The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has been plugging a recruitment video that brags how the DWP is “touching so many people’s lives” and “truly” making “a difference to so many” claimants. On its own, that farcical double-speak is sure news to the many marginalised claimants the department terrorises on a daily basis.
However, the context in which the department was promoting this was all the more mind-blowing.
The department actually posted the video in March this year. However, the Canary stumbled across the pukeworthy piece of glossy propaganda during a webinar for new jobs spying on disabled claimants. Because nothing says improving a claimants day like making them scared to even leave their home for fear they’re being tailed by the DWP’s undercover surveillance snoops.
Hilariously, it won’t be showing this trash PR at another webinar it had planned for this Thursday. It was for its Covert Surveillance Team Leader positions. The Canary had (secretly) signed up to this too and were devastated to receive an email to inform us it had cancelled the event. We can’t imagine why it decided to do that. Naturally, it wasn’t forthcoming with a reason.
DWP job advert: paradoxical propaganda enough to make you puke
If you want to ogle the offending video incredulously for yourselves, the DWP has conveniently posted it on its YouTube here:
But, for Canary reader’s entertainment (or sheer horror – take your pick), and to spare you wasting two-and-half minutes of your precious time viewing mind-numbing cringe, we’ve summed up the ‘highlights’ below.
First up was communications and insight manager Samuel making the oh-so insightful observation that the DWP is “the department of opportunity”. No, he wasn’t kidding.
Gushing inanely about his abominable employer, Samuel added:
There’s so many different things that you can go into.
That’s probably true if you fancy a career in cracking down in non-existent benefit fraud. After all, the Canary just exposed how the DWP has thousands of staff working in fraud investigations – more than any other government department or public body, including HMRC.
However, it’s obsession with ‘opportunity’ is enough to make a few hundred thousand eye-rolls, at least. Because when the department talks ‘opportunity’ for claimants its portends to serve, it invariably means brutal benefit conditionality, work programmes, and enforced ‘volunteering’-come-slave-labour to corporate capitalists.
The DWP: “touching so many people’s lives”
Then, the DWP set about doing its best impression of a benevolent caretaker of chronically ill and disabled claimants.
Against a pastel green backdrop, Ranjit, who works in service design on disability benefit croons to the camera how:
It’s looking after the most vulnerable people in society, you are changing lives on a daily basis.
The DWP wheeled out two more employees to reel off much of the same guff.
Deputy director of project delivery Tammy dutifully rattled off how:
You know you’re kind of touching so many people’s lives but not just those people, their families, their children. I can’t really explain how satisfying it feels at the end of the day to go home and know that you’ve truly made a difference to so many people’s lives.
Next was Vicki – a disabled Universal Credit case manager – because if Ranjit and Tammy’s spiels weren’t convincing enough, the token disabled staff member would clearly seal the deal.
Vicki waxed lyrical about how she was “so proud” how she got to improve people’s day at the DWP.
We are talking about the same DWP who has just rammed through billions in brutal cuts to chronically ill and disabled people’s benefits here? *Checks notes* The same cuts that will push at least over 100,000 people – including children – into poverty?
Yes, that’s the DWP, changing lives, improving days, for families and children everywhere.
The Department of…
In another scene, an employee (one of the few people of colour in the video) boasted the department’s inclusivity to the camera:
And the department being inclusive, being diverse and embracing me and what I bring because they understand everyone brings something different to the department.
It would be almost hilarious if it weren’t so jarring. This is the same DWP that’s cock-up over hourly pay could cost over 500 of its international employees their job – and their visas.
And the fawning staff in the video evidently didn’t get the memo that the DWP has lost more employment tribunals over disability discrimination than any other UK employer.
But then, the violence at the DWP has long been institutionalised. Its staff have previously admitted their own negligence in following proper safeguarding procedures. So forgive me if I’m a little hesitant to take the word of servile staff sucking-up to the DWP in such barefaced shows of brazen bootlicking.
Of course, the most unsettling part of all this is – its employees sincerely believe all this bullshit.
There are obviously a fair few more points the Canary could correct in this nauseatingly piece of piss-take propaganda. Because far from the department of “opportunity”, the toxic DWP is in reality, the department of the grave and systematic violations of disabled people’s human rights.
That’s an honest government ad we could get behind.
Featured image via the Canary
