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.

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.

Eve of Destruction

Call her Eve.

She phones my office in where I do the bidding of the Department of Hurt and Awful Nuisances and I take the call. She’s ringing to report some minor change in her circumstances that she fears may affect her Social Security benefits. She’s wrong – it doesn’t affect her at all.

She’s on Income Support which means that she’s exempt from even thinking about looking for work and is only interviewed occasionally about her circumstances.

She sounds like a nice woman: friendly; polite; articulate; and our distinctive local accent is smoothed in her voice by intelligence and (I would guess) education. She sounds in fact as switched-on, bright, self-controlled and worthy of trust and as capable of employment as any of scores of women I’ve worked with over the years: teachers, corporate trainers, university and college lecturers, HR managers and entrepreneurs. In short, given my chequered (varied, diverse, disastrous) career, she sounded as if I would be working for her if only the Fates had spun their cloth a thread or too differently.

But she’s exempt from even thinking about looking for work.

I reassure her that she need not worry about her change of circumstances, and she thanks me. In passing, she mentions she’s expecting another baby in the next few weeks. She sounds very happy, and I offer her my congratulations for which she thanks me again and she promises to call us as soon as she can after the baby’s born so we can advise her about any changes in her benefits. We say goodbye, and she’s off the line.

In anticipation of the happy day when that call comes, and in case missed something and need to call her back, I check her background files to see what, if any effect this will have on her income stream.

Here’s the bio.

Born in 1976, she had her first child sixteen years later and then one at seventeen and then another at nineteen. Now all these kids have the same surname (not the same as hers, so let’s call it Anonymous) so she may just about have been married to or cohabiting with Mister Anonymous for a few years and the both of them trying to make their way in life and make a living the old-fashioned way.

Somehow I doubt it. Living together would jeopardize the Income Support unless one or both of them can prove they are ‘disabled’. We’re not talking white stick and Labrador here or a wheelchair. We can be talking ‘depression’ or ‘panic attacks’ with the right care worker and the right doctor working together for the good of us all.

Income Support means an income for a single parent in addition to the following goodies: free dental care, prescriptions, school meals, Housing Benefits, and Council Tax Benefits. The latter two meaning she gets paid 100% of whatever proportion of a private rent that the Rent Service has allowed for her particular family in her particular dwelling (roughly, the more children there are, the more rooms she’ll ‘need’) and all her Council Tax bill. If she rents from her Council Housing Department then she’ll get 100% of her rent as council housing is assumed not to be overpriced, and the same for Housing Association lettings. God only knows how much taxation – local and national – goes to keeping this ‘social housing’ ‘affordable.’

Child Benefit is £20 per week for the first child plus £13.20 for each of the next up until sixteen, or up to twenty if they are in further education or training.

And because she is a single ‘mum’ she doesn’t have to look for work [ i.e., go onto the same amount of income but Income Support is replaced with Job Seeker’s Allowance and you have to sign on fortnightly and show that you’ve been looking at the jobs papers, visiting the library, etc] until her youngest reaches twelve years old. That’s changing to seven years old from October 2010. No rush. It’ll not affect her even when Septimus is born. Let’s assume that goes to plan and calls to delay this ‘cut ‘don’t succeed. Oh, and enterprising single mums can work up to 16 hours without loss of benefits, so there can even be a rewarding extra income on the side, if you can be bothered. But it looks like she may not have been too bothered as it happens because…

Did I mention the three other kids, surnamed, um, Beneficiary, born 2001, 2002, and 2004? No? Three lots of more of all of the above. And guess who’s paying to have them all ‘educated?’ Guess whose children are putting up with, and losing valuable learning time to their disruptive behaviour assuming that Eve isn't always effective as a cross between Maria and Baron Von Trapp

So let’s tot that up, shall we?

As things stand now, Eve has been exempt from the rat race; from listening to any boss at all tell her to bloody well get on with it - but has been housed and provided for and at all times taking into account and adding ever more income for the growing size of her ‘family’ - all her legal cigarette-buying life. And this will go on until 2021.

That’s 1992 to 2121.

A thirty-one year holiday, on your credit card, with no work-seeking requirement at all.

