I picked this macro up from Another Angry Voice; a left-wing blog that I follow on Facebook.
Usually I’m happy to hear his anti-Tory rants, but matters relating to the
Department for Work and Pensions strike a nerve with me. So here it is:
On the face of it, the message is clear: In a Tory
government, people have been sanctioned from claiming benefits for very unfair
reasons, while the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions can seemingly avoid
work and not have any penalty. It plays to the rhetoric of “One rule for them,
one rule for us.” It’s an appalling situation, one that has caused a lot of
hardship for many people. It could and should be handled better – the Universal
Credit scheme, for whatever it’s worth, seems to be an attempt to do that.
I therefore take no pleasure at all from saying that this is
a series of unrelated facts, to which, with a bit of research or even some
common knowledge, we find some qualifications: Yes, we’re in a Tory government,
although at this point it’s a conservative-led coalition. Yes, people have been
sanctioned for unfair reasons, but that would be the case under Labour too. And
yes, it is true that David Gauke did not attend the debate, even though it is
not mandatory for ministers to attend. He sent his deputy who took part in the
debate, so there was a presence from his department.
I’ve never forgotten the point in my life when I found
myself at the tender mercies of the Department for Work and Pensions. It was
2010, in the last few months of the Labour government, and I was claiming Jobseekers
Allowance from the DWP. I never missed an appointment, and always did my job
search. Yet they cut it off after several weeks and some dialogue with me,
because as it turns out, they don’t happen to think that being told to leave
your job is a good enough reason to do so. Unfortunately my previous employer
played it very well, offering me the so-called choice of either leave or go for
a job with the company’s legal team in Nottingham that I didn’t want and had no
guarantee of getting. Either way, as far as they – and by extension, the DWP –
were concerned, I left by my own choice, and that was the reason I was unable
to claim jobseekers allowance.
This happened under a Labour government that had been in
power for thirteen years by that point – any changes they might have made to
how the DWP handles its benefits and sanctions had already been done by then.
So let’s not load the blame for unfair benefit sanctions on the Tories. It
happens, and they should handle these situations with more respect for
individual circumstances, but the infrastructure had been constructed long
before the last few governments took office.
The other question the macro fails to address is: What was
David Gauke doing while this debate was taking place? I’m sure we’d like to
think he was taking the day off, or out for lunch in somewhere he can afford. I
suspect that the reality is quite remote from this. Possibly there were other
matters, meetings etc. that needed his attention, and with the matter supposedly
in hand now, he felt it would be a better use of his time to send his deputy.
We’ll probably never know – but unless we do, we have no more business accusing
him of being lazy than coming to his defence for speculative reasons.
As I write, I wonder as to the point of this. The fact that
some people have been unfairly sanctioned isn’t news to anyone. The gap between
the elite and the so-called common people has always been there but the matter
is nowhere near so straightforward. All I appear to be saying is: Don’t formulate
opinions on the basis of a two-sentence macro with some provocative pictures
and devoid of any meaningful context. Do some research. Examine the facts. Find
out what you’re talking about. The government, the country and its people are a
mess – but we’re not going to make it better by mud-slinging.
