Book Review: Political and Social Construction of Poverty: Central and Eastern European Countries in Transition

Serena Romano’s book is predominantly an academic history of the economies of five of the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe: Czech Republic, Estonia, Slovenia, Poland and Hungary.

Although each country has its own unique story there are some consistent themes. During the Communist era poverty was less denied than ignored though the use of euphemistic language: the deprived stratum, disadvantaged, limited consumption, etc, with a strong focus on the deserving and undeserving poor through terms such as parasitic behaviour and ‘dysfunctional’. What welfare support existed was only accessible via employment schemes and, with the collapse of the Soviet economic model, the rapid rise in unemployment led to the loss of access to welfare for the already poorest in society. Current welfare systems, devised under EU and World Bank guidance, were developed to enable them to gain EU membership in the early part of this century, just before the international economic crisis that still grips us.

There is no real attempt at an analysis for what this means for the wider EU community today, particularly in attitudes to work and work migration. An annotated map and/or chronology would also be a useful addition. However, published in 2014 the book coincides with the 25th anniversary of the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the 10th anniversary of Central and Eastern Europe countries beginning their membership of the EU, and serves as a timely reminder of just how recent these events have been, and should be of particular interest to leaders, policy makers and those with a need to understand current trends in these countries.

 

Serena Romano, Political and Social Construction of Poverty: Central and Eastern European Countries in Transition (2014), Policy Press, Bristol, http://www.policypress.co.uk, ISBN 978-1-44731-271-0 (Hardback £70)

Politics and the Professional

Politics is always in the news and, among other things, I seem to be hearing an awful lot about UKIP at the moment.  Perhaps because the whole European debate is hotting up and UKIP is keeping to the fore of the arguments.  Whether you or I agree with UKIP policies or not is one thing, and I’m not planning on pinning my political flag squarely on the mast (it might be there and a bit lopsided though), but the right to follow a legal political party, and the impact that can have on your employment status, is another.

And not so long ago (November 2012) that debate arose when foster carers in Rotherham had three children removed from their care following an anonymous allegation that they were paid up members of UKIP.  Having worked with a considerable number of applicant foster carers in completing their Form F Assessments (which do not specifically require applicants to reveal their political affiliations) and worked extensively in the private fostering sector, this story was of particular interest to me, and I have attempted to follow the outcome.

There was a brief furore in the press and promises of inquiries made.  As yet I can find no evidence of the publicly available result of any inquiry.  So I am writing this blog on the basis of the information given in the news reports from the time and without knowing any official outcome of any inquiry, or if indeed there ever was (or will be) an inquiry once the initial dust had settled.  (Update March 2014 – there is still no publicly available evidence of an inquiry or the outcome.)

First a quick recap, culled from the various news reports.  A couple from Rotherham in South Yorkshire had been fostering for seven years when out of the blue the three children they had in placement were removed by the local authority.  Of course, except for the carers and the children, it wasn’t entirely out of the blue: the local authority had been in discussion with the fostering agency for around three weeks before removing the children with no notice to either the children or the carers.  Unless there were genuine concerns that the carers might abscond with the children (which does not appear to have been the case) the lack of professionalism displayed by both the local authority and the fostering agency is sadly astounding.

But, back to the original story.  The three children concerned were siblings of an ethnic minority family (Eastern European Roma) and had been in placement for just under eight weeks.  Various concerns about the placement were mentioned but the primary reason that kept surfacing in the news was the fostering couple’s membership of UKIP.  UKIPs foundational campaign of UK independence from Europe was not the issue.  The issue was found hidden in the depths of their policy on Asylum & Immigration, which the local authority considered racist.

Now, without an inquiry, it seems to me that poor old Rotherham, who haven’t had the best of press over the years, have had a quick knee-jerk reaction and these carers and children have been the ones on the receiving end.  Criticised in court for not previously taking into consideration this particular sibling group’s ethnic needs a whiff of further criticism following an anonymous tip off that the carers were members of a racist non-mainstream political party led to an unfortunate reaction that got them back in the headlines again.  The placement was not sound on the grounds of poor matching to ethnic needs, including the birth parents concern that the children were losing their ability to speak their native language.  But this was a temporary placement while a more suitable ethnic match could be found.  To then bring politics into the argument and remove the children in an unplanned (with the children’s welfare at heart) manner seems a little unfortunate.

Now, the bit that scares me is that I don’t personally agree with ALL the policies of any one political party, for various reasons.  But I might choose to vote for them if I agree with the overall principles of that party, whether that is UK independence from Europe, or the socialist or capitalist policies of other parties.  And I might not even be aware of all the minute details of some of the policies if, like most people, I haven’t read the small print.

