Benefits Read online

  Benefits

  by Zoë Fairbairns

  First published in 1979 by Virago

  Published in 1998 in paperback by Five Leaves

  Published in 2012 in ebook by Five Leaves

  PO Box 8786, Nottingham NG1 9AW

  www.fiveleaves.co.uk

  © Zoë Fairbairns, 1979, 1998, 2012

  ISBN: 978-1-907869-80-8

  Five Leaves acknowledges financial support from Arts Council England

  Cover image and design by The Brickworks

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter 1: Summer of Seventy-Six

  Chapter 2: After the Summer

  Part Two

  Chapter 3: The Wrong Rats

  Chapter 4: Marsha

  Chapter 5: Lynn

  Part Three

  Chapter 6: Foreign Policies

  Chapter 7: International Relations

  Chapter 8: The Protection of Women

  Chapter 9: Terrorists

  Chapter 10: Planned Population

  Chapter 11: The Women’s Day

  Introduction

  The UK economy is in meltdown. The dispossessed are rioting in the streets.

  A beleaguered government is casting around for ways to cut public spending and restore order. Shall it persuade, or coerce, volunteers to take over social work and run schools? Shall it force the unemployed to work for no pay? Shall it abolish old age pensions, cut child benefits? The welfare state seems doomed to be dismantled: the only questions are, how? And how soon?

  As traditional family values break down, radical activists with alternative lifestyles occupy public buildings.

  Does this sound familiar? It does to me, as I re-read Benefits, a dystopian novel which I wrote in the mid-1970s and which now in 2012 comes to you courtesy of electronic media which, had someone foreseen them at the time, I would have said, “Don’t be silly, no-one will believe that.”

  Benefits is fiction — the tale of a group of women and men living through momentous and sometimes sinister political changes — but it grew out of fact: in particular, an episode in UK national politics in 1976 which seemed to prove beyond doubt the truth of the feminist slogan “the personal is political”.

  A Labour government was in power — one which, despite the ongoing financial difficulties brought on by the oil crisis, double-figure inflation, and the collapse of the pound, seemed friendly enough towards at least some of the demands of the burgeoning women’s liberation movement. As well as an Equal Pay Act and a Sex Discrimination Act, both of which were in force by the end of 1975, they were promising to introduce child benefits: weekly cash payments for children’s main carers, usually mothers.

  An element of domestic redistribution was involved: fathers were to pay more income tax in order that mothers could receive cash from the government. Child benefits would mean, as some commentators cosily depicted it, “a transfer of money from wallet to purse.”

  This did not go down well with some male trade unionists. “On being informed of the reduction in take-home pay which the child benefit scheme would involve,” said a Cabinet minute of the time, leaked later to the magazine New Society (17 June 1976), “the TUC representatives reacted immediately and violently against its implementation, irrespective of the level of benefits which would accompany the reduction in take-home pay.”

  To add fuel to the flame, the government was at the same time trying to persuade the unions to moderate their wage demands, and promising that in return it would not increase income tax. But the child benefit scheme would involve a tax increase — on breadwinning fathers. The two promises contradicted each other. One of them would have to be broken. In May 1976, the government announced that it was postponing the child benefit scheme indefinitely.

  I was not a mother and had no plans to become one, so it didn’t affect me personally, but I was furious. So were a great many women, mothers and others, inside and outside the women’s liberation movement. The U-turn on child benefits was proof, if proof were needed, that gender was political and politics were gendered.

  Many in parliament seemed to agree; the Guardian reported “widespread accusations of a Cabinet surrender to ‘trade union male chauvinism’” (26 May 1976). Barbara Castle MP wrote in the New Statesman: “The row over the government’s decision to postpone the introduction of the child benefit scheme is … the eruption of a growing anger at the stubborn masculine bias of British politics.” (4 June 1976) She predicted that women would not take this disappointment “lying down”.

  And we didn’t. Women of all political backgrounds, including trade unionists and Tories, communists and Christians, poverty pressure groups, mainstream women’s organisations, and, of course feminists, protested and petitioned. Eventually an untidy compromise was stitched up. Child benefits were reinstated, but at a lower rate than had previously been planned.

  As a freelance writer and feminist activist, I observed — and sometimes participated in — the controversy from a damp basement near London’s Euston Station: the Women’s Research and Resources Centre (WRRC).

  The WRRC, precursor of what is now the Feminist Library, was the perfect vantage point from which to watch the child benefit saga unfold, not only because the dampness of the small single room kept it cooler than the rest of London during one of the longest, hottest summers on record, but also because of the way the entire debate rushed across my field of vision in the form of the literature and propaganda with which all sides kept the WRRC supplied.

  Every post brought new contributions. Most feminists favoured child benefits for mothers, but did we really want them financed by money taken out of the pay packets of fathers? Were child benefits not just another term for “wages for housework”, a demand which some women supported but others abhorred? If women were paid for housework, would that make the government our boss? The argument flowed through my ink-stained fingers as I cranked out newsletters on our huge, noisy Gestetner duplicator. (Whatever happened to all those Gestetner duplicators when whispering digital printers took over?)

