“Together with a new less positive view of the poor came new ways of funding poor relief. Across Europe, starting early in the sixteenth century in the Low Countries, towns and cities amalgamated charitable funds into single centralised 'common chests' for the poor. Charity became subject to secular regulation; face-to-face charity between individuals continued, though on a decreasing scale. In England, a series of Poor Laws, culminating in that of 1601, uniquely financed poor relief on a national level through rates collected and distributed locally by the parish.
Treatment of the sick poor was sometimes contracted out. In Norwich a variety of men and women practitioners and former lazar house keepers (leprosy having declined) were contracted to cure the poor, the aim being to get them back to work. London parishes often paid the poor to look after the sick poor as well as giving them money to pay for treatment and medicines from practitioners in the commercial medical marketplace.
However, only when one was completely penniless was any aid given. Moreover, there had to be a perception that a person could not work, usually because of sickness or the infirmities resulting from old age, for relief to be given. Old age did not by itself make a person eligible for poor relief, though many recipients were old. Men and women were expected to work into very old age if they could.” (Andrew Wear, “Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, Cambridge University Press, 2000)
This feels *really* familiar, doesn’t it?
It also feels notable that this was when capitalism was really getting its teeth into society in England (and a lot of Europe) too.
In 1886 a new workhouse was built to imprison the poor of the Wandsworth & Clapham Poor Law Union, in Swaffield Road, off Garratt Lane, Wand
In 1886 a new workhouse was built to imprison the poor of the Wandsworth & Clapham Poor Law Union, in Swaffield Road, off Garratt Lane, Wandsworth, now part of Southwest London, but then in open countryside.
Under the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, the Boards of Guardians were obliged by law to ‘help’ local poor folk unable to support themselves either with ‘outdoor relief’ (a minimum dole) or with ‘indoor relief’ – accommodation and work in the workhouse. In practice the workhouses were made oppressive, cruel and humiliating, to dissuade as many people as possible from applying. Families were split up, food was pitiable and inedible, long hours of grinding work were imposed under often sadistic overseers.
The Poor Law had been brought in because of a widespread concern among authorities and the upper and middle classes that the cost of welfare was spiralling out of control, and a convinced belief that people would rather seek an easy life, ie claiming relief, than work. The Act was therefore designed to make claiming relief so painful, degrading and inadequate that people would rather take any work instead.
If this sounds in any way familiar… There are many parallels between the way the power-that-be in the 1930s were viewing the poor, and discussing the ‘problem’ of the cost of welfare, and how this debate in recent years has also been framed. For an interesting exhibition, put together by the Anarchist Time Travellers, which illustrates the links between the two, see This Way to 1834.
Although there were riots in northern England when the Act was introduced, and a sprinkling of resistance by the working people forced into workhouses throughout the 19th century, all in all, the system worked quite well from the perspective of the rich. Fear and hatred of the workhouses (which became known as ‘bastilles’ for the notorious french prison) grew so that people would rather starve outside than in, and the shame of having to apply to enter became internalised deeply into working class consciousness.
However, in the sharp recession following World War 1, hundreds of thousands of working people were thrown into unemployment, including many who had taken part in strikes and industrial unrest before and during the war. As thousands of soldiers were demobilised from the army, and the war economy was suddenly wound down, struggles over rights to relief, and facilities for the unemployed, broke out all over the UK. Initially organised through local committees of the unemployed, most federated by 1921 into the National Unemployed Workers Committee Movement (usually known as the NUWM), which was to be the main vehicle for unemployed organising for 20 years.
As an example of the local struggles which gave birth to/characterized the early years of the NUWM: in July 1921, the unemployed in Wandsworth and Battersea were told by the local Board of Guardians they would not receive any outdoor relief, but would all have to apply to workhouse. The Battersea & Wandsworth Unemployed Committee decided that the best was to deal with this was to swamp the Workhouse. 1000 people all applied for tickets to enter, at the same time! Then, in late July, 700 unemployed people, including whole families, took over the building, having marched from Clapham Junction with a bagpiper at their head! (Interestingly, this became a sort of local tradition: I remember in the early 1990s, anti-poll tax and anti-cuts demos in Wandsworth used to march on the town hall with Alasdair from metal-bashing band Test Dept playing his pipes at the head of the procession).
