Benefits

by Zoë Fairbairns

  ‘My fiancee and I have a simple answer for homeless families. We won’t be getting married until we’ve saved enough for our deposit. And we’re old-fashioned enough to believe that children come after marriage, not before.’

  ‘So sickness benefit is going up again! I have kept myself fit all my life, avoiding infections, abstaining from drink, tobacco and hazardous pursuits. Now, it seems, I am to be out of pocket ...’

  ‘Very nice to be an unmarried mother and live on social security. As a mere wife, I live on what my husband chooses to give me ...’

  The newspaper became embarrassed; so much so that they ran a follow-up feature called ‘Lest We Forget.’ Amid all the tales of scroungers, it said, let us not forget the deserving poor; and its journalists located hardship cases with impeccable credentials. The single mother who was a rape victim (you have no excuse whatever, the judge had told the culprit); the family whose home was struck by lightning the day after their insurers went broke; the legless man who packed cosmetics at home because he liked to feel he was paying his way.

  ‘These are difficult times for all of us,’ thundered the editorial, ‘and will continue to be so until we are reaping the full benefits of North Sea oil. But let us not forget the reputation for compassion in which Britain still leads the world ...’

  Mrs Travers made one of her television appearances. ‘Is it not remarkable,’ she said, her pretty brows arched in bewilderment, ‘that an organisation set up in support of the family is thereby assumed to be against the welfare state? Are the two incompatible? I hope not.’

  Even the weather collaborated on the day of that first family procession. Sun shone through a gentle breeze. Crowds waited outside the town hall for three o’clock. A clash of cymbals struck the hour, trumpets and trombones burst into ‘The British Grenadiers’, the gates opened and the procession began.

  Musical families from all over the borough formed the brass band. Their instruments gleamed with polish and sunshine. The players — men, women, children — were spotless in their white shirts and jeans. They sweated and marched, played and smiled. Their banner proclaimed, ‘Families in Harmony.’

  Cars followed. The mayor, the mayoress and an obscure royal rode in the first sleek open limousine. It was not an official visit by royalty. But it was rumoured that the Palace was enchanted by what it had heard of the planned event and wished to make a noncommittal gesture of support while not embroiling itself in politics. The mayor, who had a reputation for trendiness, wore a pale yellow suit under his chain of office; his lady was in pink flowers and a wide-brimmed white straw hat; the royal relative was orange from head to foot. The three dignitaries waved stiffly.

  The second car carried Mrs Travers and Mrs Patel, respectively clothed in pale and deep green. There was no awkwardness in their greeting to the crowd; Mrs Travers’ arm, pale and silk-gloved to the elbow, waved like the sail of a windmill, while Mrs Patel, shyly confident, gave little intimate grins and shook her wrist in short bursts. Watchers assumed they were film-stars or monarchs, but looked in their programmes and found each woman self-labelled as an ordinary housewife.

  After the cars came representatives of the caring professions and local charities. There were few official delegations, but small contingents were present from most groups. ‘Family Doctors for Family Life’ handed out information on how mothers could treat colds at home without medical supervision. A few middle-aged social workers walked together with prim pride, while younger colleagues had leaflets: ‘Lack of proper funding is making our job more difficult. But we’re here to help families, and we’ll help you all we can.’ Nuns and priests had organised a float whose theme was the Holy Family.

  Then came the families themselves. The Tynes, perched in their multitudes on the hand-carved cart that had lain cherished and unused in their garage. The cart, the programme explained, had been in the Tyne family for generations. Carpenters since the sixteenth century, the Tyne males now sat benignly sawing wood while the women and children did intricate carvings and played with sawdust. Then a family of writers: father published thick texts on the future of man, mother contributed to magazines, and the tall, serious children persistently took prizes in essay contests. Mr Meat the butcher (it actually was his name) with a pig’s head on a tray, garlanded with strings of sausages carried by his wife and two sons. An income tax inspector (anonymous) on a rather flippant float, looking grimly into the crowd and singling out strangers. ‘I want your money,’ he roared, while his wife brought him piles of paper and the children sat at his feet counting money into a piggy bank.

