Welcome to UNDERCLASS

An introduction

Where to start?

The last time I wrote anything was over a decade ago. I started a blog called Diary of a Benefit Scrounger

https://diaryofabenefitscrounger.blogspot.com

I started it when the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition formed, specifically as Iain Duncan-Smith, then Secretary of State for Department for Work and Pensions, decided to cut virtually all of the support sick and disabled people relied on, all at once. I’ve been extremely ill all of my life with Crohn’s disease. Operation after major operation, seizures, stroke, hole in the heart, huge blood clots. You name it, I’ve pretty much had it. Over 30 long and often desperate years. I was well placed to comment.

It was 2010, 13 years of Labour Governments at an end, and the Tories meant Austerity Business. The Lib Dems just meant well. But after 5 days in a room with Osborne and Cameron, Clegg and Alexander caved on virtually every manifesto pledge they had made. Tuition fee promises torn in two, electoral and Lords reform, welfare security, all sold for a handful of tax beans.

I have to cut a long story short here, it isn’t really the point : The blog got very popular, very quickly. Dozens of other disability experts, charities, or sick and disabled people themselves also opposed the cuts as loudly and as creatively as they could. We came together to produce a report proving that the government had outright lied about their consultation on reforms to disability benefit. (Now PIP). I raised money online to get it published and delivered to every Lord and MP in Parliament, just days before the first Welfare Reform Bill debates were due to start. The previous weekend, we swamped the press with previews and huge stories we’d saved. By Monday 9th January, 2012, we were ready to launch. Thousands of sick and disabled people were ready to man Twitter. (Back in the day when that could mean something quite important, but that’s for another day.)

We trended No 1 globally, trending at No.1 in the UK all day. https://diaryofabenefitscrounger.blogspot.com/2012/01/i-support-spartacus-report.html Over 2 million people saw our little UK welfare reform report. We had lobbied Peers individually and relentlessly for months before the votes. Within days, we had won NINE amendments in the Lords against the Government. For the full story, you can read more on the blog by reading from around September 2011 and March 2012. If you visit my YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCacGXlfvp26vFQuhBTDKrcw you can watch a selection of (terrible quality, I apologise in advance, I had to video-videos) clips that show a few interviews or speeches I gave.

But the Labour Party was the thing I cared about most. Back then. The thing I knew inside out, my passion and my ambition. All of my life my family had worked for, or supported Labour. My Mum had ben a Labour councillor in the 70s in Hertfordshire when that was rarer than a very rare thing indeed. Although the campaign was non-partisan, my particular role was to work VERY hard to convince Labour to back us. I attended every Labour conference from 2009 to 2014. I lobbied and schmoozed and ambushed shadow ministers and MPs shamelessly, whenever one came within a few hundred yards. My blog was heavily supported by other Labour supporting blogs and promoted to Ed Miliband himself most weeks. They all shared my content most days. By 2012, grassroots Labour members knew me very well and I had built strong contacts right across the Labour Party from left to right. But mainly, right down the centre. Virtually all of my friends or media contacts or sponsors at the time, were centrists, and they included Ed’s closest inner-circle.

But I stopped writing and campaigning in late 2014, disillusioned and heartbroken. If you watch the video on my YouTube channel where I finally get to speak at a Labour conference and read the blurb below, you’ll see we had won a false victory. That very day, Labour had sacked the ministers we had finally persuaded to support us and replaced the shadow Secretary of State, Liam Byrne, with……. Rachel Reeves. If you catch the very last frame of the clip, you can see her sitting there on stage, looking furious, while Liam Byrne and Ann Black laugh.

Yup. Rachel was bought in to silence those pesky sick and disabled people, and she did an impressive job of it. Every other politician I had met, had some kind of “game”. They promised the world but didn’t deliver, they gave you 3 minutes, then got their secretary to come in with “urgent business”. Some of a more drunken or Jurassic nature, just stared at your cleavage, hoping it would make you too uncomfortable to go on. But not Rachel. She just said “No”. Cold as that. Stopped answering, stopped listening and just said “No”.

Fast forward 10 years, (and those years in between are DEFINITELY for another day) and I can write again. The media clauses that meant I could never even share the secrets and plots I learned campaigning, finally long expired. And I knew I would write again, but I didn’t know what or when.

And so (FINALLY, I hear you sigh with relief, posts won’t always be this long, 15 years is a lot to catch up on) onto this Substack. As you can see from my previous blog, I love an ironic, inflammatory name. This one, UNDERCLASS, came from an unexpectedly heated debate I had with Sam Freedman (for those who don’t know, a political/polling pundit) on Twitter during the last election. Well, several really, because I couldn’t bear his daily wrongness on polling and felt compelled to respond now and then, when the wrongness overcame me.

