Ewan Aitken: Stigmatising those forced to live on £53 helps no-one

He had been made redundant and was struggling to find a new job. As a result of losing his job he’d lost his house. As a single man he was low priority for social housing but eventually had been given a home in an area far from where he had  previously lived.

His benefits after rent left him around £50 a week for bills and food. He couldn’t afford a phone. His flat had very little furniture and a small black and white TV. He spent his days trying to stay warm, feed himself and maintain some social contact with others. He told me: “I’d work if I could, but I can’t get a job. I’ve no suit for an interview and I’m competing with much younger folk. And it takes so much energy just to feed and heat myself, it grinds you down.”

I thought of him when I heard Iain Duncan Smith say he could live on £53 if he had to. Could he live with the social exclusion of being called a scrounger? Could he live with the energy-sapping grind of trying to stay warm and fed, desperate for conversation and company but little opportunity for either? Is that really living? And is blaming someone for being in that situation really loving our neighbour as ourselves?

When Iain Duncan Smith says that he “could live on £53 a week” if he had to, he really misses the point. Those who live on £53 a week do so not because they have to, they do so because they have little choice to do otherwise. To suggest, as he and his colleagues continually do with their “shirkers and skivers” rhetoric, that those in poverty are lazy or addicted or on the fiddle do much more than abuse folk who cannot answer back. Do we really want a society built on stigmatising the poor? Do we want a society where those in power decide who are the deserving and undeserving poor? Are we treating our neighbour as we would wish to be treated by suggesting that those on benefits are a burden?

The report Truth and Lies by the Church of Scotland, Methodist,  Baptist Union of Great Britain and the United Reform churches challenges the present stigmatising of people in poverty by the Government because we know it not simply hurts those in poverty. It hurts us all. If we collude with misrepresenting those in poverty, blaming them for their situation and ignoring the massive injustices at work, then we are all set to fail. We will create a society which is unsustainable and divided, where those with power or privilege are wilfully blind to those without.

These churches wrote the report because we know from our colleagues in parishes the devastating effect this language is having on those who live on sums like £53 a week. I met a project recently which buys packets of nappies and sells them individually to mothers whose benefit levels mean that by the end of the week they cannot afford a whole pack. Colleagues tell of families on similar sums who say that their choice is food or heat. I spoke recently to a congregation who run a food bank and have had to ask the local primary schools to make special collections on Fridays as the demands are so high. These folk are striving to survive. Stigmatising them does not help, it hinders. They don’t choose to live on £53. It’s a choice taken for them.

• The Rev Ewan Aitken is Secretary of the Church and Society Council of the Church of Scotland

400,000 sign UP TO CALL MP’S BLUFF

ALMOST 400,000 people have signed a petition urging former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith to put his £53 a week where his mouth is.

The Work and Pensions Secretary was defending welfare changes when he appeared on the Today programme on Radio 4 earlier this week shortly after market trader David Bennett bemoaned cuts to his housing benefit.

Asked if he could live on that amount, which works out at £7.57 a day, Mr Duncan Smith replied: “If I had to, I would.”

This would mean a 97 per cent reduction in his current income, which is £1581.02 a week or £225 a day after tax.

A petition was quickly set up on the campaigning website Change.org, which reads: “This petition calls on Iain Duncan Smith to live on this budget for at least one year. This would help realise the Conservative Party’s current mantra that ‘We are all in this together’.”

At last count, just over 380,000 people had signed the petition, which Mr Duncan Smith has brushed off as a “stunt”.