  Perhaps it was the heat, but I was becoming dizzy. Wiping sweat from my brow and ink from my clothes, I realised that I could see both sides: yes, women who did domestic work at home should have money of their own. Yes, such a payment could turn malignant and become a weapon of social control. Obviously I was going to have to write a novel. Which I did. It is the one you are holding in your… whatever you are holding this in.

  I was not new to fiction writing. I had made an early start, publishing two novels while still at university. But these had not earned enough money for the publishers to continue their interest in me, and I had been unceremoniously dropped.

  It‘s hard to be a has-been in your early twenties, and for a number of years I had written no novels, though I joined a feminist short story writing group (with Sara Maitland, Valerie Miner, Michèle Roberts and Michelene Wandor) which helped me rediscover my fiction-writing enthusiasm and voice. In late 1976, I started work on Benefits.

  It was never intended as a manifesto. That’s what you write if you think you have all the answers, which I didn’t and don’t. I wrote Benefits to tell a story about how sexual politics impact on people. The characters include Lynn, a journalist and mother of a disabled daughter; Derek, Lynn’s loyal but sometimes put-upon husband; Marsha, Lynn’s friend and lover; and Judy who, like Cassandra in Greek myth, is cursed always to speak the truth, but never to be believed. Another important character in the novel is a building: a crumbling inner-city tower block, squatted and colonised by dissident women.

  Benefits took two years to write, and was published in October 1979 by Virago. It featured in Time Out magazine’s alternative bestsellers, was translated into Swedish, Danish, and German, and published as a mass-mark
et paperback in the USA. It was adapted into a stage play, and shortlisted for two literary awards (the Hawthornden and the Philip K Dick). The Virago edition remained in print for nearly 20 years, after which the rights were acquired by Five Leaves. A quotation from the book became the text of an alternative Christmas card: “The birth of a man who thinks he’s God isn‘t such a rare event.” I have heard rumours that there is a tea towel bearing this slogan, but I have been unable to verify this.

  Reviews at the time of first publication were plentiful, in media ranging from The Guardian, The TLS and the Observer, to Spare Rib, Gay News and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Review of Vista, California. Opinions varied from rapturous enthusiasm to bored distaste, from supercilious putdowns to cordial disagreement and reasoned debate.

  Women’s Voice, the women’s paper from what is now the Socialist Workers’ Party, declared the book to be “feminist but not revolutionary”, mainly because of its “dangerous assumption that we are involved in a gender struggle and not a class struggle.”

  “Spot on,” I thought. The Women’s Voice reviewer and I might not have seen eye-to-eye on the meanings of the words “feminist”, “revolutionary” and “dangerous”, but she had noticed what many other reviewers missed: that Benefits is a political novel in which all the serious struggles are about gender. Other issues (class, party, race, international affairs) are treated as peripheral, important only insofar as they reflect on how the sexes relate to each other.

  This was not because I saw (or see) class, party, race or international affairs as side-issues. That would be absurd. Such matters, and the relationships between them, are too complex to arrange in simplistic pecking-orders of importance. But the male-dominated Left in the 70s was notorious for doing just that: loftily informing feminists that our concerns were no more than bourgeois deviations from the real struggle, and that the problem of sexism could be left to solve itself, after the revolution.

  I thought, what if it were the other problems — the ones which these men did acknowledge as important — that were left to solve themselves? And I wrote Benefits in that spirit.

  In spite of this, and in spite of the fact that the book was written before Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, it was often seen, during the Thatcher years, as an attack on Thatcherite welfare policies. When the stage version of Benefits was produced at the Albany Empire in south London in 1980, Shelagh Stephenson played Isabel Travers (leader of the fictional anti-feminist Family Party) as a Thatcher clone — voice, handbag, the works. Stephenson brought the house down, and I enjoyed her performance as much as anyone, but I couldn’t help feeling that an important point had been missed.

  I don’t worry about that any more. It is only right that a novel like this should take on a life of its own, and that the politics of the time when it was written should interact with those of the time when it is read. That is my answer to those readers who, encountering the book for the first time, notice all the things I got wrong in my predictions about the early 21st century. What, no internet, no mobile phones? No 9/11, no war against terror? No AIDS, no politicisation of religion? No Conservative Prime Minister advocating gay marriage?

  Such developments were unforeseeable, at least by me. And yes, it’s embarrassing, or it would be if I had set out, in Benefits, to say, “Here’s what will happen,” instead of what I did set out to do, which was to put flesh on the bones of a debate by telling a story.

  I did get some things right: government by coalition, wealthy trading blocs putting pressure on their less prosperous neighbours to change their social policies, and, long before Diana Spencer was a twinkle in a paparazzo’s eye, a charismatic princess who espouses the cause of the downtrodden.

  But never would I have guessed that, more than 35 years on from the 1976 debacle, politicians would still be arguing about child benefit. At the time of writing (2012) the plan seems to be to means-test it, taking all or part of it away from families with one high earner, but paying it in full to families with two moderately-high earners. Which doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it’s what you get when you start means-testing a universal benefit.

