Graham Martin argues that the third sector can become crucial in a transformative new movement which not only exposes poverty but overcomes it
Another week at TFN, another report saying that poverty is growing, that misery, desperation and hunger is increasing.
This week, it’s Citizen’s Advice Scotland (CAS), which has firmly skewered the role the benefits system plays in punishing the poor and making them poorer.
Is it possible to get a kind of fatigue when seeing all these reports, which third sector groups – as they must – turn out with telling regularity?
Well, possibly. CAS’s Susan McPhee admitted as much when she said: “There have been many different studies over the last few years showing that poverty is growing in Scotland. Our concern is that, as a society, we are in danger of becoming used to these reports, and that we are beginning to accept it as the norm.
While the third sector readily provides the ammunition around poverty, no-one is firing the gun
“CAS believes that Scotland should never fall into that way of thinking, and that we should always assert that extreme poverty has no place in our society.”
Her last point is crucial and should always be invoked when battle weariness at being presented with the often numbing details of destitution takes over.
Because draped on the bones of the statistics is real, feeling, hurting human flesh. It’s those who have to choose between heating and eating. It’s the parents who go without meals so that their children don't have to.
These reports don’t exist in a vaccum, they exist because the problems they describe are concrete and vast. And the third sector shouldn’t ever be apologetic about mapping this miserable terrain.
Because who else is going to do it? Not the Tories who, as TFN has revealed, have actively tried to cover up the extent of food poverty. There will be few in the third sector who expect anything from our new, unelected prime minister, who is only ever going to exceed our lowest expectations.
One aspect of the weariness is that while the third sector readily provides the ammunition, no-one is firing the gun. Lenin doesn’t often get a mention in TFN, but here goes. As the Bolshevik leader asked: what is to be done?
This new CAS report does go beyond framing the problem and it provides a series of sensible, practical – and crucially – humane solutions.
But to be enacted they need political will. And that ship won’t rise till the tide rises around it.
And that’s where the third sector comes in. The third sector can be a crucial part of a wider civil society movement which captures the ground on this, which effects change in a variety of ways: from the practical responses which keep people alive, such as foodbanks, to creating such a tumult that political allies are carried along.
Throughout the world, many of the old political certainties are dissolving. The era of the movement and people’s assemblies, where the strict division between formal politics and civil society falters, could be upon us. The example of some of the social movements in Spain and Latin America point to this.
In Scotland, we can play our part in this movement. We won’t stop talking about poverty, we will continue to unmask its effects. But we must move from posing the question to forcing the answer.
Forget fatigue – this should be a wake up call.
Graham Martin is news editor of Third Force News.
