Caitlin Moran: ‘I lived on welfare. Here’s my take on Benefits Street’

The weird thing about having started so many columns, speeches and meetings with the sentence, “I was raised on benefits” (it has become by way of an odd catchphrase, my version of “Nice to see you – to see you, nice” but a lot less fun) is how rarely in London it is met with a cheerful “Me too”. I mean, it never happens.
I so rarely experience a rejoining, “Amazing! I was also raised on benefits!” Or, “Do you remember those old yellow books — that you had to take to the Post Office? And how Thursday was the best day of the week — because that’s when you got your money? Awww, man — old skool vibez! High fives!”
I’m not trying to be disingenuous here, but I genuinely can’t remember anyone having replied “Me too” in the past ten years.
Back in the Nineties you’d get it a fair bit, interviewing bands from Manchester and Glasgow and Swansea. We’d do our povvo-bonding over the years they spent signing on before they got a deal. Being 18, getting kicked out of your parents’ houses and moving into a tiny flat. Safe for the first time ever. Thank you, benefits. Thank you, welfare. Thank you for never letting the sins of the father become the sins of the child. For letting every generation have the potential to start again — under its own steam. And then letting that generation — the ones I knew, anyway – eventually buy a Rolls-Royce and drive it into a swimming pool.
But in the past ten years, since I’ve given up music journalism, I’ve pretty much stopped meeting people in London who come from a background like mine. I’ve stopped meeting people raised on Incapacity Benefit, Jobseeker’s Allowance or Child Benefit.
“Sports and rock’n’roll — they’re the only two ways out for the working classes,” as my dad used to always remind me. “There isn’t a third way unless you win the pools.”
And he was right. In the past decade I’ve primarily hung out with journalists and writers instead: gone to meetings with TV production companies and department heads at TV companies, met with film people and done most of my socialising — getting drunk with and kind of falling on top of — comedians, actors and TV presenters. And none of them knew about the cream-coloured books or Thursday. None of them knew about always feeling judged — as if everything could be taken away at any moment. None of them knew about the terrible, heart-constricting fear. None of them had been on benefits.
And that’s because people who were raised on benefits never really make it all the way to here — to London. To this London — Media London. To the place where the power is. Those Giro cheques, and those social circles, don’t stretch this far. Those people don’t get to commission documentaries, or make dramas, or write columns or books about their lives, speak on Newsnight or tell jokes on Have I Got News For You. They do not get to the place with the control of all the stories. They do not get to speak.
You just see them in crowd shots instead, as a mass — shouting on the terraces, or queuing in the Boxing Day sales at Next. In film terms people on benefits would be credited as “non-speaking extras”. They get neither names nor lines. And they certainly never sit in the director’s chair.
And so to Benefits Street, the Channel 4 documentary series that has caused the biggest controversy and ratings surge since My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding – also on Channel 4. With 57,000 signatures on a petition to withdraw the rest of the series, more than 1,000 complaints to Ofcom and Channel 4’s head of factual programmes hauled on to Newsnight and accused of making “poverty porn”, Benefits Street has kicked the hornet’s nest of Britain’s “underclass” issue.
Many have called Benefits Street a straight-up piece of character assassination on benefit claimants. The first episode showed two men called Fungi and Danny involved in various criminal escapades, soundtracked by some oddly upbeat “look at the resourceful peasants!” music. Danny lined a bag with tinfoil in order to go shoplifting and ended up getting handcuffed, face-down on the pavement, in the middle of the Bull Ring shopping centre. Fungi, meanwhile, stole magazines from a Premier Inn and sold them — pretending they were The Big Issue — before spending the money on lager.
On screen these scenes were accompanied by the repeated flashing of the hashtag #benefitsstreet — as if to remind viewers to tweet such messages as “Gas these scroungers”, “Where do we get guns to kill these w*****s?” and “F****** burn them”, which they duly and dutifully did. About people who — let us not forget — we knew the exact addresses of along with the precise, undefended, flammable flimsiness of their front doors: James Turner Street, Birmingham, B18 4ND.
Many others — primarily those who’d actually watched the show — argued to the contrary: that this programme was actually good for benefit claimants. That it was in all truth a well-balanced piece of documentary-making let down only by its misplaced soundtrack and peerlessly Daily Mail-activating title.
On Benefits Street — this supposed Hammer of the Scroungers — we saw a real and solid community with people in and out of each other’s houses, feeding each other and entwined in each other’s lives in a way you would not see in, say, Hampstead or in the Cotswolds.
Here was a local entrepreneur called Smoggy, who went door-to-door with a tray, selling cups of washing powder, sugar and tea for 50p — often the biggest unit of cash available to residents. “I’m thinking for this street it should be only 30p or 20p,” he said after only selling a single cup all morning and giving away washing powder to a resident who’d had her Job Seeker’s Allowance stopped and was living on £30 a week. “I know what it’s like,” he said to her gently as he handed it over without payment.
We also saw a progressive, open-minded community, one that would have shamed a similar street in a far higher wage bracket and containing residents with far better educations. On Benefits Street there were 13 different nationalities coexisting on limited resources with little or no friction. Uncomprehending Romanians tore open binbags and travellers pitched up on the park at the end of the street, but there was little more than grumbling and the odd catty comment. No violence as they dealt, practically — stoically — with the issues that paralyse and terrify Westminster. Just sitting on the front step with an extra long fag, smoking and watching.
