Who or what is to blame?
| Author | Lawson, Neal |
An epiphany is a sudden moment of realisation. Don't worry, I haven't had one of those. But something has been creeping up on me, dear Renewal reader, which may have implications for how we do politics and even why we do it, and I wanted to share it with you.
Personalising responsibility
Two mutually supportive events have triggered this mini-change of heart. The first was the reaction of Lisa Nandy, the impressive Labour MP for Wigan, to a campaign Compass had been running called 'In the Public Interest' where we had set our sights on the 'feral elite'. This you will recall was in response to the phone hacking scandal which had followed hot on the heels of the politicians caught with their hands in the expenses till and the bankers with their hands in everyone's till. So, in a moment of self-satisfaction, we coined the term 'feral elite' and it took off for a while--even managing to rise to the giddy heights of an article about the phrase in The Guardian. But Lisa took me to task. We shouldn't be vilifying individuals but systems, she said. Such vilification was getting Compass column inches and was targeting the people who were causing the mess the country was in--but I knew she was right.
Roll forward a few months and we come to the issue of benefits and welfare. At the end of June 2012 David Cameron made a speech in the Bluewater shopping centre near Dartford in Kent, in which he effectively signalled the end of the welfare state as we know it--if the Tories were able to win outright next time. Of course it's a death that has been a long time coming, as successive governments have chipped away at the universal, contributory, and insurance-based system and replaced it not just with increasingly strident conditionality but a sour and vindictive language that castigates the poor for their poverty. It was their fault they had failed and the system should be re-engineered to punish their failure. The acid test of this personalisation of responsibility is the archetype of the sofa lying benefits scrounger. 'Why should we work to pay for them to do nothing?' Why indeed?
I've long struggled with this issue and the gap between what my heart says is right and the political reality of a discourse that's all one way traffic towards the demonisation of the poor. It is not so much that the logic of conditionality takes you to the Poor Law, the workhouse and even, if followed to the extreme, the starvation of the 'idle'. It is much more the fact I...
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