What lies beneath
2/07/09
The News of the World’s ‘Real Sick List’ claims to ‘uncover the worst benefit scroungers in Britain’. It maps the top ten ‘blackspots’ for incapacity benefit with a thoroughness not seen since the paper published the addresses of alleged paedophiles, in a previous, equally geographical take on its favourite bogeymen.
But shouldn’t this latest attempt at bashing the poor strike a discordant note in the worst economic downturn since the great depression?
Apparently not according to a recent Fabian report .The report, published last week, found that the recession has done nothing to change the belief that people on benefits are ‘scroungers’ and that those on low incomes largely deserve to be poor. The fact that greater numbers are now in contact with society’s safety net has done nothing to change this attitude. Whilst it is remarkable that people retain this perception of benefit claimants even as the redundancies close in around them, it is simply putting the boot in to pour scorn on people facing destitution as inflation fails to match the rising costs of living.
The public show no sign of losing their appetite for stories of the undeserving poor, ‘out there’ in a non-descript but faintly Northern version of Edward Said’s Oriental hinterland. The Fabian report shows that most people define themselves as somewhere in the middle of the income spectrum, regardless of earnings. These findings suggest that poverty is viewed as something that happens to ‘other people’, kept at arm’s length but kept in view: a picture of what our own struggle has averted, a reward for our ceaseless toil, voluntary pay cuts, 5 days holiday per year. If everyone is in the middle, then the poor are just what lies beneath.
What emerges from the ‘Real Sick List’ is an archipelago of poverty, a line traced through old mining communities in Wales and Northern England, the usual suspects wheeled out to feed and sustain our voyeuristic need to gloat over those who could not keep up.
Changing attitudes to poverty might not abolish it, but it might begin the debate that will. Amartya Sen’s ‘capabilities’ must figure in this new language, and Demos’ Capabilities Programme can help form it, until the News of the World top ten lists not scroungers, but parents struggling to feed their kids. Only when blackspots describe Britain’s marginalised, rather than benefit ‘scroungers’, will we have the real ‘Sick List’.