Like there’s no tomorrow

I work for the underclass.

I also work for a bunch of other people who are in the financial mire - temporarily or permanently – and from which I suspect no amount of health insurance and voluntary pension saving could ever have diverted them; pace my purist libertarian former comrades.

Basically, a major part of my job is to help the unemployed or over-parented to understand and sometimes to do the paperwork and walk them through the process of means testing so they can show The Social and The Housing just how broke they are and hence can they have some more money, please?

For some, injury and illness or the loss of a job is a temporary misfortune that they intend (and actively seek) to escape as soon as possible. My cynical colleagues and I find it hard to begrudge them the taxes we all pay to keep the roof over their heads and the electricity on and food on the table. Dear reader, you may disagree with that, but absent compulsory individual or family-based unemployment, sickness and retirement funding - something likely only in a vibrant, thriving, successful economy supported by well-educated workers and intelligent middle managers (yeah, right) - it just doesn’t seem decent not to pay minimum (or even briefly better than minimum) poor relief to the innocently, accidentally skint.  

(Pensioners are a much tougher and bigger problem in that since the Pensions Increase Act generations of workers and housewives (and increasingly cast-adrift fifty-something first wives) have been encouraged  and duped to face retirement age without a pension pot of their own above whatever the National Insurance scheme provides.

But let us set that Godzilla-class train wreck aside for now and concentrate on what the system has unselfconsciously dubbed Working Age benefits recipients.)

A sizeable minority of folk whose reports, letters and emails cross my desk and whose (expensive mobile) phone calls sound in my ears are victims of a generations-long experiment in wishful thinking, unfunded social liabilities, and all-round good intentions and so here we are in the Inferno that the Clever and Decent have unintentionally built: The Bolgia of the Intergenerationally Useless. The ‘Vulnerable.’ Peace be unto them.

Now, I sometimes joke at work with my colleagues about the wide variety of first names with which the latest cohort of the Vulnerable have been branded by their hopeless, clueless, husbandless mothers. All those Ka-s and Sha-s and De-s that unmarried Kylies and Julies choose to imagine raises their offspring to the glamourous level of America’s Great Society black underclass, the poor sods.

It really helps you to assess a boy’s life chances when you learn that his first name is Tyson; may his tribe increase. Because nothing quite says ‘aspirational parenting’ as well as naming one’s tiny baby son after a tattooed, bipolar, serially bankrupt, multiple-bastardizing, drug-addicted convicted rapist who publicly lamented the non-lynching of a brown-skinned man found not guilty of murder.

We chortle too at the narrower range of surnames. These are often double-barrelled in memory of Mum’s latest bedwarmer-but-three who stayed around for three entire Christmases and for almost one whole gestation before he flew the nest leaving another cuckoo for your children, dear reader, to support and endure lifelong. Support, that is, assuming that the little hellions will in fact shut up and stop screaming long enough for your kids to acquire what the political class nostalgically refers to as a publicly-funded ‘education’.

The Vulnerable won’t read (even if they can read, kind of,) and their commonest first resort when faced with officialdom’s requests for further information (intended to allow means-tested benefits to be commenced or to continue in payment) is to ignore such requests altogether…until some welfare bureaucrat somewhere is obliged to suspend and eventually to cancel their claim – whether of a principle (subsistence) benefit or a supplementary payments for help with housing, children, illness and injury, etc. Their next resort; rather than reading and responding to the authorities concerned is to go for help to some third party advisor or case officer such as the CAB or a social worker and who, in all  probability, will eventually ring us up and discover they don’t have written permission to discuss the ‘customer’s’ private business and who wait another fortnight while written or verbal permission to discuss is obtained and who then learns that, yes, answering the letters and providing pay slips, birth certificates, proof of rent, debts, etc, is exactly what is needed to get the money flowing again as requested three, four, five patient months ago.

Their childlike, untutored minds - infantilized by child-centred ‘progressive’ education and protected culturally from blame, shame or responsibility by the Guardian class of anti-demonizers - simply will not take responsibility for any of their acts at any time. They literally cannot understand why their serial idleness, fecundity and absence of thrift should in any way be mentioned at a time when the debt chickens have finally come home to roost; such as when the repossession of their homes is imminent or enormous Sky TV packages are about to be cancelled despite a months-long series of advice and warning letters.

“How do you expect me to pay my rent when I’m only on Maternity Allowance before my Income Support, Child benefit, Child Tax Credit, free school meals and prescriptions will kick in when I have the baby, and now you tell me I’ve got to pay my poll tax as well? If I kill myself, it’ll all be your fault.”

