The Business of Jobs

Let me be clear, I'm no fan of Labour. It seems that under Tony Blair it went wrong pretty quickly. The Ecclestone affair, cash for questions and, more importantly in my mind, the introduction of tuition fees. This was a watershed moment, the first step in kicking the ladder away from the lower classes. It certainly had an effect on me as I quit a university course that I was uncertain about because I didn't want to get into lots of debt. I'm not wont to try again given it would only increase that burden, no matter what the conditions are regarding paying this off. 

But it wasn't Labour that were to blame for the current bullshit - at least no more than the Tories and even the Liberal Democrats (having now shown their true colours). This is simply because the City and the banksters are the Tory party. No matter how right wing Labour have become, no matter how hard they've tried to take the centre right political ground (to curry the favour of the likes of the Mail and the Express), they've been completely wrongfooted by the Tories and Blue Milliband cannot fight them on this ground. No matter how many times I hear the Coalition blame the Labour for the 'mess they left us in', the truth is that mess was predicated by the privateers that the Tory spirit likes to champion: the world of big business. That's not to absolve Labour of any guilt - fighting the Tories at their own game meant making the same appeasals to the same banking and finance interests.

Right up to the crash David Cameron pledged to match Labour spending pound for pound. In fact Osbourne was calling for banking deregulation. If Labour were profligate, the tories intended to match them. Never mind that NHS waiting times, despite awful people like Patricia Hewitt, were decreasing while the Tories left the schools in a dire state in 1997. 

How things have changed. How the media message has been spun so effectively that people now believe the only way out is the Tory way. Part of that is their wholesale belief that the public sector is the enemy; that growth comes from business. But that's bollocks. Here's a smart man in America explaining this. Makes sense to me; no business is set up to hire people and provide work but to make money. They make less money the more people they have to pay (which of course is why workfare is so appealing to them, the government and so dangerous for everyone else, no matter how self defeating). So they are only going to hire people if the demand for their goods/services exists and that requires people have money. 

Some have said the best thing the government could have done with Quantitative Easing, even though it's not quite printing money, would be to give it directly to the people to spend. What's the likelihood of that happening? That's the sort of kickstart the economy needs.

That of course is if you want a capitalist system in the first place and buy into the myth that we have no money. Of course we have money. It's all tied up in debt, land, assets and the bank accounts of people that want to tell us to make do with less.

The Olympic Dream

I can't believe how cowed the masses have become (and that's my own naivete). Hearing a 'discussion' about the Jubilee on Radio 5eebleLive with the ever useless Nicky 'West Hent Kunt' Campbell, the amount of desperation in the voices of those so desperate for anything that even seems positive was frightening. People so desperate they'll buy into any old mirage; like a man drowning of thirst in the desert (see what I did there?). So tired and so beaten they only have anger left; how dare you wreck my day off. How dare you ruin my street party. The queen is white skinned and works hard. That's what's important!

The Olympics! What a fucking joke. Everywhere I go there's a billboard with pictures of naive young athletes selling crap. Lord Coe's the modern Fagin with his band of street urchins hawking travel taverns and face creams. The shiny youthful vital face of gullible capitalists. These are our heroes? Performing under the Eye of Sauron and his missile launchers. But how dare you question it when some local school kiddie won a prize to drag a fire hazard six foot up the road just so YOU can be a free citizen. Don't you know this shit is important? People died for the right to tell you what you can and can't eat in a square mile of corporate branding that was once the place you went to school

God bless you ma'am.

And now we hear that some of the people carrying the torch are ebaying their Olympic merchandise. Critics are vocal in their disapproval: "it's not in keeping with the spirit of the games."

Are you sure about that? Selling mass produced shit in the name of sport seems to be entirely what the Olympics represents. Just wait till after the medals are tallied and we see 'Sir' Tommy Jones, aged 17, fresh from throwing a pointed stick further than anyone else, barking that the latest razor shaves him even sharper. All in the spirit of the Olympics.

Who PullsThe Trigger?

