Mr. Duncan Smith is either a fool or a fascist.

Mr. Duncan Smith has been talking about child poverty being a result of parental addiction to drugs and alcohol. Does he not know that what he says is pernicious, not to say toxic? If not he is a fool – and worse. But my betting is that he does know – and if he does, the public expression of those opinions marks him as the worst sort of elitist: combined with his power it damns him as a fascist (with eugenical tendencies)... (See also Part 2 of this post.)

Let’s be clear: there are no meaningful statistics to support the strength of his assertions and, having worked with hundreds of seriously deprived children in the poorest parts of London for over twenty years, I can say there isn’t even any great anecdotal support.

[A survey (which I saw in the Huffington Post today, but which is presumably published elsewhere as well): it is the public view, apparently, that the main cause of child poverty is parental addiction to drugs and alcohol. A shortage of money only comes fourth in importance as a cause of child poverty, according to the public’s perception!]

Well, we know that IDS has declared war: this latest wheeze is just an advance of his right flank. I think it now justifies what I’ll be writing in Part 2 of this post, which I had previously decided was beyond the pale...

It’s that public perception which provides the real object lesson for poverty campaigners, however.

We’ve got nowhere. And, in the present climate, we’re going to get nowhere.

That’s not intended to be defeatist: for me, it simply means that a new analysis, some completely new thinking, is required. It just vexes me that I – like so many on this side of the battle lines – do not have the mental resources needed.

(Part 2...) Talking of pernicious, I believe that any mention of the Nazis on the internet, and certainly any parallel drawn with opponents in argument, is regarded as pernicious and odious. Well, IDS has his gloves off, so here goes anyway.

(Don’t stop reading: there is a point to my madness.)

I do from time to time suffer abyssal nightmares, but on the whole such dreams as I have are pure escapism... In one of these, the other day, IDS appeared in a cameo role, resplendent in his glorious, jet-black uniform: SS-Oberstgruppenführer Duncan Smith. Boy, he looked cool. And he looked the part.

And others of that motley crew? Grayling (‘tough love,’ smirk), clearly a bully-boy SA-Mann, of comparatively minor significance. Kreisleiter of an obscure Pomeranian town, perhaps. McVey, she of the parroted speeches? A BDM platoon leader, I suggest, desperate to be noticed but wholly out of her depth. I don’t think Hague is really nicer than the others, but he somehow seems to be, so a captain in the British Army in the BEF in 1940. There’s nice. Cameron? So obviously an overprivileged public-school boy. but not, I’m afraid, a good officer. Alan Clarke? One of those foolish patricians who thought they’d be able to control the Nazis, sorry, Tories. I hesitate to compare Osborne with Hjalmar Schacht, since at least Schacht was good at his job. And Thatcher as Wagner, the great composer of the Herren-Volk legend.

Funnily enough, bar perhaps Thatcher, I can’t think of any of the motley who have the stature (!) of Uncle Adolf.

[Added 3rd Feb: Nick Clegg as Vidkun Quisling?]

Arbeit Macht Frei.

The point:

Odious to draw parallels between our government and the Nazis, almost certainly... but at a quite fundamental level, parallels do exist, however pale, especially between now and the first months of 1933: The outcasts, dictated by ideology; the demonising; the tame media; an ill-informed and submissive public in thrall to a half concealed fear; the steady ratcheting of the pressure; the willingness to let the untermenschen conveniently die...

You don’t believe it? I can assure you that what I write is felt by a growing number of the disabled and the dispossessed in this country. With my parents victims of WWII and distant relatives dead as political prisoners in Hitler’s camps (and in Stalin’s – megalomania is very equal opportunities), I don’t feel that the parallels I’ve drawn are so very exaggerated.

[Added 5th Feb: Medical assessments by doctors (!) who are serving the ideology of the state with no interest in the subjects of those assessments... Not exactly compliant with the Hippocratic Oath in either case... Maybe it's not such a pale parallel after all...]

I don't know how to prepare my appeal...

I’m supposed to be preparing my appeal. I have at least three problems doing so.

Firstly, I don’t actually know what’s wanted.

I’m not living at home at the moment, but staying with a long-time friend who’s basically keeping my show on the road... Unfortunately she lives in a well-off part of the country: the local CAB are very kind and patient, but they have no experience of benefit claimants appealing and have not been able to help; unlike in some boroughs, there’s no council-run welfare office; and legal help is out of the question. So there’s no-one who can help. There’s plenty on the internet, of course – but unfortunately there’s far too much, and it’s contradictory and confusing. Organising what’s there is beyond me: frankly, I suspect it would be beyond me at my most compos mentis, which at the moment is a distant dream. All in all, I’m on my own: which would be fine and dandy if I weren’t dealing with a system which is designed – not to put too fine a point on it – to ensure I fail.

