The Truth about Benefits

I’m really disappointed with my country right now. I’ve been on the official Government Petitions website, and looked up benefits as I feel strongly about the cuts, caps and workfare mentality being introduced.

There are many petitions there about benefits, and most of them do not say what I thought they would. I was actually disgusted by the attitude of the petitions’ authors, so much so that I am posting on it immediately.

There is a myth being fuelled that people on benefits won’t work. We are told to hate these claimants because these lazy scroungers are sucking out resources from the hardworking rest of us, contributing to the recessional shortages and cuts. If only we could get rid of these clingons, we’d have more public money to go round the rest of us. Ministers tell us of a large annual welfare bill to be incendiary to those whose image of a claimant is the feckless thick drug using jobcentre loiterer.

In my experience, people who claim benefits don’t enjoy doing so. If they could manage another way, they would. They are desperate to be able to have their own income. I think people who think otherwise have never been to a jobcentre or housing benefit call centre. They’ve not had to fill in a huge Incapacity benefit form or attend an invasive medical to see if they are fit for work. They’ve not had to bring in all their wage slips and bank statements for a stranger to peruse and copy. They’ve not had someone aggressively ask why they were unable to actively seek work at the time of their parents’ death. They’ve not felt the powerlessness of sitting in that chair across a corporate desk with security guards lurking, while jobs are suggested which show utter ignorance of the signing clerk who doesn’t understand many qualifications or careers. They’ve not spend hours on a phone trying to get through to rude, impervious staff, or had to queue up amongst the ‘feckless’ to get a giro for their hungry family. They’ve not had the dark parrot on their shoulder, asking them was there something else they could have done to get work – even as they lay in bed, or watch a film; asking them to justify why they are going out, fearing what the DWP will say on their next visit, or if they might ring and demand you attend an unsuitable interview or else lose your money. It’s not even nice meeting people, being asked that inevitable question, what do you do – only to answer (however elusively or euphemistically) that you’re on benefits. Friends greet with the same sad ‘Any luck this week?’ as if they are an extension of government staff. To claim, you are meant to declare all your activities which really means you justify the interests you have – being treasurer at the sports club, the church, or making cuppas for your local theatre company – all of which might cost you your benefit.

So strangely, most of us are keen not to be in that system.

I consider it something to be proud of that one’s country recognises that their citizens need support sometimes and as a society that we want to help each other out. ‘Society’ and ‘community’ get used regularly, but our neighbourliness is not meant to extend to the undeserving – which often is those the government think are undeserving and so use the media to get the people to agree with them.

Those anti benefits prophets are subscribers to capitalism, for they are propounding the belief that one’s worth is through money – not a very spiritual belief and not a very evolved one. Our worth is not through earning and certainly not how much. I love the many spiritual writers who remind us that  we are ‘human BEINGs’. Money is human created – animal and plants exist without it, as do some human societies. We have made it a necessity and also a shame if we do not have enough of it so that we have to borrow, beg or default on our debts. That’s an unhealthy and corrupt value system.

Our society is also saying: some work is better than none. A right wing minister said that there is greater worth in earning than in not, in any job. As a well paid man doing the job he wants (if he isn’t, he shouldn’t be a servant of the people), this is a hollow speech. Doing a job you hate is more than the 40 hours a week you spend at it – it’s the focus of your life. Why do we expect work to be hard and unpleasant, a grind necessary to exist and have status? I recently spoke with a business counsellor who said that for her, work you want is the only kind there is. It doesn’t make sense, from even the right wing Functionalist sociological perspective, to put ill matched people into work they hate. It benefits no one – for then the employers are getting the wrong staff, staff are ill and depressed, and society is full of sick leave bills – or even hospitals and suicides.

What perhaps the government hates most is those who live outside their system. Perhaps many of us hate that too – and I think it is partly about wishing people to conform and partly resentment that others have the courage and freedom to do what we are not.

I’m also disturbed by the amount of petitions asking foreigners to be repatriated and benefits to be withdrawn from them. My pride in my nationality is not in ostracising others, especially if this might cause them poverty or even harm.

We do need a reform of benefits but we need a system which helps those who need it, and does not penalise for working (as often this one makes you worse off), or not having a career path that isn’t on a drop down menu on a civil service computer. The fear, bullying, intrusion and humiliation of the current system with whipped up frenzy about lazy bleeders needs to end. We need this recession as a value reassessment, and to see that the world we’ve created in many countries is about as far from our souls’ calling as it is possible to be. And yes, souls do come into policies and statecraft. Why else would we be here?