The Left needs to stop parroting the terminology of the Right. Talk of "welfare" only fuels the scrounger myth - it's time to go back to "social security"

I've been planning for a few weeks to write about the change in the language used to describe people who claim benefits - a resolve hardened after seeing the much-shared Daily Mail front page pronouncing Mick Philpott, convicted of manslaughter following the death of six of his children, a "vile product of welfare UK".

Once my spluttering rage at the grotesque inappropriateness of equating an extreme criminal act with claiming benefits had subsided and I'd wiped my spittle-flecked monitor clean, I started to pay closer attention to the headline's wording. One word clearly took centre stage: welfare, a term known once upon a time as "social security".

Then, quite by accident, I stumbled across this excellent article by Labour peer Ruth Lister, chairman of the left-wing Compass group. Lister charts brilliantly why this change in language matters. If social security suggests a safety net to stop citizens falling through the cracks, then welfare, used as a noun, is easily associated in the minds of the public with what she calls:

a stigmatised US-style residual form of poor relief. It is all the more stigmatising because of the constant coupling with "dependency", so that in many people's eyes receipt of social security is now equated with a "dependency culture" that research does not in fact substantiate.

With the scrounger myth continuing to exert a strong hold over tabloids and public alike, it's ever-more important that the Left chooses its words carefully. In other words, it's time to stop borrowing the Right's terminology. Let's bid farewell to welfare and "benefits" (the latter carrying a vague suggestion of luxury rather than entitlement) and say hello to good old social security.

Most politicians have no idea how the less well-off live. They should be forced to find out if they want to remain our elected representatives.

In Thomas More's Utopia, a strange sixteenth century mix of fiction and political philosophy, the author floats an intriguing idea: that anyone who seeks political power should automatically be disqualified from holding it.

While that might be taking things too far - after all, we don't want to press-gang people into public office against their will - we should give serious consideration to the question: why do people choose go into politics?

For large swathes of the general public, the answer to this would be because they are all self-serving individuals out to feather their own nests. Personally I think that's overly glib and cynical, and not a view borne out by the politicians I've met in person. I'm still naive/gullible/stupid enough to believe that the majority of politicians enter politics out of a genuine desire to make a difference, but to succeed that needs to supplemented with a large dose of personal ambition.

There's also no question that the last few decades have seen the professionalisation of politics and the rise of a distinct "political class". If More's criteria were applied today, the House of Commons would be entirely empty. As the Guardian's Aditya Chakrabortty pointed out in a recent column:

In 1979, 40% of Labour MPs came from a manual occupation; according to analysis by the Smith Institute that is now down to 9%. Just 4% of all representatives in the Commons can claim a background in a manual occupation, which is roughly the same proportion as went to Eton.

Over one in four of all Tory MPs were previously employed in finance; more parliamentarians came from jobs in politics than from health, teaching, the army, agriculture and voluntary services put together. With his frictionless ascent from thinktanks to backroom Labour politics to the cabinet, David Miliband is typical of the gilded class who masquerade as our delegates in Westminster.

But while it's perhaps perverse to ban those who want to do the job, it's not unfair to say that, as a bare minimum, our political representatives should know how their constituents live and a degree of empathy for those living in less fortunate circumstances than themselves.

Fast forward then to Iain Duncan Smith. The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions experienced what many pundits referred to as his "Marie Antoinette moment" this week by claiming during an interview with the Today programme that he could live on £53 a week "if I had to". A hastily drawn-up petition asking him to do just that has currently amassed almost a quarter of a million signatures.

Yes, there is something unseemly about a Cabinet minister on £134,565 claiming he would have no problem getting by on a fraction on that. But what was more disturbing about IDS's dismissiveness was that he is one of the most knowledgeable Tory ministers when it comes to the reality of social deprivation. His issue is not that he is unaware of how people live, but that he lacks the empathy to put himself in their shoes. For the former Tory leader, the impoverished are simply not aspiring and striving hard enough.