Secondly, and following on from that last sentence... The report on which the DWP’s decision to renege on their obligation to me was based was positively Kafkaesque (or 1984esque, or something).

My understanding is that I’ve got to make the appeals tribunal understand the particular limitations I face: I would have thought I’d done that in my answers to the original questionnaire and in the WCA interview. The DWP’s final report didn’t even bother to take what I’d said out of context: in half of it they simply ignored what I’d told them (they said I could drive a manual shift car without problems – contrary to what I’d written and said: they said I was writing a book – actually yes, I was, but yonks ago. Etc.) and the other half they simply made up (details on or shortly after 7^th February, to give them time to explain - see explanation elsewhere in this blog).

Despite illness, I am (at my best) reasonably if not very articulate. But I don’t know where to begin in this world of shadows which they’ve created.

Which leads to:

Thirdly: When I was in my teens, I learned very precisely that nobody was interested in my mental problems (again, more elsewhere in this blog, I hope). I subsequently and probably consequently, spent a lifetime presenting a front to the world: it wasn’t always successful and eventually it collapsed altogether, but the point is that I lived keeping my problems private.

Suddenly some physiotherapist with no mental health qualifications spends a few minutes with me and I’m expected to break the hard-fought-for habits of a lifetime by describing everything, as if I had a broken leg. Then she scrambles – and largely invents – a narrative (nice post-modern, governmental word, that) upon which decisions affecting my life are based.

So what do I write this time? The same as before, to be ignored again (and probably to be told “it’s not new evidence”)?

Do I trust the tribunal any more than DWP? Perhaps. Do I trust myself to present my case well? Not at all.

I can’t do it. And I'm in pain.

I’m lost for words again.

Hensher is not wrong, but he misses the point.

Philip Hensher wrote an article in the Independent, last Friday, which seems to have earned him a great deal of twittered opprobrium. Well, I must be missing something, because (while for political reasons I’d rather he’d taken a different tack) I can’t see anything unreasonable in what he wrote (with the possible exception of his reference to the bicycling disabled).

There is an element of the anti-ATOS/DWP/WCA campaign which wishes to see no examination – assessment – of claimants at all at. Such a hope (however understandable when the government is being so barbaric right now) is divorced from reality: the state not only has the right but the duty to assure check up on claimants. I can’t see that there’s even a moral case to oppose that right/duty.

As for Hensher’s widely held contention that there those who shouldn’t be on benefits: a part of an assessment system should no doubt be to establish the extent of the matter.

The problem is not with the idea of assessment but with the philosophical basis – the politicised, counter-scientific and plain counter-humanitarian (or do I mean inhumane?) foundation stones - of the assessment process that’s now in place.

The attacks on Hensher are neither kind, nor well-targetted. They do our case no favours at all.

But the point he misses is that positions are becoming so entrenched as they have done even more, including to his cost, however unfairly, as a result of his article because of the cruelty of the system which the government has set up, and the apparently gleeful cruelty with which the government watches its effects.

 -/-

Hensher deserves engagement, because his analysis was incomplete. He does not deserve the abuse he appears to have received. Just as bad: the public attitude to benefits claimants boils down to hearts, minds - and votes. The attacks on Hensher will have cost us those...

The Eternal Jew...

No-one with a grasp of History would deny that it’s a commonplace: dysfunctional government seeks – or, if necessary creates – enemies, external or internal, to misdirect its own people.

North Africa, this week, has been been a gift for Cameron. He has been able to identify yet another group of Muslims as alien, different, ‘the other’... to demonise them, to promise unceasing war... And it sounds so reasonable, doesn’t it, these awful people in Mali, about whom we know nothing...

Poor Duncan Smith: with a Judicial Review and a back-bench debate against him, circumstance this week has given him no-one new (disabled, scroungers or skivers) to assail for now. Never mind: he’s been able to come up with the figure of £5.3 billion which he can claim benefit-frauds have stolen from honest Englishmen. He has no evidence or justification for that figure which will bear a moment’s examination, but why should he care – it sounds somehow possible. So he can go on demonising, and promising unceasing war...

DWP don't reply.

Just for the record:

I've written to DWP a couple of times since I put in my appeal.

No reply to a letter of 17th December (recorded delivered on 20th), so this week I checked by phone. "We won't be replying," they said, although the letter would be forwarded with my appeal (to be heard in minimum 6 months time).

