Hayley Does Donacster.

No 'me' post today - I'm cogitating on the How Right-wing Are You? debacle of yesterday - and on how the quiz itself and Cherry Pie's suggested alternative suggest a sinister angle in the real world...

In the meantime, for social schadenfreude fans, here's a link to a new programme tonight that my colleagues are keen to watch.

21:00 Benefit Busters

The government is trying to revolutionise the welfare system. Benefit Busters follows the work of a private company trying to get lone parents on benefits back into work.

The market, public money, and workless single mothers meet. What could possibly go wrong?

Possessions

The Brother phones me up.

His little sister Pixie is shrieking in the background but she’s just too vulnerable to come to the phone right now.

The Brother speaks as he no doubt ‘writes’ on the numerous forms and letters with which he fails to provide usable information to The Social for his own benefit claims; with that wind-tunnel-vowels-into-puddles-of-scummy-consonants vortex mixing non sequiturs into an all-you-can-blag buffet without gaps or pauses for breath or to trying to establish understanding or to identify himself or me or any inflection other than slowly rising angry tones which tell you from the start that under no circumstances is he going to listen to anything at all that you say until he’s said his piece and put you in your place because saying it is all: The Word shall set him free – or at least Pixie’s rent will soon be free, he hopes, and so growling and interrupting my polite greeting is just the ticket to ram home the fact that he’s been terribly inconvenienced by having to sacrifice precious time from his busy schedule working at the Wii-face to say just how disappointed he is that some other servant of the State is remiss by dint of not immediately reaching into the big old barrel of twenty pound notes that we all keep by the phone to send to Pixie so that she can go on living in the flat she recently rented at (it turns out) about forty quid per week less than The Housing are prepared to give her and which doesn’t leave her with ‘anything to live on': it’s about fifty pounds actually but who’s counting?)

Succinct Town is not a suburb of Castle City.

This is how the steamroller of the Welfare State tries to roll forever and take over the universe.

Pixie has rented a home of her own. Moving out confidently to make her way in the world like the social entrepreneur that she is, she’s decided that it’s long overdue that she left her Mum and her latest boyfriend’s house, and no doubt a gaggle of diversely-surnamed little half brothers probably monickered Jo-Boy, Tyson and Jakub who have been getting on her ‘pecs since they discovered just how high a decibel level they could generate for her and the neighbours’ listening pleasure without Him thumping them or Our Mum cutting them briefly off from her thin, cool, struggling stream of highly conditional but nevertheless genuine love.

She’s found a nice place to rent privately in Castle City’s economically obsolescent outskirts which is conveniently far away from the highest concentrations of needle-carpeted rookeries just as most of her school friends have done in recent years to put down roots and to blossom into mothers; sometimes within weeks of signing the lease.

Only she hasn’t read the small print.

To be fair she probably hasn’t read anything that didn’t have the word ‘celebrity’ in the first paragraph or that has ‘Fits sizes 16 to 18’ printed on it since she finally learned at about twelve how to read at all, but what she hasn’t done at any time during her daydreaming is to speculate about the consequences of signing a legally-binding contract but not being able to pay all the rent with someone who works out of the back of a taxi company’s office where his pit-bulls sleep except on overdue-collection days and who never gives receipts and who holds onto the rent book throughout the tenancy. He’s not been getting enough rent and has been Having A Word. Sharrylleanne and Nicole and Kimberley-May get every single penny of theirs paid okay and they were all mates at school together so why not Pixie?

This last is, approximately, what The Brother wants me to answer. You’ll have guessed by now that he wants me to answer it just so he can tell me I’m wrong. He intends to bully me into persuading The Housing to go to their Bumper Barrel O’ Twenties and do that whole All Creatures Great and Small thing with some Housing Benefit clerk playing James Herriot and the taxpayer representing the archetypal breach-birthing cow or the aardvark that’s swallowed (but which just can’t quite pass) an ocarina. It’s ironic that I have to explain the facts of life to a man who utters synonyms for the act of generation as every third word, but there you have it: there are a million stories in the naked city but only one verb.

