Hatred and the Express

I'm increasingly baffled by the Daily Express and its editor Hugh Whittow.  He appears to have three main preoccupations: 1) the death of Princess Diana  2) exaggerated weather forecasts and  3) hatred of all benefits claimants.  If he could get all three into one story he would no doubt be delighted.
That hatred of people who claim benefits - and "hatred" really is not too strong a word - is now descending into lies calculated to make targets out of the sick, the disabled and the unemployed.  There are writers (I won't call them journalists) on the paper who are happy to cobble stories which are becoming increasingly bizarre.
Take Alison Little and Jan Disley.  They produced a piece yesterday which conflates two bits of "news", with no justification whatever.  One was about a fraudster who faces jail for claiming around £94k that she wasn't entitled to.  Quite right too.  Nobody, least of all genuine claimants, would ever defend her behaviour.  But how's this for a headline: "Benefits Britain shame: Welfare cheat swindles £94k while 3.5m homes have NO ONE working".  Not only does the one have nothing to do with the other.  The Express has cited what was actually claimed as good news for the government by everyone else.  And in its first three sentences the writers manage to imply that the workless household figures are getting worse, "out of control", when in fact they're improving.  The Indus Delta site has a neat summary, taken from the ONS figures.  There's a sort of acknowledgement of this by the Express: "Although the number of families dependent on welfare was very slightly down from last year's 3.7m, opponents of Britain's benefits culture said the official figures were still extremely worrying."  And those opponents include, unsurprisingly, the the boss of the odious and misnamed Taxpayers' Alliance.  So, whatever it takes to stoke the hatred is permissible.
But that's not enough.  Today a writer called Giles Sheldrick produced another bizarre piece: "scarcely-believable excuses of benefit cheats revealed".  (Note that "scarcely-believable".  Not brave enough to say outright that they were lying.)  The piece is scattered with the familiar hate phrases; "generous handouts" and "lifelong layabouts" are just two.  They talk about "some of Britain's most deceitful individuals hellbent on conning the welfare state out of £1.2bn", without any explanation of where that figure comes from.  They issue "a fresh call to hard-working and honest families to 'shop' those who view welfare as a limitless cash machine", linking dishonesty and unemployment.  And, despicably, they say that IDS's reforms come from "frustration that a generation of lifelong layabouts trapped on benefits creates an annual £208bn welfare bill - £1 of every £3 raise in tax revenue".  Note the carelessness of the verb "trapped" when that's not what he means.  But, more importantly, note the way in which the benefits bill, which includes pensions and working tax credits, is said to be spent entirely on layabouts.
We heard this week that attacks, verbal and physical, on disabled people are increasing as morons, stirred up by this sort of vicious and dishonest writing, accuse them of being scroungers and worse.  That's the tip of the iceberg.  Hatred begets hate crimes.  Why Whittow is doing this I can't imagine.  Maybe it's down to his paper's owner, Richard Desmond.  But the freedom of the press doesn't cover the freedom to spread this sort of vicious dishonesty.

The law of unintended consequences

We have written about the likely consequences of the "bedroom tax", the deduction from the housing benefit paid to people in social housing who are considered to be "under-occupying", i.e. have spare bedrooms.  There is a severe shortage of smaller accommodation in the social housing sector for them to move into, and falling back on private rented housing will cost more in housing benefit.  But now we hear that Universal Credit is going to cut the amount of private rented accommodation available.  According to the Telegraph, the Nationwide, the biggest buy-to-let mortgage provider, is not going to offer any more loans to landlords.  The reasoning is that under UC the housing benefit is paid not to the landlord but to the claimant; so the likelihood is that a lot of rent won't get paid and so landlords will default on their mortgages.  Net result - a lot of homeless people.  I don't think that's quite what Iain Duncan Smith intended.
And there's another hole which the government has dug for themselves, or rather for local councils.  Those councils have had their support for means-tested council tax benefit cut by £500m, and many councils have had to charge people on benefits who currently don't pay anything.  The Guardian reports that up to 84% of those hit with the charge are not likely to pay it.  While some councils will pursue people for payment, others will consider that the cost of going after what are small sums is just not worth it.
Another snippet of news: new figures from the ONS show that in 2012 a quarter of all workers earned less than £12,800 a year.
Finally, hats off to a group of churches, the Methodist and United Reformed Churches, the Church of Scotland and the Baptist Union, who have published a study called The Lies we Tell Ourselves.  They accuse the government of deliberately misusing evidence and statistics to misrepresent the plight of the poor. There's a summary on the BBC's website.  (Be careful, BBC, they'll be complaining about bias again.)

Jonty's "tweets are protected"

Jonty Olliff-Cooper, A4e's Director of Policy and Strategy, seems to have learned his lesson about careless postings on Twitter.  You can't read his tweets now unless you're a "confirmed follower".  We can't know whether he got a rocket from his employer for that offensive exchange (see our post of 9 February), but it's disappointing that journalists, even on Private Eye, missed it, or didn't think it important.

I suppose I must comment on the latest employment figures, but it's wearisome.  We all know that the figures are, if not exactly rigged, at least hiding the truth.  12% of the increase in "jobs" is accounted for by people providing free labour on the various "workfare" schemes - the ONS insists that it has to include them.  We have no idea how many of the people reported to have come off JSA are being sanctioned by being kicked off benefits.  And it all seems at odds with the recent story about Costa Coffee advertising 8 jobs at its new shop in Nottingham and getting 1,701 applications.  (One of the saddest things about that story was that a spokeswoman said that some of the applicants were former managers who were "clearly overqualified for the positions".)  Iain Duncan Smith was heard to say today that the figures showed that the Work Programme was beginning to be effective.  No, they don't.

"Statistics cast doubt on coalition's '500,000 new jobs' claim"

That's the headline to an article in the Guardian yesterday.  It will no doubt surprise most of you to know that if you're on the Work Programme you're counted as one of the half a million new jobs which the government brags about.  105,000 people, 20% of that total, are on what the report calls back-to-work schemes (the Work Programme and MWA) but are classed as in work.  The article is muddled on its figures in places, but it's clear on that 105,000.  The vast majority are on benefits but the government counts them as new jobs.
Apparently it's not really the government's fault.  The (ILO) International Labour Organisation insists that our Office of National Statistics "counts people as employed if they are adding to the nation's economic output, regardless of whether or not they are paid."  Mark Hoban wants the ONS to change this, but says that it makes little difference.  The equivalent of, "Whatever".
Now here's an interesting point that lawyers might want to get their teeth into.  People on these schemes are "adding to the nation's economic output" - the ONS has accepted that, and it's what Hoban doesn't like.  So shouldn't they get at least minimum wage?
The next time that the government puts out any figures on unemployment or jobs, they are probably not telling the truth.