Telling Stories

#OweninResidence at Staffs Uni

If you can't help chuckling at the meme that juxtaposes a photo of Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Jones with one of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker, yet still find it genuinely comforting that these two are on the side of the Rebel Alliance, you would have enjoyed last week's lecture on 'The Politics of Hope' (or was that 'A New Hope'?) at Staffordshire University, delivered by Owen Jones with his customary optimistic, self-deprecating eloquence.

One point he made that struck a particular chord was how we on 'the left' tend to fight our corner with facts, figures and statistics, while the Daily Mail et al make their case by telling stories - generally of the teenage single mum with eight kids gets £10,000 a week in benefits or illegal immigrant housed in £20 million castle variety.  I made those up, just to be clear about that.  You'll see why that's important later.

Owen's point about stories was that we should, in the best possible way, be less like the QI Elves and more like the Daily Mail, and tell more stories of our own.  He cited the example of the man sanctioned for not being 'available for work' because he was selling poppies for the British Legion, which arguably did much more to make the case against JSA sanctions than any set of stats.  There are plenty of others, about people sanctioned for attending job interviews which clashed with Jobcentre appointments or for having the temerity to be in hospital after a heart attack or RTA when they should have been on a Work Programme course. A DWP officer once insisted to me that 'we don't sanction people, they sanction themselves by their own behaviour.'  No quantity of stats can refute that claim.  A single good case study shoots it down in flames.

Stories are also damned difficult to counter without seeming to call your opponent, or their unimpeachable source, a liar.  Many years ago, a client at a project I worked for in Hampshire insisted that New Age Travellers got extra benefits for their dogs.  Not true, I laughed.  Is true, she insisted - her friend told her so, and her friend's daughter worked for Social Services. Similarly, a family friend recounted one day how a friend's son or daughter worked in a mobile phone shop and had to give out top-of-the-range mobiles to asylum-seekers after they refused to take basic models.  I knew full well that this was an urban myth straight out of the BNP book of bedtime stories, but there was no persuading our man - after all, why would his mate at the pub make something like this up?  More recently, I had a skirmish at a country park tea stall with a lady sat at the next table, who was telling her friends that smokers on benefits got extra money for their fags.  I politely introduced myself as a CAB benefits specialist and assured her this was not so, only to be told that her friend had seen it on her son's benefit letter.

In each case, although I had the facts at my fingertips, and my professional role to lend them credibility, it was difficult to deploy them without seeming rude.  I found myself making excuses for the 'friend' - they must have misunderstood what they had seen or heard - to allow the story teller to save face and not appear a gullible fool.  A 'counter-story' might be easier to deliver and at least as effective a tactic.  Instead of 'Excuse me, but that's wrong because...', an approach based on 'Really?  I'm surprised to hear that, because I know someone who...' might get a more sympathetic hearing and make the point just as well, only there is client confidentiality to consider, of course, and stripping out personal details can leave your own story sounding unconvincing.

On the subject of unconvincing details, I was stunned to see that almost 90% of tip-offs to the Benefit Fraud Hotline have proved baseless.  I would have guessed quite a high BS factor, but for more than 8 in 10 to be without justification is staggering.  Of course, this risks ending up as just another statistic bandied about by us leftie benefits geeks if we aren't careful.  What people need to make this sink in is a real-life version of Severe Discomfort.  Unless a real 'Lyn' or 'Terry' is brave enough to come forward to tell their story of what it's like to be an innocent person on the wrong end of a DWP investigation, to the neutral, it's all just numbers.

Hand-Up or Hand-Out?

The Antidote to Channel 5?

Channel 5, if we are to believe their version of events, are engaging in a 'bold social experiment', which we will be able to view next Tuesday evening.  Naturally, this being Channel 5, those being experimented upon are families in receipt of Social Security benefits - hence the edifying title 'The Great British Benefits Handout.'

I should be grateful, in a round-about sort of way, as it gives me an excuse to plug my stories about the benefit claimants the TV companies don't want to show you, who don't fit the stereotypes and don't draw the rantings and ratings.  Instead, it fills me with dread.  After perhaps a small amount of progress, with the Chancellor's defeat over Tax Credit cuts and broadly sympathetic coverage of the people who have lost their personal independence via PIP's impact on Motability, the debate about benefits looks set to become poisonous again.


