Britain Isn't Working

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Hello, Helen here.

Before we get going with the episode proper, I just wanted to deliver a very important message of my own.

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That way, you'll get to hear the latest pearls of wisdom from me and Amando as soon as is humanly possible.

Thank you for listening.

Now here is this week's episode.

Hello and welcome to Strong Message Here from BBC Radio 4, a journalist and a comedy writer's guide to the use and abuse of political language.

It's Helen Lewis.

And here is Armando Inucci.

That was a bit more showbiz than usual, wasn't it?

This week, our title is Britain's Not Working.

How do governments talk about unemployment and welfare?

But before we get to that, Armando, I understand you've been reading a book about.

Yes, I've been reading a book that I've been instructed not to read, helpfully, by Meta.

It's the book Careless People by an ex-Meta and Facebook employee, Sarah Wynne-Williams.

Full title, A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism.

So I wonder what's in that.

And Meta

have been encouraging, and in fact using the law in America to prevent the author from publicizing the book and are doing their best to stop people reading it.

It was one of those situations where the jokes slightly write themselves, don't they?

And that they are saying that, has this book even been through fact-checking?

Exactly.

It's like, well, at least it doesn't have a kind of rubbish AI image at the top.

And also, you know, they are kind of all for, as Zuckerberg explained very recently, all for freedom of speech.

And I thought, oh, are they hypocrites here?

Are they hypocrites?

Because, you know, they promote freedom of speech, but don't seem that keen on it when it's someone talking about themselves.

And I met a spokesperson that actually issued an explanation as to why they're doing this, which is the book is a mix of out of date and previously reported claims.

So they're doing it actually for environmental reasons, in that there's no point, you know, using all this paper for something that we already know.

That's right.

Exactly.

They are hypocritical.

That's very hypocritical.

We know that.

It's been very widely reported about all the terrible things that we've done.

So I don't really see why we need to go through again.

And we're so unbothered by that that we're pursuing the publisher through, though the author personally through the court.

She worked in the global team, didn't she?

She worked on global policy, yes.

Yeah, but we should say she did leave, I think it was eight or nine years ago.

So that bit of the story is correct, that she signed a non-disparagement agreement and has presumably now broken it in rather spectacular fashion.

Although there is a law somewhere in, I don't quite know how American law works, because there always seems to be a judge somewhere who overturns something another judge has indicated.

There is a law that non-disclosure agreements don't necessarily stop you from raising issues that are in the public interest.

That kind of makes sense.

In the way that there was

the Reynolds defense in libel law, which is basically you can print things that are spicier than usual if there is a public interest to defense.

Yes.

So I feel I'm doing everyone a service here by asking them not to read Careless People by Sarah Wynne Williams.

Full title, Cautionary Taylor, Power Greed, and Lost Idols, and publisher Macmillan.

ISBN number 372795.

Do not read or require a copy.

What has stood out?

Because I've been reading the reporting on it, and it said it's very interesting on Mark Zuckerberg's negotiations with the Chinese Communist Party about trying to get Facebook into China, which didn't in the end happen.

The other thing I thought made me want to read this book.

I read Character Limit, which is the New York Times journalist Ryan Mack and Kate Conger's book about how Elon Musk took over Twitter, which was basically the blueprint for Doge.

You know, just

parachute your cousin in or a 12-year-old and then just get all the passwords to the commute system and then just shut everything down and then reopen back up the things that you find out have broken.

So I probably will read this, but one thing I really loved about it is that the title is from Great Gatsby, isn't it?

It's Tom and Daisy, where they were careless people.

They smashed up things and people and retreated back into their vast carelessness.

It's such a beautiful thing.

Yeah, yeah, leaving other people to kind of mop up the mess.

The one thing I will mention that surprised me, it's less to do with Facebook and more indication of the political landscape in America in that when Sarah Wynne Williams, the author of Careless People, a full title, Cautionary Teller, Power Greed and Lost Idolism, first worked in Washington, she's from New Zealand and she came over to work in Washington, D.C.

in the New Zealand Embassy.

But when she told Americans where she came from, they would all say, oh, well, your English is very good.

That, for me, was the eye-opener.

That's very fun.

I've got a lot of relatives in New Zealand, you know, and apart from saying fuft and suxt, I think their English is pretty good.

Shall we move on to today?

Move on to the main topic.