Having occupied the workhouse, the unemployed refused to recognise the authority of the Poor Law officers, and refused to accept the measly food and harsh conditions. As there had been 900 people already in residence in the workhouse, the institution descended into chaos. A massive solidarity demonstration took place outside in support of the occupation. “From the hall of the workhouse speeches were delivered to the demonstrators outside. Then, to the amazement and jubilation of the demonstrators, about 9 o’clock just as it was getting dusk, we saw the red flag run up on a flag mast over the workhouse.” Eventually the embattled Poor Law Guardians withdrew their order and restored outdoor relief on 27th July.
For more on this occupation, the unemployed struggles of the 1920s-40s, it’s worth reading Unemployed Struggles 1919-36, by Wal Hannington, and We Refuse to Starve in Silence: A History of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, by Richard Croucher.
However, bad luck, a primitive infrastructure, and a poverty bordering on immiseration can only explain so much of the one-third population loss. British policy-makers also bore much responsibility for what happened. The accusation is not new, of course, but the modern brief against Britain contains a different set of accusations. The old Irish nationalist charge that London pursued a deliberate policy of genocide in Ireland has been discredited: modern research has also tempered another old charge. With the exception of one critical period in late 1846 and early 1847, famine Ireland imported more food than she exported. What turned a natural disaster into a human disaster was the determination of senior British officials to use relief policy as an instrument of nation-building in one of the most impoverished and turbulent parts of the Empire. In particular, Whitehall and Westminster were eager to modernize the Irish agricultural economy, which was widely viewed as the principal source of Ireland's poverty and chronic violence, and to improve the Irish character, which exhibited an alarming 'dependency on government' and was utterly lacking in the virtues of the new industrial age, such as self-discipline and initiative. The result was a relief program that, in its particulars, was more concerned with fostering change than with saving lives. Thus, to facilitate agricultural modernization, London demanded that the inefficient small farmer surrender his two- or three-acre plot in order to qualify for relief; and to promote self-reliance, Parliament passed the Poor Law Extension Act, which transferred the entire cost of relief to Ireland. The Extension Act proved a great boon for Irish tax collectors, whose numbers increased by 22.5% during the famine – and for Irish coffin-makers, whose numbers increased by 187.6% - but not for the Irish peasantry, who were doing most of the dying. With saving lives reduced to a second-order priority, the death toll continued its relentless march upward toward 1.1 million.
The Graves are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People
The Act of 1834, and its subsequent administration by men like Chadwick and K a y , was perhaps the most sustained attempt to impose an ideological dogma, in defiance of the evidence of human need, in English history. No discussion of the standard-of-living after 1834 can make sense which does not examine the consequences, as troubled Boards of Guardians tried to apply Chadwick's insane Instructional Circulars as to the abolition or savage restriction of out-relief in depressed industrial centres; and which does not follow the missionary zeal of the Assistant Commissioners as they sought to bring the doctrinaire light of Malthusian-Benthamism into the empirical north. The doctrine of discipline and restraint was, from the start, more important than that of material "less eligibility"; the most inventive State would havć been hard put to it to create institutions which simulated conditions worse than those of garret-masters, Dorset labourers, framework-knitters and nailers. The impractical policy of systematic starvation was displaced by the policy of psychological deterrence: "labour, discipline and restraint". " Our intention," said one Assistant Commissioner, "is to make the workhouses as like prisons as possible"; and another, "our object . . . is to establish therein a discipline so severe and repulsive as to make them a terror to the poor and prevent them from entering". Dr. Kay recorded with satisfaction his successes in Norfolk; the reduction in diet proved less effective than "minute and regular observance of routine", religious exercises, silence during meals, "prompt obedience", total separation of the sexes, separation of families (even where of the same sex), labour and total confinement.
Edward P. Thompson (1966): The Making of the English Working Class, 267.
“...poverty...is the natural, the primitive, the general, and the unchangeable state of man; and that as labour is the source of wealth, so is poverty of labour. Banish poverty, you banish wealth. Indigence, therefore, and not poverty, is the evil, the removal of which is the proper object of Poor Laws. Indigence may be provided for—mendicity may be extirpated; but all attempts to extirpate poverty can have no effects but bad ones.”