Am I repeating myself about that dull old not-needing-to work thing?

Sorry, but if someone was having a go at you in a thoroughly Spartan way with a Napoleonic Age ramrod and a hedgehog you might feel the need to repeat yourself too.

Today her Child Benefit alone amounts to £99.20 per week, every week. That’s £5158.40 per year. (Call it half a classroom attendant in the provinces.) Plus Income Support, Housing Benefit, Council Tax Benefit, NHS dentistry, lunches for the kids on schooldays and all the prescriptions she’ll need, poor lamb, and Job Seeker’s Allowance at the same rate until 2029 when Septimus’ Child Benefit finally ends and all she’s left with is her wages or her Jobseekers’ Allowance if by some ill turn of Fate she doesn’t find a job that makes benefits unnecessary. And she’ll be pretty much near the top of the Council’s housing list due to the large size of her ‘family.’ So that’s a home for life.

On your tab.

By 2021 she’ll be 54 and expected to fend entirely for herself in a rugged, get-up-and-go frontierswoman Thatcherite sort of way until 2041, by which time, after maybe twenty years of exhausting labour (that’s the waged kind of labour, not the ’Push, push, you’re doing fine I can see the head’ paid-for-from-general-taxation kind) the State will step in to help this particular hard-working family to the State Pension and maybe Pension Credit as well to top up any retirement income shortfalls due to, oh I don’t know, temporary absences from the workforce? and hence gaps in paying her national Insurance payments and occupational pension contributions.

Do not, under any circumstances, get me started on people who say ‘I can’t afford to pay into a pension.’

Just don’t.

As I said, she’s a sweet-sounding girl, and I’m pro-life, and my suggestion is going to have to take both factors into account.

How about we stop paying benefits for further children after her third child? Make her work or seek work part-time after the last child’s reached five – say 9.30 am to 2.30 PM between the two school rushes? And no more child-related tax credits, premiums, allowances or payments after that third child has been taken into account. Ever.

Mrs. Northwester, a hippy-type Lefty, feels much the same about what needs to be done, but she thinks that it is a right-wing myth that women have children just to get welfare benefits.

It makes no difference if a bad thing's happening for right-wing reasons or for not right-wing reasons. It doesn't really matter if you're being hurt by the Dialectic of the Dodo or on the orders of Sir Rupert, King of the Pixies; when a Bad Man's waist-deep in another chap’s alimentary canal it's still going to sting like hell and make the chap want to use the cubicles and sit down to do Number Ones for the rest of his life.

But make her responsible for funding her life choices after that third child – and what politician seeking re-election would dare to stand on anything ‘meaner’ than help up to replacement-plus-one? – and maybe her life choices won’t include Quartus, Quintus, Sextus and Septimus.

Maybe she won’t take the decisions that lead to the lifestyles and drinking at the tax-wells that gave us the sylvan peace of Biff Malcolm‘s rich family life or the almost idealised tranquillity of Karen Matthews’ Walton’s Mountain-style home.

She might even choose Mister Anonymous a little more carefully in the first place. She might choose one she thinks will stay around, and try and make it work. She might insist on getting married, or something. She might just control her fertility.

This is not a right-wing myth, nor is it a rare exception. Without even trying to I encountered a couple more bios for two more ‘mums’ in the next day after this call, as colleagues mentioned them or paperwork crossed my desk.

‘Embla’:

Born 1980, issue 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006 (twins).

‘Pyrhha’

Born 1975, issue 1992, 1993, 1997, 2000, 2006, 2008 and 2008 (more twins).

I meet hundreds of ‘families’ like this per year.

Now if I was, say, a British Prime Minister hoping to do some lasting good for Britain that would temper history’s otherwise unanimous verdict of ‘The biggest Number Twos at Number Ten ever,’ and if I therefore wanted to find some money to help reduce the national debt in order to do so because I had, for example, put the whole economy on the nose of a horse who came in second, I might think of something like the above modest suggestion.

Except that Labour’s political culture will never allow ‘targetting the most vulnerable in society who need the most help.’

That’s why Frank Field is out.

Pity, really.

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