Anyway, one day, a small charity had released a job advert, clearly not aiming to reach your average applicant. The language was extremely informal, intended to provoke, even. Just a list of minorities that might feel the job wasn’t for them, urging them they were exactly what was needed. But two in particular had provoked Sam greatly. “Underclass” and “Criminal Class”. I was genuinely quite surprised. When I was campaigning, I worked with some very well renowned economists, and beyond the ABCDE classification, I couldn’t think of a better or newer term than “underclass”. If you aren’t in the system at all, don’t claim benefits, don’t do anything official in your own name, maybe only use cash or for 100 other reasons, then what DO we refer to those people as? Because there are at least 7 million people in the country who for whatever reason aren’t in “employment, education or training”, cut off from this society we created. If you don’t have a name, you don’t exist. And that’s very convenient for every comfortable, privileged, journalist or politician who is meant to be fixing the reasons that people fall through these cracks in the first place

I asked if it was the “class” or the “under” he objected so strongly to, and he said “class” because “He wasn’t a Victorian”. I thought that was a little tectchy, so decided to Do My Own Research. I asked every progressive journalist and economist I could think of what term THEY would use to refer to people outside of the ABCDE classification. They all stumbled and stuttered, but no-one had a newer or better term.

Over the months that followed, this stayed with me. For reasons we’ll go into (it will be the main content of this Substack) I’ve come into very close contact with virtually every public service in this country. Health, policing, homelessness, failing Ombudsmen, broken justice systems. Child services, adult services, all failing or in “special measures” Failing the communities they served, but more importantly damaging real people and their real lives every day. Who spoke for them, if every last service was hollowed out to empty shells?

So I decided I would write those stories here. I’m not entirely sure that you have to have no apparent means of financial, support to feel you’ve fallen out of the system. That you have nowhere left to turn. To find that there is no voice. You won’t be heard, and will have to live with whatever great injustice you went through. Or maybe you’re very successful. There are lots of reasons a person might make a lot of money that they either don’t want to or can’t declare. Perhaps whole industries we could make safer AND make a tidy tax bundle on? Not to mention the benefits to public health. But we don’t have conversations like that in the UK, for fear of The Daily Mail.

However, it seems events have rather overtaken me. All of the same people I knew so well, the journalists and MPs, the advisors and SpAds. The researchers and bloggers and charity supporters? They’re really most of the same people either on Starmer’s team now, or new MPs in his government, or still advising him in some way or another. And despite their unwavering and generous support at the time, it seems memories are short. And those same people now want to cut sickness and disability benefits all over again! Using the same tired old Tory lines, full of the same tired old nonsense we explained very clearly to them last time around.

Finally, the polling wrongness I mentioned above. It was by no means only Sam, to be fair. It was virtually every pundit and pollster in the country. Starmer was riding high and would win. A huge majority. But as soon as the election was called and people started to see him and his team for themselves, both his own - and the Labour Party’s - popularity started to plummet. And keep falling. Even for months before the election I was concerned that Starmer had nowhere near the kind of leads or popular appeal Blair had enjoyed. Or the polling leeway to win such a huge majority. With a few weeks of the campaign left to go, I was genuinely worried that it had been so terrible, Labour would end up on about 34% or 35%. Of course I was mocked. But every time I ran the figures, Reform split the Tory vote a bit more and it didn’t matter. Starmer could and would win his “landslide” with 34% or 35%. As the results came in, it was cold comfort to be vindicated by numbers. (My other claim to polling fame is that I was virtually the only person in the country to predict Corbyn would *gain* between 30 and 35 seats in 2017, so at least I’m more right than most.)

But with his authoritarian, technocratic style and his seeming lack of any political or voter awareness at all, like Cassandra I warned over and over that Starmer would only keep falling lower and lower in the polls. And the public were in no mood for more broken promises and broken dreams. If he won his “majority” would it even last two years? Did we really want to go ahead with all this Tory and Reform dog whistling, if it was going to end in abject misery in months rather than years?

I realised that logically, winning a thumping great landslide was unlikely to EVER allow any form of Labour Party to stab that Leader in the back within a 5 year term. (Well, *some leaders* but….. not Starmer. Not their guy.) Nonetheless, I knew, with every miserable bone in my body, that this is where we would be about now, and just how deep this mess goes. I had often found myself wishing over the years, that I didn’t know so much about it all. And here we are. Just as I plan to write my stories at last, I find myself able to comment with decades of credibility and experience on the very policies and people falling so far, so fast.

I can’t bear one more day of Alice in Wonderland “news” and “commentary”, where everything is fine and we just need to “tighten our belts a bit more”. One more day where we all pretend Farage truly matters or Trump is a real president.

Please subscribe and share, as I said in my very first speech “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”. If we do have security and privilege and love, our great power is what we can give back. To give voice to the voiceless when we can.