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.

Tied up every which way

Orphans of Liberty discusses the suggestion from a police officer that benefits keep people away from committing crime and Peter Hitchens is discomforted by the release of a career criminal so that he can spend time with his family and - presumably – also your possessions.  

I think that the police officer is correct, kind of, even though it is also obvious that he’s missing the point by about one million of your Earth miles. I expect that for those individuals for whom starvation is the only alternative to crime when they are jobless, actually paying benefits will prevent crime of the stealing-bread-for-my-children variety. Not that that appears to have happened very much in the Great Depression: charity and family seem to have fielded that ball without a crime wave amongst the poor unemployed. They didn’t have much, but they weren’t, by all accounts, thieves.

Now the welfare state does the theft for their 21^st Century successors via taxation and benefits and I suppose it’s less violent than mugging for bread and burglary for fresh fruit and vegetables would be. It’s not seen as theft and so, according to the morality of the majority, taxation for fairly extensive welfare provision is seen as quite moral.

So logically, while it is probably true there’d be some more family-feeding thieves if basic subsistence wasn’t provided (along with free school meals, free healthcare, free schooling, -TANSTAAFL, but you know what I mean - Child Benefit and Child Tax Credit, higher levels of help with rent and Council Tax for families), those things are provided. While I don’t think that charity and self-help and family and neighbours would fail to help out to prevent actual starvation amongst the jobless instead of extensive welfare benefits, I also don’t think there’s a cat in hell’s chance that any British electorate would vote against the continuing availability of basic welfare provision any time soon – including many amongst the ‘right.’

But that’s not the problem here. The first problem is inter-generational lawlessness, illegitimacy and welfare dependence with children growing up either (and mostly) fatherless or, as in this quite rare case, with a repeat felon as their only role model.

Such children use up and yet often don’t benefit much from disproportionately high levels spending in education: child psychologists; special classroom assistants; case workers from half a dozen “agencies”, and are the bane of their classmates’ and teachers’ lives as they disrupt most or every lesson if they attend school and everyone else’s if they play truant.  Nice of this crook to stick around with those who seem to be his genetic offspring

Then they grow up [(or rather they grow large) and become half-criminal disturbers of the peace and serial welfare parents themselves. They will use up police and court resources and waste acres of paper and months of administrative time as they career clumsily and negligently through the benefits system; racking up debts to landlords and to the benefit-paying agencies as they are overpaid benefits to which they were not entitled because they actively defrauded the system of negligently failed to report changes in their circumstances that would have reduced their overall entitlement. The they create more children themselves as the marginal gain from receiving of benefits is higher as more children arrive,  and so we have to support and “raise” – read suppress – those children with all of the above, and disturbed peace and squalor and increasing levels of malnutrition and disease.

And then they go on to suck up more and more resources as hopeless and amoral physical adults who never, ever contribute anything to the society that has supported them throughout their lives.

I don’t think that the right or the libertarians have much chance of persuading MPs to reduce the high and general levels of entitlements, but I can see how they might influence them to break the cycle of crime and welfare dependency by a couple of easy measures: a three strikes and you’re out policy for crimes against property and persons (and sack the magistrate or judge who refuses to sentence accordingly)  and the limiting of child-related benefits to help with two children per mother per lifetime – see how Kylie likes the idea of sleeping around and “falling pregnant” knowing she’s going to have to foot the bill for little Chardonnay-Steffie  #3 or Tyson-Staffy #3 out of her Income Support or Jobseeker’s Allowance.

Of course, we’d have to dismantle the human rights legislation and amend the welfare and tax credits laws in the teeth of a howling Civil Service and ‘independent judiciary’ and an almost-united welfarist establishment, but if a certain political party actually thought it might gain votes, seats, and stay in government that way, then backbenchers might just go for it.

Of course, next those backbenchers would have to get that into the party manifesto and then persuade the Prime Minister to allow its enactment.

Which isn’t likely, given what this Prime Minister lets the criminals get away with because he’s on the other side in the culture wars.

See how the culture wars get everywhere?

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.

Modern marriage

Beginning the service.

Traditionally, the bride and groom enter the church separately - the groom first with the best man, and the bride at the time set for the start of the service, on the arm of her father or another relative or friend (it does not need to be a man).

The couple may enter together.

However, the groom likely slipped away within the first week of her gestation being announced, or during its last week, or shortly after this first week of his full ‘fatherhood.’ He may never be seen again by the State, except on the birth certificates of subsequent issue.

The bride may enter alone if she wishes, or sign on online or at Job Centre Plus.

The State will welcome the contributions of all concerned. Your family and friends have an important role to play as victims and paymasters of this new style of marriage.

The State employee will read an introduction explaining what Christians believe about marriage.

The bride will ignore this and do her own thing, regardless. He or she will also ask, as the law requires, if anyone knows any reason why the transfer of funds may not lawfully take place.

The bride will ignore this and do her own thing, regardless.

Declarations.

The bride will be asked to promise before God, her friends and her family that she will appreciate, spend wisely, honour and be grateful for your money and be respectful about them as long as you both shall live.

The bride will ignore this and do her own thing, regardless.

The State will also fail to ask the congregation to volunteer to support and uphold her marriage.

Vows.

Turning their backs to each other, the bride and taxpayer ignore each other and the bride makes vows:

I swear (and you can bet she does, constantly)

'to have and to hold all the stuff you can buy me
from this day forward;
for better, for worse,

and I deserve quality, like my kids do,
for richer, for poorer,

me richer, you poorer

in cash or on credit,
in sickness and in health,

if I can get signed off sick I don’t have to have no more kids for a while,
to love and to cherish them in an offhand and patchy sort of way and never raise an angry hand to them except when I’m tired or in the head teacher’s office again,

and to receive Child Benefit, Child Tax Credit, Income Support, free school meals and dental care,
till turning eighteen or twenty us do part, when I will chuck those kids onto the taxpayer’s charity and have a couple more.'

Funds.

The couple then exchange funds as a sign of their ‘marriage' and a reminder of the vows, and the taxpayer is assumed to have said:

'With my body I labour to support you,
all that I am I give to you,
and too much that I have I share with you,
within the love of God,
State, Revenues and Benefits Bureaucracy.'

Still, two takes on the same ray of sunshine from The Lone Voice and Devil’s Kitchen.

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.