Tomorrow is finally right here, and nothing very much belongs to her.

These are the great grandchildren of the nation of shopkeepers that stood almost alone against the greatest war machine ever devised and that fought it to a standstill while awaiting the nascent superpowers to join the fray.

But they are human beings, and despite Julia’s unceasing evidence of their Hobbesian lives I feel stricken whenever I see their children, snotty-nosed and toyless writhing in primal frustration in our interview room (while an ageing teenaged mother wrestles with the intellectual challenge of understanding that ‘help with rent’ requires proof of rent and thus maybe binning a tenancy agreement provided by an expatriate, incommunicado landlord wasn’t her smartest move ever) when I know with little room for doubt that their ‘home’, though full of broken bikes and computer games, lacks both books and ornaments. What could those poor kids have become with even a little sense and sensitivity?

We’re looking at spiritual genocide here.

   

And yet. And yet.

Here’s a thing.

A few weeks ago I was walking home from Castle City’s Office Of Vulnerable Affairs and I heard in the middle distance screaming so high and broken that it could only be the voice of a creature in torment. On I walked through the gathering gloom until along the canal path towards me came a man, forty-something; not overly tattooed, pushing a child of three or four in a baby’s push-chair. Three or four and she was still being wheeled along; not skipping or waking alongside and holding the man’s hand. Many of today’s Morlocks probably start at school with muscle development inferior to their Eloi ‘protectors’ and advocates.

The little girl had a crown of blonde curls, wasn’t jam-smeared or grubby, and she was singing. Cheerfully. Out of tune, but loving it. Smiling. It was Tomorrow, from the musical Annie.

Annie is schmaltzy and celebrates America’s awful, proto-totalitarian New Deal (and here we are in its lousy British equivalent), but it’s also optimistic and upholds the western - and may I say Christian - ideals of hope and love and making the best of a bad job in truly hard times. And musicals are very middle- and aspirational working- class things and not always too gay. Just how the hell does a pre-school tot, wheeled around like shopping by a possibly related male get to see musicals, and thus absorb a little notion of hope and love and neighbourliness and friendship and crossing the class ‘divide’ and the possibility of happy endings arranged, in part, by non-malignant rich folk and despite the conniving dishonesty within a corruptible, fallible child-protection system? Who or what brings the love in?

Is it cheap DVDs or streaming? Is it a truly aspirational mother who is actually out working to support her kid while anonymous Dave or whoever wheels her to the park or back from his court-appointed contact hours?

Is there room in that tiny, curly-haired cargo’s future for books and something better than i-phones and broken bikes and absentee, revolving-door ‘fathers?’ Love and laughter and peace ever after?

As we near the boozy end of the season where some of us still recall the most successful (and the most aspirational) single mother of all time I’m allowing my cynical heart to admit that - rather than spiritual genocide - that little girl and others like her might find amidst all the empty debt-fuelled material plenty and her pictureless Council housing walls a lovable tomorrow that’s a day away rather than a tomorrow that belongs to semi-intellectual thugs and their brutal, ignorant cannon-fodder.  

Happy New Year.

Picture from here.

28. Days later

Yesterday was supposed to be benefits Armageddon according to Polly Toynbee of the Guardian and the BBC: in which the mindless recipients of thousands of pounds in benefits and who simply can’t think or act for themselves, and the homeless would stalk our land, dying in silence and resorting to cannibalism in order to survive…

Thursday 28 March 2013

Benefit cuts: Monday will be the day that defines this government

Those on low incomes, after all the vicious talk dismissing them as cheats and idlers, will be hit by an avalanche of cuts… and so on and so forth…

   I’ve worked in benefits for nearly ten years. So sue me.

   I read about 100 case files a week. I’ve interviewed or been quizzed in person at our offices by hundreds of claimants and spoken to many hundreds more (thousands, in fact) on the phone – many of them receiving Disability Living Allowance.

In all that time I’ve seen one guide dog, one set of crutches and one stump where a severed thumb used to be.

    I continue to read files and talk with customers who’ve borne children while they’ve been receiving Disability Living Allowance and /or Incapacity Benefit – and not just once but multiple times. Or big, healthy people who have ‘anger issues’ that consist of trying to intimidate benefits staff into sympathizing with them and paying up despite whatever lack of evidence they are in the office for. And then there are the ‘depressives’ who manage to survive for months after they stop claiming main benefits for subsistence without work or savings or income of any sort but who somehow don’t starve and freeze but who still need to have their rent and Council Tax paid. How do the most vulnerable in society do that if they aren’t very thrifty and resourceful? If they are thrifty and resourceful, how can they be vulnerable?

