Dissociating from poverty

In this interview with Laurie Taylor, Tracy Shildrick describes how Britain’s poor don’t’ regard themselves as poor. “People don’t want to associate with the stigma associated with poverty” she says.
This is not a new phenomenon. In his English Journey, written in 1933, J.B. Priestley described poverty in Blackburn:

First house, an elderly couple. Long, toothless man, just got up and now sitting down to a bowl of sensible soup. This made by jolly woman who said: “Ay, there’s been lots worse off nor us”, and meant it. These two lucky. Man been out of work between four and five years. All savings went. Lived on 10s a week…
Lots worse off than them. They all say that.

Dissociating oneself from poverty, then, seems to be a persistent attitude of the poor - even those who we would regard today as absolutely poor.
This is an example of what Jon Elster called “sour grapes”. Our preferences adapt - partially - to our circumstances with the result that we don’t feel bad about our lives, however awfully they are going. This is a necessary coping mechanism. Counting your blessings is a way of keeping going in the face of adversity.
There is, though,  a problem here. If people don’t sufficiently acknowledge that they are poor or are being mistreated by society, the demand for redistributive policies will be low. If this coexists alongside a desire by the rich to bash "scroungers" (via), then there’ll be a systematic bias in public preferences and discourse against  the interests of the poor.
In this sense, there’s a conflict between democracy and equality. Social democrats are insufficiently aware of this.

Comments

[FiscalSubvert]

This is a recurrent issue. The sociologist Peter Townsend did a fantastic study of poverty in the 60s & 70s that approached the subject taking both self-perception & perception by non-poor seriously. He attempted, and largely succeeded, in establishing that the definition of poverty, and government action, be based on a combination of their aspirations (e.g. "would love to afford a holiday twice a year for family") and objective measures ("how many holidays did they actually take?"). Its in this way that one can reduce bias caused by the understandable fact that poorer people want to avoid social classification as poor because that, in practice, reduces their life chances even more.

[gastro george]

The obverse of this is that many people believe that they are middle class, even though they're not. They don't see that they're getting shafted by the economic consensus. It's even worse in the US.

The poor also bash "scroungers", largely on the basis that "we" are the deserving poor but "they" aren't. And a steady stream of scrounger lies from the Tory press.

[Salis Grano]

And the poor can presumably attempt to cast off the image by maxing out their credit cards.

On the other side of the coin, there are many people/households who style themselves as middle income when they are in upper 9th and 10th deciles.

Maybe we all want to seem to be average.

[Agog]

This is all very true. I would add that use of terms like 'the squeezed middle' suggests that some Social Democrats are aware of these issues and trying to come up with labels that people are happy with. The overlap between the concept of 'class' and value-laden ideas like 'caste' is a big issue imo (and part of the reason why discussion of class is frowned on in places like the UK). One of the successes of the old workers movement was to bring about a collective self-awareness that inverted the conventional value-hierarchy.