All The Fun of the Welfare

I’ve been reading the media coverage (both left and right) about welfare reform for some time without really commenting. But today’s intervention by George Osborne finally pushed me into belated action. The part of the speech that caught me was this little snippet:

“Now, those who defend the current benefit system are going to complain loudly. These vested interests always complain, with depressingly predictable outrage, about every change to a system which is failing.”

As if the Tory Party is without its own set of obvious ‘vested interests’, but I digress: here are my thoughts as one without any vested interests. I am not a member of the Labour Party, I have never voted Labour, I have never claimed Job Seeker’s Allowance or Housing Benefits and I don’t work in the public sector. I am unlikely, thanks entirely to good fortune I believe, to ever need to fall back on the welfare state for survival. And yet I think it is absolutely essential that the welfare state does survive.

That is down to one thing: empathy. I may not have the experience of living on a tiny amount of state handout, but I’m good enough at Maths (and that’s not really very good at all, by the way) to realise that £111.45 (Job Seekers Allowance at its absolute top end) per week isn’t very much to get by on. As I have no experience of this, you can get an excellent breakdown of how that money would get eaten up in no time elsewhere on the web. I actually believe that most politicians are privately aware that their rhetoric about ‘strivers vs skivers’ is a cartoon caricature of a problem that is massively overblown, but they don’t dare challenge it as being soft on welfare is political kryptonite. This is not an excuse: just because it’s political rather than intellectual cowardice doesn’t make a great deal of difference: it’s still cowardice, however you paint it. Ultimately, what’s the point in an opposition party if they don’t challenge the government’s implausible definitions? This probably goes a long way to revealing the reasoning behind my earlier statement that I have never voted Labour, but I digress again. You can read a brilliant response to the tired arguments against welfare here, rather than me regurgitating the same thing again.

MISUNDERSTANDINGS OF POVERTY

Which brings me onto the recent petition to get Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary to put his money where his mouth is and live on just £53 per week, after he casually tossed off that he could do it if necessary. I signed it myself, but have been kind of questioning whether I should have done since, mainly because it risks trivialising the issue. It’s not so much that living on £53 for a week is impossible - I reckon I could have a stab at it, uncomfortable as it would be - but that doing it as a temporary stunt misunderstands the very nature of true grinding poverty, where it’s truly endless, and a sudden unexpected expense could ruin you. I could go on at great length here, but Alex Andreou in The New Statesman explains why much more articulately with genuine experience to back it up, so I shall leave that there. Since I started writing this piece, Duncan Smith has told his local constituency paper that the whole thing is a ‘complete stunt’ - he’s right, of course, but entirely wrong if he thinks that’s going to end the whole thing. Also, in saying that he’s been ‘on the breadline’ twice before (a claim that has come under some scrutiny already) kind of misses the point when he is in the process of cutting rates to levels comparatively lower than what they were when he used them, in a time when there are barely any jobs around, and his government is in the process of demonising people using the safety net as ‘scroungers’ (though not, to his credit, something that Duncan Smith does. According to a Telegraph blog post he was “absolutely livid” when he heard about a Tory poster campaign contrasting a nice family in work with a feral one on benefits).

But that’s an aside, really. Duncan-Smith’s most controversial moment so far has come through Workfare, a scheme encouraging people to work in return for their benefits to give them experience to get a job in the long run. Laudable on paper, but making it compulsory with sanctions for those that decline, and giving free labour to multi-million pounds like Tesco and Poundland is oddly counter-intuitive for a country so clearly desperate for growth. In my experience working in the media has taught me anything, it’s that free trumps paid for everything. I think most people would be in favour if the work was for not-for-profits, or local council projects for the good of the community, but it’s hard to sympathise with saving Tesco a few quid on their salary bill, that would then be taxable income for someone no longer drawing JSA. The whole benefits for work thing reminds me vaguely of Keynes’ not-to-be-taken-seriously idea that you could pay people to dig holes and fill them in again, rather than having them idle. It’s not the first time government rhetoric feels like it’s from a bygone age.