I don't watch Carole Malone, unless she happens to show up on a discussion show I happen to be watching. I have long found her to be another ridiculous right wing troll. It used to be that I would watch the Wright Stuff of a morning. Unfortunately that show has long gone downhill, turning into the arse end of tabloid tv. Not surprising given that Channel 5 is owned by Richard Desmond now. There was a time though, when the show had James O Brien on, that it was half decent. There was also a time when the odious Malone was a regular talking head on the panel, but I kicked the habit years ago.

It seems she has outdone herself this week; on This Morning, that popular festival of informed and deep discussion, she claims that the Philpott family, who have no lost 6 kids in the most awful circumstances, somehow 'drew attention to themselves'. Consequently this has caused something of a backlash. But where has that backlash been all these years that Malone, and the rest of the obsequious right wing troll media, have been provoking the kind of 'enemies' she talks about the Philpott's having? Isn't it sad it takes something as awful as this tragedy to get people to see what these odious pundits are all about?

The point I want to make is this: if it turns out that fire was deliberate, and Carole mentions the use of accelarants being discovered, then we have to ask why people feel compelled to rage against 'scroungers' this much. I can tell you for sure that Carole is certainly one of those accelarants, as are all those within that part of the media; the part that happily preys upon the unemployed, milking them for headlines. "Look, here's a man with 17 kids, how dare he want what YOU don't have, or that which you have to WORK for." This increasingly shrill line has been underscored over the last decade, and ever more so since the coalition came into power. I am 100% sure that, were it not for this terrible event, Carole Malone's fake sympathy, she feels sad because that's what you do of course (i doubt the woman has an honest bone in her body), would be non existent and she'd be happy to write copy about the audacity of a man out of work with too many kids.

Her point is easily understated, because she understates it herself - as if this is what all right thinking hard working brits should think: that, while it's tragic, he somehow brought it upon himself. He made a name for himself in the media and got greedy. She sees nothing wrong with that thinking at all, but unfortunately there is a lot wrong with it, and the gutter press in general, which seems to me to be a feeding frenzy infused by ignorance and motivated by a kind of bitter envy. We should all be jealous of the man with, now 11, kids and his life of freeloading, as if having raising kids and being a dad to all of them isn't itself a full time job or at least an easy ride. I don't know much about his story because it's none of my business, but here's the media to make sure it becomes my business. Here come the likes of Carole Malone to make sure it does seem outrageous and to further burden our stressful working everyday lives with more dissonance, more reasons to be bitter and envious of our neighbours.

There is something really dangerous at work here: this may well have been an 'accident waiting to happen', but not for the reasons Malone says, as she of course casually distances herself from the troll horde she's happily made a living being part of. It was also no accident: anyone sick minded enough to try and burn someone they don't like to death, and their family, is someone that's easily manipulated by the media. But who set up the conditions for this 'accident'? Which part of society regularly feeds the minds of already embittered, stressed out, and generally uninformed working people, giving them direction in who to hate - because the media always needs a bogeyman.

Carole was right to say an accelarant was used. What she fails to mention is that accelarant isn't simply petrol: it's the right wing media of which she is a part. Malone and those like her have made a living feeding on working class fears and general ignorance for years. They have long stirred the pot, setting people against their neighbours to sell their tawdry rags and to appear on TV spouting more hatred.

If someone hated these poor people enough to comit arson, then part of that hate, at the very least, came right from her mouth.

The media always needs a bogeyman; unfortunately when it's 6 innocent kids who's only 'crime' was to be born to a man readily labelled a scrounger by the populist press, their deaths are just collateral damage for the sales and ratings of an increasingly sick minded machine.

Dancing in the Ruins part 2

Every time I get my scrounging allowance I have to consider how much to keep back until I next sign on, usually this is around £40. This is because I cannot guarantee when next I sign that I'm not going to find myself being told 'you haven't done enough to find work. If that were to happen I'd need something to try and keep me going until I could at least speak to the CAB and put in some kind of appeal - not that £40 would really cover me for the duration such a process would likely take. 

Now I'm not sure that this is how such a scenario would play out, but that lack of security, that lack of knowledge is really what the DWP thrives on. The same with the Work Programme. You are never really told how things work, when things happen and what you can do. You are given a Jobseeker's Agreement, but at the same time expected to undertake what is reasonable to find work - and you cannot presume the two are the same. I am given to believe, but of course I am not at all certain, that the adviser would refer the decision to stop payments to a behind-the-scenes decision maker and, more importantly, pay my benefit until that is resolved. However I have also been told, although this was many years ago, that's not the case and that one is presumed guilty: ie money is stopped until otherwise decided. Hence my budgeting.

