The best thing about Tottenham (where I grew up) being exposed to a wide audience as welfare ground zero is that it helps a case I often make on this platform. I didn’t need the data to tell me that almost 30K households in David Lammy’s constituency - the home of rioting, crime, social decay, and disturbing demographics - were claiming UC or the benefits that came before it, because the people in a place like Tottenham (which has the largest welfare bill of any constituency, at £624.9 million) will *just tell you*. We imagine topics like personal finances (and especially benefits) to be taboo and something that, thanks to good old British reservedness, people would never dare openly discuss. But the people in a place like Tottenham are not British. They do not share our sensibilities. The Somalis, Eritreans, Nigerians, Turks, Kurds, Albanians and others in Tottenham will straight up tell you about the various benefits they’re claiming. They’ll even tell you about their dodgy DLA/PIP claims and the various ways in which they scam the system. They’ll tell you about their Motability car and the fraudulent way they obtained it. They’ll openly tell you about their “friend from my village” who works at the council’s housing department and who they bunged £10K cash to get a nicer social housing property with more bedrooms and a garden. The fraud is out in the open and totally normalised. Yet when I describe this phenomenon to faux leftist white middle-class people, they instantly dismiss it as the stuff of far-right conspiracies theories. I understand why they instinctively do so, because this is behaviour that is totally alien to us British people (with some exceptions for the underclass - but even they’re more savvy and secretive than the Somalis et al when it comes to their benefit claims). The reason middle-class Sensibles™ can comfortably dismiss what I am describing, is because they do not live among the “diversity” the claim to love. They do not have socially housed Somalian neighbours who openly describe how they got three of their kids diagnosed with ADHD by using a online Conners Rating Scale and harassing their GP for a CAMHS referral, and how they obtained PIP for their “trauma” from the war back home, and their Motability car. But, to those dismissive people, I say respectfully: listen to those of us who know what we are talking about and have direct “lived experience” of this stuff. The people we have imported over the last thirty or so years are not like us and never will be. They do not share our sensibilities. If I tell you about the kids in my school discussing the new cars their mums were driving and how they “got it free from like the government and dat”, or Turkish neighbours gloating that they’ve managed to secure DLA for young Hasan, Ali and Mehmet (a hat-trick!), I really am not making it up. I’m glad everyone is discussing the scale of benefit claims in places like Tottenham, Edmonton, Hackney, and elsewhere. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.