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.

Simples

This from The Independent, via Julia.

I think I need to begin this blog by clarifying my use of the word ‘hate’ as I don’t use it lightly.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as having an intense dislike or strong aversion towards someone, which pretty much actually summarises my feelings towards David Cameron.  Furthermore, I cannot think of another human being that I would apply this word to.  Sure, there are certainly tyrants and evil dictators around in the world today, but none of them have the negative impact on people like me that Dave has.

Woah!

Going to have to stop him right there for a moment.

I get that he’s intense about this but perhaps he might intend for some people to stop supporting the Tories after reading this and that he intends to do it by a logical argument involving facts, a sequence of statements relating to the contention that Tories are bad for disabled people (I think they are, right now, but for slightly different reasons from his), with perhaps some rhetorical gloss or garnish to emphasise the emotional impact that these policies are having on him. It seems strange, therefore, that his first paragraph should end in obvious nonsense.  

Here, for example, are two Downs Syndrome women) being on the receiving (and also on the delivering) end of a much more negative impact.

You can say many things about Mr. Cameron and his policies towards the disabled, but he never strapped explosives on them, unlike the Religion of Peace.  

But seriously, folks.

A resistant reader might want some context here as to how even the Tories’ (admittedly economizing) provision for the disabled under Universal Credit and other reforms/cuts/feeding the blind and the lame to the sharks compares to most of the world. I suspect the countries where the minarets stand or where there remain the pedestals once boasting statues of Queen Victoria or Lenin aren’t so generous to the disabled. Also, some at least of the republics and kingdoms over which, before Operation Overlord, the swastika flew so merrily.

Disability Living Allowance is going. There will be a disability element within Universal Credit, but it won’t be a separate income. DLA gives additional incomes intended to make up for the extra needs that being disabled confers that being able-bodied does not; so the care element provides money for people to come in to cook or take you shopping or to take you to the toilet or help you to bed. There are two levels of mobility help with transport for shopping and other excursions. Certain levels of DLA confer privileges, such as being completely  disregarded in income calculations for Council Tax Benefit and Housing Benefit, and also some DLA awards increase the minimum income (Applicable Amount) that a household headed by DLA recipients must be allowed before taking other incomes into account. Self-supporting family members usually trigger small, incremental and progressive reductions in Council Tax Benefit and Housing Benefit awards, but not if they are living with DLA (care) recipients.

Serious, valuable help especially for a single disabled person and also for couples. It’s sometimes either that or going into an institution for some. Some disabled can’t earn a living, and even those who could do so might not compete with the able-bodied in the employment market so this kind of help makes sense even to my ossified Thatcherite heart.   

I believe that many of us here on the frothing, hate-filled Right don’t mind such things in principle for the unfortunate folk who physically or mentally can’t cope with good times or bad. We can argue with the Left about the details and amounts and the qualification criteria and all the rest, and still have a good faith, agree-to-differ argument of the old school; the way politics was occasionally thrashed out before we lost the culture wars and the brakes came off and there were never supposed to be any limits to what the government could do for us all.

(Pauses to feed the unicorn that farts money for the Welfare State anna likkle chillun.)

Of course, someone who both expects to be paid to get his lobbying of the party a possible future government…

Then, in 2006, I received an email inviting me to perform at a seminar on future policy around disability.  Basically they wanted me to do ten minutes of comedy and then probably pose for the press with Dave to make him look more “diverse”.   But as if this prospect wasn’t tempting enough, they expected me to work for absolutely nothing.  They weren’t even prepared to pay my travel and access expenses. 

…(unlike, presumably, all the Greens and the gay-marriers, and the social workers and any law-and-order or eurosceptic types still stupid enough to try to influence Cameron who went to the Jumbo Shrimp™)  and who then decides to attend anyway just to annoy that party because it turns out he can afford to after all when you put it like that, might not be quite the go-to guy for good faith argument.

I can’t see Cameron, or any ministry that contains, him reducing that special kind of help to the helpless on purpose, though there’s always the incompetence thing.

Which leads me onto my main point.

Laurence Clark* is actually right.

Conservatives, in the old-fashioned sense of wanting to preserve the good and to deal with the world the way it actually is (rather than the one where Islam is Methodism Lite and utterly and profoundly non-violent, and the one where the Euro stabilizes countries’ economies and keeps extremist parties out of power,) rather than in the shiny new sense of conservative meaning being other Liberals in fancier suits than those rented or inherited by the sandal wearing cyclists’ usual choice of MP, tend to believe that people ought, for their own self respect and for the good of the rest of society, all other things being equal (and something not being equal), to work to support themselves. Even if just a little.

There’s the whole wanting to be useful thing, which actual conservatives like because it represents both an ancient instinct to be loyal to and productive for the tribe, and also newish civilised habits of fitting in and not dragging strangers down economically, and in also because it makes us healthy types feel grateful that these folk are at least trying and succeeding to earn a living.

So why the hell do this:

….the closure of Remploy factories whilst at the same time restricting the Access to Work scheme.

Really.

Institutions (kinda old ones, too) that employed disabled folk to produce value and feel (justly) that they’ve contributed to the wealth of our nation are closed down. A scheme  to bung a few quid to the disabled with the bottle and nous to seek and be offered jobs is deleted.

In case Cameron and the Tories haven’t noticed, and they haven’t, as haven’t most of the Lib Dems (many of whom are off riding pound-farting unicorns) and of course Labour and all the Nationalists, our island’s population is a little too large to employ everyone in productive jobs at market rates. If our education system doesn’t go into overburner soon and turn out innovative, solidly-educated would-be entrepreneurs and innovators in sufficient numbers to employ said overpopulation per job it seems that the private sector alone isn’t going to provide the jobs that give people at least the semblance of self-sufficiency and proved the habits of punctuality, endurance and cooperation that might lead to better-paid employment as and when it becomes available (right after that education system afterburner thing cuts in: say 2027 when the US economy shuts down.)  

Some kind of state support, therefore, for non-market-priced jobs looks to be the way to go if we don’t want to perpetuate a hereditary dole-class, or cull them. God forbid.  

So closing Remploy and access to Work seem to be the exactly wrong direction to travel.

Might I suggest somewhere where money could be found (once Cameron’s focus-group and Lib Dem satnav have located his gluteus maximus in a rear-trouserly context) to subsidise both the disabled and the able bodied unemployed in public works schemes, or prison building or litter-picking (why should there be a single untidy street in Britain with our levels of unemployment?)

As well as stopping paying child-related benefits to every mother after bearing three kids, why not look a little closer at all those ‘self-employed’ recipients of Working Tax Credit who reiki one customer a week or who sell one painting a quarter? Tighten that jam stream up and get them to either seek more customers to support themselves in their chosen hobby/trade, or admit they’re unemployed and oblige them to look for actual employed work in the takeaways and offices that their barely-enterprising sensibilities have forbidden them to look?

There are a lot of such and I though think the idea of positive income tax (which WTC is intended to be), is a help in these jobless times, there are a lot of people out there trading very little and being paid Tax Credits either to indulge a hobby, or fouling their lives up with incompetence and negligence and passive fraud, or who show little or no profit, or to do nothing at all much and pretend to be working.

At least the Remploy folk manufactured stuff people bought.

*Nah. Different chap.

Picture from here. 

FM sideways

Julia takes the biscuit, again.


Big, big bottoms.

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?