I can’t help it. I have to post. This is an amazing piece of investigative journalism in the Guardian. Not. It concerns the supposed “carers scandal”. For those who don’t know this relates to a social security benefit in the UK called “Carers Allowance”. If a person cares for someone who receives another benefit called Personal Independence Payment or Disability Allowance, (or a raft of others), then that person, the carer, can also get a benefit. The amount seems to be £83.30 a week. It is worth noting that in order to get Personal Independence Payment a claimant may, but only may, have to undergo an interview. That interview could be in person, but it could be over Zoom, or over the phone! No specific medical diagnosis is required, though, e.g. an ‘ADHD’ label could help. (Hint; if you want to claim PIP get a private psychiatrist to give you or your child an ADHD ticket). [1] If you do have to have an interview the interviewer will ask a series of questions about what you can and can’t do. It seems your word is taken at face value, and to help, there are countless consultants on the Internet who, for a fee, will coach you how to pass. You can claim Personal Independence Payment if you are in work or not, and it is not means tested. Clearly; a certain percentage of PIP claims will be unmerited. But, I digress.
The supposed “scandal” around Carers Allowance is that a very large number of people [2] have received more than they were entitled to. The key is that the benefit is only payable if weekly income is less than £196.00. [3] What seems to have happened is that a large number of people, (approximately 83,000), seem to have forgotten not to claim the benefit when their income went over this limit. The DWP (Department of Work and Pensions) has continued to pay them on the basis of what they told the DWP. However; the DWP is now doing retrospective checks and finding, (I would guess by making comparisons with HMRC data), that these people have been scamming them – claiming money when, based on the rules, they were not entitled to it. The DWP is now sending people letters asking for the money back. In some cases, (I think quite a small minority), people are being taken to court. The actual scandal here is that, (no surprises really), it turns out that huge numbers of people are a little too relaxed about the rules when claiming social security benefits. One could, possibly, also make an argument, that the DWP has been lax in not running checks which would catch people sooner. Their counter argument, one would imagine, would be that it is the claimant’s responsibility to declare a change in circumstances or any income or savings which make them ineligible for the benefit. Benefit claims forms used to, and I would guess still do, have “You must tell us if your circumstances change”, stamped all over them.
I’ve written about this before, on my social affairs and education blog. What is happening is the invention of a victim narrative. In the Guardian article I commented on there, the readers were told that someone had been “fined” for over-claiming. In fact, bar a token £50.00 penalty that family was simply being asked to repay money they had claimed from the public purse which they were not entitled too. The current article, which is also credited to Josh Halliday as co-author, who was the author of the first article, follows the same pattern. We are told that someone who was prosecuted for stealing public money “earned marginally more than the limit” (the cut-off limit for the benefit). We are further told she “supplemented” the “meagre” Carers Allowance by working 16 hours a week. It doesn’t matter. “Meagre” is subjective. And, anyway, “meagre” does not justify taking what is not yours. if it did; anyone on a low income would be justified in stealing. That was sorted out in the 19th century, if not the 14th. The journalists have a very distorted sense of responsibility. This lack of any idea of personal responsibility is encapsulated in this idea: “school dinner lady was allowed to accrue overpayments”. This is like blaming a householder for being burgled because they did not install triple locks on their doors and windows. The school dinner either knew or should have known that she was over the limit and needed to stop claiming. It is an amazing innovation in ethics to put the primary and indeed all the blame onto the person from whom money was unlawfully taken for “allowing” it. Nonetheless; this is the victim narrative in full swing. It is going at such strength that it has simply lost touch with reality. It is only in a dream world where everything should be arranged for us that people over-claiming a social security benefit and then being asked to pay it back, or, in a minority of cases, being taken to court, could be described as an “unjust and cruel” system.
The people featured in these Guardian articles are being exploited and used. This is a movement of power. The idea is to ensure that everyone conceives of themselves as a victim. Everyone is to have a diminished sense of personal responsibility. As people’s sense of personal responsibility is reduced so power, in the sense of all the mechanisms of power, which operate through state institutions, increases. This narrative, (with its “victims” of the “carer’s allowance scandal”), is an operation of power. In the last 30 years power in the UK has been dismantling older traditions of authority. A good example of this is how school teachers no longer have personal authority which comes from their role in civil society and which they are allowed to exercise autonomously. They are required to “deliver” set programmes of “learning” and they are under constant surveillance in the name of “Safeguarding”. Under surveillance themselves, they must also surveill their students for; signs of having been slapped at home, signs of political extremism (including right-wing thoughts, and, of course, deviation from approved narratives on what constitutes a person. The key analyst of the process of the rise of petty power and the retreat of civil society is Josie Appleton. [4] A key analysis of the process of inculcating weakness and docility in education is The Dangerous Rise in Therapeutic Education. [5] The new development, as seen here, in this fake narrative about “victims” of overpayment, is a direct challenge not just to authority, but to the very principle of law itself. It is amazing. Taking both these Guardian articles together we can note that they seek to establish the principles that it is not the responsibility of people to follow the law, but the responsibility of the authorities to stop them breaking it and, at the same time, that breaking the law is justified by subjective and personal assessments of what is fair, without reference to the rules embodied in law. This is a twin attack on the basic foundations of law.
