Don’t be scared

Today, at an advice outreach session at a Women’s Centre, I met ‘Helen’. From the moment I saw her in the waiting room I was worried about her. She’s mid-fifties, very thin and very pale, and she seems to be shaking a lot.

A relative drove her a reasonable distance to see me but I don’t know if she’s up to this. She tells me she is feeling dizzy, so I offer her my arm and we walk slowly to the room where we can talk in private.

She kept apologising in a very quiet voice though I reassured her often that there was nothing to apologise for. She told me she used to work full time but her epilepsy is out of control. She had a seizure at work and broke a bone. There are other health conditions which exacerbate her seizures. Anxiety is one, and that’s why she is shaking, and apologising, because she thinks she is about to have a seizure.

She can’t work anymore and she can’t go out alone. She’s been on a low rate of Disability Living Allowance for many years but wonders if there is anything else she can claim now that she can no longer earn money.

Aside from a reassessment of her DLA which should see her rate increase, I mention claiming Universal Credit.

The shaking visibly increases and she starts crying.

“They won’t force me to get a job will they? I saw it on breakfast telly this morning, they’re stopping people’s benefits…will they stop mine because I can’t work any more?’

I have a sudden urge to run out of the room and out of the building and shake my fists in the general direction of the government and the media while shouting ‘you fuckers!’ at the top of my lungs. But of course I don’t do that because I’m still hanging onto coherence by a thread or two.

Instead, I calmly reassure Helen that the media has seized the opportunity to show us the very worst of themselves once again; to scaremonger and sensationalise the cheap headlines from the more unsavoury aspects of the government’s ‘plan’ – but, the forcing of people into work will never happen to her because of her disability, of which there is ample proof and a longstanding disability benefit claim.

Worth saying here that the sanction plan – awful as it is – will not apply to anyone receiving a disability element, housing element or child element. That means a lot of people are not in scope and need not be fearful. Don’t just take my word for it, it’s on this webpage: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/employment-support-launched-for-over-a-million-people

[Added 19/11 nothing has disappointed me more this weekend than seeing tweets from a high profile disability campaigner that appear to be needlessly whipping up fear. I don’t get it.]

I know she doesn’t believe me, because she asks me again and again, the same question: ‘but will they force me to work?’ My answer is unchanged, no they will not, you need not be scared of this. Please don’t be anxious.

At the end of our meeting, I had written down all the advice of what to do and how to do it and once again, that she need not worry about the government. She asked me to do this because she struggles to remember things and gets mixed up. I put my name and number down so she can ring me and ask me again if she needs to.

I hope I’m right. I hope the ‘department’ makes rational decisions about who is fit for work and who isn’t – all of my experience in this field tells me I’d have to be a bloody idiot to think that. But I can still hope.

But how many vulnerable people out there will be just like Helen? Seeing the headlines, watching the click-baiters on TV opine on things they know very little about, for ‘entertainment’ purposes and ad revenues? How many Helens will be alone with these fears, exacerbating depression and anxiety, and prompting contemplation of ending their lives, because it’s already so hard and apparently getting harder?

It’s not fair. Whether elements of the ‘plan’ are good or bad, the net takeaway for Helen was that she was either going to be forced into a job that put her in physical danger or lose her potentially life-saving medication. Neither of these things were prospects she needed to worry about in reality.

But the way this government has used its monumental platform to scare, blame, castigate and vilify people like Helen, is something to shame us as a nation. The media who are complicit in this should also share this shame. If they don’t know the harm they do, it’s time they were told. Though it’s much too late for that for some.

And as for that minority of benefits claimants who may well have their claims closed and the ability to then claim free prescriptions – I stand by my tweet to Mel Stride:

I probably should have said ‘you are actually stopping a very small number of people on benefits from getting free prescriptions?’ But, that’s Twitter, a nuance-free zone, and I do actually loathe what this government has done to the poor and vulnerable over the past 13 years.

There are plenty of us who do not join in the lynch-mobbing of poor people, who will fight with you every step of the way, for a just and decent society that provides a proper safety net, knowing that any of us, at any time, might need it.

Don’t be scared.