   Then there are the alcoholics and other addicts who till recently got more pay than the unemployed in order to, presumably, avoid the requirement to look for work but about 30 quid a week extra can buy a few bottles or maybe some drugs. That was Incapacity Benefit before it was more or less replaced by Employment Support Allowance.

Some people receive DLA because they have ‘panic attacks’ – which when you interview them turns out to mean they hate it when someone sends them on work experience or asks them to attend work training… or any kind of appointment.

   There are also genuinely sad cases out there for whom proper psychiatry might help (but not necessarily enable them to work soon or indeed ever), and of course some people do get injured or otherwise sick so Incapacity Benefit/DLA/ESA are temporarily needed and I’d not like the disabled element of Universal Credit to disappear. And it won’t. That would be and is a safety net. I don’t resent a penny of tax that goes to keep  them alive, fed and housed.

   But so many uninjured people have ‘issues’ it seems obvious that doctors have been handing out disability assessments more or less wholesale, and that has helped to create a permanently non-working ‘disabled’ welfare caste who do not even have to seek work.

   They aren’t imaginary. They aren’t a tiny minority – they are a hard core on the scrounge and they are taking scarce and shrinking resources away from people who actually need medical or welfare payment help and the taxpayers who might otherwise get to keep and spend their own hard-earned money on themselves and their families. Some are hoarding bedrooms built and financed by local government to house people instead of ‘a lifetime’s memories.’ It’s not ‘demonizing’ them; it’s called actually meeting them.

    One third of Northern Ireland’s working age Incapacity Benefit recipients were ‘incapacitated’ until Incapacity Benefit was phased out? I didn’t know the IRA was that effective. Or that the Coalition could do wholesale biblical miracles.  

    There’s a welfare aristocracy out there that needs to be abolished, and it’s a pity that (as seems likely in this bureaucratic day and age) ATOS is going the tick-box route, but ‘disability’ is a way of life for those shameless enough to claim it.

   It’s being stopped, and though I won’t be voting for the Conservatives (probably ever) and haven’t done so for years, at least they are doing something.

Picture from here.

Virgin ™ Queen

Patriotism runs through the British people like blood - or as the word Blackpool runs through seaside rock. Sometimes I miss it because I’m a pig and a pessimist about the welfare state’s bureaucracy.

Lorraine is smart and very knowledgeable about the benefits laws and rules and works two steps above me in the welfare hierarchy.

She’s also about half my age, half my body weight and as cute and as small as a sugar mouse.

And there’s the problem, I think. She has an infectious giggle (infectious like the Black Death) and resembles one of those fluffy office bunnies that the, um, maturer women of firmer figure and unfulfilled or unfulfilling ambitions love to dislike. If you didn’t know her for the benefits regulations wizard that she is and met her at a party or something you’d think: senior stylist at Toni & Guy, or guess her to be the Lancôme agent at Boots.

(Fear not for my marital fidelity here, gentle reader; Mrs. Northwester sits as close to me in all her Valkyrie charm as Lorraine does and herself outshines the rest of Womankind as the Sun does all the other stars.)

So I’m guessing that it’s mostly the avuncularity that comes with middle age that makes me think Lorraine’s just too cute for words. And I’m a pig; remember that.

But Lorraine has the heart of Elizabeth I.

It was like this at the office a week or so ago.

There were these two benefits advice cases: each concerned young people on whose behalf a parent was trying to get more payments out of the system for their offspring, and each was running into difficulties because their adult child was incommunicado one way or another.

Now the Data Protection Act, strange to tell, informs and constrains all that we do regarding inquiries and appeals about benefits claims. We just can’t talk to any third party about a person’s claim (even by as much as admitting that such as claim even exists) without a claimant’s written permission in advance or their verbal authorization if they are present there with their case worker/parent/prison officer.

And sometimes the law and the regulations require us to actually have information - often written and signed for - from the claimants themselves, or benefits just can’t be paid.

Most third parties don’t understand this. Most of them don’t even live in a world where abstract principles such as the law of the land apply to their own interests or desires, and therefore anyone who obstructs them when seeking what they want is an affront to their human dignity and some kind of bureaucratic bully. They don’t know the law and don’t care about it because ‘their money’ is involved here. But they do know their rights. Parents, friends, previously undeclared ‘partners,’ landlords and some ‘case workers’ who turn out to be nursing home cleaners trying to help some granny out, waste about half our phone time trying to negotiate or bluster out of us exceptions to the rules of confidentiality.

