Power: good at handing out the pain, maybe not so good at taking it

As the sun was rising on the morning of Saturday 4 May, a 53-year old woman stepped off the hard shoulder of the M6 motorway in the Midlands, into the path of an oncoming lorry. She was struck and died instantly.

Before she left home, she wrote notes to friends and family, one of them to a neighbour with whom she also dropped off her keys so that her cat could be rescued.

Why did Stephanie Bottrill take her life? To her son, she wrote ‘Don’t blame yourself for me ending my life. The only people to blame are the Government. I love you so much.’ She chose to die because the government had brought in the ‘bedroom tax’ which reduces housing benefit paid to claimants who have a spare room (a room ‘too many’ in the judgement of some of the wealthiest politicians in the country).

In a parliamentary debate in January, among a litany of such tales, Labour MP Steve Rotheram told the story of a constituent, Janine: ‘Her dad was thrown off sickness benefit in November after an Atos work capability assessment and was declared fit for work despite suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Six weeks later, on Christmas Day, Janine's father died.’

The government is no longer able to count the number of people who die each year after being judged fit for work: it costs too much money to find out. It might also cost too many votes. However, the generally accepted figure is that around 30 people a week are dying after having been refused incapacity benefits.

As part of the celebrations for the 400th anniversary of the King James’ Bible in 2011, David Cameron said ‘we are a Christian country and we should not be afraid to say so.’ Saying so is cheap, but acting as though it were so, seems to be beyond his powers. Here’s Matthew's Gospel (25:36): ‘Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.’

Funnily enough, that last bit, about prison, is particularly apt. In March this year, Bethan Tichborne, teaching assistant for disabled children, appeared in Oxford Magistrates’ Court, charged with disorderly conduct. Her offence? When David Cameron had been switching on Christmas lights in Witney, his constituency, she’d tried to climb a security barrier to approach him and protest against benefit cuts.

Bethan Tichborne,
troublemaker for reminding Christians of the plight of the poor

She claims she was beaten by his security entourage for her pains. However, it has to be said that she did shout at Cameron, telling him he had ‘blood on his hands’. This profoundly shocked the judge who heard her case: he found that her comments could ‘hardly be more insulting to anyone, whether a politician or not.’

It seems that Cameron is a sensitive soul. Not sensitive enough to want to stop harming the Janines of this world or the Stephanie Bottrills, but more than sensitive enough to need a judge to spring to his defence if someone says something nasty about him.

In other words, he’s OK about handing it out, not so good about taking it himself.

Tichborne was duly convicted of the charge and ordered to pay fines and costs amounting to £745. History does not record whether Cameron came to her, in observance of the injunction to comfort those who lie in jail, any more than he tried to clothe Stephanie or to visit Janine’s Dad.

Instead, yesterday George Osborne, our Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced that he didn’t intend to raise taxes as part of his drive to reduce government debt. Clearly, he needs to do something because far from reducing the outstanding amount, he’s only managed to increase it over the last three years. So clearly he means to move away from his already eye-watering formula of 80% cuts and 20% tax rises, to focus even more on cuts.

So expect more Stephanies and Janines. 

The upside is that Osborne will continue to protect important people from the pain of tax increases. That’s important people like his boss Cameron, and Cameron’s friends, such as his neighbour Rebekah Brooks, now facing criminal charges over the hacking carried out in News International on her watch.

One wonders whether her judge will be as stern in applying the law as the one Tichborne faced.

Incidentally, where did I get the Stephanie Bottrill story from? My source was ‘Calum’s list’ which tries to publicise some of the cases of deaths attributable at least in part to the government’s benefits cuts.

And what was Tichborne trying to do when she was prevented approaching the Prime Minister? Why, disturbing the peace by reading Calum’s List to him. Not that it would have disturbed his peace. That good Christian wouldn’t have listened. And if he had, he wouldn’t have taken any of it in.

Benefits: be proud of them

We made a number of good friends while living in France, including one who I regard to this day as something of a model of business practice, and business isn’t a world where exemplary behaviour is in excessive supply.

He set up a small independent company working, which now employs 20 or 30 staff and has become the French subsidiary of an American corporation supplying a couple of highly innovative devices to improve healthcare. An attractive story, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Today, a Facebook friend shared a piece on the interview J K Rowling gave to Jon Stewart in the US. Now, I can’t claim to be a fan of the Harry Potter books, but I can’t deny that they’ve given an awful lot of pleasure to a great many people around the world, and why would I object to that?

Rowling talking to Stewart

Why have I chosen to mention these two apparently unrelated stories?

Because they have one feature in common. Both my friend and Rowling spent some time drawing state benefits. My friend lost a job through redundancy, an event that faced him, as it faces anyone, with financial difficulties but, above all, represented a terrible shock to his morale. Fortunately, France has a system of unemployment insurance which pays a large proportion of the salary from the previous job, for a significant period. It does not demand that claimants avoid doing any work; instead the authorities actively encourage them to create new jobs if they can.

That’s what my friend did, and as a result he has created 20 or 30 jobs. Which suggests that the benefits paid to him were a great investment for the French state.

It was one of Jon Stewart’s comments to Rowling that brought all this to mind. He suggested that the benefits paid to her, when she was writing her books and struggling to cope with poverty, were also an excellent investment: she has not taken refuge in a tax haven and is paying large amounts of tax to the British authorities. Certainly, like my friend in France, she has paid back many times over what she received.

Two stories, both of which turned out well. Of course, behind them are many millions of stories of people who don’t emerge from unemployment to quite such success, or in some cases never emerge from it at all.

What I can’t understand is what it is about those people that makes them any less deserving of help than my friend or J K Rowling. Sure, a minority has no intention of ever working, but far more were in jobs and had been for years, until the bankers crashed the economy in 2008.

If they were happy to work before, what makes them shirkers now? Like Rowling and my friend they’re in need of help to deal with a disaster over which they had no control. Some are suffering from disability; some are able-bodied and merely out of work. Not all will set up successful businesses; very few will become world-famous authors. But many of them will return to jobs if they’re given the chance. And even if they don’t, why does that make them need help any less?

There is a terrible and cruel current of thought rampant in our Western societies today. It suggests that benefits are legitimate targets for cuts to generate savings, making life still worse for people who are already vulnerable. It treats people on benefits as scroungers, turning the victims of the failings of our society into wrongdoers. Surely, at a time when many shameful things are being done in the name of economic orthodoxy, this must be one of the most shaming.

Why are we so keen to denounce the payment of benefits? Surely we should be proud to live in societies that help those who need it most. Sometimes that can help a businessman to achieve success, or an author to conquer global prominence. But what really matters is just – that it helps.