Britain’s right wing media have long been engaged in a sustained attack against the poor, vulnerable and excluded. Increasingly the logic of this attack focuses on how, supposedly, these groups are a drain on public funds. The argument often takes the form of: The good hard working majority pay taxes and receive nothing in return while immigrants/single mothers/ benefit recipients/ social housing tenants etc. receive huge subsidies. This argument (although false on a number of counts) appears to have a significant resonance with the British public.
Due to public concern about the ‘undeserving’ receiving hand-outs, I thought I should highlight a few cases which seem to have been overlooked by the right wing media.
The first case is the pregnant young woman, who has been unemployed for months, receiving hundreds of millions of pounds in state hand-outs on top being allowed to live rent free in a 20 bedroom house, which was re-furbished by the taxpayer at a cost of £1M.
A Scrounger on Champagne Lifestyle
Second, there is the pensioner who has never worked and currently receives £30m a year in state hand-outs whilst being allowed to live in a prime London location with 775 rooms (as well as numerous tax-payer funded second homes). Meanwhile many low paid workers are being forced to receive a cut in support due to being deemed to have just one superfluous bedroom.
Queen of the Scroungers
Third, is the case of a former convict and tax evader (who managed to avoid prison) receiving billions of pounds of tax payers’ money to fund his private enterprise. At least this disgusting case was recently exposed at length in a major British newspaper:
Scrounger and a criminal he may be. But he seems to be having fun!
If you tot up all the direct subsidies [former convict] Branson’s west coast mainline service received between 1997 and 2012, and convert them to today’s prices, you get a sum of £2.79bn handed over by us – before a single ticket has been sold. And it is certainly before you factor in the service’s upgrade (worth around £9bn, and paid for by the public), and the fleet of Pendolino trains (again, largely subsidised by the government).
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Most of the improvements [in Branson’s stock] were subbed by taxpayers, with Virgin paying the state an agreed amount in the last two years of the franchise. Yet Branson and his shareholders could declare a cumulative net profit of £538m and trouser £499m in total dividends. No wonder some canny infants like to play with train sets.
Finally, the same newspaper brought to my attention the issue of numerous foreigners receiving millions of pounds in state hand-outs.
Most of the land [in the UK] is owned by exceedingly wealthy people. Some of them are millionaires from elsewhere: sheikhs, oligarchs and mining magnates who own vast estates in this country. Although they might pay no taxes in the UK, they receive millions in farm subsidies. They are the world’s most successful benefit tourists. Yet, amid the manufactured terror of immigrants living off British welfare payments, we scarcely hear a word said against them.
Indeed we scarcely hear a peep from the right-wing media about these cases of foreigners, convicts and the jobless receiving epic levels of state subsidy. The figures involved dwarf the benefits received by the majority of social security claimants. The only difference between the groups mentioned here and those so demonised by the tabloid press (apart from the huge differences in the amount of hand-outs they receive) appears to be their wealth, power and connections. Yet despite being members of groups traditionally loathed by the British media (foreigners, pregnant women on benefits and convicts) many of the people I mention here are celebrated and revered by the right-wing press as either figures of adulation, examples of entrepreneurial genius or valuable contributors to the economy. This, to me, represents the most blatant example of double standards. As George Monboit points out:
The minister responsible for cutting income support for the poor, Iain Duncan Smith, lives on an estate owned by his wife’s family. During the last 10 years it has received €1.5m in income support from taxpayers. How much more obvious do these double standards have to be before we begin to notice?