Benefit sanctions: Hold on to your anger, you're going to need it

Learning that, despite the pleas of countless charities to extend the three-month moratorium and despite the reams of evidence about the ineffectiveness and inefficiency of the system, the Government has insisted upon restarting a notoriously and uncommonly harsh sanctions regime, elicits a visceral response. Anger, shame, despondency and fear all spring to mind as fitting reactions to this latest demonstration of unabashed cruelty from the Conservative Government.

READ MORE: Mhairi Black absolutely nails the truth about Tory benefit sanctions

Anger because the Government has heard the harrowing testimonies and they’ve read the sobering statistics which tell us that this approach fosters anxiety and hostility, leaves the sanctioned with nothing at moments when they are often most vulnerable, and simply doesn’t achieve what it’s supposed to: getting more people into work or on to higher earnings. The Government know all of this; they just don’t care.

Anyone who truly believed this would herald in an era of “compassionate conservatism” must have had their capacity for critical thinking drowned out by all that clapping

Shame because, for better or worse, this is our Government, our Union of countries, our society’s democratically chosen ideal of how people should be treated when they’re out of work or need some extra support because their wages or hours are too low to make ends meet. On so many counts, imagining what people must think who are looking in at the UK from outside right now is a pretty shame-inducing experience, and this makes the top of the list.

Despondency because we’ve been having the same conversations on a loop for years and next to nothing has changed. Because saying the same thing repeatedly feels like wasted energy but saying nothing feels like compliance. Because here in Scotland we’ve voted and voted and voted to get the Tories out, and like a hydra they just seem to come back stronger and stronger thanks to large parts of England and Wales. And because as much as we might have wished for them to choose something different, something better than this, when they had the chance they didn’t take it.

And fear. A hopeless, gut-wrenching fear of the future. For the people already on the brink of financial or emotional crisis whose lives will be made more stressful and humiliating by a process which is antagonistic by design. For those who risk being plunged into poverty and destitution like so many before them if they’re sanctioned for missteps as minor as being late to an appointment. And for those who are shielding or affected by the virus, who must decide between losing the money they need to survive and endangering their own and others’ health in order to meet their job-seeking conditions.

READ MORE: UK Tories to restart 'cruel and degrading' benefit sanctions

The following words were removed unceremoniously from Gov.UK guidance shortly after midnight on July 1: “You will not get a sanction if you cannot keep to your Claimant Commitment because of coronavirus (Covid-19).” Numerous claimants reported receiving a message around the same time, alerting them to their reinstated commitment.

As if the pandemic turned into a pumpkin when the clock struck 12 and now the Cinderellas of the world had better get back to sweeping before the wicked Prime Minister and his ugly cabinet secretaries find out they’ve been living it up at the lockdown ball. Yes, even ridicule feels like a natural, if defensive, reaction to the Government’s characteristic bullheadedness in pushing forward with this decision, consequences be damned.

The one emotion which can no longer easily be summoned is shock. Ten years into Tory rule and even the most naïve among us have surely moved beyond the disbelief and denial stages of grief. The pandemic may have bought us a brief reprieve from some of the worst elements of the Government’s punitive social and economic policies, but anyone who truly believed this would herald in an era of “compassionate conservatism” must have had their capacity for critical thinking drowned out by all that clapping.

Admittedly, when the Government chose to pay up to 80% of furloughed workers’ wages, this was momentarily disorientating. Here the Tories were, taking action and spending money to help people who would otherwise be pushed into poverty – exactly the sort of thing they would normally refuse, upon pain of death, to consider. (And that’s no exaggeration: austerity-driven poverty has literally killed people.) But this move wasn’t so surprising when you understand that it was also essential to the survival of the big businesses on whose support the Conservatives rely.

Benefit sanctions are an ideologically driven punishment on poor people for being poor

The facade of kindness – and of rationality in the face of scientific evidence – has quickly chipped away as the Government’s devotion to business interests and indifference to people on low or no incomes has resumed in full swing.

There was always going to be an expiry date on emergency measures taken in response to Covid-19.

It just turns out that for those reliant on social security this date has come before, rather than after, people have had time to come out the other side of the crisis, never mind recover from it. Welcome to the new normal, same as the old normal.

Since the beginning of lockdown charities, campaign groups and everyone with any grasp on the events that are unfolding before us have pointed out that this crisis lays bare injustices which were already present and necessitates long-term change, not just temporary sticking plasters. Fixing fundamental flaws in the Universal Credit system – from the waiting period, to the level of payment, to the unreasonably harsh sanctions regime – are among the changes which need to last well beyond the short term.

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The fact that the Conservative Government understood why such changes were necessary to help the millions of people who were forced by Covid-19 to sign on, in many cases for the first time, should be a lesson in why the same should apply to those who require social security for innumerable other unpredictable reasons.

Sadly, this is not a lesson they are inclined to learn. Imagining that they might learn it now would be to believe that they had somehow arrived at these policies by accident and not as part of a wilful expression of their own moralistic vision of work and welfare.

SNP MP Mhairi Black hit the nail on Wednesday when she tweeted: “Benefit sanctions cost more to administer than they save.

This is the one feeling that must always be guarded against. Acceptance.

‘‘Benefit sanctions are not about ‘saving the taxpayer money’ – though that would be a shite excuse for having them anyway. Benefit sanctions are an ideologically driven punishment on poor people for being poor.”

And whoever let a little thing like a global pandemic get in the way of ideology?

The final stage of grief, they say, is acceptance. When loss is irreparable and the fight unwinnable, this is a healthy goal.

The danger in facing such a bleak political landscape over an extended period is that you find yourself slipping into that same sense of resignation to the inevitable; that creeping desire to close your eyes and be consumed by the waves when the alternative feels like swimming, endlessly, against the tide.

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This is the one feeling that must always be guarded against. Acceptance. There is nothing acceptable about the way that people, families, children in the UK are not only allowed to sink into poverty, but intentionally pushed and then treated like criminals for the pleasure.

It is on all of us who have the time, energy, money, or platform to challenge this and to never allow the Government a moment’s peace on the subject. Hold on to your grief, your despair, your unbridled rage, and your abject horror – you’re going to need them if things are ever going to change.