I try to explain, but to save wear on my PC’s ‘f’ key, I’ll not quote our dialogue at length here; nor his many and essentially fertile interruptions, nor detail the Cloverfield soundtrack-bassy thumpings from Pixie’s room around him that are so loud that it seems her bed or sofa must be being repeatedly flung up into the air and then cast down onto the carpetless floor as if by some malign supernatural force.

Single people under 25 are not expected to live alone in four-roomed flats solely at the taxpayer’s expense. They are entitled to Housing Benefit at the shared accommodation rate, which is about half the rate allowed for a single unemployed adult living alone. Pixie should have got a shared house with a room of her own and a kitchen, living room, and bathroom in common with a couple or three others by this logic. Up to 25 you’re supposed to muck in like students. But Pixie is a rugged individualist who needs her ‘space’, according to The Brother.

Anyway, she has single friends at about her age who get all their rent paid. Do they have children? Some of them. There you are; ‘families’ have bigger needs and get more benefit. But, argues Brother Rumpole, some of the friends are alone, under 25 and ‘on the sick’ like Pixie and they get all their rent paid even though they aren’t parents. I explain that, yes, more of their daily spending-money benefits income will be excluded from means-testing help with their rent. If they get health or disability related benefits the system disregards certain food-and-bills benefits and adds disability premiums. There’s a core subsistence level that the government calculates for individuals or families according to their health, age, and mobility and to the numbers, ages and sexes of any children. The sicker you are, the more your spendable benefits are excluded from this matrix of subsistence 'needs'.

In the background, Pixie’s bed (or sofa) has ceased it bungee-thumping, and she is shouting the plaster off the walls with a deep, chthonic boom you wouldn’t think a (human) female chest and voice box could make. Perhaps she’s floating above the bed now.

The system allows proportionately more of the food-and-electric-and-mobile-phone benefits to be excluded from Housing and Council Tax Benefit calculations, with the mother of all exclusions on those who have the higher rate of Disability Living Allowance for both ‘Care’ and ‘Mobility', as they generate very high disability premiums. There’s nothing wrong with the logic of means-testing: the more knackered you are; the more fate has hammered you down in mind and body and the less you can reasonably be expected to do to provide for yourself. I suffer no pain at all at the thought of paraplegics or the blind getting extra help so that they can rent more expensive ground floor suburban flats that allow wheel-chair access or that permit guide dogs to be kenelled there.

Oddly enough I rarely get elderly paraplegics or the totally blind yelling at me, though occasionally they are sincerely grateful if I point out that they’re missing a trick and they find themselves better off after my advice. Poor old gimmers: they just don’t have the proper attitude some of them, unlike their juniors and betters.

The problem, of course, is that government ‘logic’ doesn’t take into account Ingenuity, Indolence and Greed or any other Hawkwind songs. Not everyone who wants to escape a life of getting out of bed early five days a week to work amongst unfriendly strangers is fortunate enough to be totally broken.

‘How do you fecund expect her to live on fecund nothing at all when she’s fecund sick?’ inquires The Brother sweetly. It’s tempting to reply that until a few magical moments ago I had been entirely unaware of her very existence and that therefore I had had no expectations at all as to her viability, but I know that that’d be a sacking offence - unlike say squandering trillions on a housing bubble - and so I hold my tongue.

He mutters something to the wailing voice behind him and the line crackles as she howls her disability qualifications at him to pass on to me. A positively First Century Galilean sound they have; what with her troubles and her attacks. And her ‘issues.’ How thoroughly the underclass has adopted the pusillanimous vocabulary of the victim-generating middle classes. But in the end it turns out that whatever it is she has wrong with her, the Department for Work and Pension’s top specialists have tragically only been able to award her the lowest level of ‘disability’ which means that The Housing have rightly taken most of her spending money benefits into account and haven’t been able to ignore the fact that she’s under 25 and single and renting a starter home at a cost and in a neighbourhood that’s more suitable for a hard-working, tax-paying family; the poor bastards.

