Rarely a day goes by when I don’t think about social security benefits. That’s partly because I am, myself, a benefit claimant or, as the Daily Mail might call me, a feckless scrounger leaching off the state. My benefit of choice is the State Retirement Pension which I am constantly and incorrectly told by my fellow doddery old pensioner acquaintances is not a benefit at all: it’s a pension. Us geriatrics don’t like being referred to as benefit claimants, but that is literally what we are. The state pension is the ultimate contributory state benefit. There is always debate about the benefits system and sometimes I find myself agreeing and disagreeing with everyone about which benefit is fair and which is unfair.
Take the Motability Scheme, for example. If you qualify for certain benefits, you can have a mobility vehicle in exchange for part of your benefit. This is a great boon for people who otherwise would not be able to get out and about. I agree with that. But there’s another side to the story. The Motability scheme has the biggest fleet of vehicles in Europe and the second biggest on the planet, just behind the Chinese army. There’s been a lot of fuss about the scheme recently with those on – surprise, surprise! – the right of politics not just attacking the scheme but ridiculing it.
It is a fact that only one in ten mobility vehicles have to be changed in order for disabled folk to use. It is also a fact that many claimants are able to obtain a number of vehicles in one household and can acquire top end vehicles, like BMWs, Audis and 4X4s. People driving around, like I do, in second-hand cars, acquired on the never-never could be, and indeed are, jealous of what the perceive to be privileged treatment for a certain group of people. There are other benefits, too, which I won’t drone on about here, which make the Motability scheme extremely attractive to people. That’s why there are something like 860,000 of them on the road today.
Populist idiot and Tory ‘leader’ Kemi Badenoch, who could pick a fight in an empty room, joined in. She would “restrict Motability vehicles to people with serious disabilities”, adding that, “Those cars are not for people with ADHD [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder].” Now she tells me. If only I had known and I could have had one, too, just like those hundreds of thousands of benefit claimants ‘swinging the lead’, pretending to have a neurological condition or chronic anxiety. Lee ‘Anderthal’ Anderson of the fascist party Reform UK Ltd said that Motability was an “absolute scandal”, adding, “I remember back in the day if you were on disability and you wanted a car from the state it was a blue three-wheeler. What’s wrong with that? Let’s go back to that.” What Kemi Badenoch and Lee Anderthal don’t directly say is that they think all people who are disabled in one way or another, or have mental health and neurological conditions aren’t unwell at all. If you have no legs, they will argue, then stand on your own two feet. These right wing Douchebags should at least remember who was in office when the scheme ballooned: they were.
Yet, when something like 20% of new vehicles are snapped up by Motability, many of them high end luxury cars, then isn’t some kind of balancing required? I have never owned a new car and never will. I am not jealous of the fact that disabled people get new cars when I don’t. I have better things to concern myself about but clearly many critics of the scheme don’t. Look, how about a compromise? Make most Motability vehicles bog standard Fords, Vauxhalls and the like, except for, as Kemi put it, “people with serious disabilities.” I rather like the idea of extra mobility for those who lack mobility.
We’ve also had the same argument about the scrapping of the two-child benefit cap being removed. I have always had mixed feelings about paying extra benefits as people have more children. When I worked for the DWP, the common view among colleagues – and me, by the way – was that if my partner and I had more children, our wages, which were piss poor already, didn’t go up accordingly, but those claiming saw their benefits rise. How on Earth was that fair? I still feel that way and yet I don’t. Labour’s decision to scrap the cap means that something like 400,000 children will be taken out of poverty. I support that, too. But the popular image on the cesspit that is social media is of Matt Lucas in drag with six young children, clearly on benefits in a popular but twisted TV show like Little Britain which punched down at the poor to solicit laughs from the comfortably off. Lucas and his desperately unfunny ‘comedy’ partner David Walliams have played major roles in demonising the poor and I know that at least the former accepts it.
In general, no one gets rich on benefits, unless they are involved in fraud but – and I am loathe to write this – there are a lot of people who are far from poor who use Motability vehicles. PIP (Personal Independence Payment), one of the qualifying benefits, is not means-tested. That is not to say that any of the recipients are not deserving a a car because they fulfil the medical criteria for PIP but just a factual statement that some – I don’t know how many – people on PIP are not poor. I’m not suggesting moving to means-testing, either, because that’s potentially even more expensive to administer. But given the state of the public finances and the perception of fairness among The Great British Public, there is a debate to be had, just not from the attack-dog debate from the populist right.
A major problem with our benefits system is around perception. So many people, particularly those who get their opinions from the gutter press and social media, come out with the same bollocks as the likes of Badenoch and Anderson, that everyone on benefits is living the life of Riley while the rest of us are struggling to get by. It’s true that David Cameron’s Conservative government of 2010, in which some Liberal Democrats took jobs, took an axe to the benefit fraud investigation department and made it far easier for fraudsters to operate, but it is also right to point out that you have to go through loads of hoops in order to claim any benefits at all, few of which cover even the basics in life.
Somewhere between the two extremes there is a better way. Somewhere between top-of-the-range BMWs and blue three-wheelers is a compromise vehicle. Lifting the two-child benefits cap could come with obligations, too, which include assistance in getting into work. And somewhere there must be a solution to the mass poverty Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives inflicted upon Britain because what I see today is worse than ever. A change has to come. Attacking the weakest in society isn’t the answer, no matter how hard the Daily Mail tells you otherwise.