Prize Number One went to the mother of a jailbird trying to persuade us that he had been still officially the resident of accommodation for which benefit should be paid for a period during which he had been in prison. There are circumstances when the system is obliged to provide help with rent for those on remand or in prison on short sentences, and Mrs. A (Miss A in all probability) wanted to persuade us that for a certain period last year he had been ‘resident’ for benefits purposes, and thus that he should have help with his rent for that time – money that in all probability the highly suspect landlord should have no right to and thus which we should not advise The Housing to hand over as benefit payments. It looked exactly like a scam. Young Mr. A, however, was in prison again, and unable to tell us there and then that it’s okay to talk to Mum, and likely too lazy (and too unconcerned about what might become of his flat and possessions whilst he was Inside – the State will provide) to write to us any time soon at all, if ever. If he even could read and write. He’d never worked in his life and had been ‘in trouble’ ever since at the age of sixteen truancy metamorphosed itself into Not In Employment, Education or Training.

But we are supposed to help when we can (it says it right there on our contracts and a tiny percentage of us don’t even object to the system sending tax money to criminals and their families,) and so a number of senior benefits advisers and managers spent some considerable time trying to persuade the incandescent and Infinitely Entitled ‘Mrs’. A to persuade the thieving little scrote to Put It In Writing, and we’d see what we can do.

Benefits bureaucrat time spend / wasted on this oxygen thief, his pullulating family and the landlordly parasite? Maybe six hours. Six hours wasted when we could have been detecting and correcting overpayments caused by fraud and error, or helping pensioners actually get what they had earned and saved and were taxed to receive, or people who really do have debilitating illnesses or injuries rather than employment-absolving ‘depression’ or ‘panic attacks.’

Prize Number Two was actually a sad case.

Young Mr. B was unable to come to the phone at all, and we needed confirmation from him about something to authorize help with rent for a similar early period. Dad wasn’t getting it either. Poor chap, he was trying to keep the lad from getting into debt and plain couldn’t see why his own say-so shouldn’t be enough to put the story straight and thus send the money on its way to fill a hole in Mr. B’s bank account. When you work all your life to support your family it’s not obvious to you why The Social can’t just recognise your integrity and truthfulness as you’ve always proved such by doing the job in all weathers come what may.

Same rules apply – no ‘okay’ in writing or in person from the customer and we can’t discuss it, full stop, and thus can’t explain just why the boy should write to us or phone ASAP. This is not merely a ‘detail’ or a ‘bureaucratic roadblock’: it’s Mr. B’s legal right not to have his parents pry into his finances without his say-so. We’d written to Mr. B at his new residence via a mailing address in Hampshire and though I expected the inquiry to be passed to him soon, I simply did not expect him to be free for a phone conversation in which we could explain the counter-intuitive point that we needed him to understand so he’d give us the information to prove he qualified for retrospective help with his rent.

It was frustrating. I wanted to help, and those around me wanted to help, but we couldn’t see a way around the confidentiality issue at that point. But Lorraine could, and she explained how we could get the job done without breaking the law or paying unjustified benefits. I won’t go into the details of our workaround which was boring, but the job was done.

Up jumped Lorraine with her idea, like an HMV Spitfire pilot and for all the world a Size Six Britannia: all elaborate summer holiday plans, boy band gossip…and patriotic indignation.

‘It’s not fair to do everything for someone in jail and then we can’t help someone who’s gone to fight for his country.’

In my opinion, the welfare state for working age ‘customers’ should be third or a quarter of its current size, but if anyone ever does decide to cut it down to non-insane proportions in terms of funding, entitlement and personnel, I hope they don’t start this bleach-blonde Boadicea.

Maybe they should start with a pig.

Picture from here.

Milk and cookies

As of November this year, Council Tax Benefit and Housing Benefit calculations will now no longer taken into account the Child Benefit which parents [read mothers] get automatically. It's not means tested so millionaires can have it and now it won't be used to reduce the amount of the two residence- based benefits above. More cash for part-time working families.

Especially bigger ones. See Harriet's story here.

Good for hard-working families, you might think, but with three or more children and a part-time job, 'mums' might not have to work too hard.

Also in the past year, The Housing ceased to take into account any child maintenance paid by former partners or ex-husbands when calculating these two benefits. Which means again, less incentive for mothers to work full-time (especially if they have larger families).
Better to pack up the familial home and sell it at a loss in order to live off the ex's now-disregarded Child Support, a few hours' wages a week, Child Benefit and Child Credit and Working Tax Credits.
For the unambitious (and our schools and TV churn them out every year), it's better than mopping and drying, serving in shops or freezing in warehouses.