It's not that what I asked is necessarily that important: I'm just not keen on being ignored all the time. (Extracts below.)

What worries me far more is that I sent a much more serious letter in January (which they also say they're not going to answer). This was a grave complaint, with legal implications and having a profound bearing on both my assessment and my appeal - and on me. I suppose I have give them a month to change their mind and reply... Delivered to them 7th January, so full text here after 7th February. It may be my first important contribution to the whole ATOS/DWP/assessment debate.

I hope that Google and the other search engines are beginning to show this blog in their results by then... Years ago, I got my previous blog well up in the ratings very quickly, but I've forgotten how I did it!

My letter included:

1) "I understand that when I requested (the) HCP report, I was entitled to an extension of the deadline for submitting my appeal, which is not discretionary. Can you confirm that this is the case?" (I was given no extra time, so I had just six days to prepare the appeal. I was unwell; I didn't do a good job.)

2) "I recently requested from DWP a copy of ATOS HCP’s report of my face-to face interview...along with copies of paperwork (evidence) given by my carer and myself to HCP. I was promised that I would be sent all of this. I have received HCP’s report, but not the other paperwork. This consisted of a letter from my carer, and some evidence handed over by me to HCP at her request which, not intended to be handed over, had not been copied by me. I should be most grateful if this could be expedited."

3 "I also understand that the interview itself may have been recorded. Again, I should be grateful if this could be confirmed and, if so, I could be advised how to obtain a copy. Some conversation that took place might be subject to interpretation, and I need to have this material when it comes to my appeal." (I have reason to believe that there is a recording, but I can't yet prove it.)

The rest of the letter related directly to the appeal.

Who are these people who don't appeal?

Of those who are assessed 'fit to work' by ATOS/DWP, about 40% appeal.

I can understand that some people can't cope with, or simply face, the process of appeal - I nearly bottled it myself. And there are probably a few who accept that the findings are correct (tho' I can't think why - else why did they apply in the first place?)

But still, 60% don't appeal??? Who are all these people who go through the assessment process (believe me, a humiliating and unpleasant experience) and then just drop out when they're rejected by a process which they must know is superficial.

I truly don't understand.

Money is far from the only reason for appealing.

So I’m appealing against my claim for benefits being rejected.

This whole business started for me in June last year. I had a call from DWP today. My appeal will probably be heard in July/August/September this year.

Let’s just assume that I’m as ill as I say I am, subject to ‘moderately severe’ and often ‘severe’ depression: 15 months kept hanging around, you might agree, is not just intolerable but actively cruel.

Obviously, the most immediate issue is money. (Last week, I cracked a tooth, which I do quite often, since I grind my teeth badly in my sleep. Do I pay for tooth, food or heating? At the moment, I can go for two out of the three.)

But subsistence is not the only reason for my appeal. In the long term it may not even be the most important.

Reasons to fight:

1. I need the money. Of course.

2. A matter of principle. I have a contract with the government, and I did my part for three decades. Now they’re reneging.

3. Anger. When I was a child, my condition was treated negligently – and dismissed – even though I was in real trouble by the time I was 15. [The nearest I got to a diagnosis was to be told – out of the blue and on no basis - that I suffered from a masturbation complex: half a century on, I’m still reduced to gibbering fury by that...] As recently as 1990 I was told by a GP that there was no such thing as depression, and by another to ‘pull myself together’. In recent years, at last, I started to get the support I desperately needed.

The trouble is that I thought attitudes to mental health conditions had changed...

4. One of the problems with being ill is that I find it very difficult to focus. There is a number 4, but while writing the first three I’ve completely forgotten what it is. I’ll fill it in if it comes back to me. How in tarnation I’m meant to organise my appeal, I have no idea.

There’s a number 5, too: that, before all this started, I was taking active steps to get myself off benefits under my own steam, and DWP has squashed that completely. I want to write at length about this, but when I’m a bit less ill, so please ignore it for now.

Now DWP, on the basis of a short interview by a physiotherapist (why not an architect, or a professor of ancient languages?), has told me that there’s nothing wrong with me – in almost so many words that I’m lying. I am back to where I was at 15, treated like a waster. And I can’t – and won’t – forgive them for it.

-/-

It may be that Duncan Smith believes that I should be disposed of... [Funnily enough, I would accept that viewpoint as rational, if a bit National Socialist.. At least I could fight it.] He is, after all, doing everything to encompass my death. But while he and his would be far too cowardly to come out and say it, I am willing to stake what little honour I have left that there are MPs who secretly - or not so secretly - believe exactly that.

To be continued.