Latest Blog Post

Benefits Street: In search of a Mockingjay

Let me begin with a confession: I have not seen any episode of Channel 4's 'Benefits Street', and do not intend to. Like reality TV's 'Big Brother', it is something I hope to get through life having avoided. I have, though, read the many thoughtful commentaries about Benefits Street, and what follows when television 'ratings' go chasing caricatures of the poor.

We already know there have been demands that the police prosecute some of the residents in 'the street'. There have been death threats on Twitter. And a barrage if indignant 'Scroungers' headlines has been splashed across the front pages of right wing newspapers.

The street in Birmingham may already have become a perverse tourist attraction, but there has also been a flood of public complaints, about media distortion, to the Regulator (Ofcom).

Britain has a seedy history of programmes like this, picking (often Northern) cities and communities to reinforce beliefs that it is the poor who are to blame for the mess we are in. Such programmes tend to follow the cycles of economic recession.

So, even before the Chancellor warns of a further £25bn of cuts needed in the next parliament, his austerity economics have been forcing Districts in all parts of the country to tighten their belts. 'Extreme' weather events have added to the crisis by taking it into areas untouched by austerity. The underpinnings of society, and what sustains it, suddenly look very shaky.

What programmes like Benefits Street do is to turn this insecurity into a more focused hostility; one that divides the deserving from the undeserving. They foster an hostility that demands retribution. And they play us off against each other. The more we absorb from TV, the more we resemble 'The Hunger Games'.

Those who have read The Hunger Games will have to forgive me a little. George Osborne does not have the guile of President Snow, David Cameron cannot play the audience like Caesar Flickermann, and Ed Miliband is not about to metamorphose into Katniss Everdeen. Still, there are uncomfortable parallels we should reflect on.

The Hunger Games is about a dystopian future in which downtrodden Districts have to send 2 of their own children, each year, to compete in games that require them to kill each other. The Games are designed to divide and denigrate the poor whilst entertaining a 'Capitol' steadily sinking under its accumulated wealth, self-indulgence and brutality. It is a remove from today, but not a great one.

Pope Francis has already begun pissing of wealthy donors in our own 'Capitol', pointing out that the spiralling distance between the lives of the super-rich and the poor threatens the very stability of the planet. Yet most governments, including our own, have taken the side of the Capitol; shifting the political focus onto internal Districts that must fight it out between themselves. In The Hunger Games, only the Capitol remains unscathed.

There are no victors in Benefits Street but it plays the same game; a spectacle in which television tracks blighted lives to deliver the inexorable (inevitable) character 'assassinations' the Games demand.

Bread and circuses

We have become accustomed to salaries of the super-rich that rise faster in one year than the rest of the economy does in a decade; to annual bonuses that are higher than some earn in a lifetime. In the midst of a crisis, the untouchable lives of the rich have become the new 'given'.

What fascinates me is what this says about us - the viewers, the audience, the voyeurs - in this ritual denigration of the poor.

In The Hunger Games all the Districts are forced to watch as children are chosen to compete in each year's Games and then to watch as they fight each other for survival. But no one claps, and no one blames the kids. They know who the enemy is.

Britain loses £1.2bn a year in Benefits fraud, but twenty times this amount - £25bn per year - goes in tax fraud. There are always demands that Benefits cheats be prosecuted and imprisoned. Yet the banking community goes largely un-prosecuted for the financial crash they engineered.

The government will not cap bonuses (even in companies making losses) but enthusiastically caps Benefits. A new welfare state is emerging, in which corporate handouts are generous, unconditional and unaccountable, while personal welfare becomes conditional and judgmental.

The 'bedroom' tax punishes households, without any benefit to society. It creates homelessness, hardship and costs taxpayers more. Its role is to shift attention from the under supply of decent housing to the under occupancy of decent properties. That over 90% of all the extra spending on Housing Benefits goes straight into the pockets of private landlords, barely receives a mention.

Another welfare state is also being created for new nuclear power. This will guarantee (and index link) its benefit entitlements for 35 years, loan the money for its (spiralling) construction costs and cover most of its liabilities. Pensioners would love to be offered the same deal.

Personal taxation may be mandatory but tax loopholes have made Corporation Tax increasingly 'optional'. Energy companies happily receive an annual £15bn in public subsidies, but they whinge about the 'unaffordability' of directing it back towards reducing our heating needs rather than increasing energy consumption (and bills). Citizens of the Capitol live in one world, the rest of society lives in another.

None of these distinctions offer a eulogy to the lives of those 'starring' in 'Benefits Street'. The point I am making is that their lives are not the roots of the crisis we face.

Back to Katniss

All dystopian fiction has to be taken with its own pinch of salt. The Hunger Games is no exception. In the way of most American novels, it is obsessively preoccupied with the individual. Katniss Everdeen may turn out to have amazing survival instincts, but she never had a plan or an 'agenda'.

In fact, she becomes incredibly hacked off to discover that others had a plan all along. Her intention was never to overthrow the system. It was just to protect herself and, if possible, those close to her. It was other people who portrayed her as the Mockingjay - a bird that came to symbolise a refusal to be crushed, divided or denigrated. And it fell to others to remind her ... "Just remember who the real enemy is."

So it is with Benefits Street. The (character) assassination of everyone living on the Street would not make any of us one penny richer, one penny safer, or one penny closer to a better society. To do that, we need our own 'agenda'; one that goes well beyond the Street. That agenda doesn't require heroes (Hollywood or otherwise). It requires solidarity.

Perhaps the lesson to be drawn from The Hunger Games lies in the moment that marked the beginning of the end for the Capitol. It was when, in the televised presentation of Contestants ('Tributes') before the final Games begin, the Tributes all held hands in defiance of the Capitol. It was a momentary statement that they were not the enemy.

It didn't last. Not all continued to do so. But those who did became the bringers of change.

It has been ever thus. In the face of today's tyrannies, we should not underestimate the power of holding hands.

Alan Simpson Jan 2014