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[/audioplayer]No scandal has been more successfully covered up than the appalling truth about what happens to Britain’s poorest people. We have, as a country, grown used to pretending they don’t exist; we shovel them off to edge-of-town housing estates and pay them to stay there in economic exile. We give them welfare for the foreseeable future, and wish them luck in their drug-addled welfare ghettos. This is our country’s dirty little secret, which has just been exposed by a devastating Channel 4 documentary. And the left are furious.
The outrage over Benefits Street has been quite extraordinary, comparable only with the furore over phone hacking. Labour politicians have lined up to denounce the programme and 31,000 have signed a petition of protest. Channel 4 stands accused of ‘demonising’ working-class people, and cynically hawking ‘poverty porn’. A letter signed by 100 charities demands that Channel 4 ‘review how this damaging and grossly unbalanced programme came to be broadcast’. The subtext is clear: this is Britain — we don’t talk about poverty. Or if we do, we never show its full, sickening extent.
All this fuss, of course, made Benefits Street the most watched show on British television on Monday, with five million viewers — more than anything else that Channel 4 broadcast in the whole of last year.
Fungi and his dog. He is shown picking up free magazines from a hotel, then successfully selling them on the street.
Those expecting ‘poverty porn’ would be baffled: it is a fly-on-the-wall documentary shot in James Turner Street in Birmingham, where most occupants of the 99 houses are on welfare. Its characters speak for themselves. As quickly becomes clear, they are overwhelmingly kind, neighbourly and surprisingly upbeat, given that they are, in effect, inmates in a social prison.
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