Why does Benefits Street make us so angry?

Yes, it exploits people, but so do such Reithian delights as ‘My Daughter The Teenage Nudist’, ‘The Undateables’ or ‘Secrets of the Living Dolls’; exploiting people for public entertainment seems to be Channel 4’s raison d’etre. It most certainly demonises the working class, but no more so than a Midsummer Night’s Dream or EastEnders does.

I think it’s because we think that Benefits Street is the political equivalent of Samuel Eto’o’s stamp or the penalty that Theo Walcott should have had at the Emirates: outside interferences that advantage the cash-rich and deeply dislikable team in blue. I think it’s because we believe that if it weren’t for programmes like Benefits Street or newspaper editors like Paul Dacre, then we might find the British people a little more susceptible to some of our favourite remedies.

Public polling provides grist to our mill. We find that people generally believe that Britain is a crime-infested wasteland, populated almost entirely by Muslims, single mothers and Romanian scroungers, ruled over by a corrupt class of politicians who all went to Eton and Oxford. This gives us some small licence to hope that perhaps, if we told people that most of them are agnostic non-practising Anglicans born to nuclear families, and that the most dangerous criminality they are likely to encounter is internet piracy, they might become more inclined towards Swedish socialism.

It’s tempting, but misguided. A depressing truth of the human condition is that telling us that we’re wrong doesn’t make us change; it just makes us tetchy. Try telling most people on Labour’s right flank that Tony Blair was on course to lose the 2010 election, or most of the Labour left that Labour’s three-time winner was more redistributive than Clement Attlee: you’ll be right both times, but don’t expect to win friends or influence people.

That’s because, as nice as it is to believe, we don’t, in fact, encounter a situation, discover the facts and then reach a conclusion. We reach a conclusion, often an instinctive one, and cherry-pick the facts to suit us. Rebranding welfare as social security, or pivoting from housing benefit to rogue landlords is like telling someone that you did the washing up on Sunday: it’s not always particularly helpful to be right.

That doesn’t mean, necessarily, that you accept the emotional perspective unilaterally. Promising to take care of the dirty crockery in perpetuity might breed resentment but a rota might cut down on arguments. On immigration, Labour has come far too close to promising never to leave the sink unwashed, but there’s still time for a more balanced response to the public’s anxieties on welfare.

What might that look like? It would start by recognising that hectoring people about the level of fraud in the system is counterproductive. Benefit fraud might weigh in at a subatomic 0.7 per cent of welfare spending, but it’s not just poor accountancy than leaves the public believing that a whopping 24 per cent of social security is fraudulently claimed. If you work in a corner shop and someone pays for a jobseeker’s bus pass with a crisp fifty, then that feels like benefit fraud. If you live in a council house, wake up in the small hours and are kept awake at night by loud music from the flat above, then that feels like benefit fraud. And the reality is that both of those could be completely fair, just and necessary: but they don’t always feel that way.

Now, that doesn’t mean that those feelings are right, or that they can necessarily be met with a policy response; it’s sometimes enough just to feel people’s pain. But the danger to Labour is that if it can’t speak to people in a language they recognise, and blame the whole problem on tabloid journalism or sensationalist documentaries, we’ll find that people turn to the Conservatives – who will have little difficulty describing the whole welfare state as nothing more than benefit fraud.

———————————————————

Stephen Bush is a contributing editor to Progress, writes a weekly column for Progress, the Tuesday review, and tweets @stephenkb