DELIBERATELY BLURRED DEFINITIONS The government say that the welfare bill is enormous, and that’s kind of true, but the trouble is they’re deliberately vague about what’s covered under welfare, because people automatically assume this is mainly housing benefit and job seekers’ allowance: in other words ‘the scroungers’ in the cartoon rhetoric they choose to frame the debate in. This actually isn’t fair, as this handy tax calculator will explain. Simply pop in your earnings there, and it will break down your daily tax return. With my salary, I pay just over £11 per day to ‘helping others’, but just over 50p on unemployment and housing benefit. Old age is over half of that, but the elderly are rarely hammered by budgets because they tend to be the group most likely to get out and vote and the public are a lot more sympathetic to the elderly than the unemployed. If you put the maximum salary of £200,000 per year into the calculator, JSA and housing benefit comes in at just over a fiver a day: hardly generous, compared to the £46.83 old age care goes up to. Sadly it’s hard to imagine Labour hammering the Tories over benefits in the same way they did with ’the granny tax’. Suffice it to say, a lot of the hostility towards social security comes from the misinformation about it, shown in the infographic at the top of the page, and expanded on in more detail here.

But even if you do object to paying a fraction of your taxes to the unemployed or underpaid (yep, as the graph at the top says only 3% of the welfare bill goes to the unemployed) the point about taxation is that you don’t get to pick and choose the bits you want to fund: it’s a social obligation. I put up with funding the monarchy (which went up £5,000,000 or 16% this year), nuclear technology and bank bailouts as part of the collective tax burden, and don’t particularly like it, but accept it as part of my social contract. Yet part of the rhetoric in the attack on social security is it being about getting value for the tax payer by getting the most out of those in the safety net. Odd: you don’t hear the government offering to launch our nukes when they’re expiring to get our money’s worth with a nice firework display.

Ultimately all this comes down to priorities. Don’t believe the argument that welfare is no longer affordable: it is if enough people deem it to be a priority, and it becomes politically expedient again (though support has dropped by half in the last 20 years). Personally my views on welfare can be summed up as follows: I’d rather we overspent and some people exploited the system, rather than we underspent and many genuinely needy people couldn’t survive. This doesn’t seem that radical an idea to me, so why won’t the opposition do the right thing and speak up convincingly for the most vulnerable, without needing to cover themselves with so many caveats that their support is essentially meaningless?

[CORRECTION 7/04/13: Someone with a great deal of knowledge about the workings of Job Centre Plus tells me that you can claim interview travel costs, so this wouldn’t come out of JSA. I have removed the suggestion that it would.]

Games played in 2013 #3: Hotline Miami

A New Year’s Resolution of mine is to write more. To help this along, I’m going to write some stuff about any game that grabs me enough to finish in 2013 - the only rule is that I won’t bother if I’m reviewing it elsewhere, because that would be wholly pointless. I’m also delighted to say, my last post encouraged at least one person to buy The Walking Dead - take a bow, Debbie.

There’s plenty of things I can say for myself with certainty: I will never enjoy camping; I find songs by The Ting Tings massively irritating; I will (probably) never play for Derby County. One certainty that was challenged with Hotline Miami was this little gem though:

I will never enjoy battering a man’s skull in with a brick, while wearing a rubber animal mask.

To be fair, this wasn’t one of life’s great ethical questions, and it’s seldom asked in polite conversation. But blasting all the way through Hotline Miami, the top down retro indie game in a few hours (it’s quite short) was a thoroughly enjoyable experience, busted skulls and all.

If you were to glance at screenshots, which you can do if you like above, you’d probably come to the conclusion that it’s a Grand Theft Auto clone. But not a 3D Grand Theft Auto clone, an old school top-down car thieving, hari-krishna running down, cartoony take on organized crime. It’s not really… well not entirely. It’s actually like a cross between original GTA and another Rockstar game: Manhunt.

Because it requires quite a lot of planning and stealth, and it constantly reminds you that even the best laid plans of mice and men can be derailed… especially if said plans involve smacking a guard to the floor with a door, grabbing his AK47 and blasting the remaining guards to the floor in a blaze of blood and glory. One shot kills, and the guards aren’t shy about taking that one shot.

On top of that, firing a gun makes noise, and noise attracts others from the building. Unlike the hand-holding modern games of the minute, where ducking behind cover for a moment will miraculously cure that punctured lung, or broken legs, if you’re hit in Hotline Miami, then you go back to the start. Fortunately rounds are pretty quick if you do everything right, which makes it like the trial and error of Super Meat Boy.

