Another 'repeat' here - a post from my 'serious' blog about benefits looking at the phenomenon of 'Benefits Street', billed as 'showing the reality of life on benefits' by Channel 4, who also shamelessly wallow in its notoriety. It's due to finish on Monday with supposedly a 'debate' about our Social Security system; let's hope they can get a better quality of 'expert' than Channel 5 did when they brought in Edwina Currie and Katie Hopkins!
If a production team and camera crew followed you around for a year, what would the resulting documentary about your life look like? Here are a couple of possibilities for mine...
The first, portraying the delusional political activist, concentrates on shots of me hunched over my computer, trawling the national and local media for Social Security related news to share with my Facebook 'friends', doing battle with the 'trolls' on our local rag's website and writing desperately uncommercial 'Welfare Rights Lit' (ensure shots with alcoholic beverage on hand are utilised). A few shots of washing up waiting to be done, an overfull laundry basket and Himself cooking dinner convey failure to deal with proper feminine domestic chores. Cut to meetings with fellow activists in cluttered rooms bedecked with CND posters, a little sequence of us being ignored by passers-by when handing out anti-Bedroom Tax leaflets and some marching through the streets of London or Manchester against the cuts - again, splicing in some bored-looking members of the public to stress the irrelevance of it all. Any suggestion that I have non-leftie friends and non-political interests - in short, a Life - would go. And because the audience isn't supposed to approve of this idealistic and anachronistic politicking, they'd be a snarky voice-over and an ironic music score.
Another version follows the do-gooder adviser: it could be sympathetic, looking at the issues brought to the doors of advice centres in these tough times and showing how dealing with unremitting poverty and injustice can be demoralising, depressing and frustrating. A true picture would catch colleagues moved to anger and to tears. But why do that when you'd have enough shots of us gossiping with each other, eating biscuits and drinking tea behind the scenes to give the impression that precious little real work gets done without private sector commercial rigour? They might be lucky and catch some unguarded uncomplimentary comments about clients and funders to spice things up - indeed, if they had earned our confidence and become our friends, I'm sure they could elicit some with a couple of gently leading questions. So a thoroughly decent and highly committed team appears on screen as burnt-out, callous and lazy, and there's precious little public sympathy when a few 'characters' get their redundancy notices.
Of course I pose the question as 'Benefits Street' continues to make headlines. I have to be honest and admit that I haven't watched it, but I've caught a fair number of clips and trailers which appear intent on stirring up controversy by presenting deliberately negative images of James Turner Street, its residents and its piles of rubbish. As I've said before when discussing the 'On the Fiddle' type programmes, you never will get benefits reality in 'reality TV' as the most typical non-pensioner claimants are either too shy to step forward and face the perils of publicity, or their lives are too tedious to be entertaining. Television wants controversy and 'characters', not the quiet but dull life of the chronically sick middle-aged woman living in fear of the 'brown envelope' calling her for an Atos medical, and her year-long struggle on the minimum income for a fully-fit person while waiting for an appeal to put right the flawed assessment.
That's reality, but it's not television.
An aspect of all this that hit me today is that not only do these programmes hurt benefit claimants, by making it politically popular to cut Social Security and political suicide to defend it, they also make cuts in funding for welfare rights projects and law centres more palatable. There are already local 'trolls' who hurl the accusation 'Traitors' at my own workplace for having the affrontery to advise asylum-seekers and migrant workers, but if our 'indigenous' clients are perceived as 'scroungers', who will speak out against Legal Aid cuts, the loss of grants for benefits casework and the annual salami-slicing of our Council grant?
And so the luckless claimant looses again. Found fit for work when you're seriously ill? Paying the 'Bedroom Tax' when you should be exempt? Accused of benefit fraud when you've made a genuine mistake? That's just too bad, because there's no place for Justice on Benefits Street.
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