The benefits cap - a damned lie or a statistic?

The forthcoming benefits cap (1% p.a.) doesn't really affect me; I'm probably not getting any benefits at all for the next year, and after that I'm on a decimated pension.

But stopping benefits, capping them, what have you, it's all part and parcel of what's going on... so I do have an interest.

The ministers' position is that the benefits that are to be capped have risen faster than inflation over the past five years. It's transparently a fix, but the blue rinse brigade, the Daily Mail and 14 millions readers (+ whoever else) have leapt on that statistic, and they applaud.

It's on a par with saying that because the daytime temperature reached 38C one day in 1976, lower temperatures in 2012 prove that there's no global warming. You can always take an extreme position in the past and thereby fudge the present: that's why a statistic is so much more toxic that a simple damned lie.

When I came onto the job market over 40 years ago, I was lucky in that I never needed the dole (unemployment benefit). But some of my friends did. £4.50 a week it was. In today's terms, even by the government's rather conservative calculation, about £140 per week.

*Prices I happen to remember from that time:

Beer, 7p per pint (I was a student) - say £2.25 now;   potatoes, 5p for 7lbs - say 20p per lb now;
rent (on the low side) for a three bedroom flat in West Kensington, £4 pw - say £1.20 now.
Cigerettes, 15p (£4.70) for 20;                                  petrol, 15p per gallon - £1 per litre now.
Good 3-course lunch in the cafe in Gloucester road by Karnak's, where I worked for a while: 17.5p.
Paperback novels, around 12.5p

The MPs are asking for another £30,000 a year on top of what they're getting at the moment. They may well deserve every penny (no sarcasm implied or intended). But to ask for it in the same week as they lie about and cut the little that the poorest get - who often work just as hard - is mind boggling.

Who's doing this to me?

I’m in the middle of a nightmare. I’m being treated not just negligently but derisively by a group of people (Cameron, McVey, etc.) who long ago gave us reason to hold them in contempt; and I don’t think I can be faulted if I admit that I don’t like it.

[Summary. In a blog I was trying to run five years ago, well before he became Prime Minister, I said that Cameron was not going to be (as still used to be said when I was in uniform) ‘a good hofficah’. (Go to www.plagueyear.com, dormant but still just about in existence.) If you’ve ever served, you will know that the other ranks can tell...  often instantly... ‘Not a good hofficah’ was one who didn’t understand the special relationship between a proper officer and those beneath him.]

It may help if explain that I’m nearly 64. My age gives me a particular perspective, which I realise is different from that of younger people around me; simply, I grew up in a different world.

There may be no point in looking for someone to blame for what’s happening to me; but it’s only human nature to do so. But, actually, I don’t blame Cameron or his motley crew: they are, if truth be told, only creatures, fronting something much deeper and rather nastier. I don’t even blame the Lib Dems – the economic liberals of whom, like Clegg, have long been closet tories - although Beveridge Liberals, if there are any left, should be hiding their heads in shame at their party’s collaboration

The ‘nastier’ is the Old Tory spirit which has plagued our Parliament for the best part of 300 years, which resisted inter alia the reform bills, and the abolition of slavery, and home rule for India and Ireland and so on. 

Change of direction, just for a moment... National economic ‘success’ (never mind for a moment its pros and cons) comes in one of three ways –

            1) Solid growth, based on long term investment, planning, etc., etc.

                        Steady, but slow – decades or even centuries.

            2) Boom... oh so attractive, massive fortunes made, etc, etc,

And so often based on the parasitic devouring of the inherent structures and wealth that had been built up by previous solid growth (see 1 above). A few years, decades at most, but glorious while it lasts. For a few people. Or

3) Serendipity (Norway and North Sea gas, Brazil and resources) or inverted serendipity (Germany and Japan after WWII, or China and India, although this requires a disciplined and educated workforce.).

Sometimes you get more than one of these at a time: the British Industrial revolution (which was 1 and 2) built massive fortunes for a few by devouring the heart of our nations – so that the working population of 1900 ate less well, worked longer and harder, enjoyed less leisure and poorer health, died younger, and had a more miserable time generally than the English peasantry of 1500; but, at the same time, new structures were put in place that created the wealthier Britain that followed.

