In the book ‘Landet mot nord’, author and historian Mona Ringvej uses 22 key people to tell the story of Norway over 1,000 years. Alf Prøysen is the last.
Why exactly him?
Prøysen depicted life at the bottom of the table, from the poor farm of the old class society, says Ringvej. He calls it “a connection to the voices of the past”.
This fall, it’s as if these voices have been brought back to life.
THE COUNTRY THAT FORGOTTEN POVERTY: Alf Prøysen, portrayed in 1964. Photo: Ivar Aaserud/ Aktuell/NTB
sea View
Not gonna happen because Christmas is coming and we hear “Christmas Eve” but because a grown man appears on “The Debate” on NRK and says he wants gum as a Christmas present. One mother says she sits under a blanket and eats slices of bread to save money.
4,000 Christmas greetings hang on the Christmas tree at the Church’s city mission in Haugesund, reports NRK Rogaland. Last year there were 1,800. The girl (18) wants a rain jacket. Boy (2) wants winter shoes in size 26.
Bård Tufte Johansen rightly commented in “New again”: It is as if this debate is sponsored by the Prøysen Museum. It’s a shock.
Price increase on electricity and many other things made things worse for the poor of Norway. We still talk like it was something that happened out of the blue this fall.
Poverty has been on the rise for a long time. Prøysen’s echo has lurked for many years.
We hesitate to use the word poverty. To maintain order in the debate, most people are consistent in using the statistical term: Persistent Low Income.
This doesn’t make things better. 115,000 children live in consistently low-income households. This means that almost 12% of all Norwegian children grow up in what we must be able to call poverty.
Calling it differently would be like asking poverty to knock on the door, and kindly asking permission to enter the warmth.
Development in recent decades has also followed a rather steep curve. In 2000, only four per cent of Norwegian children grew up on persistently low income.
We might think that today’s poverty is not what it was before, for example in Prussian times. Class distinctions were explicit. The farmer preferred to sell the farm rather than inherit it to his son who wanted to marry a farm girl, as described by Ringvej.
I’m not so sure. Times change, and so do the expressions for strangeness and distance. Now that the poor have begun to raise their voices, the details are emerging.
The Red Cross dived in this. In a new report, they asked young people what it’s like to grow up on consistently low income.
Four out of ten fear going to school, because differences are strengthened and made visible there. They have to stop their recreational activities. It doesn’t help that young people take on extra jobs, are sponsored by acquaintances or make special arrangements with trainers: they are not “solutions that allow participation over time”.
They take jobs to help support family finances, and they don’t attend birthday parties because they have to bring a gift.
They want basics like winter jackets and warm socks for Christmas.
Daily life for the poor it has changed since Prussian times. So have the demographics. But strangely this fall there has been little attention to that.
The representatives of poverty that we saw, for example, in “The Debate” have white skin and did not speak in broken voices.
But six out of ten children growing up on consistently low incomes have parents of immigrant background.
Is it perhaps easier to put poverty on the agenda if the immigration debate is kept at arm’s length?
The situation requires that we ask a question: why have we allowed poverty to increase so dramatically in Norway in recent years. Line of work was highlighted as an important explanation. But is there something more, something that is not so easy to talk about?
The story of the dismantling of the welfare state in the USA has been explained by some with this narrative key:
When public swimming pools in white areas had to be turned over to blacks, many chose to fill them with concrete. Instead of sharing the benefits, they have chosen to make them unavailable to everyone, including themselves.
The debate on poverty is complex. The most important reason for the increase in inequality in Norway in recent years is no longer immigrants, but that the richest fled.
So it should be possible to tax more, right?
This brings us back in the political arena, where the debate on poverty has played out rather amusingly.
Since the PA/SP government under pressure promised ordinary people the turn to campaign and suffered price hikes soon after, they now have to answer for their mistakes.
But how has the development of the area been in recent years?
Statistics show that under the bourgeois government of Erna Solberg, the proportion of children with persistently low incomes increased more strongly than under the previous red-green government of Jens Stoltenberg.
It probably contributed to the fact that “social equalization” had become a dominant issue during last year’s general election, after having has grown strongly in voter attention. While 4% said it was the most important issue in the 2017 election, 16% responded that it was last year’s most important issue.
Gets no oil from the EU
And now, after the change of government? It now appears that Støre’s government has allocated too much and too little for economic redistribution. More redistribution than the business community will accept in the form of higher taxes and fees, but not enough to raise the minimum number of retirees above the EU poverty line.
This says something about how manipulative and inadequate public debate can be. And how difficult it is still to adopt policies that can lift people out of poverty.
What is striking about the stories that are told is how little the poor ask. crumbs. The sum is still more than anyone seems willing to give them.