Yes, welfare reform, which we're constantly told is spiraling budget in need of reform.

And, you know, I feel I've been looking at this for decades because it is such a refrain.

At some point, a government will say, we need to sort this out.

The system is broken, it's spiraling out of control.

And the solution always is cuts reduce the budget.

So maybe we should look at how welfare, poverty, unemployment, disability, the language used by governments over the years.

Maybe look at that first and then we should ask ourselves: does the language now being used reflect what's actually happening?

How does it match actions and argument, really?

I think the background to this is worth saying is that there is a genuine problem here, which is particularly post-COVID, there has been a really big uptick in the number of people claiming long-term sickness benefits, above what you would expect, just because, you know, we're on a long-term upward trend anyway of disability and sickness benefits because the population is getting older.

And as people get older, they pick up more, you know, dents in the bumper and they find things harder.

So we have got this multi-billion pound,

it is a black hole.

I mean, this might be a Kirsten's reasonable black hole, but there is more and more funding need to be met from that.

Also, at the same time, that the working-age population is getting smaller and smaller.

There's fewer taxpayers to put into the system.

So I think the background to it is something that every successive government is aware of.

Since the last has been very aware of.

And we can argue about this later.

I wonder whether the spiralling costs of it are less to do with people using or gaming the system and more to do with the fact that there are blockages in the health system.

And until those blockages are worked out and resolved, you're going to end up with this increasingly huge backlog of cases and you're dealing with.

But anyway, I think there's also a series of perverse incentives as well, which is that the rate for unemployment benefit within Universe Credit is now pretty poor.

And you can more than double that by being signed off for mental health reasons too.

So if people are really, really struggling to get by on unemployment benefits, there is every incentive to claim the maximum that they're entitled to.

So, maybe there were also people who were technically entitled before and didn't, and they now have been swept into that group.

Yeah, although, interestingly, I'm no one to stop bandy statistics backwards and forth, but

four-fifths of those who claim illness through mental health also have a disability.

And the system is so complex, it's unsurprising that anyone who has a disability and who has to try and work their way through this system, there will be pressure on mental health alongside it as a result.

Anyway, that's something that I hear from lots of people who have taken time off work for mental health conditions is that actually the stress of navigating the system when you're suffering from anxiety or depression is something that compounds those problems.

I mean, when I was prepping for this, I did find myself writing down a list of all the DWP, PIP, WCA, ESA, universal credit.

I mean, it is a bewildering acronym, a thon, isn't it?

That's right.

Yes, it's yes.

It's a jungle of acronyms.

And if we're having trouble trying to parse it and understand what's what, imagine you are in a kind of tense, highly anxious situation where you know that how you fill in these forms and the questions and the answers you supply will determine whether or not you have something to get through the week.

I have noticed a change in tone of the language that Liz Kendall has been putting out.

In the past, I remember Jeremy Hunt, about a year or so ago, so just before the general election, talking about possible reforms of the welfare system, using a carrot and stick approach to get people back into work.

And my question is, why do we actually have to use a stick on those with disabilities and those mental health issues?

Why do we have to use that metaphor of a stick?

But I have noticed a very deliberate effort by Liz Kendall and indeed Keir Starmer to ditch that language, to say we're going to do away with the language of scroungers.

You know, people, it's clear people are out of work and are ill from work that do need help.

And it's about encouraging people back into work.

So that has changed.

It's then a question of is the solution in the proposals, has that at all changed from what's normally offered?

I think that's caught up with reality in some respects, right?

Which is that some of the language, you know, I remember Nick Clegg's alarm clock Britain and the idea of how hard it was for people to go to work and see the drawn curtains of people who were still at home.

Yeah.

Nice.

Squeezed middle.

Squeezed middle.

I remember the man squeezed middle very

vividly.

But Nigel Farage at the weekend interviewed The Times said, my voters have alarm clocks.

There's a lot of that.

But I wonder if one of the reasons why Labour aren't using language like that, not only because lots of the backbenchers don't like it, I mean, lots of their backbenchers don't like these cuts, full stop, but also because it creates an artificial divide between people on benefits and people who aren't.

You know, I think they're trying to ditch that idea that Britain is essentially made up of two different, unchanging groups of people, and people do move in and out of work as well.

And I think that's the thing they're trying to do: is say, what we'd like to do is help people who are currently in the economically inactive group get back into the workforce.