Channel 5's PR department are already playing an ugly double game on this programme.  The Independent, obviously drawing from a press-release from C5, plays up the positives - the amount of specialist support the families had to manage their money, the programme-makers' alleged desire to see them succeed - although it can't resist adopting the usual language around 'escaping' from benefit dependency. 


The Mirror ran with an altogether more typical tabloid take on the story - of feckless poor people being reckless - and went on to fuel the controversy and boost the advance publicity with the equally typical families hit back at.... story yesterday.  It's media manipulation at its most cynical from all concerned - two versions of what the programme shows, carefully targeted to get both broadsheet and tabloid-reading audiences tuning in and fuelling the Twitterstorm even before the programme airs.


At risk of doing the Daily Maily thing of rushing to condemn before the programme has even aired, I am already deeply suspicious of what is going on here.  For a start, if this was a serious social experiment, why would the families receive their money in a suitcase full of banknotes, rather than by direct debit into a bank or Post Office account?  Benefits no longer arrive as giro cheques to cash at the Post Office anymore, they have been paid into claimants' accounts for years (making me suspicious of the authenticity of references to 'giros' these days).  It's clearly for the cameras, particularly that most exploitative image, which shames the Daily Mirror article, of the little boy with his arms overflowing with wads of notes.


And why £26,000?  That wouldn't be to reinforce the myth that that's what every family on benefits gets, would it?  Ever since that became the 'Benefit Cap', the idea has pervaded popular culture that all claimants get this much in 'handouts'.  Trust Channel 5 to be the ones to let us all see what it looks like in lovely, fluttery notes - just in case all you hard-working viewers weren't feeling jealous enough already!

If I honestly thought this might come close to being a serious examination of the possible impact of a 'citizens' income', I would put up with the usual sarcastic voice-over and mocking music.  But, to be such a thing, it wouldn't only give suitcases of money to benefit claimants.  It would see what a low-waged, long working-hours family chose to do - whether they would live it up or use the funds to adjust their 'work-life balance' in favour of life.  It would give a stash of dosh to a few struggling artists, to see if it helped them through the creation of their masterpiece or allow them to finish that crucial first novel.  The 'social experiment' could take the money worries away from a carer or two, or from someone close to retirement struggling with a physically demanding job.  When you pick only benefit claimants - and, it seems, those with good entertainment value from what has been leaked of their business plans - you aren't experimenting, you're exploiting.

I wish more people would question the vicious class bias that runs through all of these 'reality TV shows'.  There was a trailer on Channel 4 yesterday for Britain's Weirdest Council Houses.  Am I alone in wondering why, when Social Housing tenants pimp their homes, what we see is 'weird', while private owners have Amazing Spaces - and the super-rich have Grand Designs?

Bad news for the 'Beverage Fund'?

CAB team face 'hungry gap'!

We've been food shopping this afternoon, including the monthly 'biscuit ration' for the workers at Hanley's CAB office, purchased with the profits from sales of 'welfare rights lit' and home-made jam.  As Amazon pay me 3 months in arrears and sales were pretty healthy through the autumn, the fact that I won't have fruit for jam-making until June or July shouldn't pose a threat.  However, sales of ebooks have been very low this month, though the trade in free downloads remains brisk.

This is good news - at least as far as the original 'cunning plan' is concerned.  'Welfare rights lit' is supposed to be a not-for-profit counter-propaganda exercise, using tax-dodging Amazon (with deliberate irony) to host the material and similarly suspect Facebook and Google to spread the word.

In addition to the usual 'freebie' days, there is an extra opportunity to get the first two stories, Severe Discomfort and Continual Supervision this Wednesday, which is the third anniversary of Discomfort's publication.  All I ask in return is a share with your friends (especially any who subscribe to the Channel 5 view of people who claim benefits, or anyone who co-ordinates a book club) and/or an honest review on Amazon, Goodreads or CompletelyNovel. 

If you live near a welfare rights project, law centre or CAB, and you can spare the funds, you could bring them biscuits.  After all, it's almost the end of the financial year and, if you've read any of the Solent Welfare Rights Project's stories, you know this means we're all tightening our belts!