In her brilliant column this week, Millie Brierley argues that benefits are an act of human decency and points out that the current benefit system is humiliating. As someone who has come into contact with the welfare state, I whole-heartedly agree. What’s more, I don’t think I would be at Cambridge without the welfare state.

I won’t bore you with my life story, but some of it is relevant to the point I’m making. I am from Iraq. My family sought asylum in this country as political refugees in 1995 after we fled the country. A lot of things have happened since then, some of which I will never go into, but what you need to know for the purpose of this article is that we lived on benefits until I was 16. I was eligible for free school meals and the school uniform I wore was probably paid for by some of your parents. Fortunately, I am no longer shackled to the welfare state.

Being on benefits was ‘normal’ for me. I went to a secondary school in London where well over half the students were on free school meals and most families were on benefits. I didn’t realise how ‘poor’ we were until I came to Cambridge. And it was when I came to Cambridge that I started to question the welfare state. For a very long time, I was embarrassed to tell most people – even my closest friends – that I lived off benefits.

The reason for this, as Millie accurately points out, is because people are – and feel – humiliated for being shackled to the welfare state. I have used the word shackled intentionally: being on benefits was restrictive, unnerving and embarrassing.

I have a perfect example to illustrate this. At school one day, an insensitive supply teacher asked: “Who is on free school meals in here? Put your hands up.” I didn’t put my hand up. Neither did the 29 other students in the class. An awkward silence permeated the classroom. But I knew very well that each and every one of us was on free school meals – you knew who used their Meals Card and who paid with cash.

This is part of the problem. From very early on, we were separated and distinguished. Groups quickly formed – the posh and the parasites, the snobs and the scroungers, the rich and the poor, the good and the bad. This distinction pervades society as a whole: those on benefits are reminded of it all the time – at the Post Office, bank, supermarket, school, youth clubs, on the streets, and even at home.

It can be compared to public execution in the Tudor period; though society is more enlightened, people on benefits do die a little bit inside when they are publicly reminded of their financial hardship, whilst the rest of us look on without compassion. Though the UK is not as bad as the US, for example, the reminders are constant and unapologetic.

But there’s more. Have you ever been inside a Jobcentre? If you haven’t, let me try and tell you what it’s like. Imagine being in a cage at your mother’s funeral. Sadness, foreboding, despair, disappointment and the odd bit of anger or regret every now and then – all in a cage. You want to go out for some fresh air to get away from it all, but you can’t, because you’re incarcerated. Oh, and let’s not forget – the smell is worse than the stench in Life. In short, it’s a bit grim.

Living on benefits is a form of social incarceration. When you speak to people about why they oppose benefits, they say things like: “I see them buying clothes with their benefit money.” Clothes! You are expected to buy certain things and not to buy others. You are expected to exist, not to live.

What is the rationale behind this humiliation and negativity? Apparently, people on benefits only have themselves to blame – their plight is self-induced; “they just don’t want to work”. That is so far from the truth.

When my dad came to the UK from a rural village in the heart of Iraq, he did not speak a word of English. He left behind his entire family and culture, both of which he was very fond of. He was 30. You don’t need an expert to tell you how hard learning a language is, especially as you get older, and especially when you have five children to look after. Of course we needed a helping hand when we came here. What my dad did was sacrificial. Sacrifice is generally applauded, but not when you’re on benefits. 

This unsympathetic attitude is fostered because, as I have said, society is quick to separate the hard-workers from the scroungers. Before I came to Cambridge, I knew seven white British people, and three people who were not on benefits. I didn’t live a sheltered lifestyle, but, like some of the most privileged students here, I lived in a bell jar, albeit a very different one.

Because the hard-workers and scroungers rarely come into contact, assumptions about one another are made. The idea of neighbourhood, of helping someone out, doesn’t strike a chord with you because the person you think you are helping out – the scrounger you’ve constructed in your mind – is not that person in real life. The reality-perception dichotomy is still going strong.

We shouldn’t help people just to humiliate them. We need to adopt a Scandinavian attitude to the welfare state: as my friend from Copenhagen put it: “I’ll help others out now because, one day, I will need a helping hand myself, and when I do, the State will be there for me.” You never know what cards fate will deal you in the future. As Chinua Achebe tells us, “things [always do] fall apart”. But they always have a habit of coming back together.

Now that I am studying Law here, I hope that I’ll live a comfortable life, comfortable enough to pay my taxes, so that someone in the same position I was in all those years ago will be given a helping hand. I’ll be happy to do that because I’ll know that I wouldn’t have a Law degree from Cambridge without the help of the welfare state.