11.04.2013

Mick Philpott: Class war offensive on benefits

The Tories and their allies in the media have made full use of the tragic death of six children to attack welfare in general, writes Michael Copestake

For George Osborne and the Tory media it seems there is political capital to be made through the cheap exploitation of the death of six children in horrifying and freakishly abnormal circumstances.

Whereas their father, Michael Philpott, scrounged parasitically in life, in death the children now have the opportunity to ‘give something back’ as symbols of the shameless anti-welfare crusading of Osborne and the likes of the Daily Mail, who unproblematically draw a straight line from the receipt of benefits to arson and the manslaughter of one’s own children. Truly it is a sign of the times when this poisonous and downright nonsensical garbage can not only be said with a straight face, but be taken up and uncritically repeated in the media as a whole, or at best treated as a controversial talking point that deserves serious attention.

Let us state what is absolutely and immediately obvious: the crime of Mick Philpott, who set fire to his own house while his children slept in order to pin the crime on his former mistress and hopefully claim credit for rescuing them, has nothing to do with him receiving benefits. There is no cause-effect relation. There is no relation, full stop, and it would be crazy to ascribe one.

That has not stopped some people though. Osborne stated that the Philpott case raises “a question for government and society about the welfare state” and whether taxpayers should be funding “lifestyles like that”. What is more, the case raises the question of a “debate that needs to be had”. What Osborne only heavily implies the Daily Mail shouts gleefully from the rooftops: “Evil born out of welfare dependency,” screams one headline. The Philpott case is a “parable for our time,” says another (April 3). Except, of course, it isn’t. It tells us almost nothing about the welfare system, precisely because it is such a freakishly exceptional case - and thus headline-worthy.

The offensive against ‘scroungers’ is part of the concerted assault on benefits - the fact that they mostly go to pensioners, those in work and people with children is irrelevant. The use of the Philpott case is part of the ongoing attempt to keep our class divided and thus more easily controllable, in much the same way as the equally bogus narrative of ‘privileged’ state-sector workers with their ‘gold-plated’ pensions is contrasted to the good, honest and humble private-sector workers who are grateful to have a job. Just as there are deserving and undeserving workers, so there are deserving and undeserving benefit recipients - although how one can be undeserving of something to which one is entitled is a mystery. It is an ideological accompaniment to the package of cuts to welfare and council tax benefit, the bedroom tax and so on that have already been pushed through - with more to follow, no doubt.

Facts

So are there hundreds of thousands of Philpott families out there living the same benefits ‘lifestyle’? Unsurprisingly not, but facts count for very little in this class-war offensive.

For a start, Mick Philpott has had 17 children with his two principal partners. In the whole country there are no more than 2,000 families with as many as eight children and only six percent of all families in receipt of benefits have four or more. Usually, as is typical in the wider population, at least one parent is in work. So we are already at the far end of the statistical curve. Philpott is clearly a damaged and troubled man. He has been described in court proceedings as “controlling and manipulative”, and the fact that he thought up such a scheme as setting fire to his own home with his children in it speaks for itself. One example is the fact that he himself took control of not only the child benefit the family received, but also the wages earned by both of his partners, his wife and his mistress, who were in part-time work.

Allegedly, according to the Daily Mail and the like, the only reason he had the children was so he could live on their child benefit, which after the first child amounts to an astonishing £11 per week - or £8,000 per year for the 11 of them who were living with him prior to his split with his mistress, who took five children with her. This amount of money is a pittance, especially for a family of such a size. Children are, by their nature, very expensive to raise. There are endless rounds of new clothes, the need for food, toys, educational material and transport costs. In short, having ‘loads of kids’ and living on benefits is one of the worst get-rich-quick schemes one can imagine. If anything was the basis of Philpott’s relative leisure and comfort, it was his appropriation of the wages of his two partners, but there has been rather less media braying over this kind of misogynistic exploitation.

In fact, far from enriching Philpott, the benefits the family received allowed these children to attain a greater approximation of normal social existence than they would otherwise have had. The whole episode gives the lie to the claims of the ideologues of the right that they are motivated by concern for children. In reality, the ruling class regards children, in particular those whose upbringing the state must subsidise, not as society’s most cherished asset for the future, but as a tiresome burden, and it is quite prepared to see them deprived of basic necessities. No doubt there are more people like Mick Philpott out there, but we are talking about minuscule numbers, and the cost of child benefit is substantially less than that of taking the children of these people into care or of imprisoning the parents. Even purely on a cost-accounting level, it is nonsense.

Indeed, if evil is in fact “born out of welfare dependency”, then we have to ask why there is so little of it about? Why is Philpott such a rarity? So exceptional was his case that he had already featured on the Jeremy Kyle show and a documentary on ‘scroungers’ presented by Anne Widdecombe.

Class war

The Philpott case is a useful tool in the class-war offensive designed to keep the working class atomised and unable to act collectively. That it is an illogical example that has been utilised as a propaganda battering ram is, up to a point, irrelevant. Osborne and the Daily Mail can get away with pushing this complete bullshit, because at the end of the day the reactionaries can shout louder than we can.

Yes, occasionally the likes of Owen Jones are called upon to put a different view - see, for example his appearance on the BBC news channel, where he points out that benefits are largely a subsidy to landlords and capitalists paying low wages (www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22034539), but this is a drop in the ocean compared to the constant anti-welfare propaganda which saturates the media. It is our weakness that allows them to get away with such poisonous fairy-tales. There is no leftwing mass media - and that, of course, is related to the fact that there is no serious attempt to combine our forces in a viable party.

Labour, despite denouncing the obscene manner in which the right has used this particular case to attack the welfare system, nevertheless plays along with the game when it comes to stigmatising ‘scroungers’ and cutting the welfare state. Osborne uses the Philpott case as a launch pad for a “debate that needs to be had” on the continued existence of the welfare system in its current form, but his Labour counterparts seem prepared to accept this premise. Shadow chancellor Ed Balls finds Osborne’s behaviour “cynical” and “desperate”, but accepts that we still need a “proper debate about welfare reform”. Stephen Timms, Labour’s spokesperson for work and pensions, finds Osborne’s insinuations distasteful, but only insofar as it is “wrong to link these acts with the debate [that word again] about welfare”.

That “debate” is, of course, utterly one-sided. The ‘solution’ to the benefits ‘problem’ is predetermined: those on welfare must be attacked.