Chain mail limbo dancing

Just a quickie to depress you further and to hammer your just prejudices deeper in.

A colleague of mine read a customer's letter out to us last week.
This customer had been trying to persuade a benefits decision-maker to give him more money to live on. He complained that he only got such-and-such for Jobseeker's Allowance (the routine welfare payment for those fit young men too gormless to persuade some dippy doctor that they have panic attacks, agoraphobia, or Depression), and so much Housing Benefit to help pay the rent.
He didn't mention his Council Tax Benefit but then folk on Income Support or income-based Jobseeker's Allowance have their entire bills paid for them by the local authority and after a few years on the dole they forget - if they ever knew - that they have any Council Tax liability at all. 'I don't pay Council Tax' shall be the whole of the law. The Poll Tax rioters should be spinning in their graves.

So anyway he wrote; clearly and politely in prose that could have been that of a suburban housewife describing the high cost of living, that what with one thing and another he just couldn't afford to make ends meet, and so he hoped that the decision-makers could see their way to upping the payments made to him. Then came the clinching and final very matter-of-fact sentence which I paraphrase here only slightly.
'If you don't pay me more I shall have to shop-lift or steal money to manage, and I'll get even more fines and then how will I manage?'

Do you see what he did there?
He went straight from expressing in some detail his dissatisfaction with the Welfare State through to his sole conceivable option of breaking the law and violating the property rights of others, and then straight on to anticipating with self-centred regret how the consequences of his crimes would impact his own comfort and convenience.

It's my contention that the underclass are a kind of aristocracy.
The purity and blamelessness of their pain and their insoluble and eternal helplessness absolve them from all moral responsibility and especially the duty to ever, ever exert themselves for their own support other than by insisting that the tax base and the tax collectors do so.

We may well deserve it for taking the Half Crown ourselves, but welfare advisers in the bloated bureaucracy are on the receiving end of daily abuse and why-me whiny self-pity as people complain that their benefits have been stopped because they failed to 'sign on' and how do we expect them to manage?

I love that one.
I fantasize about saying, perhaps the day after I see the Lottery jackpot clearing in my bank account (or failing that the day after a Conservative government announces that there will be no more 'hardship loans' and interim Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit payments based on 'nil incomes' for people who neglect to do the one simple, easy thing that they are expected to do to feed and house themselves, which is to attend the Job Centre for half an hour once a fortnight) that I never heard of them before today and therefore that I have no personal plans, opinions, or ambitions regarding their future managing behaviour and prospects.
No, strike that 'behaviour'. They don't connect their behaviour with outcomes in their lives at all, (' It's not my fault - the Job Centre messed up') except for their ability to browbeat or wheedle some bureaucrat to simplify and indeed to perform the task of supplying and filling in a new claim form and suggesting wordings whereby a decision-maker might change their mind and allow benefit payment back to the start of the sanction.

The other one I like is when someone - usually young and single and childless and gormless complains that they've rented a flat and that it turns out to cost twice the maximum amount of Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit that they are entitled to due to their age and state of health. How do I expect them to be able to afford to live?
What were their expectations, I wonder, when they signed the lease?

The underclass are an aristocracy: an aristocracy of weakness and failure.
They aren't subject to the same laws as we are and they are absolved lifelong from personal responsibility for their subsistence, breeding, housing, clothing, and entertainment. They are surrounded by brow-beaten and servile lackeys who seek to extort from some distant and unseen peasantry (that'll be you, dear reader), the means of their subsistence and pleasure.
And the threat is there - always there - of violence: violence to the lackeys or, failing that, to anyone who insists that they pay their fines, attend interviews, return overpayments from fraudulent claims, or to reply to correspondence.

The Normans: ruthless and murderous looters though they were, at least got around to building great cathedrals and endowing monasteries and universities. I suspect it'll be a long time before the country feels any lasting benefit from this aristocracy from importing Chinese-made trainers, Burberry caps and plasma-screen televisions. Forever, possibly.

This lad could only think of theft to support himself in the absence of more generous welfare payments, and so I wondered who set the bar in life so low for him?
Who persuaded or taught or showed him that if 'they' didn't support him, he'd have to start shoving burgers or vodka or iPods into his tracksuit pants to make ends meet?
It was someone who met him long before us advisers and the other lackeys.

So - apart from me - cui bono?

Perhaps they and he might get together and come up with better ideas of how he might support himself in the future. They might do it best if they went off on some outdoor pursuits event together, to provide themselves with lots of healthy fresh air, inspiring countryside and the bracing exercise that comes with taking part in extreme sports.






Might I suggest wireless bungee jumping?