When UKIP first came on the scene, as I recall, their focus was on trade and sovereignty issues but it is some time since I last looked at their policies.  Now seemed a good time to take a closer look at their Asylum & Immigration policies, just for my own pleasure.  It’s pretty boring.  The main parties are all pretty much vying for who can be the most effective in reducing immigration and the most strict on dealing with illegal immigrants.  UKIP want to cap immigration at 50,000 persons per annum, which initially sounds comparable to Conservative and Labour comments, except UKIP include EU citizens in that figure.  And of course the UKIP policy has that damming phrase that got Rotherham all in a bother: “End the active promotion of the doctrine of multiculturalism by local and national government and all publicly funded bodies”, alongside a less trumpeted but rather worrying intention to repeal the 1998 Human Rights Act and enforcing the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees while a new Asylum Act is created.

Having worked in the local authority with “asylum seekers and refugees” during the immigration ‘crisis’ period that began in the late 1990’s I am well aware of the political posturing on this subject from that time, and since.  It was appallingly chaotic with the government of the day, the Refugee Council and the courts effectively changing policy and the legal rights of those affected on an almost daily basis in some way or another.  It wasn’t a pleasant time and the added stress caused to those on the receiving end was an abuse in itself.  However, I am also aware of the social tensions caused in those areas most affected.  My home town and those around are still hot beds of some serious prejudice caused by the resentment fuelled in part by political posturing and the media.  But then those same towns also have a higher than average proportion of the population from Eastern European countries and beyond.   Worryingly, through my work, I have seen this lead to a rise not just in support for relatively mainstream parties such as UKIP but also for the BNP in particular.

Back in the early days of radicalism in social work anyone that didn’t support an obviously socialist political standpoint ended up skulking in a corner and keeping quiet about their political views.  But that was grass roots opinion: social workers standing up for the oppressed and seeing socialism as the representative of the poor.  Society has changed in the intervening years (whether for better or worse).  Politics has also changed in the intervening years and the differences between the mainstream parties have become less clear.  Who to vote for now?

And there is the dilemma.  Anybody working in public services might have a personal belief that EU membership is not the best way forward for the UK.  If that person is a social worker or foster carer, or maybe a teacher or nurse or police officer, then does that preclude them from supporting a political party that represents their view, at least to some extent?  If it is accepted that supporting UKIPs views on the benefits of EU membership is not appropriate because of some of their related policies, where does that leave the social care professionals?  Is there an acceptable political party?  What if you don’t personally support one or two of their policies that you find in the small print?  Some social workers may be Christian or Muslim, and perhaps don’t support a pro-abortion or gay marriage stance (some do, some don’t): who are they allowed to vote for?  What about the fact that political parties sometimes change their views with the wind and tide of public opinion and media pressure?  Even to the point of absolute U-turns.  Where can the line be drawn?  Should there be an approved political party for social workers and other care professionals?

This is the danger behind Rotherham’s knee jerk reaction to the tip off about this fostering couple being members of UKIP.  No-one took the trouble of checking out their actual views on race and immigration (which would have been covered in their Form F Assessment).  If social work is to reclaim its radical roots (as most academics promote – see my book review on Green Social Work), then social workers cannot be afraid of their employers stance on their political views.  Social workers need the freedom to be political, and maybe there does need to be a new political party to represent that.  But they cannot be afraid that their political views will incur the wrath of their seniors in a heavy handed way as happened with this fostering couple in Rotherham.

Finally, I have a professional code of practice to abide by.  In my work it overrides my political and religious views.  I don’t bring my religion or my politics to work in any way that contradicts my professional code of practice.  Out of work I do not do anything that brings my profession into disrepute (although that cannot change my personal opinions and beliefs).  That is the nature of social work.  If I can’t accept that then I get out.

ADDENDUMS – March 2014

UKIP update

Things within and around UKIP appear to have changed in the year since the above post was written, in particular there has been a marked increase in racist and sexist allegations made against the party.  The UKIP spring conference has drawn considerable concern and criticism from mainstream media for blatant racism:

The Mirror focuses their report on the racist humour of the comic entertainment at the conference, which Nigel Farage  did not condemn.

Alex Massie, blogging for The Spectator declares UKIP a party for reactionary xenophobes.

But perhaps the most relevant article for me was from Dan Hodges of The Telegraph, in which he declares “UKIP is now a racist party”, comparing this to his view of the party a year ago, and in particular how UKIP has moved from “raising general concerns regarding immigration to directly targeting and stigmatising individual national groups”.

In Nigel Farage’s keynote speech from the Spring conference he states the key issue for the forthcoming European elections (May 2014) is the issue of ‘open door immigration’ and the impact on British jobs and services (this reference begins at 17:40 minutes into the speech).