Notice how the radical journalists are not calling for more power to individuals and less for the state; rather, the exact opposite; they complain that the state did not surveill the recipients of Carer’s Allowance more closely, and manage their lives for them. This is modern “radicalism”; while seeming to be concerned with “justice” in some sense, it typically is, in effect, calling for an extension of power, and a reduction in autonomy of individuals and civil society.
One driver for this, other than headless power, is the political class in the UK. These people are insecure. (The key analyst of the insecurity of Britain’s Political Class is journalist Peter Oborne. [6]) Without roots in society, motivated purely by careerist reasons, and living in a world far removed from the lives of ordinary people *, they fear for their positions. They are so insecure that they no longer have confidence that their positions can be maintained by the traditional system of authority and law. They want to replace that with a system where the state is everything. This is, in fact, a totalitarian state. The victim narrative is a discourse method, (one of several current actively working in the UK), aiming to transition a democracy to a totalitarian state.
* As an example. Consider the recent story about how the UK’s Foreign Secretary has become embroiled in an undignified dispute with a taxi driver in France about a fare. As a side-effect of this story being in the news we learn that the Foreign Secretary and his wife’s choice for getting from a government knee’s up with the British King in Italy to their holiday resort in France was to take a taxi costing over £600.00; a journey which any normal person would have taken by train, bus or perhaps plane. [7] This is a society where a small and insecure ruling elite live lives far, far, beyond the means of their subjects, who they reduce to docility and compliance by surveillance. (Does this sound familiar? It should).
Update 14-9-25
There is an article in today’s Guardian about this, claiming that the government is looking at paying compensation for “victims of carer’s allowance scandal”. That is to the people who over-claimed on a benefit and are now whinging that they have to pay it back. I focus on this story because it is indicative of the state of the nation. The reality: some people who were receiving a generous benefit to do what used to be, and still is in most countries, something you just did, care for a relative who cannot look after themselves, over-claimed. Like any other benefit in the UK there are rules. In order to be entitled to the benefit you need to meet certain conditions. If you don’t meet those conditions you are not entitled to the benefit; it is your responsibility to tell the benefits’ office of this. It is not hard. The narrative: these people are “victims” who have been badly treated. In order to promote the “victim” story the Guardian has to emphasise some edge cases e.g. about people who were outside the entitlement for the benefit by “only a few pennies”. Even so; all they had to do was check their payslip.
“Some face life-changing bills after accidentally breaching earnings rules by a few pence a week.”. This makes me laugh. I am reminded of when, many years ago, I worked as a “mentor” for a young man from a troubled background. He lived with his grandparents, who were in fact paid to be his foster carers, (another example of the state paying people to do what in other countries people just do). One day I took him to a café and he stole something, (I can’t remember what, maybe a spoon). He told his grandparents that he had “accidentally” stolen a spoon. I thought it was quite creative and, while disappointing, also slightly amusing. But this is the Social Policy Editor of a major newsletter coming up with this nonsense. It isn’t even a slip of the tongue. We are also told; “Our reporting….. carers who were accidentally caught out by carer’s allowance earnings rules caused public outrage”. They weren’t “caught out” by the rules. The rules were published and all they had to do was check their payslips against the rules. Not hard.
Consider this: “The problem was exacerbated by the DWP’s routine failure to check all monthly HMRC alerts flagging up potential earnings breaches, allowing carers to inadvertently accrue massive overpayments stretching back years.”. For those who are not familiar with the system, HMRC is the tax office. What the Guardian is saying is that the DWP should have proactively asked HMRC for the pay details of all their claimants and checked it. This is like defending myself against not paying tax on my business by saying that it was up to the government to proactively look at my records and send me a bill. It doesn’t work that way; claiming benefits is like paying self-employment tax. The onus is on the tax-payer/claimant to work out what they should pay/what they are entitled to and act accordingly. This information is plastered over absolutely everything. The Guardian’s story is simply made up. Patrick Butler must know that.
What are the sordid motivations for this entirely mocked up story which seeks to turn benefit scammers into “victims” and get the public purse to “compensate” them? Here are some of the likely factors driving this:
- The Guardian is a business which caters to certain interest groups. In particular they cater to professionals in social care and education and their clients. This is a campaign that will please their interest groups and keep them buying the newspaper. The Guardian’s brand is promoted.
- A lot of people, liberals in general, as part of their ideology are committed to pushing the victim narrative. They simply need to create victims. Victims are docile and support state power. The more victims the merrier, because it means more state power. Since; the overall project is to harness state power to enforce their intolerant liberal values on everyone, this is great.
- As mentioned above the Labour government might scent a populist vote-winning opportunity here, though money is tight so I am not sure they will spend a lot on “compensation”.
- Obviously, the people who scammed the system out of thousands and now may be in line to be told they can keep that without a blemish on their records are probably gagging at the bit for that to happen.
Notes
- https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6749dedd75bb645366b3a269/pip-assessment-guide-part-one-the-assessment-process.pdf
- https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2025-02-11/30627
- https://www.gov.uk/carers-allowance/eligibility
- https://manifestoclub.info/
- https://thethinkingteacher.substack.com/p/a-review-of-the-dangerous-rise-in
- Triumph of the Political Class. Peter Oborne. Pocket Books. 2008.
- https://news.sky.com/story/foreign-office-denies-david-lammy-and-wife-dodged-taxi-fare-from-italy-to-france-13367869