Return to the core issue. The Thatch-Blair boom. Glorious profits to be made, for a while... at the expense of the majority (and if you hold home ownership as the argument against my thesis, boy are you deluded). Manufacturing gone; skilled employment decimated; national assets sold at a loss; infrastructure owned not just by other nations but often by other governments; etc. The boom of the last 30 years has been parasitic, self-devouring, with nothing put in its place. (I think we’re following the route which Spain followed 400 years ago.)

And even our chance at serendipity (North Sea Oil) thrown away (like Spanish gold). So that the rich could enjoy some tax breaks. Which are already frittered away.

The trouble is that the parasitic boom seems to the dazzled to burn so much more brightly than the hard slog of steady growth... and there are always those who think the rest of us can go hang so long as they get a bit of it.

Worse.

It’s not usual for a government to connive at ripping the heart out of its own country.

And who’s paying? The poorest and weakest. While the richest are still, for a while, enjoying the boom. T’was ever thus.

Two different arguments going at once here, really. So be it.

So, another marginal comment; why not! People talk about Thatcher (criticism, for those who criticised her) as having the values of a grocer. But she didn’t: she had very little understanding of the values of a grocer. Grocers don’t sell off the goods on their shelves for pennies for a quick profit... (well, there are sales, of course...) BUT they certainly don’t then go and sell off the whole shop cheap. However, that’s exactly what Thatcherism did.

Thatcherism, but not Thatcher. She, too, was the creature – ambitious but still a creature – of that deep toryism. More of a Chernenko than an Andropov. So I don’t really blame Thatcher, either. (Although, in passing: Why was Thatcher too young to serve in WWII when my Mum, who was younger, could command an Ack-Ack battery in London? Just a thought.)

The one I do blame is Brown. That man, who could have stopped the rot, combined economic incompetence with personal arrogance to a quite awesome degree. ‘The end of boom and bust’!

Supremely ironic, really, that Brown, who plotted to help the poorest, is largely responsible for what’s happening to them (me!) now.

So what am I saying? It is that we have enjoyed (!) a boom for a few years that has burned up centuries of our future, that most of us were fooled by the appearance of a prosperity that didn’t really exist. Now the crunch has come (why, oh why, didn’t Brown read the Bible, 7 years of plenty followed by 7 years of famine and all that?) and we’re beginning to pay the price (only beginning – more and more people are going to be sucked into ‘austerity’ and it won’t end). I’m paying the price, as the state reneges on the agreement by which I paid taxes (without complaint, at a level which is now unacceptable to the richest) - in return for the promise that I would be looked after should the time come when I needed it. Foolish man that I was.

I think my point is made, somewhere in all that. I apologise for the lack of polish and finish – I really do suffer from depression and the exhaustion that goes with it, and I haven’t the mental resources to give you quite the organised arguments you deserve... though I will try to tidy this posting up, if better health permits, at some point in the future.

I really don’t know if I’ve written sense. Part of the problem with depression – my intellect’s shot... But I do know that the point of my argument is sound...

Something to think about, anyway; I hope. (Apologies to those who were there long ago – although I have to ask why you haven’t been kicking up a more of a fuss recently.)

Posted unedited and therefore with apologies. But please comment.

Happy with ATOS

There's a blogger (on depression) called Depressed Moose - Garry Williams. Worth reading (certainly more meat than I'll ever manage!)

In September, he had his ATOS interview. Two weeks later he was told that he qualified for his benefits.

I envy, and am pleased for, the Moose on this matter. (I was about to write "congratulate" and "success", but there is nothing about depression that warrants either of those two words - not even keeping the benefits to which, after all, one is entitled by contract with the state and our society.)

The Moose writes "...despite all the negative publicity about them I can only speak based on my experience with them and my advice to anyone due to have a medical would be to ignore everything you read because it will only make you ill from stress! Go into the medical with an open mind and be 100% honest about how you feel and how your illness affects your daily life.  Don’t assume anything will count for or against you just reveal everything!"