John Page over at Benefit Fraud has some harsh plans for those who want more even than this tidy wedge, and as for Winston Smith?

Well, let's just say his attitude to the mothers makes me seem like a Powder Blue by comparison. He rather more than takes the biscuit.

Lesbianism on the dole

Three items for your great escape planning for next year.

Tom – going in.

Tomasina writes in as she’s been instructed, to check if everything’s going to be alright.

She’s twentyish and has been living off statutory maternity pay (90% of her former part-time minimum wage job) and Housing Benefit at the shared accommodation rate – being under 25, the government holds that she ought to be living in cheaper shared accommodation than in a dearer place of her own that a full adult is held to ‘need.’

But a miracle of personal and international relations has occurred and Tomasina gave birth to a daughter, Maisy, a month ago. Her birthplace is here in England, but the father’s birthplace is down as Afghanistan, and let me tell you that from his name he wasn’t the British Ambassador’s son back in the 1980s - if there was such an officer.

He does not appear on any of her records. He doesn’t live with her, and officially probably never will. If he has no wage [and you’d be amazed how many non-EU immigrants can live off nothing for months whilst waiting to be entitled to British benefits which may never be paid, but you’ll never hear of such a chap starving once he’s formally refused public funding], then he doesn’t have to pay her a penny. The CSA will oblige him to pay 15% of any net wage to Tomasina, or he may be even more generous if he can afford it, but that income will not be taken into account when calculating all Tomasina’s benefits.

Which is nice.

She will get: Income Support until Maisy’s 10 years old (which confers immunity to even having to think about looking for work) and: Child Benefit, Child Tax Credit. Oh, and The Housing will pay all her Council Tax bill, and help with rent for the two bed roomed house or flat that she now ‘needs,’ thanks to the tender attentions of the stork.

And these; free early education, money to pay for childcare, money to pay for transport, free school uniforms, free dental care, free prescriptions, free school meals and milk. Plus earnings for up to 16 hours’ work per week if she can be bothered.

Not too shabby

Dick – trying to stay out.

Sally is: thirty; cute as a button; a nurse; clever; hardworking, and as dumped as last year’s sofa. Dick had given her two children in the past three years of cohabitation, married her as recently as a year ago, and traded her in last month for a newer model.

She does not want to sign on for benefits, is ardently chasing full-time work, and never wants to see me or my colleagues ever again once she finds that work.

She needs a temporary safety net, hates applying for it, and will hand it back the second the NHS gives her 35 hours or more.

She’ll probably be about the same financially as Tomasina or even slightly better off if she stays on all the benefits she could get and will be only slightly better off than that as and when she gets her job.

Her self-respect, however, is bigger even than your wallet dear reader and I do not think that she will give a word of complaint when her household budget drops somewhat if she gets that job within the next week or so. If that’s the case and my people do their jobs, she’ll have been entitled to benefits for two months, tops.

Harriet – getting out and hating it.

Harriet is enraged. She’s a lifelong Miss. She’s forty-something and for the first time in twenty years she’s an independent adult. Prior to that, she’s been a single mum (aww) and her three children have grown to maturity on the public purse and on whatever recent part-time work that Harriet could find worthwhile to do, which is not much. Her youngest child now has recently twenty and is a student and a non-dependant. All of a sudden, all child-related benefits, credits, premiums and disregards are gone. She’s down to her wages and a weeny amount of help with the rent from The Housing.

She’s no longer a State-registered mum and doing only 20 hours or so shelf-stacking at Wilkinson’s or granny-herding at The Meadow Lea isn’t making financial sense. Her three gormless children still live with her, but don’t seem to consider themselves obliged in any way to help pay her rent and Council Tax. Why should they – their nameless father(s) never did. She’s had twenty years of someone else’s earnings keeping her in a house that she can no longer afford and has only been obliged to work even part-time for the last 4 years. Under the old systems mums got job seeking immunity until the youngest child was 16. It has never made financial sense to work full time until now.

She’s not getting at me personally, she assures me, but she’d be better off on the dole than working. If you’re on the dole you get everything, but if you work, you get nothing. This is not so: she’s still getting a little help with her rent, and if she went on Jobseeker’s Allowance (eventually after a short break for quitting her job) she’d even get slightly less money on benefits altogether than working.

Just barely less. The system overall is quite mad but in many cases it doesn’t actually have a basement full of ice hockey masks, night vision glasses and surgical cutting instruments. It is fixed that single people are better off working than claiming.

