Presenting welfare reform: poverty porn, telling sad stories or achieving change?

Abstract

Much is written about the suffering resulting from welfare reform and other cuts for disabled people and others on the receiving end. Usually this is seen as a ‘good thing’. But is it as simple as that? It may not be the same as so-called television poverty porn, but what is the point of constantly recycling welfare reform’s effects? Judging from last May’s general election, doing this does not seem to have had a significant effect on public politics/attitudes. So perhaps we need to look at it more carefully. When might discussion of welfare reform be helpful and when unhelpful? Is not the real task to develop alternatives, rather than hope as the Fabians did, that if we show how awful things are, ‘then something will have to be done’?

Keywords:

• Welfare reform
• disabled people’s organisations
• Fabianism
• developing alternatives
• neoliberalism

Introduction

UK welfare reform imposed on disabled people and other groups receiving welfare benefits has led to an outpouring of literature and reportage highlighting its destructive effects. Much has been written on the subject, with many studies and surveys as well as journalistic accounts of the effects and experience of such welfare reform (for example, Duffy 2014; O’Hara 2014). Disability & Society has itself included such material within its pages (for example, Cross 2013; Morris 2013). Yet it is not clear whether this focus on the damaging effects of such policy on disabled people and other groups actually serves any positive purpose. Despite the volume of such evidence produced under the Coalition Government, a Conservative Government which made clear it was committed to further massive welfare benefit cuts was elected in May 2015 and has since shown its commitment to pursue such policy with even greater determination and enthusiasm.

The public presentation of welfare reform

Not all of the discussion prompted by welfare reform has been critical of it. Indeed its most visible expression has probably been the television programmes that have come to be seen as a new genre in their own right – ‘poverty porn’. While this construct has been contested (Hester 2014), it has been associated with a large and growing number of programmes, particularly on Channels 4 and 5, such as On Benefits and Proud¹, The Big Benefits Row² and Benefits Street³.⁴ Sometimes the sub-text of these programmes is more ambiguous and complex than the headlines would suggest. There are also programmes, like Welfare Britain – the New Reality⁵ (BBC 2013), which seem more concerned with the painful reality of claiming and living on welfare benefits, rather than polarising people or presenting them as ‘other’. However, these programmes generally attract lower ratings and interest.

Telling sad stories

Successive governments have carried out their welfare reform policies in close association with dominant right-wing media. Newspapers such as the Sun and Daily Mail, and their online platforms, have been cheer leaders for welfare reform; headlining benefit fraud, attacking welfare claimants and acting as a mouthpiece for ministers like Iain Duncan Smith, supporting benefit cuts and caps uncritically. But there has also been a parallel narrative associated with the left-of-centre broadsheets. This has highlighted the inefficiencies and arbitrariness of welfare reform and its destructive effects on groups particularly affected, such as mental health service users, people with learning difficulties and people with physical and sensory impairments. One particular exponent of this approach has been the Guardian’s social affairs writer, Amelia Gentleman, who won the George Orwell prize in 2012 and Feature Writer of the Year at the British Press Awards in 2011 for the work she has done. This has included titles such as the following:

•	‘He was a Victim of Welfare Reform’.6
•	‘Delays and Disarray Shatter Lives of New Disability Claimants’.7
•	‘Austerity Cuts Will Bite Even Harder in 2015’.8
•	‘After Hated Atos Quits, Will Maximus Make Work Assessments Less Arduous?’9

Such stories have highlighted the hardship and difficulties created by welfare reform. However, as the right-of-centre Evening Standard has reported, Gentleman is also part of the right-wing Johnson dynasty, which includes Boris and Stanley. She is married to Jo Johnson, a current minister in the Conservative Government which is now implementing these welfare reforms. As the Evening Standard said, this:

must make for some lively conversation over the supper table: ‘There’s lots of healthy debate, debate is good, [Jo] says, a view that seems lucky in light of his family. You can’t iron contradictions out of individuals and you can’t iron them out of families.’¹⁰

Of course this may not be quite how it feels to the disabled people and mental health service users, who are the subjects of such pieces and who are increasingly experiencing anxiety, suicidal thoughts and even killing themselves as a result of welfare cuts¹¹ (CWR 2013). It also raises questions about the point and purpose of such narratives.

Influencing the public?

Fewer question marks seem to hang over right-wing media attacks on claimants, including disabled people. They can be seen as part of a clear political and ideological campaign and agenda, based on close alliances between news media and politicians, with the intent to legitimate and gain populist support for policies of regressive redistribution and social division. They certainly seem to have been successful, raising levels of stigma and hostility against groups such as refugees and disabled people and, according to some sources, increasing hate crime against them (Walker 2012).

This is not the first time there has been such a media and political campaign. Golding and Middleton (1982, 4–5) highlighted an international shift to more hostile media attitudes to poverty and welfare from the mid-1970s as the economic situation worsened. According to Taylor-Gooby’s evidence, there was no strong shift in public attitudes to public welfare, privatisation or welfare for women coinciding with the arrival of Mrs Thatcher as prime minister:

To the contrary, the main services [were] as strongly supported as they have been at any time since the war. (Taylor-Gooby 1985, 51)

Having said that, the media were certainly able to play up what dissatisfaction there was with welfare from the 1970s and make it a key element in political discourse – just as has been the case more recently and now. Thus both claimants, including disabled claimants, and the welfare state have been talked up as problematic and a headline issue. This has undoubtedly impacted on ‘public opinion’, even if only at the level of the media being treated as a stand-in for it (Beresford 2016, 104 and following).

