Gather the pitchforks, light the torches…tonight, we are bravely going after the enemy who are…benefit claimants? People too sick to work? Carers? Are we sure about this?
It’s the assumption that every person claiming benefits is a lazy, work-shy good-for-nothing who needs dragging to the nearest jobcentre, having someone wave a finger at them while threatening sanctions if they don’t write 100 lines of ‘I got ill, I’m disabled, I’m a 24/7 carer, I’m sorry, I’ll never do it again’ that really winds me up.
Take my client JD. His crime against society was to get a hernia, then get another one and be told in no uncertain terms that he could not carry on working.
So he claimed Universal Credit and told the work ‘coach’ he couldn’t work, but of course they weren’t buying that – everyone’s a work-shy scrounger after all. This forty-something labourer who had worked all his life just decided one day that he couldn’t be arsed any more. Sod the mortgage, sod having enough money to live on, sod having friends and a social life. Choose sickness! Choose depression! Choose queueing at the food pantry!
The politicians, pundits and media personalities who – from a safe and substantial distance away from reality – gather up their verbal pitchforks and try to rehash the old tropes about benefit claimants - many of whom are suffering deprivation-levels of genuine poverty – well, they make me sick.
And thanks to their sour scape-goating rhetoric about the ‘Jobless’ you then get someone popping up from a Question Time audience – a low paid worker using a Foodbank once a month – actually turning their anger on those even worse off, because they get ‘free this’ and ‘free that’.
No-one’s getting free anything any more. We’re letting people starve. We’re letting pensioners die of hypothermia. We’re driving desperately vulnerable people to take their own lives. How does this help you, Mrs Low Paid Worker? Look to your employer who doesn’t pay you enough to live on. Look to the government who has reconstructed the safety net out of Andrex. Don’t buy into the myths that Stride and Duncan-Smith are peddling – they have no idea what it’s like it to be you, even less idea what it’s like to be my client, JD.
JD has recently been told that he doesn’t have a hernia after all. The MRI confirmed that the reason he is still in so much agony is that the surgery he had last year to repair the hernia has triggered a chronic pain condition that he will likely have for the rest of his life. The doctors are considering steroid injections, assuring him they will do their best to give him some quality of life back, but he probably won’t be able to go back to work for some time, if ever.
And in the meantime, JD waits *still* for a hearing to appeal the decision to refuse him Limited Capability for Work Related Activity. (He’s been refused PIP and will likely lose this appeal too). He gets £340 per month Universal Credit – his mortgage now £7000 in arrears with legal action to repossess his home being considered.
JD isn’t the worst case by any means. People receive devastating diagnoses every day and are then faced with the prospect of not being able to pay their bills and put food on the table, let alone get better, if they can. The people who give up work to care for their loved ones face the same horrible dilemmas. All this while the TV and newspaper controversy-ghouls decide these people are fair game for a kicking by way of public ‘debate’.
If you think it’s such an easy life – try it. I expect that being a media personality brings with it a certain sense of entitlement. A comfortable podium from which to look down on the less well off. But maybe you just got lucky? Maybe you knew the right people or your parents did? Maybe you were afforded opportunities that some people just never get? Think about what you do with your good fortune and what you could have done with your podium to highlight the lack of social care for people who need it, instead of making them a target.
There are plenty of voices, thankfully, calling this toxicity out. ‘Jobless’ isn’t valueless, unable to work isn’t work-shy. Jeremy Vine isn’t the messiah he’s just a chat show host chasing ratings.
Using threats to withhold or reduce benefits on the basis of ‘conditions’ not being met – during an ongoing and never ending cost of living crisis – is a barbaric and cruel idea. It won’t help people get into work, it will simply drive already vulnerable people deeper into panic and despair. We’ve learned nothing it seems.
