Then you have good health and do not live in poverty. Your children are pictures of health and are doing well at school or in their careers. You have people you love and who love you. You have friends who visit or chat to you on the phone. You can escape the city now and again and walk in wide open spaces or breathe in sea air. You have a job or hobbies that you enjoy. You have space and time. You have choices and the power to make them. Your worries and concerns are fleeting and do not weigh heavily on your mind. You laugh freely and unselfconsciously. You cry unashamedly. You don't dwell on the past or have regrets. You live in the moment and cherish what you have.
You don't live in a substandard dwelling in a socially deprived high crime area. Your bedroom walls are not dripping with damp and mould. Your kitchen is not infested with cockroaches. Your child does not wheeze and cough when you put them to bed at night. Your 14 year old daughter does not have to endure name calling or sexual assaults every time she leaves the flat and you aren't waiting for the man in your life to come home and give you a good kicking.
You don't have to travel in crowded buses or on crowded trains in order to arrive at a job that is mundane, unfulfilling and poorly paid. You don't leave at the end of the day to make the same nightmare journey home. You don't have to lie awake at night wondering if your job is going to be one of the ones that is 'cut'. You don't worry about losing the roof over you head. You aren't bullied or scared. You aren't dissatisfied with your lot. You don't think 'if only'...
I was going to blog about the governments plan to measure our happiness. But after pondering what it meant to be happy I gave up. Happiness is so difficult to quantify. Of course the poor can be happy. The sick, the scared, the depressed, the tired, the good, the bad and the mad can all be happy too. Sometimes. Maybe it would be easier to measure unhappiness and then do some clever equation that will give the answer of how happy the people of Britain are in these times of war, spending cuts and uncertainty. Y = happy X = sad A = acceptance factors R = resilience factors. Y minus X + AB = YAB over F. Didn't I mention 'F'? F = Fairness and the answer is relative to who you are, how you live and the opportunities you are afforded in life. As I am crap at sums I am going to blog about council estates instead.
Wiki on the Aylesbury Estate:
The Aylesbury Estate is a large housing estate located in Walworth, South East London. It is the largest housing estate in Europe. Along with the Ferrier Estate, Aylesbury is considered the most notorious estate in the United Kingdom. It was for this reason that Tony Blair chose to make his first speech as Prime Minister here, in an effort to demonstrate that the government would care for the poorest elements of society. The estate is often used as a typical example of urban decay.
Not much has changed since 1997, if anything poverty has increased for those living within these ugly walls and walkways. Their sense of well being is unlikely to have improved either.
No country for poor people?
The chancellor has cut the welfare budget by £18bn. It is designed to incentivise people back to work. But will it also change forever what it means to be poor in Britain? Anushka Asthana and Toby Helm
Peter John, the Labour leader of Southwark council, leads the way into the middle of the Aylesbury estate. "This is where Tony Blair gave his first major speech in 1997," he says, raising his hand towards the grim, concrete blocks looming over him.
"There will be no forgotten people in the Britain I want to build," declared Blair to residents of the notorious south London housing block. Thirteen years on, there are signs of progress but poverty still scars the landscape.
Now a new set of politicians insist that they can transform lives here. Just over two miles from the Aylesbury estate, up the Walworth road, is Parliament. It was there, at 12.30pm on Wednesday, that George Osborne delivered his comprehensive spending review, laying out where the axe would fall.
The chancellor confirmed one key strategic decision in his drive to eliminate the budget deficit. In taking £11bn out of welfare in June, he had made it clear that this was a price he was prepared to pay to protect hospitals and schools. Last week, he took out a further £7bn.
It was expected, but the welfare passage of his speech still brought gasps from the opposition. The intake of breath was particularly sharp when he announced plans to limit the employment support allowance to one year. Then there was the £26,000 cap on benefits for a workless family and a further housing benefit shock: the age cap under which tenants can claim for only a single room in a shared house, rather than their own flat, will rise from 25 to 35. That came on top of earlier housing benefit changes that critics had slammed as "draconian".
A small part of the money raised, £2bn, will be channelled back into welfare and used to finance Iain Duncan Smith's policy priority: a universal credit to replace all working-age benefits and tax credits.
For Osborne, there was a single aim. "It will always pay to work. Those who get work will be better off than those that don't," he announced to cheers from Conservative and Lib Dem MPs. The measures were tough, he said, but fair.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies disagreed. The next day it found that, with the exception of the richest 2% of the population, the tax and benefit components of the plan were "regressive", hitting the poorest hardest. Osborne was accused of pitting the working classes against the most vulnerable and demonising the unemployed. But polls suggested substantial support for the assault on benefits. Focus groups had told the chancellor they wanted welfare not cut but shredded. In Southwark and across the country, a tough new settlement with benefit recipients is about to be enforced, and the arguments have only just begun.
