and, yes, demonization was employed. The nation’s finances were out of control, said the government, blaming excessive Labour spending on schools and hospitals during the 1990s. Britain’s huge deficit, so the allegations went, arose from reckless Whitehall largesse, not the global financial meltdown. The ‘welfare’ bill—standing at £251bn2—needed to be slashed.
Here was a deliberately misleading conflation of spending in different branches of government to create one single image of desperation. In fact most of the money within the welfare budget goes on pensioners who have paid in all their lives; and, indeed, the government was quick to assure voters that their pensions and entitlements would be protected. In contrast, the amount spent on unemployed people—which is what the electorate was encouraged to understand by ‘welfare’—is only a relatively small fraction of social security spending. Yet this group took a disproportionate amount of the blame for the welfare crisis.
Support for the government’s efforts to cut back on spending depended on portraying the recipients of social security as workshy, feckless freeloaders. It required the ruthless and unapologetic application of the politics of envy to hammer its point home. Low-paid workers faced having their in-work benefits slashed and were getting wages that could in no way sustain a comfortable existence. But when they should have directed their ire at the government or their employers, they were encouraged to resent the unemployed people supposedly living it up at their expense.
Since the 2008 crisis, rather than helping the poor, Tory ministers have openly condemned them as ‘skivers’ and ‘shirkers’ to exploit divisions within the working class. In the House of Commons, David Cameron announced, ‘We back the workers, they back the shirkers.’3 The chancellor, George Osborne, asked, ‘Where is the fairness … for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next-door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits?’4 Demonization has become an ever more powerful instrument of divide-and-rule.
I began Chavs by detailing the story of Shannon Matthews, a young girl who was kidnapped by her own mother in a perverse attempt to extort money from the tabloid press. The media and politicians alike hijacked the case, hoping to persuade their audience that this wanton, aberrant act was emblematic of a broad swathe of society: the chavs.
The handling of this story foreshadowed an even more sinister manipulation of individual cruelty. At the beginning of April 2013, Derby resident Mick Philpott and his wife were sent to prison for life for the manslaughter of six of their children. It was a sickening crime. Philpott had set fire to the family home, hoping to blame his mistress, who had left the house she shared with him and his wife, taking several children with her. It was a story of habitual violence and misogyny: Philpott had tyrannized his wife and mistress, both of whom worked while he was unemployed. When he was a soldier in the late 1970s, he had shot his then girlfriend with a crossbow, claiming her skirt was too short, before he eventually stabbed both her and her mother.5
But the Daily Mail knew an opportunity when it saw one. Just hours after Philpott was sentenced in court, the newspaper plastered ‘VILE PRODUCT OF WELFARE UK’ across its front page.6 Here, it stated, was a damning insight into a welfare state that subsidised shirkers (even though much of the Philpotts’ income came from in-work benefits: this was, after all, a working household). This atrocity was thus twisted into an indictment of government assistance. It was the sort of faulty logic and wilful use of omission that had been previously used to create an erroneous connection between mass-murdering GP Harold Shipman and ordinary doctors, or to obscure the unfairness of inheritance in reporting the case of forty-six-year-old fraudster Stephen Seddon, who murdered his parents in 2013 for their £230,000 estate.7 Philpott’s large family was portrayed as somehow typical of benefit claimants, despite statistics showing that out of 1.35 million families claiming at least one out-of-work benefit, just 190 had ten children or more.8
The Daily Mail served an important function here. The paper helps to fan anger and resentment toward benefit claimants with every issue. It creates a climate in which the political elite can join in, too. Never wilfully missing an opportunity for political gain, George Osborne waded into the debate stirred up by the Mail’s coverage of the Philpotts, suggesting that it was right to ‘ask questions as a government, a society and as taxpayers, why we are subsidising lifestyles like these’.9 The Mail’s campaign as a whole was an instructive lesson; a reminder that even the killing of six little children could be transformed into political fodder, their names barely even mentioned as their suffering was manipulated as propaganda.
The truth, however, is no less shocking. According to the government’s own estimates, around 0.7 per cent of social security spending is lost to benefit fraud. But the Conservatives have created a system that drips extreme examples of such wrongdoing to the media, fuelling the myth that there exist huge numbers of dishonest benefit claimants. Examples gleefully fed to journalists include a claimant pretending that officials had got him mixed up with his ‘evil twin brother’ and another trying to pass off his wife as his sister. This is bad behaviour, to be sure, but actions typical of only a tiny minority.10 Examples of unemployed people desperate to work, sending countless CVs to employers without eliciting a response, don’t make for good copy on this government’s press releases.
Government attempts to stir up resentment against benefit claimants targeted in particular those low-paid workers who were struggling in large part because of coalition policies. This was calculated to reinforce the myth that benefit claimants were often better off than those slogging their guts out at work. For example, an initial cap of £26,000 was imposed on the amount that could be claimed, in line with supposed average household income. This in itself was a myth, because the average working family with an income of £26,000 could themselves claim several thousand pounds’ worth of additional in-work benefits: after all, millions of employed people qualify for benefits. Only a tiny number of unemployed people actually received more than £26,000 in benefits, and they either had large families to look after or lived in properties where landlords charged extortionate rents. But again, this was not about creating an effective social security net for the most vulnerable, but a political ruse. It was an attempt to turn people against each other. ‘This puts an end to the out-of-control claims that saw some households getting more in benefits than many hard-working, tax-paying families could ever dream of earning,’ as Iain Duncan-Smith, secretary of state for work and pensions, put it, seeding indignation among the electorate.11
To drive this message home, at the beginning of 2013, the coalition unveiled the Welfare Benefits Uprating Bill, a piece of legislation that imposed a real-terms cut in benefits. This was British politics at its most base and cynical. For the first time since 1931, a government was intentionally slashing the incomes of the poor.12 Charities projected that hundreds of thousands of children would be driven into poverty as a result. Throughout the Parliamentary debate, Tory MPs—many of whom are millionaires—jeered and guffawed as they prepared to plunge people they would never meet below the poverty line. ‘TODAY LABOUR ARE VOTING TO INCREASE BENEFITS BY MORE THAN WORKERS’ WAGES’, claimed a Tory poster.13 But in actual fact the majority of those affected were in working households. Low-paid workers faced a double whammy of real-terms pay cuts and reduced tax credits thanks to the Tory government, too. Worker and unemployed person alike were being mugged.
The so-called bedroom tax was another example. In this proposed legislation social tenants deemed to have a ‘spare bedroom’ would suffer a cut in their housing benefit, forcing them to pay more to stay in their own homes. These were disproportionately people living in poverty with little money to spare; it was estimated that two-thirds of households affected had disabled residents.14 So-called spare bedrooms were often rooms for carers, or customised for disabilities. If bedroom-tax victims wished to avoid losing money, they had to downsize properties: but with a national shortage of one-bedroom social houses, this was simply not a feasible proposition for most people. The argument behind the bedroom tax was that it would free up desperately needed space for others. In other words, those living in overcrowded homes, or trapped on a 5-million-strong social housing waiting list, were encouraged to resent disabled people with a little extra living space rather than attack the government for