ‘has close affinities’ with those of Amartya Sen's concept of ‘development as freedom’ (Sen 1999).

23. PGA Tour v. Martin, 532 U.S. 661 (2001).

24. Lectures at 6. The court ruled 7 to 2 that Martin had a right to use a golf cart, concluding that accommodating his disability by letting him ride in a cart would not fundamentally alter the game, which was, according to the majority, mainly about making shots, trying to get the ball into a very small hole. The scathing dissent of Justice Antonin Scalia repays several readings, lambasting the Court for entertaining, among other things, a ‘Kafkaesque’ reading in its ‘Alice in Wonderland determination that there are such things as judicially determinable “essential” and “nonessential” rules of a made-up game’, culminating in its ‘Animal Farm’ finding.

25. Lectures at 6–7.

26. Edelstein (1967), contextualizing Plato's underlying question of how the pursuit of health can be managed so that medicine serves rather than hinders or dominates our moral projects; discussed in McKenny (1997, p. 1).

27. I take the summary here of Bilchitz's thesis and argument from Ferraz's illuminating essay.

28. Such instruments, although not enumerated by Ferraz, include the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, arts 25 and 28 and art. 11(1) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, adopted by the UN General Assembly resolution 2200A (XXI) of December 16 1966, (a ‘harder’ legal form generating legal responsibilities on participant parties). See also the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), African Charter of Human and Peoples Rights 1981. I am especially grateful to Scarlett McCardle for guidance to and through these provisions.

29. In this respect, the Child Poverty Act 2010 may yet prove to be an important step in the identification and specification of relevant duty holders.

30. Reform of the United Nations democratic accountability is not a new programme (cf. White 2005).

31. Evidently, Barber is addressing himself here to what he calls democratization in societies emerging from tyranny.

32. After Bickel (1962).