Attack of the 50 Stone Benefit Claimant

Yesterday a particularly nasty suggestion from Westminster Council emerged into the public realm. Obese and ‘other unhealthy people’ will have their benefits docked if they don’t do as they’re told and get some exercise. There was also the suggestion of using ‘smart cards’ to track to progess of these fatties, a la Alec Shelbrooke’s insulting suggestions just before Christmas.

There are so many levels of wrong to this at first I thought it was a joke. Using cards to track people’s movements is a very, very suspicious move and an extremely slippery slope. As is telling people how to behave or no money to live on for you. Then there’s the issue of gyms. Gyms (and making chubby benefit claimants join them) are expensive. I Googled gyms in my area (not the wealthiest part of the UK by any means) and the cheapest private ones were about £24 a month. The council ones were between £19 and £23 a month. That is a lot of money for someone on the lowest rate of JSA (£52 a week). It’s unfeasible.

The astute among you will note that gyms aren’t the only form of exercise, and I agree with you. In fact I’d far rather go for a walk or a swim than run on a treadmill for thirty minutes. Except that gyms are very easy to track people in (I assume you just swipe your smart card at the entrance) so obviously if you’re main goal is keeping an eye on those disobedient chubsters gyms are the way to go. Otherwise we're just left with the option of trusting that people who say they walk the dog for twenty minutes every day are actually doing it. Trusting people on benefits to be in charge of their own lives? We can’t have that.

And it’s just rude. Singling someone out because of their size is unacceptable. I don’t care if ‘fat people cost the NHS money’. So to athletes, but I would never tell someone they had to stop playing football in case they got injured and spent my precious taxes on nurses and bandages. And as for those selfish fuckers who require care in hospitals for their offspring…words cannot express how angry I am at them. Don’t get me started on that dumbfuck who crashed his car and now needs a pot on his leg. No. The NHS cannot work like that, otherwise it’ll just turn into one arbitrary list of people who are banned from their GPs for various pointless reasons. I assume that the rather ominous 'other unhealthy people' phrase from the report I linked too means they will soon come for anyone who doesn't conduct themselves in the meticulously described manner laid down by their all powerful masters at the Job Centre.

Also, I fail to see what it is to do with the council or the government how wide someone’s arse is. With the exception of about 0.00000001% of cases a person being obese will not affect their ability to work in most jobs. I used to work in a warehouse. Three of the four of us on my Saturday shift were classed as overweight and yet we still managed a physically demanding job just fine. So why allow it to cut into employment benefits like JSA or tax credits?

So, having established that this is an unworkable idea, deeply insulting and just plain impolite, why have they been allowed to suggest it? Simple. Fat people aren’t people and people on benefits aren’t people so fat people on benefits are some kind of horrific, sub-human scum. At least that’s the image this proposal gives out. Like those ridiculous limits on what people on benefits can buy this is infantilising and patronising. It denies people control over their finances, their homes and, the absolute worst, their own bodies.

It’s very telling that this latest assault is aimed only at those outrageous enough to claim benefits. Fat people are attacked every day of the week but this proposal is particularly interesting. If being fat is unhealthy (as these proposals state) then why aren’t they putting in measures for people who are working and carting around a few extra pounds? I’m honestly surprised no one has suggested docking wages for overweight people in employment.    

I thought we were meant to be moving beyond the ‘Nanny State’? It doesn’t get much more Nanny state than punishing us for eating too many sweets. This proposal is utterly ridiculous and I hope to God, for the sake of the rights we should hold over our own bodies and the right to maintain dignity while relying on the welfare state, it gets dissolved in acid. If I ever meet the people who drafted it they will feel all of my fat bird wrath. I could knock these weasly fascists out with one tit.

Gok Wan's Rules of Attraction

Before we start I’m going to freely admit something; I quite like Gok Wan. It’s probably because on telly he’s always so sweet and nice to everyone but I always thought that he’d be really lovely in real life as well*. I can’t imagine him getting disproportionately angry if you forgot to record Downton Abbey for example. I also, and this could just be my soft spot for him, genuinely believe he wants to do his best for the people that appear on his shows. He does want them to feel better about themselves. My only problem is, I think he’s going to wrong way about it.

I love about 70% of the stuff he does on How to Look Good Naked. I get a bit uncomfortable by his constant reinforcement that all women must look smaller all the time but I also understand that, as that’s the message that’s constantly around us in society, that is what makes a lot of women feel good. Maybe I’m asking a bit much of Gok to challenge that assumption (his is, after all, just trying to make a bit of light entertainment) but I wish he’d make a bit of an effort.