If she’s not fussed about foreign holidays and running a car, then it may still be barely worth her while to sign on. Harriet has been where Tomasina is presently heading for two whole decades, and she may well have got used to daytime TV and hanging out with her mates for coffee and celebrity gossip, and so shifting more ready-to-hang curtains into the Soft Furnishings Section or bathing even more batty retired process workers at The Meadow Lea maybe won’t look too tempting.

Harriet happens to be a manual worker; unskilled thanks to whatever nature and nurture and state education have lumbered her with, but her middle-class counterparts are just as likely to fight for every penny and to delay the dread day of having to put in a full week’s work to make ends meet, but are more likely to hold me and my colleagues bitterly and personally responsible for their woes and the indignity of having to earn a living to make ends meet. They’ll use posher words than Harriet to blame me and my colleagues for their ex-husbands’ or former partners' uselessness.

Now I’m one of the villains of this piece. This is not only because I do the bidding of the Department for Hurt and Awful Nuisances, but because I’m also an absent father. I pay for my child’s support and save for her future and I do so willingly - which is a rare thing in my professional experience in both personal finance and benefits, but still.

The gooseberry bush and the cabbage patch are innocent of all this single motherhood lark. Men aren’t innocent; not lustful, fertile men who run or slink away from, or never intend to stand by, their parental responsibilities.

Not every girlfriend or wife can be a frigid, work-shy, spendthrift, manic-depressive self-centred obsessive: women seem to be nicer company and better neighbours and colleagues than men at a ratio of about 4 to 1 in my experience to date. Divorce can be – and often is – convenient when the end comes, though my fellow social conservatives will tell me it’s too easy and perhaps they are right. So it is easy to fly the coop and like any easy, cheap thing this particular freedom is abused big-style. Child-making has always been very easy, and what the permissive society and the Welfare State have done is to achieve a treble whammy: they’ve taken away the stigma of bastardy and single parenthood via divorce reform and liberal attitudes to sex; then they have encouraged casual child-rearing by providing welfare benefits for single mothers; and finally they have prolonged the situation of state dependence by making those benefits long-term and almost unconditional.

Who needs men? I’m not cracking on about my virtue here (you may see none, considering), but I am saying that this is where we are – this is what it looks like from the baby shower desk of the Welfare State.

Politicians (many of whom are metaphorically if not literally fatherless) are not likely to put divorce back on the country’s list of difficult things to do, but we should consider that they tend to be rich and therefore able to afford generous child support themselves. So it may be possible for the principled politicians to convince the lazy, greedy ones to make child abandonment expensive for absent fathers and life not too comfortable for would-be single mothers – many of whom never intended to keep their children’s father around in the first place.

Marriages have always been capable of breaking down. Love affairs that produce children have always been at risk of turning into something else – which is why dreams of handsome princes and dashing suitors have long featured in fairy tales and other fiction, because men is what women need to become and to remain happy mothers.

Single mothers still get men to support them of course; it’s just that they haven’t met most of them. Nor will these men know that their names or addresses as the fairy godmother here is Her Majesty’s Government, bringing princesses into palaces and pretty clothes without the need for Prince Charming to, um, come onto the scene at all.

They get women to support them, too. Dignified and abandoned Sally will soon (I hope) be doing her 35 or 37 or 40 hours, and losing out compared to being on benefits and part of her day; part of every working day of bending to pick things up and cleaning sick and silly patients and stressing to organise child care for evening and weekend shifts – part of all that labour and sweat and yucky medical stuff will go to substitute for the missing pride of our mysterious lord of the Hindu Kush and the never-seen prince consorts of the unhappy Harriet’s replacements.

Sally is Harriet’s wife.

Not so cool.

The Egregious Comet

I was right.

Phew.

It’s nice to be feeing vindicated as it’s been a dodgy week self confidence-wise.

Thursday night’s Benefits Busters programme from the impeccably Left-wing Channel Four showed us a real-life (and much nicer) Egregious Pauline from A4E whose job is drying out and bucking up benefits mothers who are married to the state.

And doing it for Maggie. Yey.

How times have changed: when the BBC broadcast its last ever not completely welfare-adoring Panorama episode of that name, the United Left went ape. Ape: as in ‘Call out the biplanes and scour the Empire State Building till there’s not a hair of its bandy legs left.’ How dare single mothers be victimized in this way – the most vulnerable in society, etc, etc.’ But that was under a Tory administration in 1994 and was seen as somehow trying to bolster the Major Cabinet’s half-hearted (or vicious and deadly, depending) attempts to reduce welfare spending.

