Last night was the first of Melanie Phillips’ two programmes on the ‘British work ethic’ on Radio 4, (listen on iplayer for the next week), which she also described in her column. I was particularly interested because we declined an invitation to help in the making of the programme, but also for her reactions to those people, struggling on benefits, who she met.
It’s very hard making judgements about other people, because there’s always a tendency to forget all the ways in which their life is different from yours. I got the impression that before the programme Phillips imagined people on benefits were mostly lazy versions of herself, with her access to money, support, education, social networks, and her ‘middle class elbows’.
She didn’t realise, for example, that people might not travel outside their town for work because they just couldn’t afford the bus fare. Or that a man might not challenge his doctor over a diagnosis that had left him in pain and on a cocktail of pills for many years. To her credit, in both these situations she admitted to having had her eyes opened. But these are just two examples, and there must be many other ways in which her eyes are still closed.
I’m still not sure she realises, for example, what it might feel like to apply for a low-paid, no-skilled, unbelievably dull job with no chance of progression and the prospect of years spent doing it. She dismisses a young man’s assertion that he wants to do an interesting job with fairly casual disdain, but is it really too much to ask, or atleast aspire to? The problem, perhaps, is that he has no idea how he could progress from an entry-level job into a more interesting one, or even what jobs might interest him. He needs access to jobs and support just as much as the man on incapacity benefit, and far less than Phillips probably did at his age. I’d be interested to hear what he thought of her portrayal of him in the programme.
I don’t want to be too harsh though – her column today shows admirable recognition of many of the problems of the benefits system. And to a great extent we all share the difficulty of truly putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes, rather than just imagining ourselves standing where they are.
In her column she notes that ‘not surprisingly, no one who was on the fiddle agreed to speak to me.’ Our Need NOT Greed campaign works with many people she’d consider ‘on the fiddle’, and we hope she’d be surprised to find that, again, it’s usually the system rather than individuals’ failings that forces them into it. For example, as we highlighted last year, people on Jobseekers Allowance who get a part-time job are only allowed to keep £5 of their wages. In this situation, can you blame someone for not declaring their work? In our experience, informal work is a great sign that people want and are able to work – we now needs a system that makes it worthwhile doing it legally.