However, I was pretty disappointed in last night’s fare, Gok’s Style Secrets. This time around not only is Gok giving out fashion advice, but dating advice as well. Whenever I see the phrase ‘dating advice’ alarm bells start ringing. If the advice is not ‘be yourself, surround yourself with people who like you to build up your confidence and then go talk to people you fancy’ then the advice is likely to be dodge. If the advice is not what is previously stated (or a version of it) there’s a pretty high chance that this will tell you to change yourself in order to meet someone. I have reason to believe that Gok’s advice is in the second category as it states on Gok’s own website he’ll be telling you what to do, say and wear on a date. The answer to all three is ‘whatever you want and whatever feels comfortable’ but that can’t be stretched out for an hour.

This advice is overwhelmingly aimed at women, and it overwhelming tells women to appear more ‘sexy’ and demure, to quieten down, to wear different clothes, to not laugh too loud or burp or talk for an hour about your favourite album/film/football team/breed of dog. As well as being oddly inaccurate (I’m as obnoxiously gassy and badly dressed as they come and I’ve never had problems getting into relationships. Or bed) it seems very strange to change yourself to appeal to someone else. Because then they’re not attracted to you. They’re attracted to the sanitised version you’ve chosen to portray. What if your dastardly plan works and you get married? Spending your whole life not farting and avoiding interesting topics of conversation sounds like just about the worst thing I can think of. You see this advice all the time, in magazines, in rom coms, even sometimes from ‘friends’ (who, if they think you need to change that dramatically, have no business calling themselves your friends).

The other aspect I find problematic is the focus on appearance. Setting up a woman for dating by telling her to be ‘sexy’ suggest that there is only one way to be sexy and this is the most important part of a date. What’s that? You think it is? It’s not. Finding someone physically attractive has nothing to do with how hard they tried to look sexy. Also looks are not the be all and end all of attractiveness.

And these looks are so prescriptive. The lady on last night had a very specific and personal style. Clearly she wasn’t sure it was working or else she wouldn’t have contacted Gok but other women might see that, look down at their crushed velvet dresses and think so is this wrong? It’s not, it’s not wrong. You wear what you want to wear, and it doesn’t matter if it looks sexy to someone else, or even to you, because it’s OK not to look sexy all the time.

This is the problem I always had with Snog, Marry, Avoid, although they occasionally let women who dressed in a punky or gothic style off the hook because they were ‘individuals’ it still told women even more specifically than Gok that being attractive was the most important aspect of appearance (the clue is in the title) and that only certain looks were sexy. If a girl wants to wear layers of fake tan and eyelashes with pink feathers on the end then what, really, does it have to do with you? These women will see themselves as just as individual as the goth girl whose just been told by Gok she looks scary.

So, I’m sorry Gok, but you’re assumptions are wrong, your delivery is wrong, your emphasis is wrong and I’m still gonna rely heavily on Doc Martens, band t-shirts and thick black eyeliner. And my lady loves it.

Maybe it’s different for lesbians.

*I did actually meet Gok Wan once. It was when I lived in Manchester and drink might have been consumed. I saw him on Canal Street, ran up to him, told him I thought he was ace and I wished I’d met him when I was sober. He patted me on the shoulder and said 'I wish you’d been sober when you met me too, love’. So he’s quite funny as well as sweet.

Ghost Nation

When I was younger I had far better taste in music than I do now. This is because until I was about thirteen I didn’t really buy my own music, I just listened to my Dad’s. The thought has never even crossed his mind, but he is one of the coolest people I know. As he ferried me and my brother around the scabby fringes of West Yorkshire we would listen to his music. I have fond memories of Led Zeppelin, The Jam, The Clash, The Ramones and Steely Dan blaring away on the stereo in his car. One of the songs I remember most clearly (probably because it is objectively brilliant and still gets played at clubs and house parties) is Ghost Town by The Specials.

A few days ago the song came on while my music was on random. I must have been in a pretty reflective mood because suddenly I realised every one of the words being sung to me could describe the UK at this moment. The second verse rang particularly true;

This town’s becoming like a ghost town

Why must the youth fight against themselves?

Government leaving the youth on the shelf

This place is coming like a ghost town

No jobs to be found in this country

Can’t go on no more

The people getting angry

The song was released in 1981 during a time of turbulence and uncertainty in Britain. There were riots, rising unemployment and during the rest of the 1980s things would only get worse as Thatcher dismantled the unions, proved decisively that the Conservatives didn’t care about ordinary British working people and undermined British society so not people and their rights but profits and monetary value were considered the single most important thing of all.