This is a stupid way to live, and it seems this is how the whole country is now living this way, regardless of their income. Meanwhile we are forever told that we have lived beyond our means (by we, the scumdog millionaire politicians mean the poor, not themselves of course). Really? All of us? I remember trying to prise a thousand pound loan from Santander back in the day (I wanted a decent pc, and in fact still do - this thing is 6 years old and is creakier than a haunted house) and being refused. Probably for the best. The whole system is debt fuelled: stop borrowing and the lenders (which include Britain, I'm sure) go bust - and they can't pay their own creditors. Stop buying and businesses go bust: live beyond our means is exactly what they want. The politicians claim to venerate entrepreneurs as though they are the new gods, but what good is inventing a new car, fridge or tv, programming an aspirant (re: compliant) nation, and getting them to want your product if they are then told not to live beyond their means. Cognitive dissonance abounds.

Meanwhile we are still bombarded with junk mail credit invitations and pre-approvals (ok perhaps not quite so much), yet this phenomena was our fault? Bollocks. So why are we paying for it? Well because that's what greases the wheels of the system. As the politicians get ever more shrill in the face of failing austerity, we hear more and more that we have to pay down the deficit and that, bizarrely, we are accumulating millions of pounds of interest a day. How on earth can that be possible; even if we undertook the most rigid of austerity programmes the interest touted by these lunatic politicians (all with an 'i hate my European neighbours, jolly old england' mentality) we'd never be able to pay that off. 

80% of these cuts have yet to come into effect. The next couple of years are going to be hell; Universal Credit comes into effect next year. I fear the worse for that; it's going to be an administrative nightmare exacerbated by the government's smart idea of not employing people over here to man their call centres, despite us having an unemployment crisis. When I first started claiming ESA the line manager at the call centre had no idea about her job, the process or what was happening with my case. Even when the actual ESA processing people sorted out the claim, she still managed to avoid taking responsibility after making me run around to try and get a second sick note from my GP. I didn't need it, but she was convinced that the information I'd sent in would take weeks to reach the relevant department (it didn't, it was their the next day) and that the quickest way to sort it was to get and send in a fresh note. You can imagine that sort of thing really makes GP's happy.

Here, in the Telegraph (again, sorry), is an article with some worryingly bizarre Tory claims.

The plans include a new crackdown on housing benefit and a “mark two” system of universal credit to help push people off benefits back into full-time, rather than part-time, work. There are also understood to be a range of measures to encourage more women, particularly single mothers, to return to work. 

As if the recent cap on HB (though not on rent) wasn't serious enough in its implications, they want to consider further limits. It's perfectly clear the Tories just haven't got a clue: the welfare budget seems to be their plaything, their new chew toy. With more people being forced to find new accommodation all they are doing is moving problems around. As demand increases in 'cheaper' areas (assuming such places have openings for tenants on HB, of course), rents will of course increase (just in time for Tory scum landlords to profit.

A Downing Street source said: “There is some really radical thinking going on around welfare, which is the most successful area of government policy so far. Why should people only work part time? Why are young people who are out of work not living at home? Why are we incentivising people to have more children? 

Part time? As opposed to what? People are only working part time because that's all the hours their employers are offering. This doesn't even make sense? What's going on here? Who is incentivising people to have more kids? What on earth exists in this current climate that could possibly persuade any rational person to want kids or to have more? Who'd bring them into this world right now? Certainly not me.

Universal credit mark two? What does this even mean when we have yet to see mark one. Be afraid children, be very afraid.

I hear also that the unemployment figure has dropped by 45000 (to put it very simplistically). But I suspect this is more to do with seasonal work. What will the figure be come the Autumn - and once the Olympics/Jubilee madness has passed. What then? 45000 isn't that much and I suspect is more easily explained by this kind of work. Even if it's not seasonal, is it work that pays a wage someone can live on, for instance is it part time, or some other form of temp work. We certainly can't assume 45000 people have all found a good career that will last until they are allowed to retire.

