The toxic trope of ‘benefit scroungers’ Labour's war on welfare is cruel and cynical

Strangely, though, few politicians are banging on about the hundreds of billions lost every year to tax avoidance, evasion and highly organised financial crime. Instead, both Jeremy Hunt and Rachel Reeves are desperate to reassure us all that they are getting tough on the work-shy and the idle. They are going after low-level scammers and old people who can’t fill out forms properly. This highly successful political tactic never seems to get old, regardless of how untethered from reality it is. This is as true of the “shirkers and skivers” rhetoric as it is of the welfare reforms we’ve seen over the past three decades, whereby ill-placed public resentments about social security have been deliberately stoked.

In 1996, with a general election looming, then-Tory prime minister John Major pioneered the benefit-scrounger dog whistle when he announced new “stiffer penalties” for the work-shy and vowed that “those who don’t want to work are exposed”. Labour pushed back against the language, but, as they did with almost everything Major’s Conservative Party stood for at the time, went on to adopt similar reforms after their landslide victory in 1997. Not only that, but they ratcheted up the scrounger rhetoric to levels Margaret Thatcher could only dream of.

Benefit cuts to single mothers and refugees, “name and shame” orders designed to deter anti-social behaviour, and bizarre plans to kick council tenants out of their homes for being unemployed are not often associated with New Labour. Nor are claims that certain ethnic groups “lacked discipline”, clampdowns targeting “foreigners who come to this country illegitimately and steal our benefits”, or fantastical claims that translating basic public service information for those arriving in the country from abroad meant they would “not have the incentive to learn English”. These things are not associated with Blair in the popular memory — but that doesn’t change the fact they happened during his tenure.

In order to advance the rather thorny issue of welfare reform, the general public had to be conditioned to believe that the enemy in their midst was not exploitative employers, careerist politicians, or an economic model that guaranteed all prosperity was absorbed by those at the top. No, the great fear was the lazy stoner through the wall, and the single mother across the street, getting pregnant for an easy life on the dole.

This narrative may suit the politician, but the root of today’s problem lies in the UK’s sluggish growth pattern, which resulted in a low-wage labour market and threadbare public services. In these conditions of precarity, following a pandemic and during a cost-of-living crisis, more people become ill and, in the absence of a functioning health service, stay ill for longer. And the longer they are out of work, the harder it is to get back in the game. Meanwhile, for those who are able to find a job, the sort of work people now tend to move into is part-time, poorly paid and with no career progression — requiring in-work benefits to supplement. That’s why brags from the Government about record levels of employment ring hollow; full employment means nothing when you have to stop by a food bank on the way home from work.

A responsible and honest political class might set out to correct such misplaced assumptions, perhaps by pointing out that there are billions saved in unclaimed benefits every year. Yet instead, they become the basis upon which subsequent rafts of ill-judged, short-sighted and meanspirited reforms are progressed. This is all the more galling when you consider that this war is waged by largely middle-class, university-educated careerists. Indeed, the class disparity at the heart of British democracy, where working-class voices are largely absent, means there are fewer people to present a counterpoint to the nasty consensus. Today, just 8% of Labour MPs hail from working-class backgrounds.

One might naturally assume this trend is a by-product of 10 years of Tory government — but in truth, it began with a party that exists, supposedly, to protect the working class. “Before Tony Blair came to power there was only a modest difference in working-class and careerists positions on welfare reform”, wrote Tom O’Grady in Comparative Political Studies in 2018. “But our research finds that during his premiership, the influence of working-class MPs dropped while there was a rise in the influence of careerist politicians.” O’Grady found that MPs from working-class backgrounds had “a stronger ideological attachment to welfare provision because it benefits working-class voters”, whereas among their middle-class counterparts, “greater concerns for electoral success and career advancement meant they were more likely to support welfare reforms”. The findings suggest that the large shift from working-class MPs to career politicians in the British Labour Party led to an erosion of representation of working-class voters’ interests. “Put bluntly,” he said, “careerist MPs are much more likely to blow with the political winds.”

