This makes me think about how 'end of history' the war on benefits claimants stuff from 2007 or so onward feels. The idea that everything was going so well that unemployment was a psychological problem rather than a practical one; using benefits to teach people lessons
When you look at it from a decade or more of distance; 'no rights without responsibilities'; 'reciprocity and obligation' social security clipboard wonk ideas of couple of years prior to the Financial Crash just carried over into the unholy mess of benefits policy that followed
The idea that need for benefits was somehow a symptom of people's own psychology and not their position within society came at high point of economic growth, as if the next horizon for social policy was the perfectibility of people. But that thinking stuck and grew and multiplied
Right now, because of Covid-19, what we're going to see really clearly as there is a negative big bang of unemployment is the way in which social security benefits in the UK function as an actual public health issue in themselves
The experience of losing your job and there not being any other jobs that you could readily walk into and then being introduced to a benefits system that expects you to do pointless things for your benefits rather than stuff that is meaningful for you or your community must end
Providing psychological or medical support for people facing the difficulties of suddenly becoming more poor than they had ever planned is not the same as the blanket right for those with unregulated power to poke around inside people's heads to create 'positive mindsets'
It's embarrassing to me that it feels like for most clipboard wonk policy ideas around benefits of the last fifteen years you could run them with a photo of the inner cities of 1981 and no one would notice because we are still speaking a kind of Thatcherite language of 'decay'
The idea 'inner cities' are filled with 'generationally workless households' that'd store coal in the bath if you gave them a bath juxtaposes the idea of workless people as odd misfits who refuse to embrace the boundless available opportunities seems unkillable.
'The end of history' got coded into our benefits system in the UK so hard that we ascribe magical powers to people who are tired and skint and scared to magic into existence employment opportunities as if having a job just came to those who could wish and smile hard enough
The idea that claiming benefits is a teachable moment led to the structuring of Universal Credit, The Work Programme and all of its malign offspring as a programme based on the idea of just needing to make new people to fit the new the world because the new world was the best one
High water mark of the New Labour years wasn't a high water mark for everyone and since then we've had Financial Crash, recession, Austerity, now Covid-19 and brexit but we still carry out policy as if being without work means you don't matter as a person, you're just bad clay
Right now, today, people who never thought they were kind of people to claim benefits will be walking into the grinder of system that will ask them to do a full time job of being an unemployed person and to look inside themselves and their lives to see why they fell from the path
I should add that, as is common with social policy, the ideas that came together into our current benefits system were first trialled with people with even less regarded positions in the electorate: disabled people, people with long term health conditions, people seeking asylum