Empathy has become a vogue subject in academia over the past couple of years but it's something that large swathes of professional politicians - and not just on the Tory benches - completely lack. Last November, Lord Freud, the government's welfare reform minister, launched a scathing attack on

the incapacity benefits, the lone parents, the people who are self-employed for year after year and only earn hundreds of pounds or a few thousand pounds, the people waiting for their work ability assessment then not going to it

When it was suggested that his background - Oxford, Financial Times journalist, investment banker, Tory peer - might prevent him from fully grasping what life was like for those living on benefits, the peer's reply was instructive: 

You don't have to be the corpse to go to the funeral, which is the implied criticism there.

Which is, of course, true. The idea that's it's necessary to have experienced something directly to understand it is the worst of all postmodern fallacies. I haven't personally been caught up in an extreme weather event, but that didn't prevent me feeling sympathy for people who lost their lives and homes in Hurricane Sandy.

There are, though, limits to this principle. In order to empathise, you have to at least make the effort to imagine your way into another person's situation. It's worth pointing out that Lord Freud has never actually been an elected  representative, which means he's never had to trundle round an estate or a tower block canvassing support from people who live there. Instead he's known the Oxford quad, the newsroom, the plush banking headquarters and now the Lords. It's hardly surprising he's not got a handle on the lives of those in Britain's low-income households.

So I'd like to propose that all Britain's political representatives spend a week living on benefits before they take office. This is not a new idea. In 1984 writer Matthew Paris, then a Tory MP, spent a week attempting to live on the benefits paid to an unemployed worker in Newcastle. He failed miserably. In 2003 Michael Portillo starred in the BBC documentary When Michael Portillo Became A Single Mum documentary (clips available to watch here). He emerged a seemingly changed man, somewhat chastened by his experience. More recently Austin Mitchell, Mark Oaten, Tim Loughton and Nadine Dorries featured in Tower Block of Commons.

You might think this all sounds like a colossal waste of time. Haven't MPs got more pressing things to worry about? My answer would be an unequivocal no. Empathy is an absolutely crucial part of the political picture. Take the Coalition's spending cuts. Without that empathy they are just a policy. It isn't until you seem the damage they have wrought up close that the human element begins to loom into focus.

Ugly business neologisms of the day #1: "Onboarding"

Welcome, dear reader, to the first in a new series.

One of the English language's great strengths is it's adaptability, the sense that it is constantly shifting and evolving, borrowing words from other languages, fusing words, their meanings altered as they are adopted by new subgroups of speakers. Most of the time this is evidence of the vitality of the language, something celebrated by writers from Shakespeare to Joyce to Walcott. 

And then there's the world of business, where words and phrases are created in order to lend an air of gravitas to concepts that would be easily-graspable by your average six-year-old. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, I give you...

Ugly business neologism #1: Onboarding

Onboarding, also known as organizational socialization, refers to the mechanism through which new employees acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviours to become effective organizational members and insiders. Tactics used in this process include formal meetings, lectures, videos, printed materials, or computer-based orientations to introduce newcomers to their new jobs and organizations.

Example usage: "He spent a week with us at corporate so we could quickly onboard him into the company culture."

Just no.

Media organisations relying on unpaid content reinforces elitism. So should journalists refuse to write for free, or is it a necessary evil?

Should journalists ever write for free? It's a knotty question.

Freelance journalist Nate Thayer sparked an intense debate this week when he published an email thread between him and the global editor of The Atlantic asking if he'd be interested in "repurposing" one of his recent stories for their website. All in all, it sounded like a relatively cushty commission. The catch? She wanted him to do it for free. 

I think we can all agree that a for-profit news organisation asking a veteran journo to provide free copy on the basis that it will boost their exposure ("We unfortunately can’t pay you for it, but we do reach 13 million readers a month") displays a fairly staggering level of cheek. But how about lesser-known writers?

My gut response is that if we want high-standard content, we need to pay for it. Yes, it's possible to quickly churn out a blog or a reaction piece to unfolding events, but in-depth journalism takes time and research. And relying on free content, as with unpaid internships, means journalism is only accessible to those with a financial safety net. As Gawker's Cord Jefferson put it:

These people are right to be concerned about the homogeneity of media, a problem that worries me as well.