Official UKIP video on ‘commonsense immigration’.

New Social Work Left

Since writing the original article above I note that there has been a continued push from within academia to encourage political awareness among social workers, in particular looking towards the development of a ‘new social work left’ (The New Politics of Social Work edited by Gray & Webb – see separate review).

There will also be a forthcoming blog on the link between political opinion and morals and values.

Who are the non-indigenous?

Modern society is coming to realise that the wisdom of many of the indigenous populations around the world has some profound insights into the damage done to our planet through the processes of industrialisation and subsequent technological developments.

Campaigns and advertising have highlighted the plight of those same indigenous populations, whose lands have been raped and their cultures all but annihilated.

But who are the non-indigenous who are getting the blame for the woes of the world and indigenous populations?

Travelling the world and meeting people from different cultures and lifestyles to my own has brought home to me just how much I have taken my country’s history for granted.  I may not have been a star in history classes but I can still rattle off references to Bede’s History of England; the Doomsday Book; and the time when the town of my birth was part of an actual island, the Isle of Thanet, separated from mainland England by the River Wantsum, until the monks of medieval times set about land reclamation, reducing the flow of the river water until what is left today is no more than a ditch in most places.

With Columbus discovery of the Americas in 1492 Europeans became the architects of invasion in the name of progress. From the early 1500’s the Spanish in particular were successful in colonising the Central and South Americas, most famously wiping out the Inca civilisations and leaving behind Catholic colonialism, Catholicism remaining the dominant religion to this day.  In the light of modern thought the methods of the conquistadors, the enforcing of their religion, seem inappropriate and unduly harsh.  Yet, for many, although trade was a part of their goal, what they did was in the sincere belief that the peoples in these countries needed to hear their message, needed the gift of salvation that they brought.  Their descendents can only trace their heritage no more than some five hundred years before they have to go to another culture to follow their ancestry.

The conquest of the North Americas took a little longer but still destroyed many of the native cultures.  The early settlers brought with them their developing knowledge of what would become the industrial revolution, along with guns and gunpowder and a determination to mine the ground for gold, silver and other precious metals.

Modern North Americans have a cultural history that goes back only a few generations in their own homeland.

The pioneers who broadened the early settlement areas to reach the west of the continent faced unknown dangers, crossing barren and hostile territory, carrying few possessions: blankets to sleep under, a few clothes, pots and pans for cooking, and, often, their Bibles.  They demonstrated physical and emotional strengths beyond imagination.  Many died before they reached their destinations, some from the harsh elements of the lands they travelled across, others at the hands of the various tribes of North American Indians (the local indigenous populations) who soon realised that the white man did not have much sympathy for either their lands or their cultures.

Mechanical relic at the Queen of Sheba Mine in Death Valley

The relics of the “forty-niners” who settled from 1849 to mine in the harsh dry desert of Death Valley still stand as a monument to their achievements: the remains of mine shafts, topped with the rusting hulks of the machines they used to ferry the rocks to the surface and begin the process of extracting the precious metals.

With those who settled on the west coast came new needs: communication with the east coast and Europe: friends and family left behind.  It could take several weeks for a mail coach to cross through the harsh lands of what are now the central states of the USA.  The Pony Express fast mail service, started in 1860, brought down the mail delivery time to just ten days.   But even this was not good enough for the new settlers.  Instead they developed the telegraph and railways, putting the Pony Express out of business in just eighteen months.

In doing so they defended themselves against the local populations who were alarmed at the changes being brought to their homeland, so much so that they all but wiped out the heritage of the indigenous North American Indians.  Their old lands have all but disappeared under the sprawling cities that have sprung up over the years, their old hunting grounds turned over to ‘management’ in the form of national parks.  The stories of their battles became the legends of children playing “Cowboys and Indians” for years to come, the stuff of John Wayne and spaghetti westerns.

Today, the descendents of those pioneers are the non-indigenous population of North America.  They are people who can only trace their history back a few short centuries before they have to look to the history of the cultures of their ancestors.  They are faced with the dilemma of admiring the amazing achievements of their forebears in overcoming tremendous physical difficulties, demonstrating amazing emotional and mental fortitude, against coming to terms with the cultural destruction of the indigenous populations that that involved.

But the North American population of today are not the only non-indigenous in a foreign land.

