Presenting welfare reform: poverty porn, telling sad stories or achieving change?

Much is written about the suffering resulting from welfare reform and other cuts for disabled people and others on the receiving end. Usually this is seen as a ‘good thing’. But is it as simple as that? It may not be the same as so-called television poverty porn, but what is the point of constantly recycling welfare reform’s effects? Judging from last May’s general election, doing this does not seem to have had a significant effect on public politics/attitudes. So perhaps we need to look at it more carefully. When might discussion of welfare reform be helpful and when unhelpful? Is not the real task to develop alternatives, rather than hope as the Fabians did, that if we show how awful things are, ‘then something will have to be done’?