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| #OweninResidence at Staffs Uni |
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.
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