However there is some good news! Perhaps the Salvation Army will get their contract revoked, though I'm sure with the good lord himself on their side (though not enough to actually do anything), that won't happen. 

As number six used to say: "be seeing you"!

Dancing in the Ruins

Life is getting stranger by the day. It's just difficult to keep up. No wonder so many people feel displaced, even the weather isn't doing what it's supposed to. Things seem to be changing, but in reality they aren't changing fast enough, or to what they ought to be. On Sunday another of the government's bald idiots (is there some pattern here? Baldness + Tory = stupid twat) decided to weigh in: William Hague's laughable comments in the Telegraph saying we (which is to say everyone else) aren't working hard enough. What does that even mean?

In the west we have a peculiarly self destructive attitude toward work and effort. We let it define our entire lives. We believe, unlike in the east, that when undertaking a task one should expend as much effort as possible. To do anything else is laziness. But the ancient Chinese always advocated expending enough energy to get the job done. Imagine advocating that over here, and the populist press, and of course the bald coots in charge, will dismiss you as lazy. It's a ridiculous idea: like driving at full speed to get to your destination, burning up way more fuel than you need. 

What does Hague want? People to press the keys on their office computer harder or faster? Does he want people to work longer hours? To package things on the production line with greater intensity? What does any of this mean? It's a stupid idea to compel people to burn themselves out quicker. Of course these Tory scumbags know this; it's just yet more divide and rule. Look at our competitors, they will say, they work harder, we have to compete with them! Look at China, with its lack of worker and human rights and its suicide nets to stop people topping themselves off because they are treated so badly. Is that what we want over here? It won't be the likes of Hague counting the cost; they will be sitting pretty in their grace and favour apartments living off their generous expenses accounts and salaries, obviously working hard themselves, though they aren't achieving much. Meanwhile they cut services, jobs and consequently opportunities to the bone. Even if you buy intop their deluded hype, it doesn't even make sense on a basic level.

At the same time everyone's favourite welfare dictator, our beloved fuhrer Ian Duncan Smith, strips Disability Living Allowance from, who else but the disabled - as if this will effortlessly lead to them finding work! It's the politics of the madhouse: or at least greedy corporate maniacs. Here's IDS in, where else, but the Telegraph:

Iain Duncan Smith says that the number of claimants has risen by 30 percent in recent years “rising well ahead of any other gauge you might make about illness, sickness, disability”. Losing a limb should not automatically entitle people to a pay-out, he suggests.

Er? Does this idiot think that losing a limb (such as might happen if you happen to be gullible enough to buy into the hype of 'serving queen and country' and get your arm blown off in a desert for the corporate benefit of the British arms industry) won't make life harder? Would he like to have his arm chopped off to find out for himself? The callousness of the attitude is extraordinary. He's assuming that people with disabilities don't automatically need help. That's a dangerous place to start from. I don't think it's patronising (which is what I'm sure he'd argue as these right wing fanatics are rampant in propagating the idea that welfare isn't helping people and they are acting out of kindness - tough love). People aren't compelled to apply for DLA so we assume those that do do so because they need it. Obviously the government assumes otherwise and thus these people are 'mistaken' (ie cheats), but where is the help going to come from to get people as independent as they can be as the government is cutting that as well, and independence is part of the reason for getting DLA.

“We are creating a new benefit, because the last benefit grew by something like 30 percent in the past few years,” he said. “It’s been rising well ahead of any other gauge you might make about illness, sickness, disability or for that matter, general trends in society.

Any other gauge? Except trained medical diagnosticians, independent of the state (ie, not ATOS!). Honestly, IDS like the rest of the right wing agenda, is operating on an assumption: x percentage of the working population can’t be disabled? That's unacceptable. But, again, it's what this means that's the problem: it's not translating into support to get people as independent as they can be, administered from a position of compassion and without judgement. Instead it's "you are a scrounger". 

Truly we are dancing in the ruins.

Workfare Wards

Read this.

If this is true then it warrants investigation right fucking now!

This is too horrible to countenance. Do you want unqualified workfare employees working in hospitals?

I'm posting this to spread the word. Let's get the facts on this. I don't have more to say, but this could potentially be the biggest story of the moment - if the right wing dominated media get their act together and do their jobs properly.

