When Channel 4 broadcast Benefits Street in 2014, it provoked outrage on sections of the Conservative benches.
The series followed the hard-up residents of James Turner Street, Birmingham, as they scraped by on state handouts, but it was the “luxuries” they enjoyed that provoked the outcry. The fact that some residents could afford televisions, cigarettes and tattoos while on welfare was too much for Philip Davies, the Tory MP. “Do you understand the concerns and irritations,” he asked the Commons, “of many of the people who go out to work every day, pay their taxes, who cannot afford those kinds of luxuries themselves?”
“Many people are shocked by what they see,” agreed the then work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith. “That is why the
