Forum Home → Discussion → Other benefit issues → Thread
Insight into the attitudes of benefit claimants to welfare reforms
Very interesting article from Fern Brady about a project with the Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust where she interviewed about 150 families who will be directly affected by the cuts. Her findings are quite revealing.
There are almost too many examples to list but the kind of attitudes I heard daily went along these lines: the disabled man thinks it’s wrong the drug user down the road gets methadone. The drug user is outraged that the large family next door gets a spare room and hopes they are hit by bedroom tax. The large family is sick of elderly people getting big houses they don’t need. The elderly woman hopes these large families are forced to stop having kids once the money dries up. On and on it went in a circle, anger constantly directed at other victims of the coalition government’s Welfare Reform Act instead of the politicians and policymakers responsible.
On being told of the cuts, one young mum exclaimed “Good! That means her down the road’ll get her money taken away” referring to a resident with severe mental health issues (people with less visible disabilities like hers were all too frequently dismissed as “chancers”).
Another tenant vented her frustration that her permanently disabled brother was having his support cut while in the same breath bitterly complaining about fraudulent disability living allowance (DLA) claimants (I contemplated having the comparatively low statistics for fraud tattooed on my face to save time repeating it).
For the whole article, see Who takes the harshest anti-welfare line? Those on state benefits
It’s so very familiar.
There has been an extremely successful divide and rule campaign in the space of the last year or so. We try to counterract it as best we can but it’s slow going. Sadly, until everyone wakes up, smells the coffee, and forms a unified stance it’s hard to see how to counterract it.
As you say 1964. Here’s Kevin Maguire last October.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/kevin-maguire-on-conservative-partys-divide-1368311
Had client a few weeks ago who had been claiming IB for many many years. Fails WCA and contacts us for advice. I explained the options: appeal or JSA and - in this particular case, CA/IS. Chooses the latter, but before we finish makes a point of telling me “I agree with them cracking down on these people who say they can’t work”. Surreal.