Chancellor-in-waiting Rachel Reeves — the latest proponent of blood-curdling rhetoric on shirkers and skivers — was born the year Thatcher came to power. She’s one of a generation of rising stars with no political memory of a time when working-class people had more than a tokenistic role to play in the democratic process. And she parrots the tired Blairite rhetoric about scroungers, while cosplaying as the Iron Lady 2.0 for middle-England voters. It’s worth noting that Reeves has, since 10 December 2019, declared donations, earnings, gifts and other benefits worth more than £650,000. Indeed, the value of Reeves’s registered interests puts her in the top 2% of all MPs. Since the start of the current parliament, only 11 MPs have taken in more than money her. Fancy that.

So, after all these years of reform, where are the results? Well, here’s the thing: they have had almost no positive impact. Indeed, all the evidence shows that poverty has only worsened, and that excess deaths have increased.

The rise in food poverty, in particular, is significant. Figures from the Trussell Trust show that between March 2017 and March 2018, 1,332,952 emergency food supplies were distributed to people across the UK. Nationally, low income was the main reason for referral and accounted for nearly 30% of food bank use. The role of welfare reform was crucial here, with benefit delays accounting for 24% of referrals while benefit changes were cited by 18% — 42% in total. The correlation between Universal Credit and food bank use becomes more pronounced when you map its roll-out, between 2013 and 2018, directly onto the areas which experienced the sharpest rises in food poverty. This reveals an average increase of 52% in food bank usage in the 12 months following the roll-out in each area, compared to 13% outside of those zones.

Food poverty is just one facet of the social crisis driven by welfare reform. A spate of related suicides has been reported in recent years, including some people even leaving suicide notes referring to the DWP. In 2020, the National Audit Office noted that the DWP had investigated 69 suicides related to benefits claims in the previous six years, while disability campaigners claim the true figure is far higher. Meanwhile, despite the fact that cuts in benefits have hit women disproportionately, the DWP’s brutal compliance regime compounds the suffering of the most vulnerable women in a manner which could charitably be described as sinister. The techniques often deployed — coercion, aggression, overbearing surveillance, gaslighting and financial intimidation — either deliberately or through sheer incompetence often mirror those of present or former abusers.

And in return? The sad truth is that welfare reform in the UK is driven by ideology and has never had any evidential basis. There’s even less evidence for the effectiveness of welfare reforms at getting people back to work. The Welfare Conditionality project, running from 2013–2018, conducted analysis on both the impact of welfare reforms as well as the practices that underpin them. Concerning the lifestyle-choice homeless, the report found that benefit sanctions caused “considerable distress and push some extremely vulnerable people out of the social security safety net altogether”. For those disabled people living the high life, the report found that the Work Capability Assessment — in which people with disabilities must prove they are unfit for certain types of employment — is “intrusive, insensitively administered and regularly leads to inappropriate outcomes in respect of disabled people’s capabilities to undertake, or prepare for, paid employment”.

Where job seekers are concerned, welfare conditionality “did not prompt behaviour change” and claimants felt there was “a lack of clarity or warning that their behaviour was sanctionable, that work coaches were too quick to resort to the use of a sanction, and that sanctions were disproportionate to the alleged transgression”. For the lone parents, it found that “insufficient account is taken of caring responsibilities when claimant commitments are devised”, and that many were sanctioned as a result of “unreasonable expectations, DWP administrative errors, or failures of comprehension rather than deliberate non-compliance”. Across the board, the persistent threat of sanctions caused “extreme anxiety, even when not enacted”.

Here we can see how the UK’s favoured economic model of neoliberalism demands that those who cannot succeed in an economy rigged against them must be held personally responsible for their failure — or commanded to blame someone less fortunate than them to account for their predicament. In the UK, this cultural mechanism is expressed in electoral rhetoric which evokes images of “shirkers”, “skivers” and “scroungers” who luxuriate in mould-ridden council homes filled with extravagant items such as televisions, phones and refrigerators, all day long, on the good honest taxpayer’s dime.

While it is certainly true that any system open to enough people will be abused to some extent, and that benefit fraud does occur, the fact remains that the “benefit scrounger” narrative so readily spouted by politicians is a rhetorical device designed, in the case of the Tories, to cynically stoke irrational resentment about welfare dependency — or in the case of Labour, to cravenly placate it for an electoral advantage.

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Darren McGarvey is a Scottish hip hop artist and social commentator. In 2018, his book Poverty Safari won the Orwell Prize and his new book The Social Distance Between Us (Ebury Press) is out on 16th June.

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