Welfare reform stories and the Fabian tradition

However, it is more difficult to see what part coverage like Gentleman’s is meant to have in challenging such policy and its well-evidenced destructive effects on large and growing numbers of disabled and other disempowered people. The assumption seems to be that if the grim realities of welfare reform are shown – their effects on ordinary disabled and impoverished individuals – then something will happen – change will follow, ‘something will have to be done’. But how this works is neither clear, nor made clear. Of course, this may be a misplaced assumption. There may not be an intention to bring about improvement. If so, we might ask what the point of such ‘misery’ accounts is.

Such questioning of ‘misery accounts’ of welfare reform seems even more important, given that until very recently, with a leadership change, the Labour Party has been reluctant to disassociate itself from ‘welfare reform’ and that big charities have also in many cases been reluctant to challenge it too strongly for fear of risking their statutory funding.

On closer examination, a significant parallel can be seen between such abstracted accounts of suffering under current welfare reform and traditional Fabian left-of-centre approaches to social policy formation. The model and assumptions seem to be similar. The process seems implicitly to be one of ‘educating the public’. ‘The public’ are told about a problem by self-appointed experts, analysts or commentators, but there is no clearly worked-out process or explanation of how this would or could then result in the problem being overcome. Traditionally, when Fabian social policy ruled, this model of change rested on a small elite of expert academics and policy-makers advancing their remedies. It was this model of change that the pioneering disabled people’s organisation Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation challenged and rejected in the 1976 document Fundamental Principles of Disability (UPIAS/Disability Alliance 1976). They argued that it was both an ineffective approach and failed to involve disabled people fully and effectively.

The Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation, and the disabled people’s and other service user movements and organisations since, have campaigned for a different approach to policy development. This is one based on the full and equal involvement of disabled people and their own democratically constituted user-controlled/ user-led organisations (ULOs) (Beresford 2016, 189–194). Here perhaps we can also begin to gain a better idea of where accounts of disabled people’s experience and suffering may be helpful, rather than open to question. The answer seems to be where disabled people themselves are fully involved in the process of creating, sharing and acting on such accounts, rather than simply serving as a source of ‘sad stories’ and passive accounts of disempowerment and marginalisation.

First-hand accounts for change

There have been many such liberatory sources since the first imposition of welfare reform. We can also see that these have been the ones which have tended to be the most influential and have most potential for resisting such welfare reform. Thus, for example, the reports, evidence and accounts produced by Spartacus, Disabled People Against Cuts and Black Triangle (Beresford 2012). These have tended to connect disabled people’s individual experience with their broader analyses, demands and campaigning strategies. They have formed the basis for bottom-up resistance and sometimes change, influencing media stories and occasionally even parliamentary decision-making, particularly in the House of Lords (Butler 2012).

Since the time of Mrs Thatcher, the political right seems to have learned the lesson that it does not have to be fearful of statistics, evidence and reports produced by isolated left-of-centre academics or theoreticians critical of it. Fabian critiques were swiftly trumped by Mrs Thatcher’s right-wing populism. Such critiques have shown little ability to force change. But this is increasingly not true of movements of disabled people, with their participatory programmes and associated knowledge production. While their capacity to achieve change should not be overstated, their determination and their thought-through strategies, including parliamentary, campaigning and direct action, offer much more hope for the future and also offer legitimate ways of drawing on and making public disabled people’s personal difficulties and hardship, without reducing it to the level of ‘sad stories’ and individualised anecdotes. They also point the way to real alternatives to ‘welfare reform’, rather than merely focusing on its failings – a very limited approach to achieving change.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. On Benefits and Proud http://www.channel5.com/show/on-benefits-proud. Accessed on 11 April 2016

2. The Big Benefits Row http://www.channel5.com/show/the-big-benefits-row-live. Accessed on 11 April 2016

3. Benefits Street http://www.channel4.com/programmes/benefits-street. Accessed on 11 April 2016

4. http://www.consented.co.uk/read/life-on-the-dole-britains-obsession-with-poverty-porn/. Accessed 11 April 2016

5. Welfare Britain - the New Reality http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01bz3th. Accessed 11 April 2016

6. http://www.theguardian.com/society/shortcuts/2015/jun/24/he-was-a-victim-of-welfare-reform-the-artistic-legacy-of-mark-wood. Accessed 11 April 2016

7. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jan/27/delays-disability-benefit-pip-claimants-mps-scrutiny. Accessed 11 April 2016

8. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jan/01/austerity-cuts-2015-12-billion-britain-protest. Accessed 11 April 2016

9. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jan/18/after-hated-atos-quits-will-maximus-make-work-assessments-less-arduous. Accessed 11 April 2016

10. http://www.standard.co.uk/news/the-johnson-supremacy-6449936.html. Accessed 11 April 2016

11. http://www.mind.org.uk/news-campaigns/news/welfare-reform-anxiety-making-people-ill/#.Vs9H5cdoDzI. Accessed 11 April 2016