From the late 1700’s until 1868 those lovely British people decided they were did not have room to look after criminals of all sorts and so shipped them all off to live in another New World: Australia.  Their crimes might have been varied, from petty theft to murder and everything else in between, but these people had nothing to lose.  They may not have made the same choices as the pioneers travelling to North America but they too brought with them the knowledge of the developing industrial revolution and settled in to make the best of what fate had brought them.  Mostly survivors of the poverty wrought by the English industrial revolution they too were fighters and survivors.  Between 1851 and 1871 their numbers were swelled dramatically by the Australian gold rush.  But again, their descents, the non-indigenous of Australia, have only a little over two centuries of history before they too have to look to the cultures of their ancestors in Europe.

Whether by choice or force these were people who found themselves forging new lives in new environments.

But what of the non-indigenous today?  Their identities are rooted in short histories in their lands.  They have to live with the criticisms of their ancestors.  They are denied pride in the strength, determination and suffering endured by their ancestors.  They are left with the shame of the knowledge that their ancestors, despite what they thought were good intentions, caused damage and harm.  Will social workers one day ask questions about the emotional damage caused by current policies to the non-indigenous?!

In asking the question “Who are the non-indigenous?” there is no intention to undermine either the indigenous populations or their beliefs or cultures.  Only to recognise that there is always more than one side to a story, and to recognise the impact on the descendents of the perpetrators of the crimes against the indigenous populations.  It has taken many years but we should now know that everyone loses and suffers when it comes to violence and war, domination and destruction.

Making Assumptions

Some years ago I worked in a social work team where one of the social workers came from Glasgow.  Now this team was in southern England, nearly as far from Scotland as you could get.  When a newly qualified social worker joined us who also happened to be from Glasgow it was assumed that these two would have a natural understanding, and were put together for supervision purposes.  After all they were both from the same country and a long way from home, and the older more experienced social worker would surely be the ideal one to support the new worker?

What, in our southern ignorance, we did not realise was that they came from opposite sides of Glasgow.  Opposite cultures within the same city.  Opposing football teams to support.  Natural enemies even.

Fortunately their professionalism enabled them to overcome the differences in their cultures, and no doubt shake their heads at the southerners’ ignorance.

It’s easy to make assumptions like that.

Even in the setting up of asylum teams in the 1990’s we made the same mistakes.  There was somehow an assumption that because asylum seekers were in the same situation, escaping war torn countries, it was sometimes overlooked that they had escaped from opposing countries in the same war!  With hindsight it was obvious, but what foolish mistakes were made at the time.

While I was travelling in Siberian Russia for a while I happened to stay for a week in a town where I was the first European they had seen in living memory.  The evening before I was leaving a young English backpacker arrived in a bar on the other side of town.  Immediately telephone calls were made and mechanisms put in place to put us in touch with each other.  Let’s call him Jay.  It was naturally assumed, that being from the same country, we would want to meet up and talk.

Actually it was good to meet Jay, less because we were both English than because we were both travellers and could compare travel notes.  Having the same first language was merely an advantage.

The impression was given that if two Russians found themselves alone in a foreign country they would want to meet.  But I wonder if that is true?

Jay and I were several years apart in age, he was a recent graduate taking a gap year while I had studied in later life, he came from a relatively privileged background while I definitely originated from “working class” stock.  I was travelling by car, he was backpacking.  Back in England it was unlikely we would have naturally met up and socialised.

Staying in an Andean village, well stuck actually due to a breakdown, the villagers would come rushing over saying “amigo, amigo?” every time another European passed through.  The same assumptions were being made.

On another occasion I met two young English girls in a backpackers’ hostel in Costa Rica.  Well, I say ‘met’, but that is probably too strong a word for it.  We happened to be staying in the same dorm room in the same hostel.  They were clearly completely confounded to find someone old enough to be their mother, maybe even their grandmother, staying in such a hostel and never managed to look me in the eye such was their complete inability to know how to handle such a situation.

Age, class (yes it still exists), wealth, education, employment, sociability, family, sexual orientation, geographical location, politics, religion, hobbies and interests.  These and more are all potential divisive factors even in our home countries.  Sure, they can all be overcome, but how many times have I seen police and ‘front line’ social and health workers gravitate to share socialising because their jobs bring them into natural contact and there is a sense of safety in that familiarity?  And why is it unusual to see CEOs down the pub with the postman or plumber?

I’m not suggesting its right or wrong, it just is.  The lovely people in that small Siberian town might be surprised at how different the lives are of people from Moscow, and that maybe the mere sharing of the same language is not a foundation for anything more than a brief passing friendship, just as was my contact with Jay.

Scottish, English, African, Latin American, indigenous; wealthy and poor; young and old; educated or not (which has nothing to do with intelligence); capitalist, environmentalist, socialist; and more.  We are all a mixture of different ingredients, unique in our own way.  As we practice that difference in our own lives, let us also remember the differences in those we work with, both as colleagues and clients.