There is a brief period of negotiation like that in August 1939 during which The Brother offer me an enticing banquet of illegal (and on one occasion physically impossible) alternatives to me doing my lawfully contracted job. Most of these choices are variations on the theme of me telling some fellow lickspittle from The Housing to ignore the various Housing Benefit Acts (note the date of that first one! Who knew that it was all Her fault?), and by forgetting all that Whereas and Notwithstanding stuff to make with the Barrel of Cash already and no messing about as he’s got Lego Star Wars to win.

You can wear this kind of person down. Pixie is doing half the job anyway as I can hear her ever shriller and ever more abusive howling begin to erode his shallow half-brotherly ability to give a shit. I’m imagining pea soup vomit spraying horizontally and maybe Pixie looking over her shoulder: right over her shoulder at 180% from straight ahead right now. I urge him to repeat to her that the law of the land won’t allow The Housing to give her more than her fifty quid or so, no matter how much she yells at him. He demurs and asks me once more why she can’t have more fecund cash (as if asking again and louder will change the world) because she’s on the sick. But not sick enough I explain. Again. She’s got something that the Welfare State considers to be dealable-with by a few extra pounds a week (or millions nationwide, let us not forget) and that’s it. She’ll have ‘panic attacks’ or be obese and unwieldy or be a moderate self-harmer or otherwise less than calm and gymnastic in enclosed spaces like factories or offices or supermarket warehouses, though I’m guessing that pubs and convenience stores and night clubs might therapeutically count as the open air.

But that’s the truth – she’s only got something trivial wrong with her, physically, but I'm expecting changes around these part. After all, if you pay folk if something happens then some people will assure that that particular something will indeed happen. That's market forces for you. If you pay peanuts you get monkeys. This is what that saying means: not that low wages produce poor workmanship, but that people will answer demand in ways that complement the demand. If you pay peanuts you get monkeys; if you pay bananas you get gorillas; if you pay with the coins stolen in a mausoleum at midnight on Halloween from the skeletal eye sockets of unpunished and unshriven embezzlers you get accordionists. Once she learns today’s lesson, I confidently expect her condition to get worse if she can squeeze it past the doctors.

‘So you’re saying if I broke her leg, she’d get more benefit?’

And you’d get a medal, or deserve one, I think.

Eventually, worn down between the brick wall of my persistence and cunningly-hidden indifference to his grief on one side and the Gadarene squealings behind him on the other, he goes off the line in the sure and certain knowledge that, while she can’t have any more benefit per se without becoming a mother or growing sicker and more disabled (both obviously very attractive career options) she can apply to The Housing for temporary relief whilst she looks for somewhere that she really can afford. She won’t look, of course. Even if The Housing do agree to pay a temporary top-up for up to six months and it goes straight to the landlord’s bank account to appease his wrath she’ll still not search for anywhere else to rent despite her present panic. She’s going to be too busy with her personal and relationship problems and rowing with her whole family to go house-hunting any time soon. So in eight months or so after the top-up has ended forever, her underpaid and out-of-pocket landlord’s pocked face will lose its film-star charms and he'll become all insistent again. Pixie’ll do a runner to another part of Castle City or to one of its exotic neighbouring mill towns leaving debts to the landlord and The Housing alike, but then it’s amazing how nimble you can be even with her disability when you need to carry a bed and a fifty-inch plasma TV screen down three flights of lightless stairs.

She’s hoist on her own petard.

Two petards.

First petard: she’s never ever given any consideration as to whether The Social and The Housing really would provide her with what she wants as much as abundantly as she wants it and as soon as she needs it for the Lord will provide. Her Mum’s on the sick with kids and she gets by and her friends with babies have their own places and they get by and some of them just like her are on the sick and they get by, and so somehow she has slightly distorted the nature of Welfare State and the grimmer reality that underlies it into some warped version of the allegory of the lilies of the fields and the fowls in the skies, African or European.