"Parasites," mutters a man standing outside a community church in Bermondsey, one of the poorer boroughs in Southwark. He is furious after reading a newspaper story about a family of 12 receiving £95,000 a year in benefits.
"It causes resentment among hard-working people," adds Pat Hickson, a smart, 70-year-old woman. She welcomes the crackdown on welfare. "Of course there are genuine cases but it is the benefit cheats that I'm talking about." She talks of plasma televisions, nice cars and breakfast brought to the doors of those on benefits.
Others disagree. Inside the church, half a dozen working mothers chat as their children scurry around. "I see the argument for supporting people into work," says Katherine Beatham, 32, a charity worker. "But this idea that there is a mass of people out there who don't want to work because they are too lazy is a lie. They are playing on people's fears." She worries that London will become like Paris, with the poorest forced to the outskirts.
"This is a borough of contrasts," says Peter John. "Between those areas that have been regenerated and those that have not. Between the rich and the poor. Between [ethnic] communities."
Unemployment here is 9.9%, well above the national average. There are 30,210 working-age residents, 14.4%, who claim out-of-work benefits. More than 40,000 receive housing benefit or council tax benefit. Almost four in 10 children were living in poverty in 2007. A similar number are being brought up by single parents.
Few here will be immune from the cuts. In Southwark, Cynthia O'Callaghan, 34, scowls when she is asked about them. The teaching assistant and mother of three is most worried about losing childcare support. But soon the subject drifts back to welfare and the unemployed.
Paul Brown, 51, a church leader, says he fears the country is returning to a culture of the 1980s. "Sweeping statements about people getting rich on benefits – I don't know anyone rich on benefits."
Certainly not Anthony Johnston. At Southwark Reach, a branch of the homeless charity Thames Reach, Johnston, 46, explains how he lives on benefits. He had worked at the Natural History Museum for 23 years as a housekeeper. Then his mother died and he had a breakdown. He attempted suicide several times and at one point did not leave his house for 21 days, surviving on water.
Johnston is on employment support allowance and is going on courses with the help of the charity. He says people look down on him for not working. "I live on £90 a week – we get a £10 bonus at Christmas." Sometimes, after paying utility bills and for transport to his courses, he is down to £8 by Wednesday and has to stretch it over four days.
Phil Lansdowne, who is on incapacity benefit, agrees that it is hard. He says he would rather work for £200 a week, and lose £100 in tax, than be on benefits as he is now. The question for both men is whether the government's reforms will help them back into work. If not, they could soon find themselves surviving on even less than they do now.
Some critics say the problem is the assumption that people are not working because they don't want to. In fact, many are suffering with mental or physical illness or simply can't find work. Jeremy Swain, Thames Reach chief executive, says he understands the need for a "revolution" in welfare and believes Duncan Smith can do good things. But Wednesday's speech make the life of charities like his harder, he says, with some of the reforms "bowling him over".
"Everyone agrees that if someone is on benefits as a lifestyle choice then that is unacceptable. But more than 70% of the 8,000 people we work with each year want get into work," he says. He speaks of one man who is putting in job applications twice a week and has been to many interviews unsuccessfully but is now likely to lose 10% of his housing benefit.
Yet he is not surprised that people wanted welfare targeted. "People have looked down on those out of work for a long time. So when you ask them what to cut – police? They say no. Schools? No. NHS? No. The armed services? No – but welfare, who is going to lobby for that?"
Douglas Alexander, the shadow work and pensions secretary, says he supports change to the system but says the coalition's plans are "cuts", not "reform". He attacks the rhetoric about "scroungers" and claims it will mask the way the cuts will hit hard-working families.
Those low-income working families are being hit hard too, according to research released today by the Resolution Foundation. The organisation researches what it calls the real "squeezed middle", working families with a household income of between £15,000 and £30,000.
The study models the impact of negative and positive reforms, including changes to child tax credits, the loss of the education maintenance allowance and the increase in the personal tax allowance to £7,475. It compares the position of families in 2012, given the June budget and spending review, to what they would have faced under Labour's March budget. The result is that a couple with a combined income of £25,656 with two children aged five and three lose around £760 a year; a single mother on an income of £20,645 with three children, including one who is 17, loses £1,800 a year; while a couple in their early 20s with a pre-tax income of £18,289 gain £320 a year.
