assessments of disabled people were drastically expanded under the Cameron government. This process of testing people to see if they are able to work was initially overseen by the French corporation Atos, and led to many sick and disabled people being deemed fit for work and having their benefits taken away. Journalists and politicians vilified these put-upon individuals, suggesting they were falsely claiming disability payments, and this had very real consequences. In the early years of the Cameron era, disability charities warned that media and political rhetoric had driven a disturbing jump in the abuse of disabled people. The mental health charity Scope, for example, found that two-thirds of disabled people reported abuse in September 2011, a jump from 41 per cent just a few months before.15
It was not just politicians and newspapers, either, who began to attack the poor. In at atmosphere of near hysteria, TV producers wanted a piece of the action, too. Channel 4 announced that they were to broadcast Skint, described as an observational documentary focusing on a community in Scunthorpe hammered by de-industrialization.16 When the show materialized, however, it foregrounded chaotic lifestyles and larger-than-life caricatures for viewers’ voyeuristic pleasure. In similar fashion, another Channel 4 programme, Benefits Street, hunted down unsympathetic benefit claimants on a street in Birmingham. The audience’s reaction triggered a wave of demands on social media for the participants to be hanged or gassed.
These are programmes that aimed to turn the poor against the poor, commissioned and produced by the privileged. ‘I was waiting at a bus stop and a Channel 4 commissioning editor stopped on the way to work in their company-owned car to drop their child off at their private school,’ says veteran journalist Christopher Hird. ‘It was a complete emblem to me of the problem that these are people who are so well-paid that they do not experience public services, they have a private health scheme at Channel 4, they do not experience state education, they do not travel on public transport, they live in a cocoon completely on their own, and this separates them dramatically from the day-to-day experience of the whole of the rest of the population, and particularly those outside of London.’
Then there was BBC 3’s People Like Us, a show revolving around an estate in Harphurhey, Manchester, which had the same approach. Local residents staged a furious meeting, attacking a ‘biased and distorted’ view of the community,17 and a local council worker, Richard Searle, whose daughter appeared in the programme, argued that ‘the BBC should not be propagating this harmful and misleading image of the working class’.18 Channel 5 staged a three-part series focusing on criminal behaviour: Shoplifters and Proud; Pick Pockets and Proud; and, finally, On Benefits and Proud. Again, the focus was on extreme examples of the socially excluded, particularly from unusually large families, like Heather Frost’s, a woman with eleven children who had already been widely featured in the mainstream media.
Many of these programmes barely gestured toward objectivity or accuracy. Take The Future of the Welfare State, presented by veteran BBC interviewer John Humphrys, which claimed that Britain was living in an ‘age of entitlement’. The programme was later found by the BBC Trust to have violated impartiality and accuracy rules. This out and-out propaganda relied on the usual box of tricks: unearthing extreme examples, relying on interviews from biased sources, and not backing up audacious claims with statistics or facts. The Trust ruled that the programme left viewers ‘unable to reach an informed opinion’.19
Another line of attack was to encourage private sector workers to turn on public sector workers. In this way real-terms government cuts to public sector pay were justified in the light of the cuts private sector workers had suffered. Attacks on public sector pensions were defended on the basis that private sector pensions had been ravaged. Indeed, private sector pensions had been decimated, but that was the fault of private sector bosses, not dinner ladies and bin-collectors. Throughout the 1990s, for example, companies saved £18 billion in pension holidays even as their workers continued to contribute.20 Rather than turn on the boss, the shelf-stacker and call centre worker, encouraged by the government and media, turned instead on the nurse and the teacher whose pension was intact.
‘Trade unions say they will fight to oppose public sector pensions cuts,’ wrote the Telegraph’s Ian Cowie, ‘but they had better beware they can expect little support from the public because most savers outside these schemes can only dream of having such problems.’ Even this piece pointed out that two thirds of private sector bosses paid nothing into their workers’ pension funds, and yet Cowie maintained the argument that public sector workers should bear the anger nonetheless. It was ‘pensions apartheid’, he offered as an absurdly inflammatory comparison.21 The irony, then, is that one of the staple arguments of the right against those wanting the richest to pay more tax is that they are guilty of the ‘politics of envy’.
During the 2015 general election campaign, the Tories pledged to slash £12 billion from social security spending but—when pressed—refused to say where the axe would fall. When asked on national television whether spending on tax credits—which supplement the incomes of working people—would be reduced, David Cameron firmly denied it, responding, ‘It’s not going to fall.’ When the Conservatives won a surprise victory in 2015, Cameron’s assertion turned out to be untrue. Cuts to tax credits would leave over 3 million working families poorer by an average of around £1,350 a year; millions of other working families would lose out, too. The government trumpeted a rise in the minimum wage to £9 an hour as a ‘living wage’: it was nothing of the sort, even ignoring the fact that the living wage is calculated partly on the basis of what tax credits people were eligible to receive. In any case, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies pointed out, the increased minimum wage would compensate for just 13 per cent of the lost income.22 Tax credits would also be offered to support a maximum of two children: in effect telling the children of supermarket workers and cleaners that if they had two siblings, rather than one, than they would not receive tax credit support.
It is notable how these policies were defended. The idea that the poor are breeding too fast, and being incentivised to do so, is age-old: Britain’s Poor Law prior to 1834 was assailed by its critics on this basis, too. And this was the rationale behind restricting tax credits to two children: to tap into the idea that low-paid workers were encouraged by the state to have larger families. Here was an outright attempt to demonize working benefit claimants in a way that was already all too common for unemployed benefit claimants.
Part of the rationale was that low-paid workers simply had to work harder. Tory Cabinet minister Jeremy Hunt announced that cutting tax credits conveyed an ‘important cultural signal’ about the importance of hard work, and would mean British workers would have to work as hard as their Chinese counterparts.23 This was continuing a Conservative theme. The Conservative Cabinet minister Liz Truss, for example, was among five Tory MPs who contributed to a book condemning British workers as ‘among the worst idlers in the world’, suggesting that ‘too many people in Britain prefer a lie-in to hard work’.24
If the Conservatives wished to decrease spending on tax credits and other in-work benefits without reducing the incomes of working people, they simply needed to raise wages. But the expansion of low-paid work in Britain has driven a rise in social security spending: indeed, tax credit expenditure rose during the first Conservative term beyond initial estimates because so many were forced to take up low-paid jobs.25 The Tory argument was that work was the route out of poverty, but with more than 5 million British workers paid less than a living wage and with most people in poverty in work, this was nonsensical. The man in charge of driving through social security changes was Iain Duncan Smith, the secretary of state for work and pensions; in his constituency, Chingford and Woodford, 48.3 per cent of workers are paid less than a living wage, the fifth highest proportion of any constituency in Britain.26
It is true that there have been some changes since Chavs was first published. The book was born, in large part, from frustration with the claim ‘we’re all middle class now’, but this is an assertion rarely made today, not even by those on the right (though, I should say, I’m not taking credit for that). Even Conservatives make pitches at working-class identity, with some prominent Tories attempting to construct ‘blue-collar Conservatism’.
But there is so much