The myth of the benefits cheat is a sign of unkind times

Zoe Williams in The Guardian

Some things are easier to see from far away, and a collective slide away from empathy and common sense, towards pearl-clutching judgmentalism, is one of them. At the start of August the co-leader of New Zealand’s Green party, Metiria Turei, was forced to resign, following an outpouring of opprobrium that threatened to poleaxe her party’s prospects in September’s elections.

The crime for which this tide of hate would have been proportionate is hard to imagine: in fact, it was spurred by her admission that she committed benefit fraud in the early 90s, a confession she made freely to highlight how hard it was then, and is now, to raise a child as a single parent under New Zealand’s notoriously punitive welfare system.

More than half of all that country’s benefit claimants owe money to their work and income department, in what appears to be a version of Gordon Brown’s working family tax credit overpayments, where you identify the country’s poorest families, pay them slightly more than you intended by a metric you haven’t really explained, then saddle them with a debt they have no hope of repaying. When you get to the point that these debts affect 60% of claimants, this is no longer a glitch in the system: this is the system.


Families on benefits are now 40% short of what a citizens’ jury thinks they need to live a decent life

As the journalist Giovanni Tiso described in a moving essay, “once the blood was in the water, the sharks had to do as nature commanded them” – her admission of guilt was deemed not quite penitent enough. The media set out to “investigate” the extent of her fraud, and found that she had also had support from family members when she was young, so couldn’t possibly have been as destitute as she claims.

The prevailing view landed on the fact that she was a thief: she had stolen from the great, honest taxpayer, that creature of myth who needs nothing, takes nothing, works only to support others lazier than himself. Turei had to go. The fact that she created something miraculous – a stable home for her daughter, a law degree, a performance art troupe, a political career – from a standing start of grinding poverty and no qualifications was overlooked.

An incalculably valuable thing – a person in politics who knows what it is like to rely on the systems politicians create – has been righteously thrown away like contaminated sharps.

And for what? The maintenance of the narrative: benefits claimants are inherently suspect, because if they were better people they wouldn’t be on benefits. You have to watch them like hawks, and if you spend more money on surveillance than you could ever save from the detection of the fiddles you lie awake imagining, so be it – our own Department for Work and Pensions sanctions system is fantastically expensive, a fact of which the government seems perversely proud.

The idea that need should come with a badge of shame is not new: the 1697 Poor Act laid down in law that those in receipt of parish aid should wear some blue or red cloth.

Yet it is relatively recent that a competing theory has been overturned. Even in the darkest days of me-first Thatcherism, the social security conversation hinged on whether or not the dole was enough to provide a decent life. State benefits were compared to the median income, and to similar systems in Europe: the question of fraud rarely came up, because the conditions of the 97% not committing it, living honestly on money to which they were entitled, were thought more important.

Simply by changing the frame, pointing attention towards the dishonest, the government managed to render whole swaths of normal social inquiry – what is life like for those at the bottom? – irrelevant. Ask not what life is like for those at the bottom; ask whether they really are at the bottom, or have a cash-in-hand window-cleaning job that puts them nearer the middle. Ask what mountain of fecklessness prevents their escape from the bottom.

Yet when people engage seriously with the concept of social security, different attitudes emerge. The minimum income standard is a research method where small groups, drawn from every social class, calculate what a person needs to live on: they consider the impact of not being able to afford Christmas presents, as well as council tax. They ponder how often one might need a new toaster. They come up with a ballpark figure that, currently, according to a report released by the Child Poverty Action Group, a huge number of people fall short of.

A household of two adults working full time for the minimum wage is 13% shy of it; a single parent on the same wage, 18%. Families relying on benefits, through a combination of inflation and the benefits freeze, are now 40% short of what a citizens’ jury thinks they need to live a decent life.

When you consider these figures as a lived experience, the picture is bleak: yet there is a thread of optimism in the minimum income standard itself. The ostentatious parsimony of the state has not cut through. People still have a conception of decency that goes well beyond mere sustenance, and wish it for one another. All that remains is that we remember how to fight for it.