And like some idealised Benetton advert overdubbed with Birmingham accents, kids of all colours played together on the discarded mattresses in the street — the “chav trampoline” as we used to call them back in Wolverhampton. Actually, we used to say “pikey”, but you can’t say that any more. Even though we were the ones called pikey.
So is Benefits Street an unkind piece of snide propaganda against Britain’s underclass? Or a balanced documentary showing how benefit claimants struggle as the coalition’s austerity measurements begin to kick in and multicultural immigration is left, pretty much, to sort itself out?
What is Benefits Street? Here’s the statistic I find most interesting: with 4.3 million viewers for the first episode, Benefits Street had higher ratings than any programme Channel 4 screened in the whole of 2013. Commentators have boggled at what a “breakout” hit this is and the coverage it has received from every section of the media.
But in the UK 20.3 million families claim benefits: more than four times the “huge” viewership of Benefits Street. Pretty much every commentator who has written about Benefits Street has presumed that the viewers are very different to the subjects — that one class is tuning in to watch another, to get an outrage boner over “poverty porn.”
The reality, of course, is that with 64 per cent of British families claiming benefits, most of the people in this country technically live on a Benefits Street. That street is their street. They know this stuff — or at least some of it. They tussle with the same paperwork. They fret over the same bills. They fear the same “bedroom tax” and they know 75 per cent of the austerity measures — which touch on their benefits and their lives — have not kicked in yet.
This is not an unexplored world to the people who watch these programmes — merely to the people who make them and those who write about them. They are presuming Benefits Street is as alien a spectacle to the 4.3 million as life for seahorses in the mangrove swamps or protons in outer space. For millions of those 4.3 million it will simply be what they can see outside their windows instead.
Media London is unaware of how obvious its unawareness is. To everyone else it’s the most noticeable aspect of all.
So this is the real thing I take from Benefits Street. Not the hugeness of the outrage — but the tininess of the cause. Re-runs of Shameless and CCTV of some muggings on Crimewatch aside, this is probably all we will see of benefit claimants on television this year: the people who need to claim benefits to top up below-minimum-wage jobs; people who need to claim housing benefits to top up an overheated private rental sector.
Ninety-nine houses on a single street in Birmingham are now seen as the prism through which we examine the lives of every person on benefits in Britain — a significance that would cause any five-part documentary series to buckle and break. For it’s impossible to do it. Benefits Street is just that — Benefits Street. Just one street. Not Benefit City or Benefit Britain.
To show how absurd the weight and analysis lumped on Benefits Street is, imagine for a moment a putative Middle Class Street.
If, on our new Middle Class Street, we’d seen three out of 99 lovely Victorian terraces engaged in crime — the same ratio as Benefits Street — but the middle-class crimes of tax evasion and expenses fiddling instead, no one would be lining up to condemn the entire middle class. No one would be presuming to be an expert on the middle-class “lifestyle”. No one would be making statements on the moral degeneracy of the 21st-century middle classes.
Even if they were, middle-class voices have so much access to the media that such statements would be easily countered by dozens of columns and radio sermons on the subject from middle-class broadcasters and writers. The middle classes would not be talked about as if they were something that must . . . end. Something to be cured. Something that has gone on for far too long and must be remedied. Something that is only ever a problem.
When the irony is, of course, that the working-class benefit fraud costs £1.2 billion a year, while tax evasion — inevitably a middle-class crime — costs £14 billion annually.
£14 billion! That it is often repeated does not dim its outrage. The fact is simple: richer people steal more. You cannot trust them. Hide your espresso machine when they come round, fellow peasant, lest they sneak them into their Cath Kidston tote and make their escape in a Prius.
But for now — no. There are no other shows about this 69 per cent of our country. There are no shows about the reality of the way this country pays for its low-wage economy and feverish, demented housing market. There’s no touching on the statistics that show that a worryingly disproportionate number of people with mental health issues are left with no option but to go on benefits. There’s also nothing about local co-operatives, communal allotments and campaigns to keep local shops and pubs open. There’s nothing about these people actually living.
For Benefit Street’s one piece of poor documentary-making was that it wasn’t about these people’s lives — it was about their mere survival. About money and worry and deals.
We never saw the interior lives of the subjects — what they read and dream and joke about. The adventures they have had, as we have all had adventures, the fanciful ideas they amuse themselves with, their views on politics, culture, sex and space. All we saw them do was try to keep warm and fed — the concerns, to be blunt, of animals. They were denied nearly every aspect of joy, creativity, revolution, the sublime.
So it continues. People whom we think of as only caring about being warm and fed do not get to write drama serials or sci-fi cartoons or jokes for Radio 4. They are not in the line-up on Question Time and they do not get to wear beautiful dresses on the red carpet. They don’t get to ask questions and they are never asked for answers. They are nowhere.
Instead all they have is Benefits Street. Five episodes and 99 houses — this one street — that currently stand for 20.3 million untold stories.
It’s not all the shouting about Benefits Street that surprises me. It’s all the silence that came from that street before and which will resume again after the series has ended. It’s how weirdly lonely, ten years in, it is writing about all this stuff.
Benefits Street , Monday January 27, 9pm