More hate-mongering

I don't know whether Iain Duncan Smith and Richard Desmond have ever met, but they certainly work to help each other.  Desmond is the owner of Channel 5 and the Daily Express, and he uses both to demonise the poor.  After Channel 4 had screened the infamous Benefits Street, it was Channel 5 which hosted the "debate" on the subject.  Now, Desmond's channel is making a series of its own.  No title has been decided, they say (but the makers of Benefits Street said the same, and they lied) but it's about the benefits "culture", and they are in the process of filming.
We can see how they go about it through the protests of one of the cities unwillingly involved.  Hull has a lot to be encouraged about at the moment, in the midst of one of the worst unemployment rates in the country.  But now the film-makers have been leafletting the poorer estates seeking gullible people to take part, and have already done some filming.  Local councillors are furious, but seem helpless to prevent it.
Of course people should have the freedom to take part, if they are given accurate information and understand what they're doing.  But what about the people who live in the area and have not consented to this?  Benefits Street led to children who live in James Turner St being bullied.  Other residents felt that they had been stigmatised simply for their address.  Many of those who did take part believed that they were misled by the film-makers.  If there's a redress in law, none of them can afford to sue.
I have a suggestion.  Send Katie Hopkins to live on one of these estates for a while.  I'd watch that.

Fear and loathing

Many people have asked how it can be that Iain Duncan Smith keeps his job.  Perhaps the answer lies here, in a survey of how Tory party members rate the cabinet.  As you see, IDS is top.  Overwhelmingly, Tories approve of Smith and what he is doing.  So he can mess up one project after another and it doesn't matter.  He can be astonishingly rude to the select committee (to which only Labour members bothered to turn up) and it doesn't matter.  The right-wing love him, because he's engaging with the enemy, poor people, and trouncing them.
But why does the right hate the poor so much?  I've come to the conclusion that what lies behind it is fear.  Consider the case of Jack Monroe.  On paper she ticks all the boxes to attract the contempt of the comfortable.  She's young, didn't do all that well at school, became a single mother, is a lesbian and was unemployed.  How's that for a stereotype?  But Jack set up a blog about food; basically, how she fed her child on £10 a week.  Not only does she give wise advice on how to eat very cheaply; she talks eloquently about her poverty and the system which trapped her in it.  The blog became hugely popular, and Jack committed the cardinal sin; she emerged as an individual.  The media took her up.  Sainsbury's employed her in a marketing campaign.  (She has made it clear that she takes only the living wage from this work and the rest goes to various projects.)  When Channel 5 planned the wretched "debate" following Benefits Street, they invited Jack Monroe onto the panel.  And there she met the stark hatred of the right in the shape of Edwina Currie.  Jack's response can be read in this open letter, published in the Mirror.  The other spouter of vitriol was Katie Hopkins.  Both of them were reacting to an individual who challenges the stereotype.  Between them, Currie and Hopkins did the right no favours, but they showed the true face of hatred - fear.
From the late eighteenth century in Britain the elites feared the Mob.  (It generally had a capital letter because it assumed the shape, in their minds, of a single monstrous creature.)  The poor could be suppressed, but when they combined their sheer numbers made them terrifying.  Riots happened frequently, and the Mob could unleash violence and destruction which was ruthlessly put down.  Remember what happened in 2011.  Rioting broke out in a few places in Britain.  The elites reacted with courts handing down brutal sentences way in excess of what the actual offences warranted.  The position hadn't changed - the Mob must be dealt with severely before it can challenge the established order.
The right cannot deal with poor people as individuals in any way like themselves, so it demonises them.  And then it fears what that demon could do.

Weekend round-up

Still waiting for A4e's accounts, but as one of our commenters points out, A4e has frequently been late filing its accounts in recent years.  Perhaps of more immediate interest is the down-grading of its credit rating.  But while we await developments there are the usual attempts by the DWP to hide its own incompetence.  The news came out that there has been a blunder with the hated bedroom tax.  Anyone who was on HB before 1996 and has been on it ever since should not be subject to the new legislation; they are covered by an older law which wasn't superseded by the new one.  One estimate is that this applies to around 40,000 people, many of whom have already had to go through the misery of losing their home or trying to exist on less money.  And I reckon that many of the people who have been on HB that long will be disabled or have long-term conditions.  So the government intends to "close the loop-hole".  It's not clear whether that will mean more retro-active legislation, or whether they can just sneak it through on a Statutory Instrument, which doesn't go through Parliament.  Either way, why did those highly-paid civil service lawyers not spot this before?
The DWP tried to distract from this with news that the benefits cap is very successful.  This is perhaps the most popular of all their bites at benefits, because it seems only fair that you shouldn't get more than many people can earn.  But it obscures the fact that the bulk of the money goes to landlords, not the claimants, so if you live in an expensively-rented home and suddenly lose your job, you will lose your home as well; this is shown by the fact that the large majority of the boroughs where people have been affected are in London.
The row about Channel 4's Benefits Street rumbles on.  The Daily Mail's contribution comes from John Bird, who is the founder of the Big Issue.  It's typically confused.  Bird thinks that the show tells the truth about benefits, and he's an expert, he says, because he came through dire poverty himself.  Perhaps the worst example of right-wing hate-mongering came from Katie Hopkins on the BBC's This Week last night.  Who's Katie Hopkins?  Quite.  Her only claim to fame is that she was on The Apprentice; she now writes for the Sun, and seems to have taken the place of Kelvin McKenzie as the nutter of choice for TV producers wanting to anger their viewers.  (The Daily Star called her rent-a-gob.)  Last night she called for more welfare cuts; directly insulted Diane Abbott MP, who showed remarkable restraint by not decking her; and said, "Food banks are a con."  The rage about her on Facebook, most of it, I guess, not from benefits claimants, shows that we might just have reached a point where the general public is embarrassed by this continual demonisation of the poorest.
One bit of news about the DWP itself came from an unlikely source - the Telegraph.  It revealed that more than 1,100 DWP staff have been warned over "prying" on benefits records.  That's breaches of privacy, accessing records they had no right to see.
Finally, how's this for irony?  "BBC misleads public every day on scale of cuts, fumes Cameron".  Yes, it's the Daily Mail describing Cameron getting annoyed on Radio Merseyside when he as accused of treating Liverpool unfairly.  No wonder the BBC has become so tepid in its journalism.