- Edwin Chadwick, “The New Poor Laws.” The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal. Vol. LXIII. April to July,1836. p. 501.
Anti-Homelessness Laws and the Annihilation of the Homeless
No one is free to perform an action unless there is somewhere he is free to perform it. . . . One of the function of property rules, particularly as far as land is concerned, is to provide a basis for determining who is allowed to be where (Waldron, 1991:296).
Consider this incomplete but by now quite familiar litany, a litany that shows so clearly how the annihilation of space by law is proceeding
[...]
The intent is clear: to control behavior and space such that homeless people simply cannot do what they must do in order to survive without breaking laws. Survival itself is criminalized. And as David Smith (1994:495) argues, the “supposed public interests that criminalization is purported to serve” — such as the prevention of crime — “are dubious at best.” Instead, there are, as we shall see, numerous other reasons for criminalizing homelessness, reasons that revolve around insecurity in an unstable global market and a rather truncated sense of aesthetics developed to support the pursuit of capital. Sometimes, as in the Seattle example outlined below, authors of anti-homeless legislation are quite honest in their reasoning, even if they still like to wrap that reasoning in a mantle of crime prevention. The hope is simply that if homeless people can be made to disappear, nothing will stand in the way of realizing the dream of prosperity, social harmony, and perpetual economic growth. Anti-homelessness legislation is not about crime prevention; more likely it is about crime invention.5
Perhaps the most stringent of the newest anti-homelessness laws are in the stereotypically “liberal” cities of the West Coast:6 according to a recent report by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, four of the five cities with the “meanest streets” are in the west.7 The winners of this dubious distinction are: Atlanta, Seattle, San Francisco, Santa Monica and Santa Ana (The Nation Jan. 29, 1996:7). Though not an award winner, Berkeley presents an interesting case. The city has long been a center for homeless youth and adults, and likewise has a long, if contested history of accommodating homeless people in parks and on streets (Mitchell, 1992, 1995). But in 1994, the Berkeley City Council debated a set of laws that would give Berkeley anti-homeless laws that were “among the strictest in the country” (San Francisco Chronicle Feb. 15, 1994). The council considered passing laws in two areas, the first concerned with begging, sleeping or sitting in public, and other behaviors associated with homeless people, and the second more generally with loitering. Begging was to be prohibited in a manner similar to the Cincinnati law noted above; but to Cincinnati’s list, Berkeley added prohibitions against soliciting money from anyone sitting on a bench, using a pay phone, standing in line for a movie, waiting for a bus, or purchasing a newspaper from a rack. Sitting on streets and sleeping in public were simply to be outlawed. (San Francisco Chronicle Feb. 15, 1994). When the council also gave preliminary approval in May 1994 to a more general “anti-loitering” law that would make it illegal to loiter “within one block of parks, schools, recreation centers, liquor stores, boarded-up buildings and laundromats that are open at least 16 hours a day” (San Francisco Chronicle May 12, 1994), its ostensible goal was to discourage drug sales.8 But the law also effectively criminalizes standing around in areas frequented by homeless people. As an attorney for the ACLU complained, “It is law enforcement by hunch . . . and for that reason it is a law that will inevitably be selectively and unfairly enforced and indeed will have very little impact on the real drug problem” (San Francisco Chronicle May 12, 1994).
The anti-loitering law was passed with the provision that it be reviewed after a year for effectiveness and abuses. The anti-panhandling, sleeping and sitting law was forced by vocal opposition to a city-wide vote. In November, 1994, voters approved it by a substantial margin, and a month later the council ratified the voters’ measure, but with the provision of $525,000 in social services for the homeless (San Francisco Chronicle Dec. 9, 1994). In February, 1995 the ACLU filed a suit to block the anti-panhandling ordinance on free-speech grounds, and the city agreed not to enforce the law until a judge had ruled (San Francisco Chronicle Feb. 28, 1994). In May, a federal judge struck down the anti-panhandling law — all provisions, that is, except for those which banned sitting or sleeping on sidewalks (San Francisco Chronicle May 9, 1995; The Recorder May 9, 1995). In essence, the judge ruled that while it was unconstitutional to prohibit begging, since it qualified as speech, it was not unconstitutional to prohibit other activities — like sitting and sleeping — that most of us take for granted.