They are not that chunk of people that is fixed and immutable.

And if you speak to a lot of people who say they have something like chronic fatigue,

the problem is, you know, we have these benefits.

The moment we try and get some work, all those benefits stop.

But if you have something like chronic fatigue, you actually have to find an employer who's understanding about the fact that there might come a point in six months' time where you need to take time off work.

No, you may lose your job as a result of that.

And under the previous system, you've then lost all your benefits.

You have to start again in working your way through the system to arrive at that.

So I've noticed there's talk now of a kind of a try it first.

This is right to try.

Yes.

I think, but obviously riffing on right to buy.

Hang right, that rhymes with right to buy.

So I'm it for three of those, I imagine, as Kendall said.

And I think that does make sense.

The idea that you would have, or the idea, one and another proposal, and this is not one being considered by the government from an independent body was that you would have a six-month period where if you started work and then you you couldn't do the work yeah you would essentially go back to exactly where you were on the benefit system without as you say going back in at the bottom rung and having to work your way through this labyrinthine process

for a lot of people who are in this system they will see that's the fear that's what's preventing them from looking for work that the fear that if it doesn't work out then that they've lost everything so that's one thing that i i think is being picked up i had to, when this issue came back once again, because it never goes away, I instantly thought of, do you remember Peter Lilly, who was the equivalent of work and pension secretary under John Major and at the Conservative Party Conference 1992, so not in Victorian era,

got out his little list based on the Mikado because he talked about welfare reform.

And this gives you an idea of how the language was coded then, not that long ago i'm not going to sing it he said just like in the mikado i've got a little list of benefit offenders who i'll soon be rooting out and who never would be missed they never would be missed there's those who make up bogus claims and half a dozen names and counselors who draw the dole to run left-wing campaigns they never would be missed there's young ladies who get pregnant just to jump the housing queue and dads who won't support the kids of the ladies they have kissed and i haven't even mentioned all those sponging socialists I've put them on my list.

There's none of them be missed.

There's none of them be missed.

It's like the idea of putting people on your list is something that always has got slightly fascist overtones.

And I really appreciate how camp he's made it.

It's so

the thing is fascinating.

Thanks to

the fascist uniforms are in a slightly camp area, yeah.

It's true.

Yeah, I mean, that's language there.

I was kind of astounded by it because we're so used to talking about speech now from the alt-right and hate speech and so on.

And And maybe we convince ourselves that twenty, thirty years ago were better times when we're a little bit more polite.

But that's actually quite a vicious depiction of the benefit system there.

Yeah, I watched the clip of that.

Fraser Nelson, the former editor of the Spectator, put it in a Substack post, which he was arguing from a right-wing perspective about the right not returning to that kind of language.

And I think the interesting thing I didn't quite realise is that it went down pretty well in the room.

Yeah.

And we've been talking on this podcast a bit about the problem with your language, you know, if you end up just in a hermetically sealed echo echo chamber, you can not realise how your language is repellent to normal voters.

And I'm afraid I fear that the Tory conference in 1992 did something rather similarly for Peter Lilly in that people were very politely laughing at his jokes about single mums.

And I think the rest of the country kind of went, oh well.

Not so sure about that, Peter.

Although, you know, if you look at Lee Anderson, who had many guises, but as recently as 2023, when he was deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, he said, I don't believe all this poverty nonsense.

This is a wealthy country.

If you want something, you can go and get it.

You need to get off your ass and go and get it for yourself.

Which is a little bit like the Norman Tebbit, get on your bike and look for work.

Yeah, I think there's always that strain.

And this is one of those situations in which I feel like there is a kind of ebb and flow, a kind of yin and yang, right?

Which is that there is, I think, a tendency on the left, maybe just to assume that there's no fraud in the system.

We can't question it.

And a tendency on the right, when that goes bad, that goes into overt cruelty towards people in the system.

And you sort of, in your political system, want to balance in the force yeah in terms of language i think but you know there have been some some things that have come out recently that i have raised my eyebrows about so the motability scheme which is for cars for people on personal independence payment seems to be a very good scheme in that lots of people you know who would otherwise be housebound essentially get out and use it but there does seem to be some fairly egregious fraud in that and also some slightly eyebrow raising lease terms.

For example, you can get a BMW on that, which I think lots of people who are working would think, well, I can't afford a BMW.

