It was three weeks after Christmas when the bombshell letter arrived. Guy Shahar and his wife, Oksana, looked at each other in stunned disbelief.
They had followed the Guardian’s investigation into the carer’s allowance scandal that has left thousands of families with crippling debts and criminal records. Not once did they think they would join them.
“Important,” it read in big bold type. “You have been paid more carer’s allowance than you are entitled to. You now need to pay this money back”.
In some weeks, she was paid just 38p more than the threshold – but for that tiny infraction she is being forced to repay £64.60 each time, the rate of carer’s allowance at the time.
Why are Anglo-Saxon ‘conservative’ governments hell-bent on punishing the poor to the fullest extent. They no longer hide the strategy that cruelty is the point! And the general public seems to like it, and votes for it in ever greater numbers, until it happens to themselves, of course.
Can someone explain this to a person who grew up in a Rhineland model based society that is now fast adopting the Anglo Saxon model (the Netherlands).
I’ve both lived in the UK and The Netherlands.
IMHO, it’s to do with how socially the UK is a very classist society were people worry a lot (insanely so compared with The Netherlands) not just about their place in the social ladder but about it being visible to others - the TV Sitcom Keeping Up Appearances is actually a pretty good illustration of this: even though it’s a comedy and thus exagerated in the forms the characters in it display such traits and act on them, the way of thinking of the characters is based on how people in Britain (especially England) tend to see their standing in society and the importance they give to projecting the “right” appearances (part of what makes that comedy funny is that it’s a satire of certain traits of British society: a lot of British comedy is even more funny once you’ve lived there for a while and start getting the in-jokes).
Then overlayed on this is the common take there on social climbing which is to spend far more time and effort trying to stop others below oneself in the social ladder from climbing than in climbing oneself. People like to look down on those seen as lower status, expect others to “know their place” and will actually put some effort into making sure those who don’t are punished for it.
This is, IMHO, why punishing the poor is so popular in Britain. It also anchors a lot of the anti-immigration feeling since there is no lower class in British Society than non-Britons.
As for other Anglo-Saxon countries, I don’t really know.
Its the overwhelming success of divide and conquer politics.
Back in the 00s British newspapers (overwhelmingly right wing and owned by very wealthy people) were constantly running stories about people on low income benefits supposedly living better lives than hard working normal people.
They were so successful that it was practically common knowledge that the country was full of families who chose to remain unemployed but lived in a cosy house paid for by the state, and spent all their time watching cable TV, paid for by the state, drinking beer and smoking fags, paid for by the state, and maybe also doing a bit of crime.
This supposedly huge group of “scroungers” were the hate target for regular, honest, hard working people, whose taxes were being wasted supporting them.
So high was the public interest in stories about benefits cheats or scroungers that TV shows were made about them like Benefits Street or Shameless. It was seen as one of the great failings of the labour government, an example of irresponsible government spending which exacerbated the effects of the 2008 financial crash.
So when the Conservative government arrived, they made a big deal of reducing benefits and benefit claimants and introducing a kind of bureaucracy designed to make it as difficult to claim as possible. This system resulted in cases like a blind man in a wheelchair having his disability payments stopped and being told by letter that he was ruled fit for work following a phone assessment by someone with no medical training. It has resulted in millions of children now living below the poverty line and often going hungry.
But these stringent measures were broadly popular because most people had been reading and talking about all the terrible problems of benefits scroungers for over a decade.
And the same thing happened with immigration and with the EU. Every week another story misrepresenting some EU regulation like bendy bananas, or a crime committed by an immigrant where his nationality is bold and underlined in the article which makes some comment about uncontrolled immigration. Articles covering crimes committed by white British people don’t mention nationality and get less space further back in the paper.
There was never much prominence given in most newspapers to issues like tax avoidance, or wealth inequality, so most people didn’t talk about it. Their hate was well focused elsewhere. Meanwhile the rich keep getting richer, everyone else keeps getting poorer, and most people spend their energy complaining about something else.
Great analysis and insights, thank you.
Perhaps, Monty Python has some insights?
If they take money from poor people, they can give tax breaks to the rich and still break even.