Second petard: she’s not used the masses of information that have always been available to her. The Housing will have written to her once her too-small help with the rent was awarded and so she would have been able to see from the start that she wasn’t going to be able to manage. Therefore she didn’t need to wait for the landlord to come a-calling or for The Brother to get out so he could shout at me. If she had had any self-possession at all, she might have phoned The Housing in advance of signing the lease and asked what she’d get if she moved into her lovely new home alone – and not rented it when they told her. Every building in the Welfare State is plastered with posters and signs and almost all correspondence has letterheads and warnings and rights and duties and exhortations to call the authorities at all kinds of local call centres or drop in advice centres before everything goes horribly wrong: we’re waiting for your call. But she’s slightly distorted all this potential help and advice to mean ‘Please ignore this letter and just get back to feuding with your mother and schoolmates and don’t bother your pretty little head with thoughts of…well, anything at all really, until The Man Comes Around, and then who you gonna call?’

Two slightly distorted petards.

And the moral of the story is?

The myth of Right-wing myths about welfare mothers and doley scroungers.

The Left says that girls don’t deliberately get pregnant to qualify for benefits and accommodation of their own, and I’m sure that a sizeable minority of them do so (I’ve heard some admit as much). They also deny that others invent or exaggerate their ‘disabilities’ for the same purpose. But there's another much wider carriageway on the welfarist road to Hell. A majority of the young people whom I meet and who have the biggest beefs with the system do so because they assumed right from the start that they’d be getting it all straight away...and with no expiry date, world without end. They'll do their individualist thing regardless: petty crime, or truancy, or unprotected sex or making tenancy agreements with slumlords and they'll expect it to be alright because the system is all about always making it alright. They are so poorly educated and incurious and accepting of their ‘rights’ that it never occurs to them that it’s not going to be perfect from the start. Guess where that puts getting jobs and responsible parenthood in their hierarchy of priorities? Talk about The Imp of the Perverse: this is the Demon of the Irresponsible.

Multiply the costs of all this by fifty-two to get the annual spend per tousled head and then by several hundred thousand nationwide to figure out where all the policemen and body armour and hospital cleaning crews and physics equipment in schools have gone to this year.

When things go wrong, they intend to fall back onto their cosy beds and let it all get sorted out.
You, dear reader, are the bed that they expect to fall back on when Life happens to them.

Kind of puts that whole bed-bucking thing into context, doesn’t it?

Hell's delicatessen

Darcy and Hindenburg mooch, pheromoning and land-whaling, up to my desk.

Darcy is 30 years old and twenty stone of permanent dole culture craftsmanship. Round and unwashed, his circular turnip face stares at me uneasily from below greasy mop of blackish hair which appears to be void of either supercomputer or tiny wildlife The Lord be praised. He’s got the Super Economy Size dark blue tracksuit top and dark blue sloppy draw-sting trousers over whose straining waistband heritage Doritos hang in the elegant curve of a hairy white belly (mostly but not quite completely) hidden below an XXXL Asda T-shirt.

Have you ever heard of that TV sauce advertising slogan that goes: ‘I feel like Lettuce Tonight?’

Him neither.

He’s tall and afraid and about as cute as hemorrhoids.

Hindenburg is his girlfriend: his ‘partner’ in the box-ticking jargon of my grubby trade, and in the low twenties in both years and stones.

She’s a unique individual; a child of a benevolent Nature and loving parents; the peak of evolution’s finest experiment with a little spark of angel in there somewhere. She’s also a head shorter and therefore denser than Darcy but with the same mass. Whereas Darcy has his own atmosphere, Lump has a discernible gravitational field to which many, many cheap and brightly sparkling objects are attracted; never to escape.

This so isn’t going to be fun, I think; Clarice Starling mouth-breathing to avoid Darcy’s hydrocarbon-rich Ozone Layer and the happy couple’s micro-ecosystems.

‘You gotta help us, Mister Marlowe,’ they didn’t say.

