#BigBenefitsRow

On Monday night, Peter Stringfellow pointed to Mik, MJ and me on live TV and said:

I'm looking at people over there who obviously deserve everything they can get.

Apparently what we didn't deserve was a place at the grown up table to discuss the issues that affect us. Sue has blogged about how she was pulled from the line up with 2 hours notice. meaning there were no benefit-claiming disabled experts to talk about the cuts. People have pointed out that White Dee claims ESA for depression; so there was at least one disabled person on the panel. But firstly, we don't know if she identifiess as "disabled". It's possible she doesn't because so many people view being disabled as such an horrific and revolting thing. Secondly she claims benefits; but she's not an expert on them. People like Sue and me are. We can tell you the fraud rates for disability benefits off the top of our heads. We can gives you names of people who died from their conditions while supposedly "fit for work".

(OK, I know I'd never get invited to be on the panel if there was literally anybody else available. Media types only call me when their first choice is unavailable. I know I'm not cool or popular or particularly liked among the prominent left. And that's OK; I've never been popular and I'm used to it.)

But given that disabled people are more hit by the cuts than any other group of people; they shouldn't have just kept Sue and Dee in the line-up: They should have had additional disabled people up there too. There's a saying among disability rights activists that's been around as long as I can remember; it's possible the statement is older than I am. That saying is "nothing about us without us". And Monday night's debate was almost exclusively about us, but apart from Dee (and Mik managing to get about 3 seconds of soundbite out) it was definitely without us.

But I want to go back to Stringfellow's comments about what we "deserve" and what we "get".

When he said it; I laughed. Loudly. But then I always laugh loudly. My laugh carries for miles; just ask most of this country's comedians. I laughed so loudly that it was my only verbal ejaculation of the evening that was picked up by the microphones. (And I really put effort into heckling in an attempt to be heard; the laugh was just my normal laugh.)

I laughed because the support we get is being cut to the bone. Employment and Support Allowance cuts, Disability Living Allowance cuts, council tax benefit cuts, the bedroom tax, severe disability premium cuts, social care cuts, NHS cuts. Do we deserve that?

What we do currently get - and what we get an increase in every time papers run front pages calling us "scroungers" - is hate.

Disabled people get called "scrounging cunt" in the street for going out while visibly disabled. WtB's Pippa got followed home by someone shouting "fucking DLA stick.". I've been told that I should have been killed at birth to save the taxpayer money.

What we get is told that we're not allowed nice things. When I first got an iPhone I sustained abuse for it. The person abusing me didn't care that it was a Christmas present to replace my broken CrapBerry; disabled people are simply not allowed to own nice things. The media has an obsession with benefit claimants and the size of our TVs. Last autumn I had a TV crew in my living room. Before I was willing to start talking to camera I made them show me the shot so I was sure my telly couldn't be seen. My TV is shit: You can't have the aerial cable and an HDMI cable plugged in at the same time or they cause each other interference. But you can't see the fault from just looking at it (unless you're trying to watch a DVD with the aerial cable plugged in), so if my telly had been shown during my 4thought; the next day the Daily Mail's front page would've said "outrage as benefit claimant owns flat screen TV." Poor people owning stuff really seems to get under people's skin; no matter the circumstances in which they acquired said things.

There have even been cases of people who don't claim a penny in benefits getting abuse for being "scroungers" for merely looking disabled.

Do we deserve that?

Do we deserve to never be able to afford holidays? To only be able to afford Primark clothes? To not be able to upgrade to a TV without a fault? To know that this financial struggle is going to last your whole life because you're an "incurable"?

Katie Hopkins kept claiming that she was there to represent "hard working Britain". What about the 58 year old with cancer who has been working hard and paying National Insurance premiums for 40 years, but has just been refused ESA? That is the whole point of National Insurance. Because disabled people weren't allowed to be part of the debate; no-one pointed out that the system is there precisely to protect hard working Britons.

Hopkins also brought up the number of people being found "fit for work": Because there were no experts on disability benefits on the panel; no-one pointed out that that includes fatally ill people like Larry Newman or Cecilia Burns. I tried heckling "that includes terminally ill people!" But when I watched the show back, I realised that I hadn't been picked up by any of the mics around the room.

