Giving the lie
Welcome to the 21st century, benefit scum. You’re the disease and technology is the cure. Apparently.
Benefit claimants will face lie detector tests and will lose benefits for a month if found guilty of fiddling the system under proposals unveiled by Gordon Brown on the eve of today’s Queen’s speech. [...] So far, 25 local councils administering housing benefit to 500,000 claimants are using “voice risk analysis technology” to test whether a claimant is providing false information.
You’d be forgiven for wondering if this technology actually exists and what we’re actually witnessing here is the birth of an urban myth to keep the lower orders in line. Like television detector vans.
Apparently, ‘in the first three months of using the technology Harrow saved £300,000′. I wonder though if there isn’t a massive placebo effect at work here. It’s all about perception. Imagine you’re talking to a benefit claimant on the phone. After a few minutes of enquiring about his circumstances you say that your ‘voice risk analysis technology’ is suggesting the claimant isn’t being entirely straight with you.
If the perception is strong enough that the technology is in place and works, aren’t a large percentage of claimants going to fold and confess there and then? It’s all about fear at the end of the day and that’s what we want the lower orders to be: fearful.
Still, if the technology works, it’d be nice to think that this was merely the pilot scheme and that the underclass were merely the guinea pigs in preparation for the technology being rolled out to other sections of society.
Wiring up the microphones in the Houses of Parliament and of the various television news channels to such lie detectors could probably save the country billions. Asking Tony Blair a few simple questions about Iraq’s weapons programmes after reminding him that he was being subjected to ‘voice risk analysis technology’ would have saved the nation a pretty penny.
Ditto the Home Secretary on the efficacy of ID cards. We could pin down the Chancellor of the Exchequer on why he hasn’t closed the tax loopholes that costs the country billions (sums that dwarf the amount lost in benefit fraud).
The thing is, nobody in the media or in politics ever seems to ask the question as to why people feel compelled to cheat the benefit system. Getting to the root of the problem would upset the easy, lazy prejudices of tabloid editor, their readers and the politicians following on behind.
So it’s not worth the bother. People like having someone to hate and scroungers will do nicely and always have. But with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation finding that it’s many ‘hard-working, ordinary people trying to survive day by day‘ who feel forced to defraud the system, the issue is certainly more complex than the ever-popular perception of legions of sofa-bound slobs crashed out in front of Jeremy Kyle. I wonder just how many benefit cheats get a frisson of ‘fight the power’ and cackle to themselves as they pocket a few more quid.
And all these intentions to hound the weak came out of the mouth of the biggest tax moocher of them all. Did everybody in the Houses of Parliament keep a straight face when the Queen, head of a household of scroungers, read this from her speech?
‘A bill will be brought forward to reform the welfare system, to improve incentives for people to move from benefits into sustained employment .’
After all, a fish rots from the head. No lie.
Posted on December 3rd, 2008 at 1:32 pm
| See also • Voicing doubts • A level playing field: treat everybody like scum • The ragged edge of technology |
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You can work into the JC+ with paint on your hands and a spirit level and they still can’t figure out you’re working so perhaps before they use machines, how about using eyes and ears?
Hah - one of my cousins claims to know a bloke who actually worked in TV detector vans. They apparently “work” by a cunning combination of looking in people’s windows and counting TV aerials on roofs.
Even if this “voice risk analysis technology” exists (and I have no reason to believe it doesn’t - much of the IT and technology industries revolve around the sales of snake oil) there is simply no bloody way it can actually work as advertised. At the very best, it could perhaps tell if someone were stressed. You’ve dealt with the benefits system, so you know exactly what the chances of someone being stressed whilst on them phone to the are…
Even the much-ballyhooed polygraph doesn’t actually work, and that involves hooking people up to a battery of instruments and doing proper calibration first.
I stopped working in the DSS fifteen years ago today, as it happens, and I can’t say I’ve missed it all that much. Oddly, as I recall, even back then it always used to be Harrow who used to trial all the new initiatives.
Lie detectors? In my day when we wanted to terrify the poor and vulnerable we had to use photocopiers….
I’d be delighted to know how this wonderful technology would interpret those with clinical depression, anxiety disorders and the like.
“I dunno boss, he sounded a bit shifty and unsure of himself.”
Lie detectors? In my day when we wanted to terrify the poor and vulnerable we had to use photocopiers….
- Cardinal Biggles, show the claimant the instruments…
- No… No!
- Press ‘Print’!
- No! Nooooo! I’ll talk! I confess to working cash in hand for a couple of quid!
You know what, waterboarding the claimants would be get results so much quicker - but maybe Purnell’s working on that one for the 2010 manifesto.
Preying on fears, indeed! The very thought of having to submit yourself to the scrutiny of the so-called ‘lie detector’ is liable to send even the most hardened Jeremy Kyle Show ‘prole’ (and I use the term condescendingly) into apoplectic, mouth-frothing fits of repentance, lest it prove to the world said subject’s wanton infidelity with his 34 year-old, mother of eight fancy-piece.
Mr Brown is obviously an avid viewer.
Personally, however, I’d always favour the more traditional - and, one might say, more honest - Marathon Man-type ‘extraction’ of the truth. It’d make for better daytime TV if nothing else.
Open wide!
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=dG5Qk-jB0D4&feature=related
Not having a TV licence (nor a TV) I’m quite used to the threatening letters from the TV licencing people. On a number of occasions they have said that they will send someone round unannounced to see me, then I have later come home and found an unpleasant letter saying that they had called and found nobody in, and asked me to phone them. When I’ve called them and explained that I’m not going to sit at home for days until a TV licencing person calls, I’ve always asked why they don’t just park the detector van outside my house for a few hours rather than wasting their time and my time with letters and visits. For some reason they aren’t able to answer that question!
You should let me go.. Don’t spoil my fantasy now.
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