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Social policy professor at the LSE and
joint founder of the Child Poverty Action Group
(The Guardian, Tuesday 9 June 2009)
The death, at the age of 81, of the
social policy researcher and campaigner Peter Townsend closes a
career that sometimes seemed as if it would never end. Even after
heart problems and contracting pneumonia, Townsend continued to
research, teach and campaign, driven always by a sense that the truth
had power.
He became a public figure in the 1960s
when, together with Brian Abel-Smith, he "rediscovered"
British poverty, a problem then often complacently discussed in the
past tense, as if it were something the Beveridge Report had solved.
Despite its huge significance, however, this work was merely one
aspect of a career of many parts, mixing politics and advocacy with
an extraordinary range of research. Townsend railed against the
narrowness of modern academic life, covering everything from
children's rights to nursing homes, at some times soaring to adopt a
global perspective, at others diving to analyse, for instance, the
social effects of shopping centres in Manchester. But a single thread
tied the strands of his work together - concern about inequality.
Townsend grew up living a hand-to-mouth
existence with his single mother as she attempted to eke out a living
as a singer during the 1930s. That gave him an acute sense of what he
called "the rough edges of life", a sense that would
eventually inform his research. Before he could pursue that, though,
he needed to win, first, a scholarship at University College school,
London, and then, with the encouragement of an inspirational teacher,
a place at St John's College, Cambridge. There he studied
anthropology before taking his studies to the new Free University of
Berlin, a city still recovering from the war, where he switched to
sociology.
He then spent the 1950s engaged in
research in Britain, with posts at the Institute for Community
Studies and the London School of Economics, before, in 1963, becoming
one of the first professors at the new University of Essex. In the
1980s he moved to Bristol University, where he kept a post right to
the end, and, in 1998, he took up a second emeritus chair, at the
LSE.
As well as studying ageing, Townsend
made it his task to establish the facts about poverty in Britain. He
sought to make his case unarguable to the authorities by counting as
poor only those families who fell below the "official poverty
line", implied by the supposed safety net of means-tested
benefit rates.
To ensure his work was authoritative he
used Whitehall's own analysis, but there were substantial gaps in the
evidence the civil service collated. So he ended up in the bowels of
the Ministry of Labour's Colindale office, trawling through hundreds
of the raw questionnaires on which official statistics were based.
The work has informed almost all academic research on poverty since.
As the damning evidence on hardship was
gathered, Townsend sought to move from analysis to deeds, co-founding
the Child Poverty Action Group, the campaigning outfit whose
presidency he held until the end of his life. His advocacy work did
not stop there: he also co-founded the Disability Alliance and worked
within the Labour party to do something practical about poverty.
His work on health inequalities,
notably through the 1980 Black report, led to a transformation of the
academic field. Another overriding concern through the 1970s was to
develop a poverty line rooted in such rigorous social science that it
would be impossible to dispute, although, by a cruel quirk of fate,
the work culminated in 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher was elected.
After that, all the implications of his study for policy simply
dropped off the political agenda. Townsend was a dogged chronicler
of, and campaigner against, the subsequent widening of the income
gap. But during the long Conservative years his was a marginal voice.
He had brief hopes when New Labour
arrived, and especially after Tony Blair pledged to eliminate child
poverty in 1999. In the end, however, he was left bitterly
disillusioned, acknowledging that Blair and Gordon Brown were
redistributing to the poor, but profoundly offended by the
mean-spirited way in which he thought they went about it. He was
troubled not only by the endless emphasis on benefit claimants who
"played the system", which he felt stigmatised the honest
majority, but also by the reliance on tax credits, as opposed to
simple entitlements that were paid as of right.
Over the last two decades he began to
look at the topics he had been concerned with through the prism of
human rights. He saw the development of a global rights culture as
the most promising feature of our age, so, despite his disillusion
with Britain's politics, this shift lent him a new optimism. This was
encouraged by his third wife, the Labour peer Jean Corston, who was a
guiding light in parliament's joint committee on human rights.
He described himself as falling "head
over heels" in love with her. They married in 1985. She survives
him, along with five adult children and two stepchildren, all of whom
he was intensely involved with, remarking towards the end of his life
that, work aside, his primary interest was family.
• Peter Brereton Townsend, academic,
born 6 April 1928; died 7 June 2009
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