But thank goodness Flash Gordon (Aha! Saviour of the Universe) has busted us down so badly that Leftie Canalo Quattro admits (and shows in, like, visible figures that the viewers might just remember?) that the income tax and corporation tax together do not cover the social security bill. That’s equal to a quarter of HM Government’s annual expenditure.

Even The Guardian’s TV critic was only slightly sniffy about the posh bird who gets richer by putting spine and self-respect back into benefits mothers. And so C4 pushed this programme as ‘This government’s attempts to radically reform the welfare state’ – without mentioning who and what made the system so insane in the first place.

There they all were: the twitching bleach-blonde drunk denying that that’s exactly what she was and avoiding the ‘A’ word like it was a 40-hour minimum wage job on a plate, and then the little girl in the big, big body who’d created £75,000 of debt not for herself but to give her tellytubby-lookalike, Pringles-enlarged moppet the best of everything including the top Sky package so she could have all the cartoon channels - ‘I don’t have anything else but the telly’ – which was the biggest TV set I’d seen outside Hollywood blockbusters. Then there was the pinch-faced graduate who had at least been married and then abandoned and obviously hating every minute of being stuck in a classroom with her vulgar facially-pierced doley sisters as if she belonged with them when she clearly thought that she didn’t; and then the cheerful salt of the earth lass who was just like all the other cheerful salt of the earth lasses right down to the same dressed up to the nines for telly I’m on Songs of Praise look.

And the same excuses.

On the bright side, while these girls might not be adept at finding their way into job interviews they seem to have no problem locating the fridge at any time of the day or night: waking or sleeping; in sickness and in health; for ri-… for poorer or for poorer, including possibly in earthquake conditions. Under nuclear attack with Martians scrabbling about and blinded by triffids.

I have to confess that I nearly shed a tear of patriotic pride when I viewed these British porky munters when I realised that in the World Couch Potato Championships our own untrained and ill-equipped girls could likely hold their own in the Women’s’ Freestyle Cellulite against even North America’s best: the great Claudette Mousse de Foie Gras of Montreal, or the greater-still Harlette ‘Hashbrowns’ Winnebago of Lard Ass, IL, or even the truly stupendous Ayesha Benandjerry Washington, of Big Butte, AZ (formerly of New Orleans, LA.)

Hayley; herself a curvaceous Evans-coutured guardian shepherdess (or should that be vaquera?), was pretty touchy-feely and a hand-holder because to lead you have to speak your followers’ language (however mawkish), if only to tell them that they’re wrong. Right from the start she explained gently that if they felt unwell with a sick stomach or a headache and didn’t want to attend a particular session, then she would not understand and wouldn’t hesitate to use sanctions, ie, getting some of their benefit stopped. It felt good, hearing that.

This back-to-work programme is expensive – the company gets £100 per day per ‘mum’ instructed over a six-week course and there’s at least one internet page which rubbishes it as worthless; a website which I can’t find again accused the company from starting up with Ve Fatcher’s help, but do look at the comments thread here for a smorgasbord of defeatism and the responsibility-evading doley equivalent of the ‘universities of crime’ that we hear about from the prison abolition movement and you’ll see on part of what we’re all up against in this lousy system.

Here’s a bit of one thread edited for humour and brevity:

The Victim:

chockollo

Im supposed to be starting this course next week and its for 13 weeks but now im thinking its just a waste of time, i would get anything i could right now if its either call centre, retail or wholesale but its kinda hard to find anything. Does anyone know if its possible to skip this course? If i just say im ill or dont go in because i have an interview or something and then i try to make another claim, will they just put me back on this course?

The Wise One:

Location114

CHOCK there is no way you will get out of it, if you skip it because of a interview you will be asked for proof of interview when you dont show that you will be put on whats called a sanction which means effectively you will get maximum £15 a week for 26 weeks which you will only recieve if you attend the course aswell, its a lot less leiant now then it was before but to cut a long story short there is no way to avoid it unless you have a job that can last in excess of 26 weeks because if you sign back on before 26 weeks you will be signed straight onto new deal to finish your course so there isnt a way out of it. Best advice i can give you is keep your head down and make

The Tribune of the People.

grafikhaus74

All a bit 'you vil go in ze gas chamber.' Screw 'em all. Claim stress, harassment, human rights anything. Play the sytem and don't let them intimidate you into going. Get the name of the New Deal 'adviser' who insists on sending you on this oh-so-inappropriate course and sue them.
Anyone who says 'they're only doing their job', again shades of Aushwitz except the Germans didn't have a choice. Some £16k a year adviser does.

Because obliging people to do something to find work to feed and clothe themselves is exactly the same as murdering innocent folk, right?

