Can I live on £53 a week? Things start off well enough when I cash in some social capital and a friend takes me out to dinner
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Zoe Williams
The Guardian, Friday 5 April 2013 19.48 BST
Iain Duncan Smith, with his imperious, 'because I say so' delivery. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images
The last time I looked, the petition asking Iain Duncan Smith to live on £53 per week had 435,596 signatures, but I'd be amazed if there weren't half a million by now. The arrogance of the man, his imperious, "because I say so" delivery, invites this response to almost everything he says: "Yeah? Then prove it."
Journalists and politicians have been doing this for as long as I can remember. It was always a staple of the socially conscious household; your mum is eating for the week on a quid a day (it is the leftwing feminist's way of saying "I'm going on a diet"), or your dad is sleeping rough for charity (the coldness of which is right there in the insensitivity of this gesture, spending the night right next to people who don't have a choice).
Brian Sewell tried to live on a state pension at the end of the 90s (it was just about possible, he concluded, so long as you had an Aga). Over a decade before that, Matthew Parris, then still a conservative MP, lived for a week on £26.80, the rate of supplementary benefit at the time, for World in Action. It was 1984, and our unemployment benefits were at the lowest, relative to earnings, they'd been for 30 years. Now, of course, they are lower still (22% of median earnings in 1979, 15% in 2012). On his sixth day, Parris had 61p left for heat and light, and was wondering whether to sit in the dark or go to bed early.
We should bear in mind, with all these experiments, the absence of children to worry about, which is all most people on benefits worry about.
£7.57 a day is meant to cover food, electricity, gas, water, phone, servicing debt, travel, renewing clothing and emergencies.
I had no emergencies, no debt to service and renewed no clothing. I took all the kids' food out of their own child benefit (this is do-able but Spartan, relies heavily on those plastic bowls of green peppers for a quid, and doesn't stretch to any meat).
Gas and electricity was £4.36 per day, I spent £1.07 on the mobile. I didn't spend any money on transport because I cycled everywhere, but I've spent a grand on the bike in the past five years (£500 on the bike itself, two pairs of cleat shoes, cleat peddles, servicing), so I called that 54p a day, plus 40p a day on a TV licence.
This leaves me £1.19 for everything else, or £5.95 for five days, so I spent 99p on rice, 89p on orange lentils, £1.30 on a giant Lidl bag of onions and I already had garlic. £2.77 remained.
On the first night, a friend took me out for dinner. She, coincidentally, wrote this piece for the Daily Mail five years ago. She said she'd loitered outside her office, pretending to have left her purse at her desk and asking people to buy her a coffee. She went to a lot of parties for the canapés, and was outraged when, at the opening of a burlesque club, they gave out pornographic playing cards instead of vol au vents.
This is why these experiments are worse than worthless. They ignore social capital, while at the same time, trading on it for everything – she wouldn't have this throng of people ready to buy her coffee if she didn't already know them and employ half of them; it is unlikely that someone on long-term unemployment benefit would be invited to a burlesque party. Damn you, and your social capital, I ranted, with my mouthful of chicken livers that she'd just paid for.
The next day, I was mainly hanging out with my own children; we couldn't go anywhere, because although their bus fares were free, I was 3p short of a round bus trip, and also, I couldn't cope with the ceaseless requests for small, perishable stuff.
So we stayed in the house, and the youngest papered the stairs with loo roll, and I explained that it cost money and therefore shouldn't be wasted. Then my oldest wrote a story about Obi-Wan Kenobi, photocopied it a number of times, and said, "I don't know if you want to come with me, but I thought we could go outside and sell these to people."
So then I had to explain the likely market value of a very lame Star Wars precis, which nearly broke me.
On Wednesday, I got into town on my bike, didn't take any lentil mush because I was embarrassed, felt lightheaded in the mid-afternoon, bought a Lucozade without thinking. Wham – £1.99!
When did that happen? I thought it would be about 65p. Obviously if I were doing this for longer, I'd plan better, but if you've no slack for discretionary spending, I don't think you'd be able to cycle. You get too hungry.
It's incredibly cold, and being between appointments is alienating if you can't go to a cafe. I wasted 30p using the toilets on King's Cross station. Later that day, I was gulled by my offspring into buying a Carambar sweet, and I owe the shop 2p.
I was entirely out of money by the end of Wednesday. Previously, I thought that unless you do this experiment as Polly Toynbee did, for a life-changing amount of time, it's bogus, recasting as a fun challenge financial conditions that grind the life out of people. Anyone can do anything for a week.
But in fact, I didn't last even half a week.
Parris noted that he couldn't do anything but "cook food and watch television," but as an adult, you can at least go for a walk, sit in a library, read with a torch.
With kids, you can't leave the house; you just don't have the contingency budget. Families I used to regard with sympathy, I now regard with awe.
My opinion on Iain Duncan Smith is unchanged.
