Views from elsewhere


Rejoice! John Redwood has discovered the root cause of poverty

Tory MP's comments on gambling show why casting poverty as the result of individual spiritual failure is seductive - because it gets the government off the hook.

John Redwood, in happier times. Photo: Getty

Clear your desk, economics. Sociology, your services are no longer required. One man, working alone, has solved a problem which decades of study in these academic fields could not touch: John Redwood MP has uncovered the root cause of poverty. And, in the casual style of the true intellectual radical, he didn't announce this revelatory finding in a research paper or at a press conference, but with a simple comment on a news story.

Asked about the proliferation of bookmakers in poorer areas, Redwood said,

"I put it down to the fact that poor people believe there's one shot to get rich. They put getting rich down to luck and think they can take a gamble . . . They also have time on their hands. My voters are too busy working hard to make a reasonable income."

There it is, the Redwood explanation of inequality. It's simple, it's comprehensive, it's devoid of empathy and it's seething with contempt for those struggling to get by: if you're poor, it's because you just don't understand that you have to work hard to succeed. You think wealth can just be chanced on as you faff about with betting slips, while the well-off just get out there and strive for their fortunes.

And as a former employee of N. M. Rothschild investment bank, Redwood has had ample opportunity to observe meritocracy in action. Sorry, not meritocracy. I meant to say he's had ample opportunity to observe the assumption of vast riches through the dumb accident of inheritance. That's the one.

Casting poverty as the result of individual spiritual failure is seductive because it gets the government off the hook. It's not George Osborne's catastrophe economics that mean people are left struggling to stretch a shrinking income over an ever-increasing cost of living, it's just in their nature to be poor. Nothing to be done about it.

And Redwood's not the only Conservative to grasp at essentialist explanations for poverty. Iain Duncan Smith loves this stuff, spouting neuroscience-ish guff about how deprived children grow up to have "small brains" (the researcher IDS quoted said the politician had distorted his work), and offering sweeping psychological judgements about unemployed people's reluctance to take risks.

In Redwood's version the original sin of the poor is that they're too willing to gamble, creating a weird composite figure of the Tory version of a poor person: someone who's too cautious to move for a new job, but happy to take the odds of beating the bookies. The idea of a correlation between gambling and unemployment is, of course, nonsense: in 2000, the Gambling Commission found [pdf] that "people in paid work were by far the most likely to have gambled in the past year".

Bookmakers don't appear in deprived areas because the jobless are compulsive gamblers, but because empty shops on ailing high streets mean cheap premises. Your social class does influence the sort of gambling you're likely to take up, though: John Redwood's constituents in Wokingham might be too busy to make bets, but perhaps some of them will squeeze in a visit across the boundary to Reading where they'll soon have a choice of two super casinos.

When it comes to gambling, the house always wins, and there's a similar dreary inevitability in Conservative attitudes to poverty: if you're poor, it doesn't matter whether you take your chances or play it safe: the Tories will find a way to hate and blame you for your circumstances either way.