She then went on to claim that chancers are pulling out of the ESA process before being assessed by Atos because they're frightened of being caught out. There are all sorts of reasons people stop their claims, including dying. Again I tried heckling "that includes people who've died!" But again went unheard by the audience at home.

Coming from a stand up background, I hate hecklers. I hated having to heckle. But seeing as the producers wouldn't let any disabled people up on the stage to rebut these distorted claims, I was left with no choice but to try shouting.

Before the cameras started rolling, the floor manager told us that if we had something to say; we should say it. She said she didn't want people to leave feeling that they'd not had their voices heard. The lack of disabled people's representation up on that stage meant that voices like mine weren't heard. With the exception of Dee, Jack Monroe and Annabel Giles; the voices we heard from were people who have no idea how miserable life on benefits is, and how cruel people can be to those perceived as "scroungers". Yes, a couple of other people said that they know people on benefits and are aware of their struggles; but trust me: Unless you've lived this, you really don't know just how horrific it feels.

Benefits Street might have made this country obsessed with talking about benefits. It might have made benefits issues a guaranteed ratings winner. But unless you let the people affected by these issues use their own voices in these debates; you've just got people pointlessly arguing for an hour. 'Nothing about us without us' my backside.

Guest post: BBC bashes benefit claimants two weeks running

This is a guest post by @indigojo_uk and originally appeared here.

I’m a little late writing about this, but I watched John Humphrys’ programme on BBC2, The Future State of Welfare, a few days after it was broadcast (I was working a night shift the actual night), and last week the BBC broadcast a Panorama programme, Britain on the Fiddle, which exposed people claiming benefits while driving Bentleys, owning yachts and houses in France, and running pubs. In between the “damning exposé” of the wealthy benefit cheats, they also showed people being caught using blue (disability parking) badges illegally (in one case, when the disabled person was not present). This was obviously done to make it look like the programme was defending the interests of “the little people” against the cheats, but it was entirely irrelevant to the rest of the programme.

Humphrys’ programme started by interviewing various people who were claiming benefits and giving some recollections about “his day” when he was growing up in Splott in Cardiff. Apparently back then, not working carried some degree of stigma, and there was one man in the neighbourhood who did not work, for some unspecified reason, and he was shunned by the community for that. The reason could, of course, have been quite genuine — he may well have had a disability or some health problem that he did not feel comfortable discussing with all and sundry. He interviewed various benefit claimants, including a family of several children with a single mother, a long-term unemployed family in an ex-industrial northern town where the father had calculated that working would not make him much better off than staying on benefits, a family from Spain who were on housing benefit so they could live in Islington, and a woman with ME who had been failed by her ATOS assessment (although she easily won on appeal).

The whole thrust of Humphrys’ argument was the need to cut the benefits bill, ignoring the issue of whether what the bill pays for is worth paying for or necessary. The reason why a modest flat in a district close to central London, where the work is, costs so much was conveniently glossed over (it was nothing like that expensive twenty years ago, before prices and rents became inflated by the sale of council properties and buy-to-let mortgages). Why a man in a northern town regards the work that is available as not worth doing was not asked (the fact is that there were serious jobs in the north until the factories and mines were closed down, and a large town like Middlesbrough cannot survive with just supermarkets and council jobs). The history of unemployment and benefits in the UK is a history of political decisions — unemployment figures (derived from numbers of dole claimants) used to threaten workers not to go on strike or demand rights, incapacity benefits later used to artificially reduce unemployment numbers, and so on. None of this is of the current claimants’ making, so we saw someone who had never had to worry about finding a job, not for a good few decades at least, making someone from a community which had been deliberately impoverished look like a scrounger. If you have ever had the notion to tell someone, “I’ve worked hard all my life”, you should consider yourself lucky that you had the opportunity to do that. Some people do not.