The bleak story told in Ghost Town was of a town fallen prey to urban decay, unemployment and violence. Now, as I face 2013, I see the same problems destroying the lives of people around me. The government says there are jobs, but no one seems able to get them and more people are facing redundancy, pay freezes and cut hours. Inflation is pushing up food prices and yet it is perfectly fine to lecture people on how to eat and feed their kids. Education is considered so unimportant the government lets private companies run ‘academies’ that brainwash our children into a Thatcherite way of thinking. Those who depend on benefits, often the most vulnerable people in our society, are demonised and hounded by a system that it too scared to tax millionaires.

Government leaving the youth on the shelf

This is exactly how I feel. But in a way I’m one of the lucky ones. I got the opportunity to go to university like I wanted to. It left me saddled with a debt of £22,000 which I try not to think about but someone wanting to do the same thing as me now would be facing at least £30,000. I’ve not been able to pay back a penny of the money I borrowed. Neither have any of my closest friends from my undergraduate degree. This is because none of us have yet earned the £15,000 a year that requires you to start paying back. To get into the jobs we wanted when we started university (journalist, geologist, sociology lecturer, EU ambassador, engineer and petrol chemist to name a random sample) would have required us to take post graduate courses which have little or no funding available or work as an unpaid intern to gain experience. Few people can afford this.  

Again I was lucky. I used some family money that was left to me to put a deposit on a house to pay for an MA. I thought I might as well as these days it would have barely got me a cardboard box. But then I was then left unable by the almost entire absence of any money in the arts and humanities to continue to the level I wanted to. This is the doing of the current government. Personal experience suggests this to me because almost every professional at university I spoke to agreed I would have got funding for my MA as well as my PhD five years ago. I have no reason to believe they were just being nice to me.

Now to my friends who didn’t go to uni. Those who went straight to work found themselves constricted in jobs in companies who cannot afford to expand or whose only chance at promotion was to fund the training themselves. Few of them are now on more than £15,000 a year. The ones who went on to training placements, apprenticeships and NVQs found the same as those who’d gone to uni-when they finished there were no jobs for them.

The prevailing narrative is that young people should be thankful for any job that comes their way and forget any ambition they may have had or career they may have worked for. Jobs people enjoy are the preserves of the super rich and with the cutting of EMA, the rise in fees and the cuts to the education budgets this distinction will only increase. I’m pretty sure Mr Cameron has no idea how demoralising it is to find out you can’t do the job you wanted because the government has moved education and training down on the list of priorities.

The way young people are portrayed (explained more eloquently in this excellent blog post by Glosswitch) is also appalling. Apparently we have it better now than we ever have because we have mobile phones and don’t have to do national service. I would have assumed jobs and homes were more fundamental, but I’m clearly of a spoiled generation and should keep my trap shut. After all, we’re all in this together, aren’t we? Young people are feckless hooligans that need to be banned from wearing hoods and being in public spaces. They’re neglected and left with nothing to do then chastised for being angry and doing nothing. They can’t be trusted in their own homes until they are twenty-five (when they may well have kids of their own) and it’s perfectly alright to attack them and how they conduct themselves as ‘bad manners’ more than any other age group.  

The people getting angry

The riots in 2011 were painted as a load of feckless looters who were only after a new pair of trainers. But, as explained fantastically by a very clever lady on my MA who was doing her dissertation on the riots, thanks to Thatcherism materialism and extensive wealth are our modern status symbols. Those young people were trying to get the things they wanted and felt they were entitled to. Those TVs weren't just TVs, they were social standing. I am not defending the rioters and the arsonists and those who attacked the police who were just trying to do their job but the blanket condemnation is troubling and over simplifies the whole thing. Violence is not the answer but people won’t listen to the question.

They rioted in Manchester, a city I used to live in and have many friends in. Why did they riot in Manchester and not, say, Leeds or Newcastle (the other two cities I’ve lived in and know best)? Central Manchester is the preserve of the rich and ridiculous property prices are pushing ordinary people further and further out. It really is the London of the North. Disillusionment and wanting to claim back their city may have played some part in it. Again someone is probably going to accuse me of defending the actions of people who smashed up shops and set fire to buildings, but I’m not. I’m just trying to understand.

People are angry because the current government have demonstrated time and time again just how little they think of us and how little they think we are worth. People have a right to be angry and I think we need to get angrier. Our towns are left to decay, our young people are abandoned to a life of violence and unemployment and in desperation we turn on each other (immigrants and benefit cheats aren’t the problem here. Tory policy is).

The Specials were right in 1981 and they're right again in 2013, only I think, rather than Ghost Town, we’ve been left with the undermined, empty husk of a burnt out Ghost Nation.