Absolutely No Shades of "That Sort of Thing"

You have to hand it to B&Q.  If there was an award for the most creative leap onto the bandwagon of that film they surely win it for the 'leaked email' supposedly sent to staff advising them how to deal sensitively with customers asking for (ahem) supplies not required for conventional DIY.  Having grabbed headlines across the entire media spectrum, they've 'fessed up to it being a spoof.

Cynical, wicked - and sheer bloody marketing genius.

Arguably, I'm missing a trick here myself.  There are 'shady' jokes and references I could be using to push my own work, not least the old anti-austerity line about being the only novelist writing about being screwed by sadistic millionaires who can't make any money from it.  I considered a short story tie-in (tie-up?): a serious tale, perhaps with our Daphne the lone placard-wielding protestor at her local multiplex, watching a lass she knows to be a victim of serial domestic abuse going to see it with her latest unsuitable boyfriend: a funny one, inspired by the B&Q story, with Sally Archer trying to buy cable ties for her electrician and getting the nudge, nudge, wink, wink from the guy behind the counter: or a 'really rather saucy' one with Hilary perusing the wares in her local Ann Summers but concluding that nothing on offer improved on nature - at least as far as her man was concerned!

In the event, one of my colleagues (you know who you are, SJ!) got there first with a splendid little snippet of Grand Union 'fan fiction'

Daphne exclaimed “at last an internet connection.”  She hastily searched for the nearest B & Q; to her delight there was one a short walk away, 
She called out to Harry.  “Just nipping out to pick up some supplies pet”
“Do you need some company duck?”
“No, you carrying on thinking, I will be back in about 20 minutes”
Daphne walked along the clarty tow path and then cut through the factories to B & Q
“Can I help you madam?” asked the sales assistant.
“Yes please, I need some cable ties and gaffa tape”…

Mercifully, she left it with the reader wondering how this little escapade would end - perhaps arguing the merits of a running bowline over a clove hitch while six pints west of sober, waking up the next morning both tied up in positively Gordian knots, neither able to reach the scissors to set them free and one of the villains on the prowl close by?  (Damnation!  Wish I'd thought of that sooner.  Note to self - remember for next Daphne Randall adventure!)  

But no.  For all the joking about, a big part of me stands beside Daphne with her placard, deeply concerned about this romanticising of a creepily unequal and unhealthy relationship, and yet another 'flawed hero' who we're supposed to drool over for being insanely rich and powerful.  Like their author, 'my girls' don't go for Mr Grey.  Daphne would gladly hand him down a lecture on respect, Hilary would have a few very sharp words on consent and as for Sally, she'd be investigating just how kinky his company's accounts were, especially that deal with HSBC... 

And she'd tell him that his skyscraper was 'crap' too.

We are not alone!

On Tuesday I was in reflective mood, looking back at two years of increasingly polarised debate on Social Security and the infinitesimally small part Severe Discomfort and its successors had played in that debate, something of a lone voice in danger of being drowned out by the baying of 'reality TV'.


Yesterday, something changed.  I saw this:  http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/04/jobcentre-adviser-play-benefit-sanctions-angela-neville   A former Jobcentre adviser, disgusted with the persecutory culture in her former department, has written a play exposing the cruelty of the sanctions system.


It's a funny coincidence that the latest Solent Welfare Rights Project story includes (minor spoiler) dissenting workers within a Jobcentre trying to spare their vulnerable customers from the wrath of a Social Justice Ambassador, though we have always known that there are 'good guys' within the DWP - just ask Hilary Carrington!


And, after a brief, unworthy gnashing of teeth that Ms Neville's play had earned a front page slot on the Guardian website while the copy of Severe Discomfort I had sent them two years ago might as well have been hung on a nail in a privy (and may have been, for all I know), the positives started sinking in.

• Someone else thought that a work of fiction had the potential to change the debate, so wrote it.
• A national newspaper has picked up the story and promoted it heavily.
• The comments (987 at the time of writing) are overwhelmingly support of the ex-Jobcentre worker's efforts and evidence.
• The article is flying round social media and getting lots more support for the cause of a fair and humane Social Security system.

So good for you, Angela Neville!  I have my fingers crossed that Can this be England does get made into a short film or radio play and, in the great tradition of Cathy Come Home and The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, inspires the change its writer dreams of.
 
It doesn't matter whose trumpet hits the note that brings down the walls of Iain Duncan Smith's citadel - only that someone's does.

Two Years On...

