The
DWP Press Office has been infamous for a long time. It's
staffed by civil servants who are supposed to adhere to the Civil
Service Code, which says that they should have "integrity,
honesty, objectivity and impartiality". But perhaps
they're working under the direction of the DWP's Director of
Communications, Richard Caseby, who appears to have no such scruples (he's a former managing editor of the Sun). Back in January the Press Office put out a press release referring to "welfare hand-outs", a term the Daily Mail obligingly repeated. Then last week came this:
There was no pretence that this was anything other than straight-forward propaganda. Objective and impartial it was most certainly not. But I bet the intern (unpaid?) who gets to do the graphics has fun.
Today they attempted a rather different Twitter campaign, one which the Press Office didn't invent but which has decidedly sinister overtones. It's called "Proud to Work", and it seems to be the creation of the ERSA, the work programme providers' trade body - but clearly they are all working together with this. The DWP re-tweeted the highly dubious statement that the "Work Programme will deliver £18bn to economy". Immediately afterwards came re-tweets of stuff from Interserve, A4e and Working Links (not on this screen capture).
What I find most disturbing about this is the "proud to work" tag. It's subtle. It suggests that those who are not working are not proud, have no pride. It suggests that unemployment is voluntary, the result of lack of self-respect. Perhaps it suggests other things to you.
Is there anything that can be done about the DWP Press Office? Not at this stage in the parliament, I think. There doesn't seem to be any mechanism for opposition MPs to complain about it effectively. What it proves, however, very clearly, is that this government, and Iain Duncan Smith in particular, work closely with the right-wing press to spread lies and damaging propaganda. If they win in 2015, it will only get worse.
YouGov sends out a regular survey which includes questions on the companies which you would be proud or embarrassed to work for. I usually leave these blank, partly because the companies they list are no better or worse than any others, but mostly because a job is a job. However, there are two organisations which I would indeed be embarrassed, or even ashamed, to work for; the Daily Express and the DWP Press Office.
There are obviously people who are quite happy to work for the Express. One is Giles Sheldrick, who wrote yesterday's appalling article headlined "6,000 claimants forced into jobs as 'war on handouts' continues". You hardly need to read more. But the sub-heading is "Thousands of feckless families are off benefits and finally earning their keep a year after the Tories declared war on handout Britain." It's based on ONS figures which, of course, show nothing of the kind. How many people would have got jobs anyway? But IDS is quoted, the odious Tory Taxpayers Alliance is quoted (and Lord Freud and Anne Widdecombe), and it's all larded with the sort of language which would land Mr Sheldrick in court if he used it of, say, an ethnic minority. Some of the article cannot be put down to ignorance. Take: "About 300 of the worst offenders pocketed £47,000 a year – the equivalent of a £70,000-a-year taxable salary – official figures show. A further 900 got up to £42,000 a year." No mention of what Sheldrick surely knows - that most of that goes straight into the pockets of landlords. Or take: "Workshy families helped create an annual benefits bill of £167.7billion – up £27billion from 10 years ago." That bill, as Sheldrick surely knows, includes state pensions, which actually make up the bulk of it. So are we to conclude that Sheldrick was simply given the 6,000 figure and told to cobble together an article on it, so he reached for all the cliches with no sense that what he was doing was wrong?
The DWP Press Office is becoming an increasing cause for concern. There's an excellent summary of those concerns on the ilegal website. The Press Office consists of civil servants, who should be bound by the Civil Service Code. They should politically impartial. Yet their press releases often are not. In January they issued a press release which referred to "welfare handouts". This was taken up by the Daily Mail as a headline, as you'd expect. You can read what followed on the excellent Benefits and Work site. When challenged, there was no sense at the DWP that they had done anything wrong. The DWP Press Office also has a Twitter account, on which it posts utterly misleading graphics and statements which cannot be construed as politically neutral.
I'm beginning to think that I would also be ashamed to work for the BBC. But that's for another day.