Today was indeed going to be a murder mystery of sorts. No mysterious Egyptian assassins or American SAS veterans would litter the bathrooms of its brownstone tenements or huddle broken and gut-shot in alleys behind its cheap juke joint or uptown night-clubs.

‘Our benefit’s gone down, and we just can’t manage,’ he explains, logically enough.

Do not cheer, dear reader on the Right - for this is a tale of Mister Brown’s Britain, and little joy in it will last for long.

It appears that one gem in the tiara of benefits which adorns the lives of D and H has recently shrunk. By seven pounds per week.

They are childless; renting a four room flat in one of Castle City’s First Industrial Revolution suburbs, and on about two hundred pounds per week benefits in total. There is Disability Living Allowance and Incapacity Benefit and other bit and pieces to spend on treats and sweets and most of their rent and Council Tax are paid for by, well, you.

They aren’t disabled enough to be unable to reach the tobacconist judging from the coffee colour of their fingers. They probably get out and about to meet the happy owners of local convenience stores specializing in generic lager, saturated fats and refined carbohydrates.

But not, I suspect rather firmly, fresh vegetables or toothpaste.

And definitely not deodorant.

‘It’s getting too expensive to heat the flat. We can only afford to heat it for seven hours a day.’

Now my regular readers are aware that I have a mind like a steel trap. They’ll say you can tell that by the enraged squeaking of the mice trapped therein. I noticed immediately that seven hours of heating are about what a couple would need if they worked full-time. One hour for staying warm while getting up – and washed! – and off to work, and a further six hours from six till midnight after work.

But my job is to advise everyone who asks - but everyone - about their benefits. I’m supposed to help them get the most out of The System that can be got by honest and lawful means.

But here comes Magic Moment Number One.

‘It’s so bad now Mister Northwester that I’ll just have to go out to work. It’s the only thing for it.’

He’s got it! He’s got the idea that you can leave the house for something other than signing on and fetching groceries and cashing in Gyros! Despite a LONG time on the public teat, the descendant of Hengist and Horsa, Erik Bloodaxe and William of Normandy is going to stand up and fight for a better life!

My heart singing, I look on the computer screen for clues of previous employment before his whole income was purely benefits based.. Nothing in 2009 of course, or 2008. Let’s see, 2007? No. 2006, perhaps? Oddly, no. 2005. Nada. 2004…. I start to scroll rapidly down to find an unbroken record of solid and successful indolence all the way back to when he came to Castle City as a wee nipper with his old Mum who’d found a Council House and he was able to…sign on right after leaving school, officially, at 18 (poor bloody Sixth-form college that had him incarcerated in it!), and then his being booted out by Mum when his child-related benefits ceased to be paid to her.

Oh, no…nearly missed it. A two-month break when he went from Jobseeker’s Allowance to its training course version a few years ago. Ah, reality check. He went onto Income Support immediately after the course. That’s the benefit which you get for not having any disabilities as such, but where you are not expected to even seek work. Single mothers get it, and men with bad backs, and people waiting to get things like Disability Living Allowance or Incapacity Benefit.

To get the mobility component of Disability Living Allowance, your disability must be severe enough for you to have any of the following walking difficulties, even when wearing or using an aid or equipment you normally use:

…you need guidance or supervision from another person when walking out of doors in unfamiliar places.

There’s a git-harder version now, called Employment Support Allowance, but as it’s possible to ‘fail’ the fitness test and after a while they’ll put you on a rather watery ‘Well, what CAN you do?’ version intended to nag you a bit as to the likelihood of maybe thinking about considering the distant possibility of listening to someone talk about finding work.

It’s a nice thought but Labour’s running it so it’s probably going to be about as successful as Galaxy Celery Whirls.

Darcy gets ‘panic attacks,’ which are even more incapacitating than a bad back because they can strike unreliably at any time, for example when you find yourself in an enclosed space with strangers under stressful circumstances - such as almost any place of employment.

They’re difficult to diagnose because they’re unreliable and also hard for benefits tribunals to determine whether you’re really sick or just malingering.