Tomorrow, it will be two years to the day since Severe Discomfort was published.  It seems a good time to re-read the preface and see whether there has been any progress.  After all, I claimed that: 

I wrote this tale to challenge the popular ‘cheats’ and ‘scroungers’ view of benefit claimants that, as I write this introduction, is leading to some particularly barbed rhetoric and unhealthy competition between politicians to look ‘tough’ on ‘welfare’.  Although all the characters and events in ‘Severe Discomfort’ are fictional, their dealings with the Department for Work and Pensions and Tribunals Service are firmly rooted in reality.  The Walkers’ predicament is exactly that faced by many supposed ‘benefit cheats’.  That isn’t to say there aren’t cheats out there, but they are neither numerous nor typical, despite what certain politicians and papers might have us believe.

Since that was written, the rhetoric has got nastier and the policies crueler, with worse promised from the Tories and only the demise of the Bedroom Tax offered in redress from Labour, the Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary famously promising to be 'tougher' on 'welfare' than the Tories and just this week attacking the Government for not doing enough to reduce 'fraud and error'.  Not a word about the continuing underclaiming of benefits, especially by vulnerable people, pensioners and increasingly young people ashamed or afraid to attend the Jobcentre.  No pledge to review Personal Independence Payment with its open agenda of cutting the cost of disability benefits.  No word on fixing the Work Capability Assessment so sick people aren't told to get up and walk by incompetent assessors and a flawed points system.  No promise to roll back the draconian sanctions regime.  Indeed, at conference last year the Shadow Chancellor promised to keep the Benefit Cap and to freeze Child Benefit.

If in May I end up putting a cross in the box next to my Labour candidate's name, it will be with gritted teeth and the knowledge that the Tories have already promised to cut the Benefit Cap still further (effectively allowing poor families one less child than at present - that's what a cut of £3,000 means in Child Tax Credit terms after all) and prevent young people under 21 from claiming Housing Benefit.  That they believe both policies are not just acceptable to the public but vote-winners means we are still losing this fight.

Without a major political party on our side, it can only be a grossly unequal fight - a handful of principled MPs, a few public figures, a network of bloggers and Facebook pages up against the majority of the political establishment, strident voices at the heart of the media, a mass of anti-claimant hate-speech on social networks, and the broadcast vomit known as 'Reality TV' - Too Fat to Work, On Benefits and Proud, My Big Benefits Family, Saints and Scroungers and, most notoriously and back for a new series just in time for the General Election, Benefits Street.

Are you not entertained?

As if that's not depressing enough Citizens Advice published their ideas for an alternative 'welfare' system last week.  It looked not at all like the system [minor spoiler] Hilary Carrington describes to her friend Daphne in Continual Supervision, suggesting instead a fragmented system with local variations in benefit rates, more discretion in administration and the following illustration of how it might work:

Greater Manchester would have a simple statutory responsibility for using this funding to promote core social objectives.  Within a fixed budget they could use the framework of existing benefits, or they could adjust the design of those benefits. They could reduce unemployment benefits for young people, for example, in order to strengthen incentives to work or stay in education, as part of a wider skills and labour market strategy.

Yes, you did read this correctly - the Citizens Advice Bureau advocating reducing benefits for young job-seekers, who are already expected to survive on only three-quarters of the adult rate.

It would be easy to lose all hope, were it not for the rise of the Green Party with their policy of a Citizens Income.  Okay, Hilary or any of her colleagues might have made a better job of explaining and defending it than Natalie Bennett, but at least the idea is out there, very publicly, and being advocated by a party whose star is in the ascent.  When the promise of greater social justice - the real sort, not IDS's fake tears and cuts disguised as tough love - was put at the heart of the 'Yes' campaign for Scottish independence, it came closer than anyone expected to success by bringing people out to vote who had given up on politics and politicians.  The rise of anti-austerity parties Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain is proof that people want better than kick-the-poor-to-save-the-rich policies and parties that differ only in the number of hobnails in their boots.  

In the meantime, my small counter-propaganda campaign rumbles on, with free ebooks whenever possible and a new 'exclusive to Completelynovel and cheaper than Amazon' paperback version of the original story and its sequel out soon.  And yes, when my volunteer proof readers have finished fine-tuning Limited Capability there's a paperback of that to publish too (before the Election please, ladies!!) with Daphne's thriller Grand Union hopefully acting as bait to draw in some unsuspecting new readers.

Let's see who blinks first, Channel 5!