REAL LIFE ON THE DOLE : PART 2

Having had some surprising reactions to my last piece including ' wear a suit ' and ' you are insulting former criminals ' ( ? ) I will attempt to continue with the reality of the way in which an unemployed individual is dealt with in Britain in 2009.

I recently had to attend an interview at the Jobcentre. The letter came from Belfast. I sign at a large centralised office in London. It is an anonymous tower block that replaced the smaller local offices in this Borough that at least had a human scale. First I was informed that I did not fit into any of their categories. I was then given a sheaf of bad photocopies outlining a new scheme. It is called a Work Trial. This document is addressed to a prospective employer and nowhere does it have any reference to an individual. It makes the assumption that you are willing to work under the following terms : The employer does not pay anything to the employee. The employer may at some point unspecified offer a paid position. Meanwhile you work as free labour with no contract of employment and thus no rights and no wages. You continue to try and exist on the inadequate JSA, mine is currently £103.40 every two weeks, while working until the employer makes up their mind whether or not they want to offer you a job. There is no indication how long this trial should last nor that there will any job at the end of it. But you would be off the unemployment headline figure.

Given that there are far more people unemployed than there are permanent paid positions available what is to stop an employer taking on people on this basis at no cost and then saying they were not suitable rather than offering a job with security and a living wage ?

There have been a number of academic studies completed that establish that the current level of benefit for a single adult is considerably below what is required for healthy living. For example in 2004 The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine suggested a stringent minimum to be £84.76. There are pages of clauses in declarations, covenants, conventions and charters that the UK Government has signed up to at International and European level that are clearly intended to guarantee as a basic right sufficient resources and social assistance to live in a manner in keeping with human dignity. This is not a poor country. Yet the wealth is more inequitably distributed than ever. Surely the resources can be made available to go some way towards implementing these agreements which remain mere words on a page and should be deeply embarrassing to a ostensibly Socialist Government.

Now, it seems, there is a move to get people to work for a level of benefit that as it stands is one of the lowest in Europe and is wholly inadequate and places the individual in a highly vulnerable position.

My Local Authority, despite being aware that I am unemployed, have enforced repayment of overdue Council Tax by the use of a private firm of Bailiffs. They set the repayment rate at £90 a month. These agents then apply there own charges on top of the debt, the Council apply charges of £25 for a Summons issued for £60 of arrears. This too is added to the debt. The use of bailiffs to collect a local tax, wholly unrelated to ones ability to pay is draconian, intrusive and highly stressful. Yet those who are unemployed are far more likely to be at the receiving end of their visits and demands. Again, incredibly the Government were on the point of giving them additional powers of forcing entry. This has only just been averted after some effective independent lobbying.

Instead of this vast complex means tested benefits system that is inadequate and unfair why is nothing heard about a basic Citizens Income ? This would be payable as a right, and not related to increasingly conditionality and these unrealistic schemes to ' encourage ' people back to work : into jobs that don’t exist and or can be magically created and will pay starvation wages of £60.50 a week.

There is a small largely academic organisation the Citizens Income Trust and the Zacchaeus 2000 Trust produced a Memorandum on Benefit Inadequacy and its consequences which was sent to the then Prime Minister Tony Blair in 2004. What response it had, if any, I do not know. What I do know from painful experience is that living on current benefit levels is tougher now than it ever has been, and it is scandalous that this reality is distorted by the drip-feed to the tabloid media of exceptional cases of individuals that have in some way apparently ‘ worked the system ’ to their advantage. These people are exceptions and have been investigated and exposed in any case. They will have to pay anything received fraudulently back, which is more than any of the executives in the corrupt major financial agencies have had to do.

What is being done is private sector consultants are being given Government contracts worth millions of pounds to coerce people into jobs. What jobs ? Consultants cannot create lobs. Jobs as private sector consultants to get people into jobs ? Granted the staff at Jobcentres are not best placed or experienced in the harsh reality of the free marketplace that has been created by the Tories and sustained and unchallenged by the policies of New Labour. But to apply the mantra of ' get in the Private sector to sort it out ' is a waste of resources and time. It is the failed Public sector that needs to be fixed and brought up to an acceptable standard.

There are so many problems that arise out of this abandonment of a certain level of basic provision that should be set in Law in a fair and just society : a reasonable non-negotiable basic income, an adequate stock of what is now called ' affordable ' housing, (which always seems to imply that the majority of housing is unaffordable to a great many people, and it is, unless you already have a mortgage on another unaffordable property) and financial institutions that can foster and assist in attaining a modest financial stake in our society. Instead there remains a largely unfettered, uncaring, un-Christian, un-Muslim, as it happens, bunch of usurers that still form 99.9% of the banking sector and who, despite having been saved by going to the Government when their greed and hubris nearly brought down the house of cards, remain morally bankrupt, parasitic on the real economy and seemingly unable and unwilling to accept any fundamental change in practice.

And remember that one of Oscar Wilde‘s, that the rich take pleasure in hoarding their money, the poor in spending it. By giving a little more to those in most need, which are at this time again in the millions, there is no doubt that it would indeed be spent in the real economy, which is a good thing, is it not ? Instead the argument from all sides seems to be seen to be tightening the screws even tighter on those that are most vulnerable.