In the early summer of 2010, I attended my local job centre with my portfolio of art and design work, representing more than 20 years of professional development. I brought it with me as a partial demonstration of my vocational skills – which I naturally assumed that the job centre would want to see – but as soon as I produced it, the job centre employee in question rolled her eyes and turned to her colleague with the words “This one thinks that she is an artist”.
This statement indicates a fundamental problem at the heart of our welfare state – namely the apparent assumption that poor people are not creative and have no potential for anything other than unskilled labour, because creative ability is supposedly reserved for those who enjoy wealth and privilege and cannot exist elsewhere.
A self-perpetuating problem
It is also a problem that perpetuates itself. Opportunities for training and employment in the creative industries – including freelancing, volunteering and accessing internships – are severely restricted for people on low incomes because they lack the financial safety net that is essential for creativity to thrive, so abilities and talents that could contribute to the creative economy are not allowed to develop, which is then assumed to be ‘proof’ that those at the bottom have no such talents anyway so why provide for something that doesn’t exist?
This vicious circle of disadvantage is not only discriminatory and unjust to individuals. It is also a profoundly counterproductive and nonsensical disservice to the economy and society as a whole, particularly in terms of creative diversity and which stories or life experiences are permitted to be told.
What is the point of forcing people to spend their lives shuttling between insecure, poorly paid employment and welfare benefits when, with the right support, they could build a career – creative or otherwise – in parity with their more fortunate peers?
Poverty and disabled creatives
The situation is even worse if you are poor, creative and disabled; because people in that situation face the dual stigma of poverty and disability so systemic assumptions about your ability for anything at all – never mind participation in the world of creative careers – leave you doubly trapped in a system that appears to prohibit you from being who and what you are.
Creativity may be the only form of self-expression that you possess in a society where both low-income and disabled people suffer ever-increasing levels of enforced silence, social exclusion and defamatory language – all the way from mundane, daily experience up to government itself. All of which is intended to both reinforce and justify the idea that poor and or/disabled people have nothing to offer and are simply a burden on the state.
I, Daniel Blake
Think the eponymous Daniel Blake and retired joiner sitting in his bare and empty flat carving a decorative wooden mobile for the young daughter of a single mum; shortly before suffering a heart attack caused by the stress of being denied entitlement to employment and support allowance, despite being declared unfit for work by his doctor.
What if the welfare state had accepted that Mr Blake was medically unfit to pursue his previous occupation and offered him a basic income alongside the means to set up his own business?
We have plenty to offer. What we do not have are the opportunities to develop our abilities and make them count within a system that consistently tries to force square pegs into round holes.
Metaphorical geometry aside; if we really want a thriving economy then low-income and disabled creatives must be provided with the inclusion, financial security and vocational support that they both need and deserve.
There is no sense in leaving people on the scrapheap and trapping them in poverty simply because they don’t ‘fit’ within class-based contexts of who is entitled to be what; and creative people do not fit. That is the whole point of who they are.
The welfare state needs to change
Our welfare state does not need to be an unwieldly, inflexible behemoth that prioritises bureaucracy over the individual. It needs to fully commit to the professional, economic and societal development of each person based on their abilities, talents and unique, human potential.
Anything less than this is just a senseless and pointlessly destructive waste.