  Fairytale characters mingled with the children in the crowd, giving them toys and bits of fruit: Mary Poppins, Mother Hubbard, the Old Woman who Lived in a Shoe. Then came the International Section: an Indian family on the back of a lorry with a stove, the mother cooking real curry that you could smell in the air; an Irish group, parents with bagpipes and children dressed as leprechauns; a steel band from Trinidad.

  Suddenly the section of the audience that was laughing at Italian children flinging spaghetti realised that everyone else had fallen silent. Their shouts died in mid-air; the procession had changed.

  Discussing it afterwards, many people said it was too abrupt, but Mrs Travers and Mrs Patel defended it. These were just as much a part of family life as the healthy, celebrating adults and children earlier in the procession.

  The afflicted families. Fathers pushing wheelchairs containing smart, vacant-eyed teenagers. Mothers with odd, floppy babies. Senile old folk in the passenger seats of cars, their younger relatives smiling bravely.

  The spectators lowered their eyes and consulted their programmes.

  ‘Mr and Mrs J’s son Alex was bom with spina bifida. “We were offered a special school” says Mrs J, “but it was so far away, we just couldn’t.” At thirteen Alex is very intelligent; he reads avidly (the Famous Five are a special favourite") and is always cheerful. COPING AWARD: a local laundry has offered Mrs J vouchers to cover fifty per cent of the cost of washing bed-linen over the next six months.’

  The spectators swallowed hard and stood very still.

  ‘The W. family have just welcomed their son home from Borstal. He is determined to make good and they are determined to help him. COPING AWARD: A local supermarket will give him a month’s trial as a shelf-filler. After the month, he will be paid. The supermarket prefers to remain anonymous.

  ‘Miss Joanna G. is one of hundreds of single women in the borough who have sacrificed career and marriage to care for elderly parents at home. Says Miss G: “Mother and I get on very well. I don’t regard it as a sacrifice.” COPING AWARD: Twelve double tickets for matinees at any local cinema.’

  The sun beat down on the discomfort of the watchers, wondering if they were meant to clap or what.

  The procession wound through the town, heralded by music and laughter, leaving perplexity and sadness in its wake. Only from the windows of a derelict tower block squatted by women was there any deliberately hostile response.

  Each of the wide windows facing the road had been blocked with a sheet of paper. And each of these placards bore a stark message, white on black or black on white.

  ‘Stop the cuts.’

  ‘More hospitals.’

  ‘More home helps.’

  ‘More nurseries.’

  ‘Better schools.’

  ‘Women can’t do it all.’

  ‘Women won’t do it all.’

  And so the lines had been drawn for the battle that still raged, feminists and FAMILY glaring balefully at each other over the dying body of the welfare state. Each held its demonstrations, its counter-demonstrations; each established its model communities. It was a new dichotomy, to confuse and criss-cross the older ones of class and party. ‘The state is responsible,' asserted the feminists from their squatted communes, their women-only states-within-a-state, when truant children ran wild and delinquent, and old folk died neglected; ‘No, we women are responsible,’ crooned the green-uniformed wom
en stewards of FAMILY, running courses in domestic skills and home nursing, and publishing books called Play His Game in the Marriage Bed and You Promised to Obey. The feminists had marched in thousands when David Laing MP, in his maiden speech, urged married women to give up their jobs because ‘there is so much to do at home’; they sabotaged a cricket-pitch (cricket being ‘male idleness elevated into religion’), etching into the grass with acid their crudest symbol: a round-cornered diamond to represent a vulva, with a large clitoris and no opening.