Humphrys also travels to New York to interview officials and charity workers involved with the “workfare” scheme there, and those dealing with its fallout. Early on, he presents it as a system whereby benefits are delivered only to those who prove that they are looking for work — the same is true of Jobseekers’ Allowance in the UK, in which claimants are required to keep a diary of their ongoing search for work, and are given jobs to apply for. Towards the end, he showed some of the soup kitchens and charity food outlets that have appeared in New York to serve people who are unable to receive welfare as their two-year allowance has run out with no work in sight. He also interviewed two women who had been in white-collar jobs and made redundant, and were afraid for the future as they had found themselves unable to get any more work. This provided some counter-balancing to the sermons from middle-class men in suits about personal responsibility (one of them claimed that people went back on welfare because they lacked the personal organisation to keep a job. But it did not seriously examine why people lost jobs and could not find anything else: people will not employ them, often because they are “overqualified”, and it might be assumed that they will not stay if employed, or they do not have experience, or the social skills the human resources department decrees that the job requires.

Last week’s Panorama really did bring the programme to a new low — the 30-minute format is something I have criticised again and again (such as here) as it lends itself to sensationalism rather than to serious investigation, but this just was not Panorama — it was more like a cheap prime-time infotainment piece, a bit like Saints and Scroungers without the “saints” (who were often people who helped the poor and disabled find benefits they were entitled to). The aim was obviously to show that the benefit bill was as high as it was because of fraud, and that “fraud costs all of us”, but the over-investigation of fraud can sometimes detract from the purpose of the benefit and make life very difficult for real claimants, so as to satisfy the mid-market tabloids. Nobody would object to someone who had been found out claiming benefits when they are not living in the country, or were perfectly well-off in their own right, or not as disabled as they claim to be, being punished or having their benefits cut, but some benefits are in fact not means-tested and the programme did not make that clear. It also did not mention that the rate of disability benefit fraud is extremely low, and therefore the cost of welfare is not being significantly inflated by fraud; it is just high because there is a lot of disability, and some people’s needs are severe and complex.

What makes this all the more disgusting is that excuses are being manufactured to “cut the benefits bill” at a time of scarcity when many people are falling into poverty. The same cannot be said of the introduction of Jobseekers’ Allowance under John Major — that happened in 1996, after the early 1990s recession had ended, although with much the same media baiting of the “workshy”. This time round, it is benefits as a whole that are being attacked, with the media — not just the newspapers which support the Tories because their wealthy owners tell them to, but the BBC which is paid for by public subscription — joining in the chorus. We have a welfare system partly to make sure people do not fall into destitution, partly to make sure that people with disabilities and other complex needs can live dignified and productive lives, and partly to pay for the costs of ideological trends (such as globalisation) and political decisions. If we wish to cut the benefits bill, we need to get people working, and that means reducing our reliance on imported manufactured goods, for a start. People who can work, and are offered a serious job (that is, one with prospects), will do so. Those who cannot, because of their own or a dependent’s disability (or because of prejudice, or some other genuine reason), must be supported. The alternative is to lose our status as a civilised country.

Ed Miliband on The Andrew Marr Show 16/1/11

Marr gave Miliband rather a grilling this morning about his, and the Labour party's, opinion on the cuts. Marr accused Miliband of being anti-cuts (as if that's a bad thing!) to which Miliband responded that, actually, he's pro-cuts; he just wouldn't have cut as deeply as the ConDems.

On benefits specifically Miliband said:

In relation to welfare let me give you a specific example: On the reforms to the Disability Living Allowance, the gateway for that. On the reforms to Employment Support Allowance Douglas Alexander has said very clearly we'll work with the government on the changes. And he's even said in relation to benefit uprating, that while we don't accept a permanent lowering of that, we would be willing to look at a change for 3 years, in order to save, in fact, rather large sums of money. So I don't accept this mythology that's being put around, Andrew. I said very clearly when I became leader "we're not going to oppose every cut."

Which essentially means that the Labour party support making less people eligible for DLA to cut the bill by 20%, even though only 0.5% of claims are fraudulent. It also means the Labour party support removing your contributory ESA after 1 year.

One to Watch: The Spending Review

On Thursday 9th September 2010 at 22:35 BBC1 will be showing local debates throughout the country about the government's spending cuts. No doubt in most regions the subject of scrounging benefit claimants will come up.

The TV Guide.co.uk page about the London edition of the show is here.