The Voice of Experience.

Deerobe

Be very careful about skipping the course. Don't say you are ill. they will take you off JSA and you then have to make a claim for sickness benefit (or whatever it is called now). A friend of mine was ill with a sick certificate and had to call the benefits people when he should have been in bed. He never got any money off them and each time he rang he was given excuses as to why they had not processed his claim. The final one was they claimed that they had not received his sickness certificate. He gave up in the end.
Don't assume you are going to get a job because you have an interview. I have had 5 interviews and still don't have a job.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The Victim again.

chockollo

I actually have an interview on the day this starts but the interview is in the afternoon, i didnt get a chance to ring up…

(Because the ubiquitous mobile phones don’t work on the dole, except when you produce the bills to prove financial hardship and apply for a Discretionary Living Allowance at The Housing)

…and ask this but does this mean i have to still go in and then they will let me go when its time for the interview?

Phew! Two lots of responsibility in the same day? It’s genocide, I tells yer.

So Haley blousily nagged and lectured and sympathised and got the women parroting positive-thinking slogans and listing goals as she cynically hectored them on how they used the kids as excuses not to work, and how she knew the routine, though she went all meeting-the-boss evangelical soppy at the thought of the MD’s motivational visit (which just has to be an all-time broadcasting coincidence right up there with the white supremacist’s black real father appearing in the studio on daytime television.)

She was right; if they wanted to work, then the takeaways are always recruiting and so what if the kids’d take the P – it’s a living.

And it is a living - for most of them (and the majority got jobs in Poundland in one fell swoop) the system is fixed so that you get more money than benefits at first when you work, and after a year at least you have the same-ish income as benefits plus self-respect and some blood and air circulation round your body. Except…

You have to work. Actually work.

The big girl with the big debts was offered a weekend job as a DJ but turned it down. She felt confident or cheeky enough to come back and lecture Haley that she really means it about getting work and she really, really wanted to be a DJ but the taxis don’t work late on Thursdays and Sundays in Dewsbury…And anyway she didn’t think she should have to work all the hours God sent for a low wage. If they paid her a lot to do the job of her dreams (for so DJing was) then okay, fair enough, she’d do it but she couldn’t think offhand of anyone who’d give her a lift to work. So, basically, the money’s a bit better but so what? It’s a bind and not a fortune, and everyone who’s trying to pay off £75,000 debt deserves good childcare and high wages and employer-provided transportation too, right?

So if you’re not ambitious or self-respecting, you might as well stay at home and watch Oprah (which I do myself from time to time just to remind myself just how lousy The Color Purple was and also to comfort myself with the thought of just how lousy a sequel would have been, Lord preserve us…)

Oh, and the system’s fixed until your family hits critical mass.

One of the salt of the earth cheerful girls had just had her benefits calculated and compared with what life would be like when working. In her case only, as she had 4 children, her earnings plus child benefit and child tax credit and working tax credit and housing benefit and council tax benefit and back to work bonus would not pay as much as child benefit and child tax credit only and housing benefit and council tax benefit do.

So she dropped out and stayed at home.

And that’s where the politicians – of any party at all – could load up votes by the truckload in marginal constituencies and landslide safe ones alike.

All they’d have to do is proclaim that they’re going to keep the system much the same as now, but that they’re going to stop paying extra at two children or after the third, and the whole inter-generational disaster of hereditary welfare dependency will end.

Most of these women can’t possibly look after, discipline, feed and deliver more than three kids safely and on time to schools which they will not immediately disrupt because mum’s too tired or useless or irresponsible to tell them all what’s right and what’s’ wrong and make it stick. Hard-working families would vote just to wipe the smug smiles off their stay-in-bed slacker neighbours’ faces as they have to trundle out to Poundland or wherever. Only the short-haired women and the long-haired men of the howling Left would object to capping generous benefits at replacement population plus one.

Only them…and the weird legislative fruitcake who originally thought up the idea of paying ever-greater child-related benefits when ‘families’ grew. He’s presumably out there somewhere: the Welfare State’s equivalent of the idiot engineer in the Pentagon’s Equipment Commissioning Bureau who insists that every smart pilotless aircraft: every self-programming mobile anti-personnel weapons-system; and every nuclear defence computer network must not only be able to do its basic job, but must also have the capability to become self-aware and rebel against its human masters in a ruthless war of extermination.

Even the latter-day urban mahout Haley agreed as the lass waddled off across the shaking metaphorical horizon to her own people that she couldn’t blame her: money talks.

And next week, the long-term unemployed: The Professionals.

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?