  They ran health centres (offering a mixture of self-help, herbalism, old wives’ tales and orthodox medicine) for women finding to their cost that FAMILY had a stronghold in the dwindling official health services; they dug up neglected laws on sex equality and fought hopelessly to get them obeyed. Women on the way to FAMILY’s housework classes would be stopped by feminists and asked if they would like to do karate or woodwork instead; new fiancees would receive congratulatory cards in the post, enclosing leaflets outlining the legal rights of wives, while their startled boyfriends got anonymous warnings to behave. And at midday on Sundays, when streets in which FAMILY had worked to re-establish the day of domestic togetherness were fragrant with the smell of cheap meat roasting, shrill voices would be heard through letter-boxes: ‘When’s Mum’s day off, then?’ (And it was not unknown, FAMILY learned to its regret, for the woman in the kitchen, hearing this, to respond: ‘Good question,’ and abandon her pans.)

  Unemployment was at a record high, particularly among men. Heavy industry was quailing before foreign competition, but the decline in traditional female areas of work was less steep. Women were cheaper, some firms preferred them. North European businesses found it satisfactory to farm out big clerical jobs to London agencies, and international corporations making domestic appliances found the nimble-fingered women of the North and Midlands surprisingly to their taste, FAMILY knew of whole streets where women went out to work and men stayed at home and neglected the children.

  FAMILY's anxiety was shared by industry. Today’s children were tomorrow’s workers. Besides, women workers might be cheaper, but too many depressed breadwinners could damage national morale, and morale needed to be high for what was coming. The country had been the sick man of Europe for too long, and Europe suspected hypochondria. What was needed was nothing less than a new industrial revolution.

  The suspension of all social security payments was only to be temporary, part of a national effort to restore confidence in the pound.

  The fact was, the beleaguered prime minister explained to a restive House of Commons, that when it came to income maintenance, history had turned the welfare state on its head.

  He made moving reference to its founding philosophy. It was, he recalled, that people should first and foremost fend for themselves. Merciful provision must be made for those who failed to do so, but the failures must never be better off than the successes. Unfortunately, years of inflation, pay curbs and good intentions had taken their toll; and social security payments were outgrowing wages.

  ‘In our mad pursuit of fairness, we have forgotten equity. Our British sense of fair play has recoiled from the prospect of anyone starving or suffering, even through his own fault — but where is the fair play when hospitals must close to put money in the pockets of the workshy? Where is equity when the idle are better off than the diligent? There have to be further cuts — on that we have no choice. But this we can choose: either to break faith with millions of decent, proud, hardworking citizens, or to look with more realism on the others: the tramps, the ne’er-do-wells, the offenders, the improvident —’

  The Commons ceased to be merely restive, and erupted. House procedures used once to be compared by class-conscious critics to a public school debating chamber; these days it was more like breaktime in a comprehensive. No longer did MPs defer to the Speaker, grant courtesy titles or bow when they left; these days it was the loudest voice that got a hearing.

  A socialist youth was on his feet, roaring with all the force and outrage of his years. The working class were not going to fall for this one, and neither were their wives. It was quite obvious what was going on. Foreign industry saw unemployment pay — meagre as it was — as the last obstacle before this country became a handy offshore pool of cheap labour. It wasn’t a question of social security payments being too high, it was a question of wages being lower than even government estimates of subsistence! Offer jobs to the unemployed; then the prime minister would see who was workshy and who was not. If people lived mean, dirty, anti-social lives it was their mean environments, made by dirty, anti-social government policies, that made them so. There had to be cuts, did there? Then cut profits, cut arms spending, abolish the monarchy.

  He was howled down by monarchists of right and left, and the house switched its attention to another speaker. David Laing did not have a loud voice; but newness was on his side, the novelty value of the Family Party. His appearance compelled the kind of attention a mouse gives a snake: in his late thirties, he looked shrivelled and ageless, anxious and ill. He was unmarried, lived alone, and, it was said, ate rarely and eccentrically, needing much of his salary to feed his addiction to coffee. The world shortage and price rises had made it a rare delicacy for ordinary citizens, but David Laing liked to sip and swig constantly. A beaker and a flask steamed on the bench beside him as he spoke.

