Benefits sanctions show this government at its Kafkaesque worst
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Version 0 of 1. It is nearly 30 years since the BBC first aired The Insurance Man, Alan Bennett's masterful, nightmarish tribute to the work of Franz Kafka. It is set in a grey, labyrinthine office complex, where working people who have been left penniless and desperate by accidents or illness in their factories and workplaces wait sadly to access the money they require. They are in a state of learned helplessness, pushed from one desk to the next with interminable demands for different certificates or yet more evidence of need. One woman sits forever outside the door to a disused stairwell with a pile of old newspapers beside her, simply because she has been told to do so. She fears that if she complains, she will be moved to the back of the queue. Those running and working in the system come to despise the ones they are supposed to help, hating them for their constant, demanding neediness and insisting that claimants should not complain – they should really be grateful for this lesson in how the world works. I saw The Insurance Man back in 1986 and understood it to be a grave lesson in how modernity and technocratic bureaucracy can dehumanise everyone involved, stripping us of our individuality, our dignity and our compassion. I sometimes wonder if Iain Duncan Smith saw it and took it as the perfect model for a future social security system. This week sees the team at the Department for Work and Pensions expel one of their periodic, sulphurous emissions aimed at a so-called "signing-on culture". There will be new rules for claimants, new clampdowns for fraudsters and new soundbites for a pliant media. It seems this weekend the secretary of state had to downplay his plans to evict fraudsters from their homes after an unfortunate clash with headlines about Maria Miller. Our attention is being drawn instead to the announcement from the employment minister Esther McVey that new claimants will need to have a working email address, have registered with the government's jobseeking website and have prepared a CV before they submit a claim for benefits. On their own, these new rules are not the most onerous or demanding impositions, but they do create a classic, Kafkaesque bureaucratic loop that says no, you must not start from here, you must have done something before you get to the beginning. This in the context of charities warning of hundreds of thousands of people being cast into destitution by benefit sanctions, often imposed against those who are genuinely trying to do everything by the book. We learn, not from the satirical pens of playwrights but the hard record of Hansard, that claimants have been given simultaneous appointments with training organisations and jobcentre staff then getting sanctioned for being unable to be in two different places at the same time. People have had their benefits stopped as punishment for not continuing to seek work in the two-week period between finding a job and starting work. Others for arriving less than 10 minutes late at the jobcentre due to attending a job interview. Not withstanding my weary cynical swipes, I don't truly believe Duncan Smith and colleagues have set out to deliberately create a system that manufactures injustice and mistakes. As Max Weber recognised long ago, bureaucracies grow as an unintended side-effect of chasing elusive ideals. In this case, the system has emerged from an ideological conviction that people are out of work because each of those individuals has failed to find a job, not because there aren't enough jobs to go around. It is a perverse calumny that disintegrates with a few seconds' rational examination, but nonetheless seems to sustain the coalition's employment policy. Under that ideological framework, unemployment ceases to be a position of unfortunate circumstance or economic consequence, and instead becomes a marker of personal, even moral failure. In The Insurance Man, the unfortunate hero finally secures a meeting with the one staff member who understands the system. His name is Franz Kafka, played in the film by a young and brilliant Daniel Day-Lewis, and he is reputed to be kind, to be a human being. "No," he sighs, with a resigned smile. "But I do a very good imitation of a human being." In the context of the story, that is good enough. Is it too much to hope that someone at the Department for Work and Pensions could perform a similar trick? |