Anger is an energy

Cathy Come Home was a BBC television play from 1966 about the lives of people experiencing homelessness.  Back then, our popular vision of 21^st century living was unlikely to include a society where people struggling to find work are handed sanctions instead of support and depend on food handouts to survive.  But that is where we have got to in the current script for Aspirational Britain. Ken Loach, Director of Cathy Come Home, has called for ‘public rage’ on the issue. 

In 1966, Loach recalls, people who learned a trade could get a job for life.  Now there seem fewer guarantees for working people to be in control of their destiny.  Loach sees it as part of a system of ‘conscious cruelty’.   In a nutshell, the popular image of ‘skivers and striders’ has manipulated the narrative of the ‘deserving of the underserving poor’ to cover up the failures to manage a changing economic system as capitalism enters a new phase of development.  Indeed the ‘politics of cruelty’ feels an apt phrase for a period of modern government presiding over growing levels of division in wealth and assets.  It was symbolic that Loach’s comments quoted in The Guardian were reported on the same day that Joseph Rowntree’s report on Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion    painted a dismal view of a society where significant numbers of young people are being hung out to dry (Four times more likely to be unemployed, 5 times more likely to be on zero hours contract, with the numbers of kids in poverty in private rented housing doubled over ten years). These days, young Cathy’s are being told to F-off as the welfare state is shrink-wrapped before our eyes.

Cathy Come Home’s portrayal of homelessness and poverty on TV in 1966 was quickly followed with the establishment of charities Crisis and Shelter. While public interest never followed through into systemic reform of the causes of homelessness, it set the ball rolling for a wave of innovations, including the introduction of the Foyer Movement to address youth disadvantage, and the Places for Change programme to transform services for people experiencing rough sleeping.  Fast forward from 1966 to 2015, and where is the rage that Loach calls for?  What has really changed in how we ‘deal’ with disadvantage in modern Britain? What would housing campaigner Shelia Mckechnie say, who served as a Director at Shelter in 1985 where she helped to set up the Foyer Foundation in the 1990s? I expect she would have written a far better blog than I can.  She would have certainly written something in the void.

Over the last few years, I’ve met countless people defending the use of negative charity advertising against my critique that it does nothing to engage public consciousness in changing the narrative of disadvantage.  The consequent dangers become very evident in the ‘conscious cruelty’ played out in the reform of welfare and tagging of so-called ‘skivers’. After all, nobody does the narrative of disadvantage better than a Government seeking to deploy austerity to reduce the size of the state and trickle down its debt.  Every exploitative fundraising poster and self-serving campaign only fuels a social consciousness that is unable to see beyond the stereotypes and is increasingly mistrusting of the message.  It is when we are challenged to see other people as we do our own children or our self, that we realise the people we dehumanise as ‘homeless’ are worth investing in with a ‘hand up rather than hand out’.  This is the whole point and purpose of what I called Advantaged Thinking at the Foyer Federation: to understand people as people and thus find the best ways to develop their abilities, skills, resources and connections so they stand a chance of thriving in the future. The real issue is why we can't  create advantage in everyone instead of our obsession with disadvantage.

So where is the ‘rage’ tonight, this week, this month, this year, about what is happening to young people - and what we can do to make a difference to harness the abilities of those in danger of being 'youth labour's lost' (Demos, 2011)?  For Cathy to come anywhere near home now, charity needs to find its capacity and locus of control to inspire meaningful social change.  And by inspiration, I mean the 1% genius type of solutions, not the 99% of fundraising perspiration it has got mistaken for - understandably though, in part, through the current squeeze on resource.  It’s not Cathy who needs a sanction; it’s the ‘conscious cruelty’ that defines what we cruelly mistake for leadership in the politics of our times. 

 John Lydon once sang that ‘anger is an energy’.  Some anger about the lack of an alternative offer might be a good thing.  But the rage Loach is calling for is best defined as the articulate voice of people who give a shit, have an idea, and can focus on the mission to deploy the resource required to actually get it done. 

www.inspirechilli.com -