From Famine Walls to Welfare Conditions, Why Do We Always Punish The Poor?
In a little under two centuries, not much has changed in terms of how badly we treat the poor
In the northwest of Scotland, deep into the Scottish Highlands and not far from Ullapool, sits the mighty Beinn Dearg.
Beinn Dearg isn’t the tallest mountain in Scotland (that would be Ben Nevis), but at 1034m (3,556ft) it’s still one of the tallest mountains in the British Isles (it comes in at 34th, for anyone who likes stats).
It’s a boggy climb with lots of cliffs and crags, and unlike a lot of more popular mountains (like Ben Nevis), there’s no road directly to the foot of the mountain or a path for most of the climb.
Travel another 30 miles or so north and you come across Suilven. With the highest of its four peaks coming in at “only” 731m (2,389ft), Suilven definitely isn’t one of Scotland’s tallest mountains either, not even a Munro, but it still dominates the landscape.
These places are remote and constantly subject to Scotland’s wet and wild weather. One mountain climber colourfully describes Suilven as,
“a remote lump of rock carefully placed in the middle of a lochan*-strewn wilderness that stretches for many miles in every direction. Don’t for a moment think you’re in for an easy day out”.
(*a small loch).
They’re not places you might expect to come across man-made structures — apart from anything, there aren’t many people there. And yet, bizarrely enough, climb either of these remote mountains and you will come across some oddly-placed walls.
The dry stone wall on Beinn Dearg travels several miles along the mountain’s ridge and can easily be seen on Google Maps. It’s 6ft high in places
Across the middle of Suilven, near the summit, is a metre-thick dry stone wall that runs down either side of the mountain, cutting it in half.
Why are there walls on these challenging, remote, wild mountains? What purpose do they serve?
These are famine walls, also known as hunger walls. Scottish peasants built them during the Highland Potato Famine of 1846–56. The walls are part of several ‘public works’, including hunger roads, commissioned by landlords and the church to provide work and income for the destitute.
The Highland potato famine was never as severe or widespread as in Ireland, but people still starved and died. Like the Irish potato famine, potato blight wasn’t the only cause, with systemic issues playing a major part.
During the Highland Clearances tenant farmers were forcibly evicted by landlords looking to make greater profits from sheep farming, depriving many crofters of land for cattle and grain crops. At the same time, local industries centred on fishing collapsed due to a lack of demand, devasting coastal communities.
Those who could emigrated to places like the US and Canada — around a third of the Highland population in total. Those that remained were dangerously over-reliant on the potato crop, with no other sources of sustenance and no work.
When potatoes suddenly started rotting in the ground the effects were immediate and devastating: starvation, accompanied by diseases such as typhus.
Relief efforts were initially driven by the Church and funded by Scottish Lowlanders. Eventually, the British government stepped in to force landlords to provide relief to their tenants.
But it was never enough, and what little relief did come was limited by the prevailing economic and social attitudes of the time, “that an economy thrives best when left to the free play of market forces, and any unnecessary interference with them is bound eventually to cause much more harm than good”, according to historian Tim Devine.
Following this ideology meant grains weren’t provided free to starving Highlanders but sold to them at market prices. These prices were inflated because grains were still being shipped out of the highlands to be sold for greater profits elsewhere, making them unaffordable to the destitute crofters.
The classism of the British state and the ruling class also played a part in limiting relief. The famine was blamed on its victims, who were portrayed as “non-commercial and backward” in the context of the prevailing liberal capitalist system.
Of course, this profit-driven system led to the clearances that had made Highlanders so vulnerable to potato blight in the first place.
Public works like the famine walls were undertaken because of the concern that Highlanders would become dependent on a handout, based on the false and stigmatising assumption that they were naturally lazy and feckless.
Thus, Highlanders were forced to build walls on remote, dangerous mountains like Beinn Dearg and Suilven, or starve.
Can you imagine essentially being forced to climb hundreds of metres up a remote mountain in the wind and rain, carrying stones and tools, all the while close to starvation, and doing so in the clothing of a peasant from the 1800s? It’s cruel, and yet it was thought of as charity.
The famine walls were both a punishment and a threat meted out to the poor for having the audacity to be victims of circumstances well beyond their control.
