Universal Credit, some thoughts

No doubt you will have heard about the way in which the government’s appalling organisation of their universal credit arrangements will leave families without money this Christmas. I have signed a petition to require them to make exceptional payments to avoid the cruel impact of their incompetence and I’d encourage you to sign it too, here.

But I wanted to say something in this short blog about why and how this is happening. Ian Duncan Smith invented this system, ostensibly to rationalise the range of benefits that are available to people in need. What we have discovered, however, is that the protocols and procedures for transferring people to this single system are a staggering example of incompetence and confusion. As always the people who carry the impact of this are not those who (mis)organised this process but the victims of it. This has been amusingly satirised as public school boys assuming that an absence of benefit can be subsidised by ‘selling a painting’.

Which leads me to the point about how this can happen at all.

It seems clear to me that it follows from the way that those in receipt of benefits have become identified as scroungers and lazy, which is one of many means by which successive governments have diminished and eroded our natural predisposition to look after those who are in need. If you start to accept this view, and that acceptance often begins with an apparently ‘conditional’ or ‘partial’ acceptance, like saying to yourself, “well, there are some people who are scroungers”, you allow this notion to skew your view of the provision of welfare. From this beginning and without noticing it, because it happens ‘below the surface’, you allow the notion that those in need of help are somehow less than you, which means, ‘less deserving’.

I’ll give you an example. On the 24th October, Pilgrim Tucker wrote an otherwise very good and important article in the Guardian about Universal Credit. (here)  One of the points in that article was:

“Most are unaware that once they are moved on to universal credit their claims will entail the same degrading treatment currently reserved only for the unemployed.

Under universal credit, workers on low incomes will be made to look for extra hours as a condition for receiving the benefit. If they are earning less than the equivalent of the minimum wage at 35 hours a week, they will be placed in one of two “labour market regimes” (otherwise termed a “work-related activity group” or “conditionality group”) with conditions attached to their benefit claims to “incentivise” them to increase their hours – or find higher paying or full-time work…

… If they are judged to not be complying with these conditions they will be sanctioned, just as jobseekers are now.”

This idea of sanction and its justification (that it incentivises people to lift themselves away from benefits) is an example of the thinking that follows from accepting the notion that those who struggle are shiftless scroungers. But Ms Tucker appears to allow this notion in exactly that partial form that I am warning against when she says, later in the article:

“In abandoning the traditional distinctions between the “deserving hardworking”, and “undeserving”, non-working poor, the government is taking a very unwise political risk.”

This, because of the expression, ‘traditional distinctions’, gives credence to the idea that some people are undeserving.

We need to be very clear in our thinking. If there are ‘some people’ who exploit, steal, misuse and so on, this is a sub-set of society as a whole, not the poor. Unless we challenge this attitude in this government, we are complicit in it. These ideas strike at an important part of our civilised or adult human nature, namely our urge to look after those who need help. This is a human quality that is an expression of dignity and integrity, it is the manifestation of compassion. We allow its erosion at our peril.