DWP whistleblower: "you can't scare people out of poverty"

[Tony Gosling]

Fraser Stewart: What my job in a UK job centre 
told me about today's benefits system

https://commonspace.scot/articles/1887/fraser-stewart-what-my-job-in-a-uk-job-centre-told-me-about-today-s-benefits-system

CommonSpace columnist Fraser Stewart recalls why 
he left the "best job" he'd ever had in a UK job centre

I WORKED in the job centre, in a previous life.

To this day I maintain it was the best job I've 
ever had, as short-lived as it was. After just 18 
months, I handed in my notice and left a 
workplace that had, until that point, felt like home.

I left for one reason and one reason alone – the 
coalition government taking office in 2010. In a 
matter of what seemed like seconds my role had 
changed from getting people into work, to cutting 
the welfare bill by any means: from merciful to 
mercenary; helping hand to hired gun.

I was told I had to sanction a certain number of 
benefit claimants per month. Sanction. Not "get in to work". Sanction.

As orders began to trickle down from the new 
regime we were given a series of targets, one of 
which I couldn't swallow with any amount of 
sugar. I was told I had to sanction a certain 
number of benefit claimants per month. Sanction. 
Not "get in to work". Sanction.

I handed in my notice immediately and the 
following week was my last. This was never 
supposed to be a badge of honour. I do not write 
this out of indulgence or self-righteousness, but 
as a person with experience on both sides of the desk.

Quitting my job was the right thing to do. It was 
the right thing to do because people should not 
be treated as targets - nor should they be 
unjustly tarred as lazy and subjected to 
universal and indiscriminate suspicion.

There are remarkably few people in this country 
who don't want to work. My own claimants ranged 
from joiners and cleaners to neurobiologists and 
architects and beyond: of the thousands of people 
I met within various capacities in the job 
centre, not one struck me as being proactively idle.

To label such a diverse group of individuals as 
parasites is to dehumanise millions of our own 
citizens with a repulsive ignorance. Of course, 
anecdotal evidence will only take any argument so far.

There exists no coherent evidence to support a 
"culture of worklessness". Collating research 
carried out by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and 
TUC, The Guardian reported that roughly 80 per 
cent of JSA claimants are off benefits and into 
work before becoming "long-term" unemployed.

Less than one per cent of all UK households had 
two generations of the same family who had never worked.

This contrived notion of "Benefits Britain", 
then, is founded on a series of hyperbolic 
falsehoods, forced relentlessly at us by a seedy 
and sensationalist media intent on demonising out 
of context those who cannot reasonably fight back.

To label such a diverse group of individuals as 
parasites is to dehumanise millions of our own 
citizens with a repulsive ignorance.

To anybody who watches shows like Benefits Street 
I urge you: stop now. Poverty voyeurism is a 
cancer rotting at the heart of human society and should be treated as such.

David Cameron’s role in this cannot be 
understated either. For allowing such 
manufactured public outrage to support his own 
privileged policy agenda he should be entirely ashamed of himself.

Of course, self-help has always served as a 
bastion for Conservative ideology, but there 
comes a point where such ethos must be shown for 
the heartless, ineffective and indiscriminate 
affront to basic human decency that it is.

Welfare must not be used as a crutch – I cannot 
stress this enough. But nor should it be used to 
persecute those who find themselves out of work, 
out of opportunity or out of options.

Benefit sanction procedures thus exist as the 
most corrupt and pitiless judicial system in the 
United Kingdom. Over a quarter of a million JSA 
claimants were sanctioned between October 2012 
and September 2014 for missing just a single 
adviser appointment, according to the government’s own figures.

More people were sanctioned in 2013 than were 
fined by the magistrate and sheriff courts 
combined (over one million in total to 849,000 
fines) yet the mechanical tyranny of the 
sanctions process remains immune to any real scrutiny or accountability.

There are no checks and balances. There is no 
grace period for payment or appeal, nor is there 
an independent body to impartially oversee such a severe process.

Full discretion lies with the adviser, pressured 
by targets, serving as judge, jury and 
executioner. Given the gravitas of the decision 
at hand, this lack of safeguarding is deeply troubling.

Welfare cuts affect people's lives in the worst 
possible way, with direct links to depression, 
anxiety, malnutrition and homelessness: they 
diminish living conditions to sub-human standards 
by treating those affected as sub-human beings.

We wonder why Iain Duncan Smith doesn’t want to 
release the sanction-to-suicide figures. I wonder how he sleeps at night.

Welfare cuts affect people's lives in the worst 
possible way, with direct links to depression, 
anxiety, malnutrition and homelessness.

Of course, the current system was never designed 
to help people; it is designed to help the budget 
by burning "leeches" from the flesh of the state. 
Austerity is social cleansing by proxy: force the 
deprived off the cliff and let’s see if they fly.

But people cannot be scared out of poverty, 
<http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/people-choose-to-be-poor-and-disabled--this-is-the-logic-behind-the-tories-12bn-of-welfare-cuts-10338790.html>as 
Siobhan Fenton so succinctly outlines. Poverty 
breeds poverty. No amount of neoliberal delusions 
to the contrary can change that.

Nobody chooses to be poor and it’s time we 
challenged this ludicrous assertion. Poverty is 
not an act, whereby kiddy-on mendicants parody 
deprivation to satisfy our insatiable thirst for superiority.

Poverty is real, both in and out of work, and 
will affect most of us, be it directly or 
indirectly, at one point or another in life.

Benefit claimants are not criminals. They are not 
a faceless parasitic sub-specimen, defined by a 
National Insurance number and a hardwired lust to 
live luxuriously from your taxes.

Nor are they lazy. They are all of us: relatives, 
friends, and people. If we carry on brutalising 
our most vulnerable citizens we will soon find 
ourselves inhabiting a dystopian husk in which 
the bonds of human compassion have become worthless.

That’s not a world anyone should want to live in.

Picture courtesy of Creative Commons

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