Labour must be the party for the socially excluded

This week David Cameron announced an extension of the Troubled Families programme. Since then, the right wing press have come out hard against our country’s poor, marginalised, and socially excluded, repeatedly using the dangerous term ‘underclass’ to describe them. The announcement led to the following headlines: “Rise of new underclass” (The Sunday Times, £), “Underclass ‘costing the country £30bn a year’” (The Times £), and “Revealed, the staggering scale of Britain’s underclass” (Daily Mail). Labour must offer an alternative narrative that reflects the need for those in power to help the most vulnerable, not a narrative that stigmatises them.

But why bother with semantics? It’s just words after all. Well, tell that to the people who fought and are still fighting against the use of racist terms (no, person on the train the other day, I do not like being called a ‘chink’), tell that to the women who have been told to ‘calm down dear’, and tell that to the students who were impacted by the three words, “education, education, education” (words can be used for good too).

Owen Jones discussed the demonisation of the working class in his book Chavs. The term ‘underclass’ represents the demonisation of our poor, most vulnerable, and disadvantaged. The problem with the term ‘underclass’ is that it suggests that there is a group of people who are below us – the term dehumanises people and gives the reader and listener a sense that they are nothing but problems. For some this is great news as it paints a picture of an ‘underclass’ underserving of society’s support and lays the foundation for arguments for cutting or removing benefits and dismantling the welfare state. Why help these people when they scrounge on benefits, are lazy and, what The Times called, “dysfunctional”?

Let’s look at what’s really happening. Across Britain we have 800,000 young people unemployed (that’s more than the entire population of England’s third largest city, Leeds), 700,000 of whom have never had a job. We have vulnerable teenagers growing up parentless with mental health issues, which sometimes spiral into drug abuse and criminal activity pushing them further away from formal education and the labour market. These are real people (some of whom I grew up with); we should not be dismissing as part of a so-called ‘feckless underclass’. In fact, these are people whom the political class and the powerful should be looking out for the most.

Yes, we live in the real world, and there are, to use a simple phrase, bad people out there, but to demonise half a million families as the ‘underclass’ doesn’t help, particularly when investing in early intervention programmes and reforming social policies can help transform their lives and, in a strictly economic sense, save the taxpayer money in the long run. We do need serious reforms to ensure that we have an effective and sustainable social security system, which Rachel Reeves is considering. But policies must be reformed with the understanding that the term ‘underclass’ wrongly personalises poverty as a problem of individuals, their personal failings and moral flaws – when in reality, poverty is a result of social problems, a broken economy and repressive structures.

But again, why bother caring? According to Anthony Bonnici, an editor at thetimes.co.uk, it is an issue of expediency, that “it is a term that everyone understands readily” he says to me on Twitter. For me, expediency is no excuse for labelling the socially excluded as ‘lesser’ than others. My guess is that it’s a sensationalist term that sells papers. Language is important. As Orwell said in his classical tome on the English language and politics, “thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” We cannot be lazy with our words as they have real impact on people’s lives.

If Labour wants to win the next election of course it must think about the whole electorate, but for our politics to be truly cohesive and unifying and non-divisive, to be grounded in the ideas and ideals of One Nation, it must say what it will do for those identified by the Troubled Families agenda, for politics is not a show, it has real impact on people, especially those who are dismissed unwillingly as ‘the underclass’. Labour must be the party of and for the powerless.