De Real World

Last Monday I had another, pointless, interview with my GP. Frankly I'm coming very close to getting shot of him. The guy really is starting to piss me off; he doesn't listen, he doesn't understand and no matter how many times I try to explain how the benefit system works (or rather doesn't work), I'm just wasting my time. 

That he's only available in my surgery one day a week doesn't help either. This is exacerbated by many factors, conditions that Lansley's privatisation smorgasbord will only make worse. Firstly the surgery, out of necessity, is partnered with a neighbouring surgery. Consequently he's available there more than here. Patients can potentially travel to either venue and be seen, but that's no good if you have to pay exorbitant bus fares to get to the other surgery which has a far bigger patient register. This means that I have to compete for time at my surgery with him with rival patients. There is no priority system whatsoever. It's a complete mess, and, having tried to complain to the Practise Manager, one that the people in charge seem unable to comprehend.

Secondly the guy it seems is either on holiday, moving house, or having a day off. Now I have no objection to any of those things, nor with doctors getting paid a lot of money. It's a difficult job. But I don't think it's much to have them work in an organised fashion so that patients can be seen!

The upshot is that if I want to discuss issues with him I have to wait about a month to be seen at my local surgery. This is fucking ridiculous. What makes it even worse is that when you have a limited window and a doctor that is not listening, it becomes a real challenge to get your message across. They have this talent for listening only to the first point you make; if you try and explain expand upon or clarity it you get cut off. Never mind trying to get someone that understands mental health issues. It's fine if you want a pill because you've got earache; they can deal with that. Anything deeper and intangible and the system fails.

So on the last appointment we go round and round again. This is the first time I've seen him since starting (and in a way finishing) on the WP. I explain to him that even the adviser there says I'd be better off on ESA. I make him aware that the adviser expects people that have mental health problems to have an adviser in attendance as well (even I know that's a ridiculous expectation to have of everyone). But he just doesn't get it. Again the programming kicks in as I try to explain that in order get onto ESA: you will have to write a sick note. Nope, sick notes  = a life on benefits = the antithesis of support. The stupid part of it is that he broadly supports being on ESA because of how it's supposed to work in respect to supporting people appropriately (of course the reality is another matter entirely). But he absolutely will not write a sick note and even seemed to think I could just self certify. The whole thing went round in circles and my head started to spin. The only concession came from him suggesting he might write to the JC+ in respect of my signing arrangements: as I'm now on the WP my signing times/adviser seem entirely random. This is not what the Work Psychologist promised both my GP and I would happen. 

I suffer from something called derealisation, had it diagnosed years ago, ironically even ATOS had heard of it (didn't make a difference). It means that at times, usually stressful/busy/hectic times I tend to 'phase out' - things start becoming unreal, like a mini fugue state. It's extremely disorienting. It makes being in busy places like, say, the JC+ on an understaffed Friday morning, difficult. When I had my regular adviser appointments, prior to going on the WP, this was circumvented because I had a fixed appointment and could be seen by the same person; I didn't have to sit in the lobby with the great unwashed (:D) and wait my turn in the dole lottery. 

I find that difficult, and recently my derealisation has been playing up (early on it was regarded as agoraphobia until a stony faced counsellor explained to me the cure for such was to be bundled into the centre of town in the boot of a car and left to find my own way home) so this morning I went to chase up the letter, to see what had been written (and to judge thus what the response from the JC might be, i doubt it would change anything). It is awaiting being typed which might happen tomorrow, but then the dear old doctor still has to sign the letter and guess what, tomorrow's his day off. I sign on again on Friday morning, I was rather hoping that might be done. Slowly the wheels to turn.

Not Quiet Enough

The self styled quiet man really has sunk. After failing as Tory leader he got stuck into social policy thinking, fortunately while away from the power to enact policy. For a time there was something akin to a flicker of a conscience in the man: a realisation that life for the poor wasn't quite the mardi gras he seems to think it is. 

That flicker was gutted when the Tories came to power. He's quickly established himself as a real attack dog in his brief as secretary of state for work and pensions; a man unable to look his opponent in the eye yet more than happy to hector and harangue. His tactics in debate are facile and ill becoming of a proper statesman. He routinely shouts people down, hectoring them, talking over them or under them. Just watch last week's disgraceful performance on Question Time. 

