The Campaign Company specialises in social research and behaviour change. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading. Here’s what’s coming up this week:
Hello and welcome to the TCC Weekly – the Friday bulletin for people who know their Floral Clocks from their Well Dressing.
Today we look, in our politics section, at what the public think people in different income brackets should be able to afford. Is it a scandal if welfare claimants can’t afford a takeaway – or is it just the way of the world? And what does this tell us about politics?
And of course, there’s the culture of plenty that is Charlie’s Attic – this week including Yorkshire Dales Monopoly.
What 'should' the poorest be able to afford?
Should someone on benefits be able to afford a smart phone? Should a minimum wage job guarantee you a foreign holiday?
How the electorate evaluates these questions is central to how they engage with politics. It feeds into debates about the generosity of the state, the levels of inequality that are deemed acceptable, and more recently, the cost-of-living crisis.
A new study by YouGov tests this comprehensively. It takes 35 items and asks which groups ‘should’ be able to afford them – only wealthy people, all people on the average income, all people on the minimum wage and all people on out of work benefits.
The outcomes are really interesting. Most people think that a minimum wage worker should be able to buy a property – but not someone on benefits. But they believe that everyone – including those living on welfare – should be able to afford an internet connection. And 40% are quite happy if only the super-rich can buy designer clothes.
In 2011, after the London Riots, the columnist Max Hastings wrote an extraordinarily right-wing column for the Daily Mail, calling those who had looted shops in the capital and elsewhere ‘wild beasts’. “Today, those at the bottom of society behave no better than their forebears, but the welfare state has relieved them from hunger and real want,” he wrote. “When social surveys speak of ‘deprivation’ and ‘poverty’, this is entirely relative.”
Whilst we at TCC Towers winced at this comment at the time (and still do), the thread which Hastings tugged at – between relative and absolute poverty – was a telling one. It tied into many of the debates about refugee and benefit claimant provisions, which dominated headlines in the years that followed. The relative poverty measure, which suggests that you are poor if you cannot afford things the majority can, is a subtle one. And tabloid stories about benefit recipients having flatscreen TVs played on these subtleties and the sense of unfairness they created in certain quarters.
In 2023 these questions have become more acute, thanks to the cost-of-living crisis. This has meant that many luxuries have become unaffordable, even to those on the average wage. The question of what someone ‘should’ be able to afford becomes a highly charged one.
As we noted a few months ago, the Tory response to this has often been to suggest that people should forgo the finer things. This may be technically necessary. But, at a time when a larger and larger proportion feel poor in relative terms, it seems likely that such an approach will bring diminishing electoral returns.
And finally, the embarrassment of riches that is Charlie’s Attic:
Ask whether the fake meat trend has gone into reverse?
Wile hours of your life away by exploring the world’s infrastructure map.