You know, why is that something that the British state is helping people acquire?

But wouldn't that be a case then for putting a bit more effort into sorting out the fraud rather than

the danger of

labelling anyone who applies for multiple you know there's always a danger that anyone applying for multiple assistance is tarred by that label as a scrounger or gaming system or uh what's it called sick fluencer you know using knowledge from people who know how these systems work to prompt to say the right thing to get the right benefit you know i think all the the evidence we have says that benefit fraud is a very small percentage of the system, but it is a problem because it is absolutely enraging to people outside it.

So just going back to business connection though, you don't see vans going around

the country with big labels on.

If your boss is moving a decimal point where it shouldn't be, can you report them, please?

You know, we don't, we have a very encouraging approach in terms of the language for business, which is, you know, come here.

We want to make it easy for you to set up a business.

There's these tax-free zones where we're going to yeah like silicon roundabout yeah yeah we're going to make it easier for you we wouldn't bother you with the bureaucracy and the and the additional costs and so on it's all carrot and no stick there because i think politicians are in love with the idea of business and see themselves as sort of business people but running a massive business which is the country it's always struck me that we never apply that same level of enthusiasm and encouragement uh to get people back into work there is still that air of

sufferance, really.

You know, you mustn't grumble.

You know, we're doing our best.

We're underving an undeserving poor.

I felt like all the way through the in Duncan Smith era when he was working pension secretary under the coalition.

Anyway, in the end, he resigned saying that Cameron and Osborne had been salami slicing the budgets.

You know, it was just impossible to work.

But there was a sort of sense of kind of proper, like little women-style poverty and feckless tracksuit-clad poverty.

But you know, and again, you're right to say that the language, I think, sort of updates itself.

Like the other other thing that's interesting from that Peter Lilly madness is the talk about women getting pregnant just to get houses.

That's disappeared.

That has been replaced by immigrants have all the houses in the sort of linguistic chain.

You know, the catch-all figure used to blame for all ills.

And you don't hear about teenage pregnancies as a problem anymore, not least because last year, more women in their 40s in Britain got pregnant than teenagers.

I'm afraid, if anything, the problem with today's teenagers is that

they could afford to live a little bit more.

You know, they're quite anxious as a generation and they don't.

Oh, yes.

Yes.

I think there's also a recognition that poverty is something that touches a lot of us.

You know, that everybody knows someone, if it's not you or your family, it's someone you know.

It's a friend or it's a friend of someone in the family.

who are affected by poverty, who may be holding down a job, but it's a very low-paid job and also need to, you know, use a food bank or a maternity bank and for whom the welfare system is a lifesaver.

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I wanted to ask you about mental health and anxiety is a big part of the upticking claims.

I have quite divided feelings on this because there's a recent book out by Susan O'Sullivan called The Age of Diagnosis, in which she talks about the fact that maybe we are over-medicalizing neurodivergence and

what would have previously been subclinical conditions.

And I think that's probably true in some ways.

I think lots of people get comfort from a diagnosis because they feel it defines their reality.

It It sort of speaks to something within them.

But I also wonder if sometimes it becomes a kind of trap too.

Yes.

I think when they talk about misover diagnosis, I think the image that's then presented is of someone getting a diagnosis, like say they have, like myself, ADHD or autism or whatever, ADD, as if somehow that is then making them feel ill and therefore that they then feel it's perfectly valid to claim benefit because it can't work.

But I don't get that sense from the actual figures in terms of the people who are receiving mental health benefit also.

A huge number of them want to be in work.

And it's not, I don't think it's a case of once you're diagnosed, it makes you feel ill.

It actually, for a lot of people, it's a helpful service in that it explains their behavior, especially if they get diagnosed later on in life.

It explains their behavior and actually makes them feel a little bit more understanding of themselves.

But I don't think it actually affects people's ability to, you know, to work.

You know, if the press in particular is looking for criticisms of those on benefits, I think this is the new, the new era one.

Gone are the plasma screens and gone are the kind of people in track suits and teenagers having pregnancies to jump the queue.

And it's now, oh, people are claiming mental health benefit and so on.

When it's in fact, you know, the reality is, you know, I've seen, I've seen people be assessed for things like, you know, chronic fatigue.

It's a debilitating process, the actual assessment.

I've seen people who are disabled or people who are restricted in their mobility being assessed.