Doctors can scan for bad backs now.

Here's Income Support:

If you're entitled to Income Support, you automatically qualify for:

free dental care free prescriptions free school meals Housing Benefit Council Tax Benefit

It’s not much. It’s not a fortune, and for the childless (thank Loki for tight underpants, generic vodka and Old Holborn!) it can prove quite a bit more lucrative to work even in Castle City’s post Housing-bubble economy. The benefits system is geared to large families and to the severely disabled and quite right for that latter group too.

And he realizes it!

I’m still staring at my PC screen chronicling an ‘adult’ lifetime of this chap sitting somewhere when Magic Moment Number Two arrives.

‘You’ll have to get a job at a nursing home again, Hindy,’ he remarks to his blushing ladylove and to our joint amazement.

A wave of golden nostalgia does not illuminate Hindenburg’s face like a bright new dawn. Painful recollections cross her face like the flitting shadows of a magic lantern show: thoughts of doing stuff someone else told her to do when she wanted to do something else. Anything else. For a moment she glares at Darcy with the cold, conscienceless, predatory eyes of a serial killer or an accordion teacher. It passes, and the word 'cud' fills my mind.

Little Hindy is a rugged individualist alright. On your tab.

Honestly, taking minimum wages at 38-40 hours each and they could probably look at £400-odd per week, ahem, gross. Even with Gordie’s cut to bail out the banks and gainfully employing Harriet Harman to disdain AA batteries and sending a roll of oven foil to Afghanistan once a year to keep the boys safe, they’re still looking at a hundred or so net above what The Social gives them.

The System’s fixed – I say again – fixed against childless couples.

So the mystery is, why don’t they?

Planning to shop properly in the various cheap and cheerful supermarkets – the Aldis and Icelands; the Nettos and Farmfoods they could eat better and more and free up pounds to add to that hundred or so and buy some soap. Or a book. Or a book which explains about soap. Maybe some more sparkly objects.

Hell, private pensions start at £50 net per month, I’m told, but don’t hold your breath; unlike me at the time. Three hundred quid’ll get them a six-months to the MOT or the scrapyard banger, and they could get out and look at a bit more of England.

Remember at the beginning and the tragic dilemma that faced them so painfully that they left their beloved home to come and see me? Seven measly quid goes down the chute and their carefully-contrived cycle of sign-and-cash-and-spend at the corner shop at top prices falls to the ground like MPs receipts?

Mrs. Northwester, bless her, complains that many working-class people have lost the knack of counting the pennies and putting so much a week away for rent and so much for ‘electric’ and so on, but these are smart Maryland cookies and they do.

These people can budget. They know how to match their expenditure precisely to what they have in their weekly purse. They even know; both instinctively and consciously, that working is a way to get more.

They know about work and, faced with the dreadful necessity to get some, Darcy is immediately prepared to volunteer himself (despite his phantom panic attacks), and also to offer his beloved Hindenburg’s services to the aged-people herding business (which is not too hellish around Castle City, I’m told, for pensioners or staff alike) which constitutes a considerable chunk of the employment in the city.

Six square-cut, crinkle-fried, cylinder-wrapped and exquisitely vacuum-packed meals and 40 satellite TV channels are enough for this pair of love-birds.

Talk about the banality of evil – this is the evil of the banal.The poverty – the true poverty - is inside the souls of two young people who should be out having proper fun and using their brains and bodies for something other than sopping up TV transmissions and ending forever and ever the freedom of movement of bag after bag of spicy corn chips.

But they won’t do anything of the sort because they don’t want to: someone somewhere lowered the bar on their dreams down to sofa level. Someone murdered their gumption and is keeping it dead - to everyone’s bitter cost.

Oh, and I was able to find their seven pounds – and then some – thanks to a trick of my trade which I’d much rather be directing to war veterans and spending on formerly runaway and abused kids getting a second chance at life.

But there you are.

For such as these, the Welfare State is a great big tube of Pringles, and once you pop, it’s damnably hard to stop.

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?