Taking A Baseball Bat To The Poor

The icing on this particular cake is the introduction of a “two strikes and you’re out” policy that allows “persistent” offenders to be cut out of the benefits equation and excised from the unemployment figures for up to 13 weeks. In cases where a couple with dependants attempts to circumvent the sanction by swapping the claim to the innocent party, provisions to reduce the amount of income- related benefits paid to the partner, or any dependant of the “offender,” will apply for the duration of the sanction. A high profile anti-fraud advertising campaign is also underway with controversial billboard posters and 40 second television spots imploring the public to call a fraud hotline with the details of friends and neighbors they suspect of fraud. 

The posters are unashamedly scaremongering (“Benefits cheats. Watch your back. We’re onto you.” and “Benefits cheats. When will your number be up?”).  

The Department’s literature admits that prosecution of employers is “not always the most effective way of tackling the problem” of employers who knowingly collude in or promote fraud. Prosecution of claimants is an altogether simpler matter, given that they don’t typically have the wherewithal to mount a legal challenge. 

No money means no costly legal battles. The daily privations of life on benefit are insurmountable enough without entertaining the foolhardy notion of appeals once benefits have been removed. The statistics are alarming: one in three Scottish children live in poverty. One in four households are on the breadline. 

One woman told me, “If I could afford to work without claiming social money I would. I know people who work and claim but still don’t make ends meet.” 

Britain’s Labour government has been applauded for introducing a national minimum wage, but one in three British children still lives in poverty. 

In a further sop to the tabloid press and the proxy moral majority, Tony Blair has also refused to back down on controversial plans to dock child benefits from the parents of children with poor school attendance records, such as the parents of 11-year-old John, who hasn’t been at school for two weeks, because his mother can’t afford to buy him a new pair of shoes; or 14-year-old Maggie, who refuses to go to school because of the casual violence and drug dealing in the playground. 

The New Deal program, which was initiated to put the young and long-term unemployed back to work, has proved to be a means of cheap labor for unscrupulous employers who enjoy a healthy subsidy for every person they take on. Young people between 18 and 24 who refuse positions they consider unsuitable lose their benefits. There are an estimated 624,000 young Britons that have disappeared from official records this way. 

This is what happened to Jason, whose pallid complexion suggests experiences beyond his 21 years. Since losing benefits he has been sleeping on friends sofas, but he knows that can only go on for so long. His mother wants nothing to do with him, after finding out that he has been taking drugs. Jason did have a job once, working as a care assistant in a nursing home for the elderly, but they let him go after he missed a shift due to illness. If he ever had any ambitions he doesn’t now: “Why do I smoke hash and do pills? Why not? There’s nothing for me. I can block things out, forget about everything. It makes me feel better.” 

The unemployed are hopeless in every sense of the word, but not in the way that punitive legislation and scaremongering ad campaigns suggest. The absence of hope and feelings of failure have given way to fatalism among the people who populate these dreary identical streets of damp filled rooms and leaking roofs. This is life at the bottom where the future often seems more of an implied threat than a reason for hope. Their dreams are modest enough—having enough food to last the week, enough money to buy a crying child a pair of school shoes, not having to borrow money to pay for a child’s school trip—but not modest enough for a Labour government whose much crowed “compassion” holds sufficiently less water than 11-year-old John’s shoes. 

Back at the now closed post office, a crowd of alcoholics has gathered while police sirens sound in the near distance.               Z