What does ‘Benefits Street’ say about Britain?

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Another day and another hatchet job in the media aimed at poor people – this time in the form of the vulgar and obvious hack that is Channel 4’s Benefits Street – carefully edited to portray the unfortunate participants as feckless, irresponsible and criminal.

The programme was carefully designed to elicit a certain kind of bile filled hatred from a certain kind of Briton and it certainly worked.

Twitter as usual amplified the venom.

• “Just watched benefits street what a bunch of lowlife scum a bullet costs about 30p  so we could sort the street out and have change from £20”
• “I want to walk down #BenefitsStreet with a baseball bat and brain a few of these scumbags,” read one tweet, while another wrote: “Set fire to #Benefits Street”.
• “Watching benefits street from last night, such scrounging bastards”
• “These people on “Benefits Street” actually need put down. Especially the two bragging about being benefit frauds. Scum
• “People like these on benefits street deserve to be ate alive by pigs”
• “Need to be dragged into the street and shot in the head. Put them out of our misery. Benefits Street.”
• “Benefits street – a channel 4 documentary, telling the story of how it would look if primitive apes lived in everyday society. Filth.”

and so on.

There was a backlash against the show with 800 complaints swiftly being made to C4 and OFCOM but with viewership of 4.3 million its not likely that C4 will give up its hit TV show easily.

what does this show tell us about Britain in the 21st Century?

(a) It shows us that a British public service broadcaster is happy to exploit powerless poor people to the stir up the lowest possible kind of hate as a way to make money – the commercial logic can’t be faulted as 4.3 million viewers will keep advertisers happy.

(b) It shows us that there are some pretty depressing market indicators which the producers of this crap – the ironically named ‘Love Films’ knew all to well. Firstly they knew  there was a market for a kind of TV tourist who enjoys pointing at and judging the struggles of the poor and secondly they relied on a certain kind of moralistic British niggardly spite that would lap up  some nice anti-poor propaganda as literal fact.

(c) It tells us that we have a chunk of people in this country that aren’t that bright. One doesn’t need a degree in media studies or even a GCSE in carpentry to see that this show was a hack from start to finish – both in the title, the selected participants and the editing – but still a goodly number of people seem to have swallowed it at face value.

(d)  It tells us that the endless poison pumped out by The Daily Mail et al is working – sections of British society are being singled out for blame and hatred. This new economic fascism is not only profoundly unjust and depressing it is also very dangerous for society as a whole – once whole communities start turning against each other then we start down a very dark road indeed.

The media get blamed for a lot – but they are uniquely responsible for building a climate of hate and fear in this country.

I agree entirely with Owen Jones:

“A healthy media would stand up to the powerful and wealthy. Not ours, though: instead it stands up to the poor and voiceless. Skint was another, similar Channel 4 offering, this time kicking a community in Scunthorpe struggling with deindustrialisation. Channel 5 broadcast a three-part series focusing on criminal behaviour: Shoplifters and Proud, Pick Pockets and Proud, and Benefits and Proud, as though being on benefits was somehow not lawful. Again, extreme examples were hunted down, including Heather Frost and her 11 children, who the media have already turned into a minor celebrity.”

When BBC 3’s People Like Us targeted an estate in Harpurhey, Manchester, angry local residents staged a meeting, decrying the “biased and distorted” view of the community. One local council worker, Richard Searle, claimed that his daughter had been given alcohol before filming, and called for the Beeb to stop “propagating this harmful and misleading image of the working class”. Take another BBC offering, The Future of the Welfare State, which was presented by veteran interviewer John Humphrys and which claimed that Britain was living in “an age of entitlement”. It was slammed by the BBC Trust for breaching impartiality and accuracy rules and leaving viewers “unable to reach an informed opinion”.

and this helps to keep the public not just uninformed but woefully misinformed

Polls show that people on average estimate that 27 per cent of social security payments are lost to fraud, when it is just 0.7 per cent; that 41 per cent goes to unemployed people, when it just three per cent; and that the value of benefits are far higher than they are. Neither is the public aware that most social security spending is, rightly, spent on pensioners who have paid in all their lives; or that the Government’s freeze on benefits mostly hits working people. Large families are passed off as typical, even though just 190 out of the 1.35 million claiming an out-of-work benefits have 10 kids or more. A healthy media would challenge myths and prejudices; ours is determined to fan them.

Both the Daily Mail and The Sun have headline stories about benefit claimants today explicitly portraying them in the usual way as scroungers, workshy obstacles to prosperity and generally unwashed.

I am forced to wonder what came first – did the right wing corporate press generate all this bile or are they just riding it? Is moralistic hatred of the less fortunate part of the British psyche?

I don’t think it is uniquely British in any way. Throughout history when things have wrong with the economy or the ecology it has been all too easy to blame a minority group – often with evil and tragic consequences.

The current ceaseless attacks on the poor in this country sounds so similar to Hitler’s caricature of the Jews that one fears for the future – and its a short step that many have already made to blame the unemployed for all our problems and then to blame unemployment on immigrants.

All the while of course the true culprits of the economic insecurity (bankers, policy makers, tax avoiding corporations), accelerating inequality and poverty are riding higher than ever – seemingly beyond scrutiny and no doubt delighted that attention is focused on people who aren’t responsible for any of it but who lack a voice with which to  defend themselves.

There is an online petition that already has over 17,000 signatures at Change.org. Click here to sign it.

You can also complain to OFCOM by clicking here and to Channel 4 by clicking here.

Lets show the people behind this show that we are not fooled by their low brow smears and that we won’t stand for it!