And it's rather like, you know, when you're being stopped by the police and you think, oh my God, what have I done?

And they really just want to know if you've seen this person or that person or do you realize your back light isn't working.

That sense of feeling guilty because even though you know you haven't done anything wrong, but the police are approaching you.

I think people going through the system are made to feel that they might be on the take and that a lot of what is happening here is just to make sure you're not on the take.

And that's a horrible feeling for 99% of people who aren't.

I think this is a point about language though, because then it becomes, you're right.

If the whole framing is prove you're entitled to this rather than

how can we help you.

The assessment office overlooks the car park so that they can watch you as you go back to your car to see if you suddenly speed up.

Already you're feeling bad about yourself.

But I do think that some of the stamina language has been better on that score.

On a sense that, you know, they talked a lot in the election campaign about, well, we need to tackle NHS waiting lists because there's a reason that lots of people are out of work.

It's because they're, you know, might be sort of waiting for a knee replacement or something like that, and that is affecting their ability to do their job.

And an idea that if your default position is that most people want to work and you've got to help them, that is a reframing of the conversation, I suppose, that is probably good.

No, this might change under the proposals, but I'd like to just quickly run you through how points are awarded for the personal independent payment system.

For example, in an assessment for washing, the document specifies that a person would receive three points if they're unable to get out of the bath unaided, four points if they need assistance to be able to wash their body between the shoulders and waist, and eight points if they need someone else to wash their entire body.

Now, imagine sitting down and being asked questions about that by someone who's not medically qualified, is employed by the outsourced company, and whose job it is or who put under pressure to get the bill down so as under pressure to minimize as much as they can the number of people who can qualify and having to be asked those sorts of kind of intimate questions.

And the language also struggles, I guess, with the reality of disability, which is that it can be quite fluid.

I mean, if you're talking a condition like chronic fatigue, you might be able to on some days be able to walk to the car, but you don't know which ones those will be.

And then it's not every day.

There's been lots of discourse about the fact that not everybody uses a wheelchair all the time.

Like our stereotypical idea of somebody in a wheelchair is that that's a permanent thing.

There are lots of ambulatory people who just, you know, can't do long distances, for example.

So are you all right?

I think that this will be a really interesting place for the Starma project to land because until now they have loved punching the hippie, as it were.

You know, they have loved taking on Tory language, Tory clothes, or even in this case, actually right-wing language.

And this might be the moment when it runs into their own backbench MP.

You know, for the purposes of their election campaign, they wanted to sound pretty un-left-wing.

Yes.

And actually now that's that road has really got them into trouble i guess on the language around this actually and and you know whether they hit that reality as i said at the beginning a lot of spiraling bill is to do with issues and systems that aren't working elsewhere which is a bigger

question

system the prison system is downstream of failures in education failures in you know youth outreach all of those kind of things let's move to the starmer metaphor tree oh gosh yes uh the man himself talking to the news agent's agent's podcast, the state should be active, it should be sleeves rolled up, it should be on the pitch making the difference.

Oh right.

Which makes me think he was advocating for a long-sleeved football shirt.

Yeah, and also you're not meant to roll your sleeves up when you're under the professional game anyway.

So

I don't know kind of what game he plays.

Well, presumably, actually, he has to, for photo what was played quite a lot of football with children in a suit, right?

If you remember the famous pictures of Boris Johnson playing rugby with those children and just skittling them down?

Yeah, there was also Boris Johnson playing football, but he rugby tackled one of them.

Well, there we go.

So Starmer is maybe the only person in the country who rolls up their slides.

I've got a word from the week.

Yes.

Which is Toxicator.

Okay.

Toxicator is the new ride at Alton Towers, and it is a toxic waste-themed ride.

Did something ironic happen?

Something ironic happened because on its first day they had to temporarily close it down because of a burst pipe flooding the area with sewage.

You don't even have to pay extra for that.

They just give you that for free.

It's just like one of those, you know, when people come up with a title that's just asking for trouble, like, you know, a play like this will close next week or something like that.

Everyone hates this.

And you just know what the review is going to be like.

That's very fun.

It's a potent metaphor for the state of Britain.

Kemi should go and give a speech in front of the toxicator and gesture to him.

Oh, I think she should do it when she's on it.

She should out-air Davy and Davy on it.

Davy would 100% do a speech where you could gunge him on the toxicator.

Well, there's some free campaign advice from us.

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