However that pales in comparison to what has been alleged by (of all sources) the Daily Express. This article reveals an even more cruel streak. It is the rotten heart of the Tories laid bare. Here is a man that simply doesn't care. This is beyond a case of ignorance, it is a wilful, rotten attack on the most vulnerable people in society.

I cannot understand the logic at work here. I suspect his goal is to hope the Work Programme provides more profit (including money saved from cutting people off from their benefits) than the cost in terms of welfare to the people now sacked from Remploy. People that he dismisses as spending all day making coffee.

Mr Duncan Smith, you are without doubt one of the most vile excuses for a human being, never mind a politician I have ever had the misfortune of sharing a country with. If you have anything resembling a sense of honour please resign.

EDIT: Of course if you were really cynical, you could argue that the Express, well known for it's hate on 'scroungers', is playing a cleverly subversive game, and that really it supports IDS' position. I don't know anything about their Save Remploy campaign, but I bet it's not as altruistic as they'd like to make me think!

Clegg's Choice

Prior to signing my soul away on the Work Programme, I was made aware of an alternative; a scheme called Work Choice (or Work Choices - I think it's the same, if not this post is a waste of time!), locally run by an outfit called Pluss. I'm bringing this up now because of this.

It seems again the government has bungled another scheme. Even though, from what I can gather, this scheme is more or less the WP by another name, and even though it's intended for people with health issues, it can't get government funding. That useless twat Clegg, the depty PM, can't even get help for those that need it the most to compete (as we must, it seems) in the job market. 

I was told that Work Choice was a scheme that runs for 6 months. If you don't find work at the end of it (and if it's anything like the WP you won't) then you go onto the WP - at least that would have been the case for me; hobson's choice. I was told they'd come out to meet me locally. This turned out not to be the case: they operate in the same manner as any local WP provider: through an office based 'nearby'.
 

Here's the Pluss webpage selling this scheme; now tell me how that's not the same spiel that WP providers dish out?

The Cost of Parking

So it seems I have been parked: that is abandoned by the WP. I have heard nothing back from them at all. I still have the forms given to me to fill in, some of which remain unanswered because the questions are stupid and I frankly can't be arsed. Is this a good example of Christian charity? But then, it seems, the Salvation Army has form in this area: they subscribe to a strict biblical morality with all the divisiveness that entails.

Thing with being parked is that you are left in limbo: the claimant still has to search for jobs to fulfil the condition for receiving JSA and show his efforts, but he gets no support from the people that the public purse is paying for that. I'm not entirely sure this is a better situation. But then I don't really want to rock the boat when I go and sign on in case I get shipped off on workfare. This is an unacceptable state of affairs, and one that goonface Grayling will doubtless deny happens. The more these experiences trickle out the harder for him it will be to keep sticking his finger in to close the cracks in the dam.

What do I do? The cold hard truth is that, at least locally, there is no help at all. I don't know if I can swithc providers - in fact I suspect that's not an option at all. Once you're with a provider, any complaints about their service have to go through them. I've heard this from JC+ staff many times while waiting to be seen. It's a convenient arrangement: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Even then the other provider (JHP - via whomever they have delivering on the ground) is also operating from a religious establishment: they are hosted at the newer and more plush (but no less Christian) baptist church down the road. Perhaps god has cornered the market on the WP: after all IDS is himself a full on believer. I'd call him a zealot.

These schemes just cannot address the reality of the problems that are out there. For people like myself in rural communities, travel is a huge problem. I simply cannot afford to be travelling around because the cost of a bus ticket is £7! That's ten percent of my weekly income. There's no concessionary rate either. Why can't the government help with matters like this? They are after all quite happy for WP providers to have to find the means to refund travel expenses to appointments, but they can't recognise that the pittance amount of JSA just cannot cope with the huge and ever increasing bus fares charged by the private sector.

I don't really see any of this changing any time soon. Parking is a sign of the times: it's easier to just dismiss problems, take resources away from people (such as help and support) and focus on things that are easier to address: superficial problems that a photo op can cure. Meanwhile the rest of us are abandoned.