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.