Back to index of Nerve 22 - Summer 2013

Benefits Flawed

By Paul Tarpey

“I was up a little later than normal because watching the faces of working people had got tedious. I'd loved to see their weather worn jealously staring up at the tinted glass of my penthouse, but it had started to feel a bit gratuitous. I'd been woken as always by the gentle flop of today's benefit hand-out floating onto the mat. This tranquillity was shattered by a whining voice on the radio. Benefits to be cut! I'd already been forced to rent out one of my garages to a stock market trader down on his luck. Now what?”

Welfare cuts, apparently, will make it easier to get gainful employment. Yeah, exactly the way kicking a homeless person in the face makes it easier for them to get a three bedroomed house. Their argument that making benefits even harder to live off means we will all suddenly get useful work is so illogical that I can't be bothered discussing it, but is paid work always more valuable to society anyway than just going about your day and doing what matters to you.

Paid employment, particularly within the private sector, is by definition only about who has the money to pay you and what they need, not what society as a whole needs. Paid work can provide dignity, but is it really of inherent value when the needs of so many people without the means to pay requires volunteering and good will. Has visiting a housebound relative got no value?

The government's propaganda also inherently implies that the current system means people on low pay should be jealous of the unemployed. But the kind of people who inflame this ridiculous stigma are exactly the people who used to tell me, when I was in a low paid job, that they wouldn't get out of bed for the money I was on. I assume with that attitude it's easy for them to project that the unemployed spend their days blissfully sleeping, but the only people I have met who do anything like that have usually done so after a decline into a depressive cycle through lack of money and support. The vast majority will fill their day by volunteering or sometimes doing the much maligned cash in hand work. Neither will provide anything approaching a living wage but it can raise your life above the stagnant to the liveable and also gives you a realistic chance of getting back into the job market. Nowhere near ideal, but it would be unthinkable for a government to offer anything more practical and remove the sense that you're being punished while on benefits.

If you choose this lifestyle then bear in mind the massive chance that it can still lead to depression and low self esteem. You can almost certainly forget about living somewhere secure, and accept it's probably best to be single. So maybe the government is right and we do need an incentive to leave this cushy lifestyle behind. So lets look at what they offer.

My attempts to get into full time paid work using the job centre have included: being kicked and punched trying to protect children, looking after a blind and autistic man without having been told about either of these facts beforehand, let alone trained in them, and being asked to illegally obtain money for a charity that didn't exist. All for six pounds an hour, or seven if you worked nights. This work meant using agencies that provide no security even in the short term and it mirrors most people's experience. Two friends who've been recently made redundant from well paid jobs they had for twenty years, have found themselves doing exactly the same work for an agency for minimum wage.

I've now found a compromise by doing a part time job that means I'm ten pounds better off than on benefits. Half week working, half week looking for other work, another half of the week working out how to get into work while still feeding myself.

I also receive nothing for time off so, recently, when I couldn't work I was advised to claim ESA. It was then, that the scariest ghoul to haunt those on welfare clambered out of the wardrobe.

Atos have worked hard to prove that me, my doctor and my employers don't know what we are talking about, and tried to bully me back into work at the risk to the well being of a vulnerable child. This was done by phoning on a Saturday to tell me I was receiving no money and putting the phone down when I asked questions. This solution came from a 'medical expert' who asked me to touch my toes, explain how I got there if I was so ill, and then gave me zero out of fifteen for my inability to work. I noted that the assumption I could do daily tasks such as washing myself was taken without asking. I was mildly flattered.

The use of Atos is one of the most sinister attacks ever committed by the state against the people; an attack on everyone who through the difficulties surrounding hard work may come to rely on long established support systems. A bullying force attempting to remove people from society, it seems that they are not actually entitled to hold the information they demand, or legally to make a decision with regards to benefits. Still, it's only the sick.

We live in an era with mobiles that can tell you the tune you are about to hum, and yet we are all pressured to accept that life has little value beyond a wage earned at any cost. The future looks very uncertain for so many people for no good reason, but one thing’s for sure: if someone hacked off Ian Duncan Smith's head, Atos wouldn’t suggest he could still work as a goal post. Such is the nature of privilege.

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