BHA: Structural reform, not sticking plaster, needed to solve poverty and social exclusion

Poverty and social exclusion – the EU’s theme for 2010 – are “structural problems not solvable by charity or by sticking-plaster handouts of welfare payments, however necessary they may be in the short term”.

There is compelling evidence that these ills are linked to the extreme inequality of income that is a feature of many European states – and that correcting this would have an extraordinary number of beneficial effects.

Citing evidence collected by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their book The Spirit Level,
David Pollock, president of the European Humanist Federation, told EU leaders at a
meeting today that EU policies should be designed to maximise human welfare and should
therefore take note of the damaging pyschosocial effects of income inequality.

“The EU,being relatively free of electoral pressure, should press member states to take deliberate steps to reduce income inequality”. Such steps might include raising minimum pay rates and setting and progressively reducing a legal maximum disparity between highest and
lowest earners in enterprises.

Mr Pollock said: “Official statistics show a straight-line correlation in advanced western
economies between income inequality and social ills as various as mental illness, obesity, life
expectancy, infant mortality, homicide, rates of imprisonment, teenage births, educational
performance, social mobility and levels of trust in society. Absolute levels of income show
no such pattern. Determined efforts by interested parties to undermine the power of these
correlations have met with near-complete failure.”

“Inequality undermines the humanist virtues of trust, cooperation, sharing, reciprocity,
social responsibility and cohesion. It produces social stratification, narrower friendship
groups, fear, rivalry and selfishness. Income is a proxy for social status: low income means
low self-esteem, and that affects performance (low status people perform better, for example, when others do not know of their status). Moreover, anxiety about social status produces chronic stress which has proven damaging physiological effects.”

Mr Pollock was speaking at a meeting at the Berlaymont headquarters of the EU Commission
between EU leaders, including the presidents of the Parliament, Council and Commission,
Messrs Jerzy Buzek, Herman van Rompuy and José Manuel Barroso, and prominent spokesmen for non-confessional organisations in Europe – a meeting forming part of the dialogue mandated under Article 17 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU.

CONTACT

David Pollock, President, European Humanist Federation: +44 (0) 7866 06932;
david.pollock@virgin.net

Pierre-Arnaud Perrouty, +32 2 (0)4 84 18 35 35;
pierre-arnaud.perrouty@laicite.net

NOTES TO EDITORS

1. The European Humanist Federation unites more than 40 humanist and secularist
organisations in over 20 countries in Europe, and has contacts in many more. Our purpose
is to represent the interests of people who have no religion (at least 1 in 3 Europeans) and to
promote secularism, i.e., separation of politics from religion and belief.

2. The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (Allen Lane,
London, 2009: ISBN 978-1-846-14039-6). Rebuttals of attempts to undermine the book’s
message are on the authors’ website at www.equalitytrust.org.uk.

3. Article 17 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (inserted by the
Lisbon Treaty) mandates an “open, transparent and regular dialogue” with churches and
what it calls “philosophical and non-confessional organisations” representing the nonreligious
population. A corresponding meeting with religious leaders took place on 19 July.