Newsflash for Tories: Being On the Dole Sucks

Me and my mates living the high life during the dole years. Photo by Carlotta Dennis-Lovaglio.

If the Tory Party Conference is basically the aristocratic Wrestlemania, where everyone's character is some kind of weak-chinned, flag-waving caricature of an English person, then David Cameron's keynote speech is surely its Hell in a Cell. Its climax, its crescendo, the title fight everybody's been waiting for while the support acts keep the crowd warm.

Sure, people might have feigned interest as Gove, Osborne and May stepped up to deliver their department-specific volleys of cloying jingosim, after-dinner anecdotes and hardline society-crushing rhetoric. But really, everyone's waiting for Stone Cold Cameron to take the mic. Yesterday was that day, and by god, he smacked it. He did it much like his namesake Cam'ron might have; aggressively and ever so slightly nonsensically.

Cameron said a lot of things. He said that Britain was a "land of opportunity" (current youth unemployment rate: 21 percent), he said that everybody will have the "chance to make it" (apart from those 960,000 people between the ages of 16 and 24), he gave a massive shout out to T-May for kicking Abu Qatada out of the country and cracked an absurdly dated joke about Michael Gove being a "cross between Mr Chips and the Duracell bunny".

Despite the fact that gag would only really make sense to anyone with enough time on their hands to watch Catchphrase re-runs on Challenge TV, Cameron was still intent on ominously holding his scissors over the daytime TV generation – declaring that anybody under the age of 25 who is currently receiving the dole probably won't be able to if he's reelected.

"Today, it is still possible to leave school, sign on, find a flat, start claiming housing benefit and opt for a life on benefits," he said, in a tone that almost suggested this was a good thing, like a president giving a legacy speech at the end of his term. Then he said that all young people should either be either "learning or earning", a nice sentiment that sounds oddly like something Stringer Bell would say to a young corner boy.

Of course, you don't have to be Geoffrey Levy to agree with what he's saying. It's not a threat to anybody's leftist principles to wonder if the over-reliance on benefits is a bad thing, and that perhaps keeping people in employment or education should be a priority for this government and, indeed, any government. But like many right-wingers, where Cameron goes wrong is with his Littlejohn-esque social paranoia. Not only believing that dole money entitles you to a life of lowbrow luxury, but that people are doing so by choice.

You see, I've been on the dole, and believe me, it's no kind of life. Sure, you might be able to survive on it, but does merely surviving count as life? I don't think so. Does merely breathing count as being alive? Technically, it does, yes. Just ask Ariel Sharon. But actually living requires a lot more than a basic ability to respire. Being young and on the dole doesn't make you some Artful Dodger-esque ducker and a diver, it makes you somebody who's basically in a financial vegetative state, somebody who's merely being kept alive rather than actually living.

There's an image that Conservatives like to perpetuate of people walking straight into a Sainsbury's Local with their giros in hand, exchanging them for a copy of GTA V and a crate of Carling and then going round the corner to meet a man who'll be delighted to sell them an ounce of Moroccan black. And while I don't doubt that some people do similar things with their dole money, I'm pretty certain the dole actually encourages people to participate in society, rather than withdraw from it.

In the periods where I had literally no money at all – in the dark days between cash-in-hand jobs and student loans – I felt like an illegal in the country I was born in. Sheltering myself away indoors, because the world seemed intent on rubbing all its cheese in my face. When you've got no money whatsoever, the high street feels like some kind of constant assault on your status, a strange world in which everyone is the guy down the road with the Porsche, desperately trying to make you feel like shit.

Except they aren't actually rubbing it in your face and they aren't necessarily rich – they just have jobs and you're just paranoid. You're a financial Joey Barton, endlessly restating your victim status, coming up with grand theories on how the establishment is trying to keep you down. The fact that you can't participate in a capitalist society makes you feel alienated. You start to find solace in things that are bad for you; the world seems like a place that's just not built for you, but perhaps that tempting realm of the underclass – with its promises of easy money and near-permanent inebriation – is for you.

The dole, as paltry is it is (about £60 quid now, just under £50 when I was on it), at least allows you to be part of the economy in some capacity. It gives you a sense of purpose and a sense of place. It allows you to take part in the activity that society wants you to do more than any other: Spending money. With any amount of money in your pocket, you're an active participant in life. Without it, you're just a bystander, existing at the fringes of our culture.

What Cameron really doesn't seem to get is that even such a small glimpse into the world of solvency gives people hope. What it really doesn't do is make it easy for people. You can't buy shit on the dole. Sure, you might be able to buy GTA V, but you'd be eating beans for a week. It's essentially money for those tiny luxuries that make life worth living.

For me – as well as, I imagine, the majority of people who've been on it – the dole was not an option. It wasn't an easy way out. Sure, it made life easier than having no money at all, but not once did I ever feel like I was somebody living some kind of happy-as-Larry existence by creaming off the state.

Scrapping the dole could backfire massively for the Tories. If they're a party that believes in aspiration – and "making things happen", as Cameron keeps reiterating, like some cokey CEO of a creative agency – then getting rid of Jobseeker's Allowance for the under-25s is the worst thing they can do.

The young people that they want to get out of living rooms and into the workplace won't be inspired to go out and get jobs, because believe me, the vast majority of them would if they could. They just now won't have enough money to even get the bus to their interviews, and will thus retreat further and further into the sanctuaries of lethargy and immorality that the Tories spent the rest of the conference deriding.

If you are the type of person who's intent on spending life on benefits, then surely you'd realise that without JSA, you might as well just have a kid and pick up child benefit instead. Which is a far more dangerous prospect for the economy and our society than the bit of cash they currently shell out on dole money, because they can't get rid of child benefit – nobody wants to see starving little kiddies. But 16 to 25-year-olds? That's fine! They can just join those ever-increasing prison and suicide stats. Worse comes to worst, they can just join the army and make £17,000 a year defusing IEDs.

In essence, Cameron believes that the dole gives people a taste of the easy life, when in fact it gives people a taste of real life. Getting rid of it would only demean the idea of real income further. It'd create not just an underclass of scroungers, but an underclass of criminals. Maybe if there were any jobs to get, it would put people on their bikes, as Norman Tebbit once said. You can't help but think the withdrawal of JSA will only lead to the total societal breakdown that the Tories clearly want as some part of Lynton Crosby-dreamed masterplan for total libertarianism.

The dole is the last real chance to experience the world of "earning" that a lot of young people have in this country. And taking it away would just send the shit hurtling towards the fan faster than Cameron could ever have imagined.

Edit: As many of you have pointed out, it seems David Cameron was in fact referencing the Mr Chips of the 1930s homo-erotic boarding school classic, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, rather than Roy Walker’s accident prone animated potato-man sidekick. My apologies, can't believe such a modern and relevant reference point got past me.

Follow Clive on Twitter: @thugclive

More about benefits:

How to Be Happy, Young and Jobless

How to Be Young, Poor and in Love

The Government's Jobseekers Test Is Weird, Pointless and Awful 

Hanging Out with the Desperate People at Watford Jobs Fair Was Really Depressing