Page 158 - Contemporary Political Sociology Globalization Politics and Power

144 Citizenship

rising with inflation. Townsend himself set the figure at 150 percent of
the British unemployment benefit rate, after taking housing costs into

account, and this was confirmed by a subsequent large - scale study of

poverty in Britain in 1985. This means that all those on welfare benefi ts
or state pensions in Britain are in poverty, as is a high proportion of those
on low incomes. Evidently, then, since the numbers of unemployed and
those employed on low wages have increased, so too have rates of poverty.
Governments prefer to use their own national poverty line defi nitions,

which result in much lower figures. In member states of the European

Union, the most common definition used is the European Poverty Line,

which defines households as at risk of poverty if they have an income of
less than 60 percent of the national average. This is a very crude measure,
but easy to use in collecting survey data. In 2006/07, around 13 million
people in the UK were living in households below this low - income thresh-
old. This is around a fifth (22 percent) of the population. This proportion

was rising for two years before this, after a number of years in which it
had decreased (see The Poverty Site www.poverty.org.uk ). In the United

States, poverty continues to be defined in terms of absolute poverty. US
citizens are poor when they have insufficient income for subsistence. The

official poverty line is the level of income that allows for the provision of

the necessities of life and is set each year for different states. However,
the amount per a year that is supposed to meet basic household needs is
too low, as the “ basket ” of goods it covers has not changed since it was
developed in the 1950s. Schwarz argues that the offi cial poverty line
should be set much higher as it has lost touch with the actual needs of
American families, which are very different now, and we should, there-
fore, be skeptical about statistics purporting to represent the extent of
poverty in the US (Schwarz, 2005 : 49 – 50). Even using this measure,
however skewed to keep numbers low, roughly 12.5 percent of Americans
were in poverty in 2008 (US Census Bureau: www.census.gov/hhes/www/
poverty.html ).
As Ruth Lister points out, people in poverty have long been “ Othered ”
as moral lines are drawn between “ us, ” the deservedly well - off or non -
poor, and “ them, ” who are inherently different. Historically, discourses
of the “ undeserving ” poor and the “ dangerous classes ” have identifi ed
the poor as diseased and criminal (Lister, 2004 ). Contemporary under-
standings of the poor, even when well - intentioned, are entangled with
such evaluations.
The most controversial term used to refer to the poor is “ underclass. ”
In the US, it both distinguishes the poor from the rest of society and, at
the same time, sums up the behavior that keeps them in poverty. People