Sour Grapes

Time for a grumble...

Tomorrow, it will be one year to the day since I officially published Severe Discomfort.  It's been great getting some really positive reactions to it, talking about the characters and issues and planning their next adventures, but I would be lying if I claimed it had achieved its goal of changing the tone of debate about Social Security.  I've reached a fairly modest audience and, as far as I can tell, largely preached to the converted. 

Lacking the funds or contacts for a good launch, it was a remarkable piece of self-sabotage to declare my arch-villain 'essentially the Daily Mail in human form' in my preface and still hold out any hope of our local Northcliffe Press owned paper taking an interest (keen though they usually are to support local authors).  Meanwhile, the 'Welfare Reform' process grinds on, justified by vicious stereotypes of idlers and scroungers very different to poor Lyn and Terry Walker and the thousands like them at the sharp end of it. 

Severe Discomfort's first birthday will be marked - entirely by coincidence - by the broadcast of something called the 'Big Benefits Row' on Channel 5.  Well-informed rumour has it that on its panel will be Kelvin MacKenzie, discredited former editor of the Sun newspaper - arguably, someone who should be more of a pariah than the most blatant benefits fraudster after activities like these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin_MacKenzie#Invented_stories
If you're a benefit claimant, you get prosecuted for telling lies; if you're Mr MacKenzie, you become a very wealthy celebrity for doing so.   

His partners in crime tomorrow night are apparently Katie Hopkins, herself another prime example of how sheer deliberate bloody unpleasantness can make you famous, and notorious former MP Edwina Currie, who grabbed the headlines recently after an outrageous statement on our local BBC radio station to the effect that people wouldn't need foodbanks if they hadn't wasted their money on dog food and tattoos.  Whether Currie had her invitation from Channel 5 before or after her interview on Radio Stoke I don't know, but it certainly won't have counted against her.  I suspect Hopkins may earned hers through a diatribe against the Social Security system delivered on late-night political TV show This Week, in which she theatrically acted out cleaning the BBC loos to show the sort of work she would do rather than scrounge off the state.  I remarked at the time that we would have had a more informed contribution to the debate from her mop and bucket!

The only possible justification for putting them on the panel is to provoke cheering and whooping from those who share their rabid, reactionary attitudes, and booing and teeth-gnashing from those who do not.  They can contribute nothing of real value.  Even if you put them in a studio which wasn't intended to be a bear pit, they aren't equipped to have a sensible discussion.  They have no knowledge of the day to day operation of the Social Security benefits system - for example, how tinkering with the points system for ESA has left chronically sick people destitute and vulnerable unemployed workers the victims of arbitrary sanctions.  No-one they know will have experienced anything like that.  Worst of all, they cannot imagine the infinite variety of circumstances that create the need to claim benefits and then shape the lives of those claimants.  It's what makes Channel 4's claim that the excruciating 'Benefits Street' shows the 'reality of life on benefits' so disingenuous.  There is no one 'reality' of life on benefits.  Most claimants don't live on Benefits Street.  They live on our street.  They are our neighbours.

It makes no more sense to pack the panel with 'celebrities' than it would to ask the pundits from March of the Day to deal with audience queries on Gardeners' Question Time (though perhaps that's unfair - Gary Linaker might be an unacknowledged leader in the field of alpine cultivation, and Alan Hanson something of an expert on herbaceous perennials for all I know).  The obvious reason for doing so is to win the ratings war, even if this stifles any chance of intelligent debate.  In the interest of balance, I'm sure Channel 5 are looking for someone suitably shouty and strident for the 'red corner', but that's not what we need.

Meanwhile, having contacted Woman's Hour and dropped a spare copy of the book off at our local BBC regional news office last week - the latest in several failed attempts to get a little bit of publicity - I wait in faint hope of an acknowledgment.  I suspect I'm not alone; there will be press releases from advice organisations and disability rights campaigners sitting in in-trays, letters correcting factual errors cluttering up wastebins.  We aren't celebrities, so nobody's listening.