  No doubt the debate will continue — in Parliament, on the streets, via social media and, for all I know, among gatherings of activists in damp basement rooms near mainline railway stations, from which the rhythmic thud and clunk of the Gestetner has long since faded away. (Where did those great hulking things go to die?)

  Zoë Fairbairns

  London, 2012

  Part One

  Chapter 1: Summer of Seventy-Six

  It was a tall, wide structure, and it stood like a pack of chewing gum, upended in a grudging square of grass on the side of a hill. It was made of glass, grey metal and rough brown brick, and had a depressing but all-too-familiar history. It was one of the last tower blocks to be built in the sixties for London families to live in. By the time it was up, planners, builders and social workers were already losiqg faith in tower blocks and the families that moved in from the dirty, neighbourly streets being cleared around Collindeane’s feet did so without enthusiasm.

  Ninety-six flats had meant more than twice that many children; but once the older boys had staked territorial claims to the grass patch, no one young or weak got a look-in. The boys found other sources of fun: filling the lift with bricks, tying door-knockers together, calling in the fire-brigade. Windows got smashed. Families withheld rent and were evicted; or vanished overnight, leaving massive arrears and furniture that had not been paid for. Childish high spirits turned malignant. Paraffin was poured through letterboxes and lit; human shit was left on landings; bricks and planks and crockery were thrown from high windows. Soon anyone with any choice in the matter moved out of the flats, leaving behind only those with no choice. Teenage mothers who looked forty. Drunken, shuffling, unemployed men. Ragged litters of children, yelling as they slithered down the endless banisters or hung from high windows to terrorise passers-by. Old folk with multiple locks on the doors, peering out at the stray dogs that met and fought and mated in the corridors.

  Disease entered the flats — pneumonia, gastroenteritis, rumours of typhoid, even a rabies scare — and the council said it would close the flats and pull them down. The local paper declared such waste inexcusable. The council promised to rehabilitate instead, and put up some swings. But before this could be done, the curtain came down on the era of affluence that had spawned and nurtured the British welfare state. The international oil crisis brought inflation that galloped through dreams, slashed welfare budgets. There was no money to rehabilitate Collindeane Tower. The council closed it, rehoused its inmates, nailed wooden planks across the doorway and tried to pretend they had never built it, indeed had not noticed it was there — one of the biggest, most embarrassing statutory nuisances on the London skyline.

  Soon after, Collindeane Tower was spotted by a group of women looking for somewhere to squat and establish a feminist community. One of them chopped through the planks with her axe, and they moved in while the council averted its eyes.

  Everyone who was in London in the summer of 1976 remembers the weather. The four-month heatwave brought pleasure at first, then incredulity, then resignation and unease as the curious realities of urban drought upset the jocular complacency of those who would never have believed that Londoners would pray for rain. People remember what they were doing that summer in the same way that they can pinpoint their location and activity at the time they heard about the death of President Kennedy.

  From May to September, misty mornings preceded glaring debilitating days and dry airless nights. The Thames became unnavigable. Workers went on strike for better ventilation. Grass browned, trees drooped, earth subsided under foundations and buildings cracked. Commuters left jackets and cotton cardigans at home and adhered to each other in packed trains, licking ices. Umbrella sellers went out of business, shorts were worn in the staidest of offices, and Members of Parliament were outraged by the price of cold drinks in Oxford Street. Da
y followed incredible day and still the heat did not let up, still it did not rain. Once or twice a grey, brooding constipated sky rumbled and flashed and a few drops of water fell, but you could not call that rain; not when there was talk of standpipes in the streets and even Buckingham Palace (it was rumoured) had a sign up in the loo saying ‘Don’t pull for a pee.’ It rained enough, it was true, to kill the Saturday of the Lords’ Test against Australia (if it had to rain one day of the year, Londoners told each other wisely, that would be the one) but that was not enough to break the drought — an almost indecent word to be used about their city, thought Londoners, to whom drought meant sandy deserts and cracked farmland in places near the equator. In unaccustomed chats between strangers, sympathy for our own fanners (pictured each night on television running dust through their fingers and waving parched roots as if the government ought to do something about it) alternated only with contrived sighs of ecstasy: ‘Isn’t it glorious?’ Londoners did not really believe in farmers.

  Women active in what was then known as the women’s liberation movement have other reasons for remembering that summer. One of the major demands of that movement was for a woman’s right to abortion on demand. It seemed axiomatic that women could not advance without full control of their fertility; and as things stood, abortion was only allowed when a woman was ill enough, or stressed enough, or rich enough to persuade two doctors (‘acting in good faith’ the law insisted), to say it would be good for her. And throughout that summer, a Select Committee of MPs, under pressure from organised anti-feminists, was considering ways of making abortions even more difficult to obtain, particularly for those women who sought them merely because they did not wish to be pregnant. The women’s liberationists’ response to these efforts was to commit themselves, this gleaming summer, to vigorous grassroots campaigning; marches, pickets, petitions, letter-writing, all aimed at showing that Parliament (which appeared to have an anti-abortion majority) was out of step with the public on this issue.