Last month was a special celebration for the children’s charity Comic Relief. It marked 40 years since the start of Red Nose Day. In the days leading up to March 21st, you could hardly switch on the radio or TV without being reminded that famous people, mainly showbiz celebrities, were going to disguise their normal features with red noses of various shapes and sizes to remind us that they were collecting money to improve the lives of poor children.
Endemic
And it does seem difficult not to see this as a positive thing given the fact that, as we are told by the charity Shelter, 120,000 children in the UK wake up homeless every day and many thousands more who may not be homeless have to suffer housing and living conditions that make it impossible for them to live comfortable and fulfilling lives. The Labour government’s new Homelessness Minister, Rusharana Ali, has herself referred to this as ‘a national disgrace’, pointing out that last year ‘more than 117,000 households, including over 150,000 children, were living in temporary accommodation’. Shelter also calls this an ‘outrage’, and understandably so, given that when it was founded in 1966, its promise was to get rid of homelessness within 10 years. Since then, organisations dedicated to solving homelessness have proliferated and Shelter now runs its own weekly lottery – a sure sign that the problem it campaigns about is endemic.
A further recent report by the Barnardo’s charity states that ‘more than a million children in the UK either sleep on the floor or share a bed with parents or siblings because their family cannot afford the “luxury” of replacing broken frames and mouldy linen’ and that ‘the rise in “bed poverty” reflects growing levels of destitution in which low-income families already struggling with soaring food or gas bills often find they are also unable to afford a comfortable night’s sleep’. And in a recent article in the Big Issue, John Bird, founder of that magazine and now a member of the House of Lords, summed up the embedded nature of poverty and homelessness by stating that ‘three decades of the same conversation is exhausting’. Other sources have reiterated the same thing. The centre-right think tank, the Centre for Social Justice, found that ‘the most disadvantaged people in Britain were no better off than they were 15 years ago, with around 13.4 million people living lives marred by family fragility, stagnant wages, poor housing, chronic ill health and crime’. And Greg Hurst of the Centre for Homeless Impact has expressed the view that ‘we are condemned to repeat the cycle of ebbs and flows of homelessness’.
Realm of fantasy
But why? After all, according to official figures, over a quarter of a million homes in England are classed as ‘long-term empty’, meaning that they have been left vacant for more than six months. Yet we all know that the way things work is that parents and children who need homes cannot simply walk into empty properties and live there. The kind of society we live in does not cater for such needs, basic as they may be, of those who do not have the money to pay for them. In the same way, no matter how technologically efficient food production has become, no matter how much food we are capable of producing, only people with enough money in their pockets will have access to it. In the context of capitalism, John Bird got it right, in one of his Big Issue articles, by stating that ‘ideas of ending poverty are stuck in the realm of fantasy’.
Scratching the surface
So can anything be done at all? It’s clear that Red Nose Day, coming back time after time as it does, can help a little but in the end it can do no more than offer a small amount of temporary relief to the poor or disadvantaged children it is aimed at. No matter how much time and energy is put into it by those involved and no matter how well-meaning they may be, their efforts can do no more than scratch the surface of the poverty problem. They can get nowhere near offering any kind of long-term solution. The Oxfam food policy director, Hanna Saarinen, recognised this recently when she stated: ‘We need to reimagine a new global food system to really end hunger; one that works for everyone.’ But the trouble – and the truth – is that such a food system is simply not feasible in the framework of the world we live in, where, at the end of the day, profit must always come before need. That is why, even in a country like Britain where food is manifestly plentiful, many people are still forced to have recourse to food banks, and charities like Comic Relief are still considered necessary. Of course, millions of workers do manage to keep their heads above water, some living reasonably comfortable lives, but even this is usually at the cost of working hard for an entire lifetime, never being truly free of financial insecurity and often at great cost to the quality of their lives.
Need not profit
And so it will remain until we not only, in the word used by Hanna Saarinen, ‘reimagine’ but also implement a wholly different organisation of society, one that is fully cooperative and human-centred and dedicated to catering for the needs of everyone not producing profit for the tiny minority – in other words designed to take care of everyone in a sustainable, inclusive way. Adequate resources to provide a decent life for all are available, but that decent life cannot be realised under the profit system. It can only be possible in the kind of moneyless, marketless society that we stand for, and that will render regular recourse to charities like Comic Relief and events like Red Nose Day unnecessary and superfluous.
Howard Moss
Blogger's Note:
The April 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard carried a rather jaundiced article on Comic Relief. "More cold water, comrades . . . "
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