The tale of Scotland’s hunger walls might be a thing of the past. However, the ideologies that informed the decision to force starving Highlanders to build those monuments to cruelty are still deeply embedded in our welfare system and our attitudes towards the poor.
We don’t make those experiencing poverty build famine walls anymore, but we do subject them to a regime known as welfare conditionality.
Under the current Universal Credit system people claiming welfare are forced to agree to certain conditions and engage in “work-related activities” to receive benefits. If someone fails to agree to the “claimant commitment”, or fails to meet the conditions they will be “sanctioned”, meaning their benefits are reduced or stopped entirely.
Often people claiming welfare are convinced to agree to unrealistic commitments that they are unlikely to be able to meet due to illness, disability, or caring responsibilities, essentially setting them up to fail.
Work-related activities are required for both the unemployed, partially employed, and the disabled. They often involve things like a mandatory job search for 35 hours a week, attending CV writing workshops, or learning to manage disabilities, not to improve health and wellbeing, but to return to being economically productive.
This regime entails constant surveillance. People claiming Universal Credit or certain sickness benefits are forced to use an online portal to prove they have looked for jobs and to communicate with Jobcentre staff. Failing to log into the system frequently enough, meet your “claimant commitments” or respond to messages or requirements can lead to sanctions.
People claiming welfare are also forced to attend “work-focused” meetings with Jobcentre “Job Coaches” to discuss moving back to work. Again, not attending, even due to sickness, will result in an instant reduction or withdrawal of benefits.
I was subject to some of these conditions — arguably the least of them — while I was off work due to severe mental health issues, and they were a source of weekly dread. On my weekly calls the “Job Coach” attempted to talk me into looking for work or starting a business, despite my doctor confirming that I was suicidal and too sick to work.
Appealing a sanction can take anywhere from 8 weeks to 6 months or longer — there is no upper limit on the timescale — during which time the welfare claimant will have reduced or no benefit.
Research shows that the conditionality and sanctions regime doesn’t achieve its aims of getting people into work and off benefits. What it does do is worsen people’s financial situation, force people into in-work poverty, and make their physical and mental health worse.
In this sense, conditionality is pointless, unless, of course, the point is to cause misery.
I was a voluntary welfare rights adviser for years, and at points, I was both a “claimant” and an adviser due to my own health problems. I also grew up in the kind of communities that are effectively the target of these harmful welfare policies.
I have seen first-hand the harm caused by Universal Credit and its predecessors. I’ve seen how these systems, ostensibly meant to support the poor, make them hungrier, poorer, and sicker.
Conditionality and sanctions, a key part of our current welfare system, are the modern famine walls.
Just like the famine walls, the Universal Credit regime is built on the threat of starvation and the assumption that those experiencing poverty are themselves entirely to blame — that they will take advantage of the system or become dependent on a handout if they aren’t constantly nudged towards work.
Both the famine walls and the welfare reforms that led to Universal Credit are aimed at avoiding so-called “welfare dependency” — in this context a derogatory term rooted in victim-blaming, and part of the rhetoric of neoliberal welfare reforms which have been rolled out over decades.
The scheme of public works that led to the building of famine walls was informed by the individualism of liberal market capitalism; the current regime of welfare conditionality is based on the individualism and productivist work ethic of its successor, neoliberal market capitalism.
Both ideologies ignore the systemic issues caused by market economics and capitalist greed. Both ideologies are based on determining human worth by productivity and the ability to generate profits for capital.
Both ideologies perpetuate the notion that it is the poor and the working class who are prone to laziness while masking the fact that billionaires, capitalists, and the ruling class do little to no work while reaping the benefits of ours.
In that sense, maybe the famine walls and the regime of conditionality aren’t pointless at all; they both uphold a centuries-old system of inequality and exploitation. They’re a warning of what will happen if we don’t remain productive and useful to the system of capital accumulation.
In Scotland, if you know where to look, that warning is plain to see. The legacy of the tragic intersection of capitalist ideology and potato blight is written on the landscapes in the form of the famine walls.
The impact of the way we harm the poor and the disabled today on behalf of capitalism is just as visible. It is written on the faces of the victims of this system — as worry lines, as visible anxiety, or as an expression of anguished desperation caused by a cruel welfare system and the harmful capitalist ideology it serves.