  All around, honourable members lounged on benches in shirts, slacks and occasional frocks of Olex, the new, cheap, crepey material being manufactured in the Far East out of North Sea Oil by-products. It came in two colours, medium brown or medium grey; it shone with a slightly oily sheen. Laing made it clear that he despised his fellow MPs for affecting the common touch and wearing Olex; he himself never appeared in the house without a worsted suit and a carnation. His hair was very short, the back of his neck shaven and stubbly. He wore thin-rimmed spectacles.

  His narrow tongue flicked once across each dry lip. He glared at the prime minister.

  ‘May I remind you that one of the largest groups receiving social security are receiving it not because they are neglecting their duty, but because they are doing it? I refer, of course, to unsupported mothers, women who have neither shirked their obligation to have children, nor left them to seek jobs, nor abandoned them to the tender mercies of the social services

  The house sighed, wishing it had not let him start. The trouble with pressure-group MPs was that they were bores. Fanatics. They brought their favourite subject into every damn debate, relevant or not. With Laing it was mothers. Single mothers, married mothers, he didn’t care. Just women who had babies and looked after them properly. Funny bloke. Unmarried, but didn’t look queer. A Sunday newspaper had once revealed that he’d wanted to marry a feminist and she’d run off with a lesbian, which was why he had it in for both. That was before he became an MP. He’d been a social worker, then a deputy director of social services — he’d been fired after the famous ‘babyswap’ scandal, but that was how he came to be taken up by FAMILY. Some woman journalist friend of his had a handicapped daughter and found she was entitled to virtually no help looking after her, whereas if she fostered someone else’s kid she got any number of handouts. Laing had worked some fiddle and hadn’t minded being caught; he said he’d proved that the state only acknowledged the work of mothers when they didn’t do it ...

  The prime minister was smiling indulgently.

  ‘As I have said, the suspension of payments will be only temporary, and when the social security system has been overhauled, special consideration will be given to deserving groups. But in any case ...’ The prime minister’s smile spread even further in the slightly crooked way it had when he thought he had an opponent hoist with his own petard. ‘There are ways, are there not, of avoiding becoming an unsupported mother, just as there are ways of avoiding becoming unemployed? The Family Party above all would not wish us to place a premium on unorthodox styles of living ...’

  Alan Travers, the other FP member, took over from David. He
was past fifty, tall and straight, lean-faced, with large handsome features. He dressed more casually, in a green suit; he liked to play the calm paternal figure to David’s impetuous youth.

  ‘Isn’t this the point we’re always making? We fail so utterly to reward responsible married women that if we give anything at all to single mothers we appear to be placing a premium —’

  Something seemed to explode behind Alan Travers. David Laing had leapt to his feet again, spraying his neighbours with cold coffee. He seemed to be having some kind of fit. His eyes stared, his mouth spat.

  ‘Yes!’ he cried, ‘Yes! Exactly! The prime minister dares — dares — to talk about unorthodox styles of living in a society that actually penalises motherhood, so much so that virtually the only women who’ll take it up are those capable of nothing else! Who’s having all the big families today? Social classes four and five, the filth, the dregs, the dross of society. The better females are too busy working, or seeking work, or fighting for their rights — and who in honesty can blame them? Who can blame a liberated woman for not settling for slavery? So they leave it to the ones who don’t recognise degradation when they see it — I’ve been a social worker, I know about these people — women too stupid and disorganised to —’

  Alan Travers grabbed his arm. ‘Sit down, Laing.’ David wrenched free and went on furiously: ‘Those women whose homes are sties, whose habits are bestial, who couldn’t raise a guinea-pig never mind a child —’ he drew a deep, shuddering breath to steady himself, then continued more slowly. ‘Do you remember — it seems a century ago — we used to worry about being overrun by blacks? Send ’em home, some of us said, stop ’em breeding. Who but the lunatic fringe thinks colour is the issue now — as we look at the decaying bones of our great compassionate nation, gnawed by whining, idle, dirty, anti-social rats of all colours ...’ His voice had sunk to a piercing whisper. ‘The wrong rats are breeding. Maybe we can’t stop that,’ he hissed, ‘but we’d better make maternity a better deal for the others, or we’re going to be overrun.’