I have one (sort of) quibble - so far! - with what he writes: "I can only speak based on my experience..." He's wrong. There is a wealth of evidence, individually anecdotal but overwhelming and overwhelmingly consistent in the flood: ATOS fails most people (many of whom are desperately ill, and up to 70% of those who are failed* are found to have been failed wrongly. And many of those who succeed in their appeals are almost immediately put through the process again. Etc. Etc.)  *If they have representation, of course.  And are alive and well enough to attend an appeal.

We can all speak with that wealth of evidence, including the Moose.

His experiences put him very much in the minority... and he knows it.

http://thedepressedmoose.com/2012/09/30/atos-dwp-update/


By the way, DWP, I ask again. If I live near Farnborough, why do you insist that my local Jobcentre is at Hyde, beyond Southhampton? For pity's sake, Luton and Sevenoaks are both closer, and would be easier to get to!

The lovely skin of the Heaven-Born

Breaking my own resolution against ad hominen abuse again. Ho hum.

But, what do Duncan-Smith, Grayling, Osborne and Cameron have in common, apart from their disdain for the poor, the weak, the dispossessed, and indeed any who are not of the Heaven-Born Elect?

Look at the fullness of the skin on their faces. It bespeaks a level of good living, privilege and, in a certain sense, ease, which are beyond the experience of most of the rest of us.

Take another look at each of them before you dismiss this observation out of hand!

NB: Mechanica McVey does not appear to have the same blessings. (It's not a gender thing - plenty of women do, but they aren't persecuting me right now.) But then, she is only an apparatchik, an Igor, as you can tell by the way she only parrots what's on the scripts she's given.

Where is Cameron's empathy?

A few people have claimed that David Cameron has used his disabled child as a political weapon, or shield, or some such.

Unfairly, I think.

I lost my young son. In Cameron's position, I can't guarantee that I wouldn't have used my son's death exactly as Cameron was accused of doing. But, all power to him, he never has.

On the other hand, he has hinted - or it has been hinted on his behalf - that that it has given him a greater empathy with the disabled.

It hasn't. Not so that it matters.

I will say that, long before I became seriously ill, the death of my son had fundamentally changed my attitude to those who suffer. I mean no boast, but if I'm blowing my own trumpet just a little, so be it... it did change the way I treated others, in the most practical ways.

And I can state, authoritatively, that Cameron has not experienced that fundamental interior change. If he had, he could not preside over a government that treats the disabled - and plenty of others - so cruelly.

As for his fuzzy Christianity, declared this Christmas... he clearly doesn't listen to the Bidding Prayer at Cambridge and probably half the carol services in the country.

Apologies (not heartfelt) to Mechanica McVey.

I promised myself from the beginning that this blog would be a simple factual account, no politics no name-calling.

Foolish man.

Of course it's going to be political - it IS political. 

But name-calling is beneath me.

I promise Ms. McVey that I shall withdraw the soubriquet... when she says something [in or (publicly) out of Parliament] which actually responds to what's been said to her, instead of reading from the script given to her.

They aren't racist...

George Osborne referred disparagingly to those on benefits who hide behind drawn blinds while their neighbours go off to work.

I hide behind drawn curtains from time to time. It's symptomatic of depression, apparently. But to G. O., it was clearly symptomatic only of benefit scroungers.

And the Daily Mail is inclined sometimes to put inverted commas around the word 'depressed' when discussing people with depression seeking benefits (or, as that paper might have it, people with 'depression' seeking benefits... see the difference?). (Sorry, can't find any of the quotes right now.)

With such subtleties is racism often presented, oh so deniably. But we know it when we see it.

Note: the internet is replete with quoted examples of the subtle and not so subtle bigotry of the Heaven-Born against the disabled. I just haven't noticed anyone make quite this connection, although I'm sure they have.


Very dispiriting, writing a blog about the Welfare State (!) as it now is: no matter how appalling I may think this or that experience has been for me, I can find a dozen examples ten times worse in a couple of minutes on my computer. I would like, myself, to shock the world just once - I'm sure it would cheer me up.