As fun as the gameplay is though, the thing that will stick with me about Hotline Miami (and I can actually prove this: I finished it in January, but have been lax at updating my little corner of the internet) is the end of each mission. Once everyone is wiped out, the hypnotic rave music and sound of bullets and death is suddenly cut out, and you calmly navigate your murderous psychopath back through the building, through the collection of corpses you left en-route. It’s pretty rare for a game to make you revisit your actions, and although it’s not a ‘what does it all mean’ moment, it does at least give you a few tranquil minutes to reflect on the nature of over-the-top videogame violence.

So I think on balance, I probably wouldn’t enjoy caving in a man’s skull with a brick. With or without an animal mask.

Games played in 2013 #2: The Walking Dead

A New Year’s Resolution of mine is to write more. To help this along, I’m going to write some stuff about any game that grabs me enough to finish in 2013 - the only rule is that I won’t bother if I’m reviewing it elsewhere, because that would be wholly pointless.

The Walking Dead is the closest I’ve come to finding a Choose Your Own Adventure Story in two decades of videogaming. Unlike those kids’ books though, The Walking Dead is brilliantly written and actually pretty emotionally draining over the 5 episodes… two charges very rarely made of games.

What it adds to the mix on top of this is a real time sense of urgency. With a Choose Your Own Adventure book, you could read the set up as many times as you liked, and then slowly turn to the page you want, read the first line, go back and decide again if you felt like bending the rules a bit. In The Walking Dead, the action unfolds in front of you, and you have very limited time to make a choice - and usually the choice is between two pretty unsavoury options. The consequences have a lasting impact on the way your band of zombie survivors treats you in future.

Case in point: we come across a group of strangers out in the woods - everyone distrusts people in this game, given the undead walk the earth, and bandits are killing and stealing the scant resources. Anyway, one stranger’s foot is caught in a bear trap. After deciding these folks are probably trustworthy, and vowing to help the guy out of his beartrap shaped dilemma, one of our party spots zombies on the horizon. The game switches to the first person and I struggle with the bear trap. All I have is an axe at this point, so I try forcing it open. It resists. I try cutting the chain the to the trap, so at least the guy can be carried away. Still no luck. The zombies are getting closer now and time is running out, when suddenly I spot a third way… but I really don’t like it, so I try forcing the trap again. As the zombies get closer I realised there really is no alternative - amidst screams of protests from the unwilling patient I take the axe to his leg for some good old fashioned ‘no anaesthetic’ surgery. It’s pretty gruesome, and it doesn’t come off in one cut. I manage 3 swings of the axe before the zombies get too close and we have to leave - his leg is still attached… just. If I’d had the stomach to axe his leg sooner, he’d have escaped, as it was he was left to the zombies, all the while in great pain and bleeding profusely from the leg. I’d failed, and I felt awful. Genuinely awful.

I must have killed tens of thousands of virtual people in sprite form over the years - this one I’d known no longer than my other virtual victims, but it created real guilt. And that’s why The Walking Dead is special. It doesn’t really matter that your choices don’t make much difference to the overall story arc (the game is remarkably resilient at ensuring your actions don’t count for a great deal in the greater scheme of things. If a character is going to die, you might make them last a bit longer, but they’ll eventually snuff it - take that chaos theory!), it’s about telling a story and making you care about the diverse range of characters.

The zombies themselves are window dressing, really - necessary scenery for the bunch of diverse survivors to get thrown together, and get increasingly fraught with each other as time goes on. You can’t please everyone, and you may find characters treat yours completely differently in your version of the story - in my case, the most cathartic moment of the game was telling a guy named Kenny, who I had spent the entire game mollycoddling through tantrum after tantrum, to “go fuck himself” when he expressed doubt at helping me in the final chapter. Suffice it to say, he didn’t react well to this, and I knew full well I was jeapordising my chance of a less unhappy ending in this distinctly miserable story: I didn’t care. Or rather, I cared too much to let the game end without giving Kenny an earful of abuse.

Considering how little I care for most game stories, that’s a major feat. And as for the story itself… well, it’s not that it's particularly novel, but it is wonderfully told, with plenty of surprises and cliffhangers, and it pulls at your heart strings in just the right way to make you care about the characters: in particular the little girl you’re charged with protecting for the game. I’m a sucker for a story with a lead achieving personal redemption, and my version of that character was just that: ostensibly a good person who had made some bad choices in life, but managed to redeem himself by the time the credits closed on the fifth and final episode - but not without a few regrets along the way, as the body count stacked up.

This is a game for non-gamers, because there’s actually not much game here, and the bits that are kind of get in the way of the story, and yet it’s still one of the best I’ve played in years. Buy it, and more of this kind of thing!