But it's then incumbent upon all of us to recognize that this is the culture we breed when we offer to pay writers nothing or next to nothing, thereby immediately eliminating anyone who needs a paycheck in order to feed themselves and keep a roof over their heads.

In other words, porfessional journalism becomes largely the preserve of the well-off. That said, I do think there are some occasions when it's okay as to write without expectation of payment, which I'd broadly summarise as:

• When you're writing for your own personal satisfaction or to air your own views (this blog would be an example). 
• When you're writing on a specialised or arcane topic that you're passionate about but there isn't really any money in. This could include writing for a non-profit alt periodical, or one with no freelance budget.
• When the exposure - for example having a piece published by a well-known news organisation - is genuinely going to add to your CV and increase the chances of having work published by other sites. 

Google glasses: just another cool accessory, or the first step towards a sinister, tech-driven dystopia?

The evil masterminds at Google have just released a new video showcasing their Google Glass project.

All of a sudden the last episode of season one of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror is looking less like a dystopian nightmare, and more like a particularly prescient episode of the Gadget Show...

Amid all the rejoicing about the passage of the gay marriage bill through the Commons, shouldn't we spare a thought for the rights of bigots?

As MPs debated the gay marriage bill today, the above tweet caught my eye.

The bill passed through the Commons by 400 votes to 175, a majority of 225 which should be enough to get it through the Lords this year.

However, there have already been mutterings from MPs such as Matthew Offord, the Conservative member for Hendon, that this represents a slippery slope which could lead to marriage being redefined to include polygamy. And picture the old school Tory constituency party members across the country fretting that this will inevitably lead to people being able to marry their pets or inanimate objects like their bannister. For them, I offer this:

You can read the rest here.

Billions of dollars wasted, thousands of communities ruined, but one simple fact about the "War on Drugs" remains: it doesn't work

If you missed The House I Live In, a brilliant documentary about the colossal failure of America's so-called "war on drugs", shown on BBC Four last night as part of the Storyville strand, I urge you to watch it (you can view it on iPlayer here).

Directed by Eugene Jarecki, the film's take-home message was simple: while hard drugs ravage communities, the war on drugs finishes them off. If you've ever watched The Wire and wondered if it was over-egging the pudding, Jarecki's film made you realise it was virtually a fly-on-the-wall documentary (the show's creator, David Simon, popped up as a talking head discussing his time on the streets of Baltimore as a journalist observing the results of current drug policy).

The film contained some fascinating insights. For example, while Nixon is credited with launching the war on drugs, his hard-line rhetoric was actually offset by some relatively progressive policy ideas, with two third of the money spent on treatment for addicts and only a third on tougher policing.

Best of all, Jarecki also took the time to talk to young men - mostly poor, black young men - who dealt drugs or had been convicted of doing so. He dismantled the idea that drugs were simply a matter of personal choice. As Simon pithily put it: history shows that if you take a company town and remove the company [or rather outsource all its jobs to China], new illegal industries will spring up to fill the vacuum. In some places becoming a drug dealer is the only logical career choice.

In case you think that sounds like bleeding heart left-wing cant, the film featured interviews with judges, law and order-loving prison officers - check out, for example, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) - and weary-looking drugs cops, all saying pretty much the same thing. The war on drugs not only isn't working, it's actually exacerbating the problem.

Surely if everyone agrees the war on drugs is ineffective, things are set to change? If only it were so simple. For one thing, only a tiny minority of US politicians are prepared to put their head above the parapet on the issue - most, perhaps rightly, assume that anything other than a hard-line stance on drugs would be electoral death.

The other thing that keeps drug reform off the agenda is perhaps even more disturbing: America's prison industry. At present the US has 2.3 million citizens incarcerated, the highest in the world, and there is a burgeoning industry with a vested interest in building more prisons, which means more prisoners are needed to fill them. It should come as no surprise that these corporate interests are lobbying hard for a continuation of the status quo.

Is it possible to have a rational debate about drugs? Films like The House I Live In would suggest it is. But until politicians truly commit themselves to evidence-based politics and lobbyists are challenged, the war on drugs will continue to destroy lives and communities across the globe.