Channel 4’s documentary Benefits Street has certainly inspired a lot of hatred – but not all directed against the same target.
Judging by the debate on Twitter or Facebook, many people are angered by the residents of James Turner Street, in Winson Green, Birmingham, who appear in the programme.
Common complaints include the fact that residents appear able to afford cigarettes and the odd beer while claiming benefits, and don’t seem to make much effort to look for work.
READ MORE: {}
On the other side of the fence, there is anger at Channel 4 for exploiting people, and for “demonising” claimants.
Shabana Mahmood (Lab Ladywood), the local MP, has accused Channel 4 of using poverty for entertainment purposes – which it is. Nobody who has watched the show could regard it as a serious attempt to explore how people end up relying on benefits.
For those who haven’t seen Benefits Street, I should probably explain that most of the people featured are of working age and, so it seems, reasonably healthy. The show doesn’t focus on people with visible disabilities or illnesses which might prevent them from working, on pensioners or on people with caring responsibilities, which would make a job impossible.
I say “visible” disabilities because there’s so much about the characters in the show that we don’t know.
Documentary makers, by necessity, shift through hours and hours of footage to produce their programmes, selecting the bits which allow them to tell a story. Who’s to say whether characters such as “White Dee” or “Black Dee” have stories which are far more complex than seen on screen.
Most Read
But the first episode focused on a resident who did appear to have health issues. Fungi, as he was introduced to us, said he had been on Diazepam (a drug once marketed as Valium) since he was 16, on doctor’s orders.
Clearly, I’m in no position to know whether his apparent illness makes him unable to work or not, but it was a question the programme didn’t even attempt to consider.
I was one of those who criticised the show. But it has prompted some thoughtful reactions – from commentators and politicians on the right.
Most people seem to agree that Benefits Street makes the residents of James Turner Street look bad, whether due to the machinations of the show’s producers (a firm called Love Productions) or not.
But Fraser Nelson, editor of Tory-leaning magazine The Spectator, claimed the villain of the piece was “a still-unreformed welfare system” which did little to help people find work – or to ensure work pays.
He wrote: “I can only assume that the show’s critics (or the minority of them who actually watched it) see demons when they look at these people. I didn’t.
“I was struck by the strength of community spirit and amazed how they managed to stay so optimistic in a street that seems to have been cut off (by the welfare state) from the rest of the economy. These are the people who have been abandoned for years.”
Don’t miss
Daniel Finkelstein, a newspaper columnist-turned-Tory peer, said the show illustrates that simply cutting benefits and then expecting people to stand on their own two feet is a policy doomed to failure.
“Without intense support, without community workers to bring help right into the home,” the residents of James Turner Street (or at least, the ones the documentary focused on) have no chance of turning their lives around, according to Lord Finkelstein.
In this sense, the programme may have done some good after all – because it has challenged fantasies of both the left and right.
The right, or parts of it, talk as if there is a section of society quite capable of working but which refuses to even look for a job. The solution is to stop giving them money unless they change their ways.
But the left’s response, sometimes at least, is to talk as if such people simply don’t exist, or, at worst, exist in tiny numbers.
If a benefit claimant is capable of working then the only thing stopping them is the shortage of jobs, we’re told. To think otherwise is to indulge in demonising the unemployed or accusing them of “shirking”, supposedly.
What Benefits Street suggests is that there are kindhearted, socially responsible people in our society who, as things stand, wouldn’t know how to start looking for work – not because they are morally inferior but because they’ve never had a chance to absorb the knowledge and experiences taken for granted by those of us with jobs, or who worked in the past, or whose partners work, or who grew up in households with working parents.
This isn’t an issue explored in any detail by the Channel 4 show, despite the kind words of some writers.
How did the residents get in this situation, and what type of help do they need? You’ll search in vain for any answers in Benefits Street.
But perhaps despite itself, the programme is a challenge to attitudes to welfare on both the right and the left.