The word on the street: Simon Webb investigates the ‘precariat’

‘For some people today, every aspect of life is precarious.’

Sometimes, new words are ugly. Sometimes they are ugly in themselves, sometimes they are ugly because they name something that is itself ugly. One new word, ‘precariat’, is quite attractive in itself – a blend of ‘precarious’ and ‘proletariat’, two English words with French origins – but the fact that we need it is a decidedly ugly truth.

I first came across ‘precariat’ when I read ‘A Torn Safety Net’, a new report from Theos, the Christian think tank. The subtitle of the report reads ‘How the cost of living crisis threatens its own last line of defence’. The foreword is written by Gordon Brown and Rowan Williams.

The precariat described in the report consists of people who experience ‘precarity’, a word that, it turns out, is not particularly new at all: the OED has an example dating from 1910, and one for ‘precariat’ from 1989.

Many aspects of the lives of the precariat are subject to precarity. Their income, employment, housing, migration status, or health (mental or physical) as well as their links to their community, or the health of the community itself, are at risk. Right now the situation is so dire that while I refer to the precariat as ‘they’, I am conscious that some readers of the Friend will already be among those experiencing precarity.

For some people today, every aspect of life is precarious. Originally, Hannah Rich’s report set out to examine how ‘chronic insecurity’ or precarity had been gradually becoming a bigger aspect of life for many in the UK. But as the report was being compiled, the cost of living crisis hit: Rich found herself looking at a worrying trend that was becoming an emergency.

While many individuals are trying to find ways of cutting expenditure, Rich’s report tells us that faith groups are also struggling to keep the lights and the heating on, in the face of giddying rises in energy costs. Churches in particular are facing the challenge of heating and lighting large, elderly stone buildings, some reeking of damp, which are impossible to insulate properly. Some of these places also rely on clapped-out, grossly inefficient heating systems.

Such spaces were invitingly cool during the recent heatwaves, but in this winter of high energy prices they have become a liability. This doesn’t just impact church services: other community activities hosted in church buildings are also affected. People who once gave time, money and food to such initiatives as foodbanks, organised by faith groups, are now wondering if they can still afford to do so. And as a community worker in Wolverhampton told the Theos researchers, it doesn’t help the state of mind of those who are struggling to see ‘extreme displays of wealth’ everywhere. 

New situations, good or bad, breed new words. The predicament described above also suggests a new twist on the old question, ‘Who will watch the watchmen?’ Now we must ask, ‘Who will help the helpers?’ Ways to help them are explored in the report’s concluding recommendations. These include clever tweaks to tax regulations and charity law, to make it easier for people to give time, money and donations.

One ingenious ‘two birds with one stone’ recommendation suggests a change to the rules surrounding property owned by charities. If they no longer have to sell their property to the highest bidder (which is usually a corporate developer) they might be able to sell to some worthier buyer, such as a social housing scheme. The report’s recommendations also suggest ways to make it easier for people in paid employment to work as volunteers, as many did when they were off work and furloughed during the worst of the Covid pandemic.

Of course no amount of clever tweaking will help if, as the report says, ‘policy makers and faith communities’ do not ‘take seriously the issue of insecurity, prioritising the security of communities as well as their prosperity’. The report reminds us of Old Testament calls to help ‘the widow, orphan and foreigner’.

The way that faith groups help out in communities is something that can be offered as an argument against secularisation and in favour of organised religion itself. But it is not an entirely satisfactory argument: secular groups also help out. I live in an old mining village in County Durham. In the next village, we used to have the County Durham Socialist Clothing Bank. A similarly-named place in nearby Sunderland hands out food and toiletries, as well as clothing.

‘A Torn Safety Net’ recognises that growing secularisation is one reason why many churches and other faith groups are in trouble, but Hannah Rich’s report concentrates on the impact of the country’s financial woes on aspects of the work of these institutions. ‘The Nones: Who are they and what do they believe?’, another 2022 report from Theos, looks in detail at the opinions of secularised people themselves.

Written by another Hannah, Hannah Waite, this second report also makes use of a new word, or rather a new meaning for an old one. Here ‘the Nones’ are the people who chose ‘no religion’ in answer to the optional question on religion that formed part of the 2021 UK census. (‘Nones’ is also one of the old canonical hours, corresponding to 3pm.) The new ‘Nones’ has to be pronounced just like ‘nuns’, so that it is now possible that you might overhear a conversation where someone seems to be saying, ‘I’d never heard of these nuns until a few weeks ago. They say they have no religion at all. And some of them campaign against religion…’

Data from the last census, released in November 2022, showed that, for the first time, less than half of respondents identified as Christian. The percentage of respondents who ticked ‘no religion’ rose to over thirty-seven per cent, up from just over twenty-five per cent in 2011. Waite’s report references this census data, which caused quite a stir when it was first released, but also draws on the results of a separate YouGov survey, sponsored by Theos and The Faraday Institute of Science and Religion, which questioned some 5,000 people, a month or so after the census itself. 

Analysis of the YouGov results suggests that the Nones can be split into three groups: the spiritual Nones, the campaigning Nones and the tolerant Nones. Caricatures of these types are provided in the report by the artist Emily Downe. Unfortunately, while her spiritual and tolerant Nones look rather cool, her campaigning None looks like the office bore in mid-rant.

The campaigning Nones are the ones you could be tempted to challenge with tales of faith groups, their foodbanks and their youth clubs, but you might be wasting your breath. Their ultimate faith is in science (which appears here in its familiar role as enemy of religion) and they agree with statements offered in the Theos survey which assert that religion is worse than smallpox, and tantamount to child abuse. We might say that these campaigning Nones are members of the Dawkiniat, to coin a phrase.

Simon is from Durham Meeting. ‘A Torn Safety Net’ and ‘The Nones’ can be downloaded for free from www.theosthinktank.co.uk.

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