"Just at the time that the government is gaining plaudits for seeking to get rid of the 'poverty trap' for those escaping welfare, there is a real risk that a new 'aspiration trap' is being set for people struggling to reach a middle income," says Gavin Kelly, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation." It is a trap that is as likely to turn hard-pressed lower-income families against their "workshy" neighbours as against the government.
According to many experts, the "welfare revolution" begun by Osborne in last week's review has its roots in the US – in Wisconsin, where tough rules and time-limited benefits make the state of worklessness utterly miserable. Advocates say the decision to target benefits did not just drive down the number of claimants; it rewired the American psyche.
"People in the UK still think it is normal to go onto welfare. In the US they don't. In the US it is a last resort," says Professor Lawrence Mead, an American academic who was one of the main influences behind the US "workfare" reforms. In June, Mead was invited to Downing street to meet Steve Hilton, David Cameron's chief strategist. Treasury officials and civil servants from the Department for Work and Pensions also attended "They wanted to know how you do it on the ground," says Mead. "They wanted me to talk about Wisconsin and New York. They really wanted to know how to do it." The core objective, he says, is to change people's mindset so that they do not see welfare as a viable alternative. That is because benefits have been driven so low. In Texas, the average monthly benefit is around £46 per person.
Perhaps it is because of Mead that Osborne began to say this autumn that people should no longer be able to choose benefits as a "lifestyle choice".
For their part, ministers insist that the support will remain for those at the bottom. Writing today on www.observer.co.uk, Chris Grayling, minister for employment, promises "unconditional" support for those who can't work.
But fears remain that plans to "make work pay" will inevitably hit the poorest hardest. A US-style welfare system, they say, risks creating a US-style underclass. Julia Unwin, chief executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, sums it up: "Threatening destitution does not work. What it does is frighten people who are already frightened. A society in which destitution is the threatened alternative to community support is not one that any of us wish to live in."
WHO WILL SUFFER
Changes affecting the non-working poor
■ A £26,000-a-year cap on the benefits an out-of-work family can receive
■ Extending the age under which people can only claim for the cost of a single room from 25 to 35
■ Reducing housing benefit by 10% after a year on jobseeker's allowance
Changes affecting the working poor
■ Significant reductions in the childcare element of the working tax credit
■ Households on incomes from around £22,000 to £58,000 lose all or part of the family element of the child tax credit, worth up to £545 a year
■ Elimination of education maintenance allowance will hit those with a household income under £30,810 with a 16 to 18-year-old in full time education
(Analysis by the Resolution Foundation)
Wiki on the Heygate Estate:
The Heygate Estate is a large housing estate in the Walworth area of London, England. The estate was completed in 1974. It is located in the London Borough of Southwark and south of the Elephant and Castle. The estate was once a popular place to live, the flats being thought spacious, but now has a reputation for crime, poverty and dilapidation. Along with the nearby Aylesbury Estate, it is planned that it will be completely demolished to make way for a regeneration of the area and the residents rehoused. However, many residents and ex-residents have complained that the council has failed to re-house them, and that the social housing that was planned to do so has not been built. Because of the decayed urban environment, the estate is used as a filming location, such as for the movie Shank and Harry Brown and The Bill tv series. (every cloud eh?)
Demolition of the first phase(Wingrave block) will begin in late 2010. The rest of the estate is not due to be demolished until 2015. The scheme has received criticism after it emerged that the £1.5billion of public funds going into the 'regeneration' scheme will actually result in there being significantly fewer social-rented homes. Environmentalist and former councillor Donnachadh McCarthy recently described the scheme as one of the biggest environmental, financial, social and political scandals of the decade.
Maybe I spend too much time talking to the people who live on these estates and other estates like them. Because I can tell you that although they may have moments of happiness they exist in a state of non well being. Will a job or better living conditions make them happier? Will a better future for their children make them happier? For some of these people, those who have escaped war, persecution and tyranny - maybe they feel safer and more content than they would in the worlds they have escaped from. But many must feel they have escaped a greater hell for a lesser one. So maybe they will score a little happier on the governments happiness scale. Who knows?
And our children? Are they happy? In our schools are our children happy? I was happy as a child, even though I lived on a council estate and my family were one of those dysfuncional ones. Because I had the A factor and the R factor. Now children just want the X Factor and that is a recipe for sadness and disappointment.
Everyone, of course, is subject to the odd bout of sadness and despair. Which is a totally separate thing from general well being, which is really what the government is attempting to measure. So forget happiness and aim instead for contentedness. Much more sustainable.
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