REAL LIFE ON THE DOLE : PART 3

So, a further visit must be made to the JobCentre, for an ‘ interview.’ There are as usual various slightly dangerous looking individuals hanging around the entrance, often with vicious dogs in tow. Some sit on the steps to the entrance, which are in disrepair. It is next to a monstrous 1970’s Arndale Shopping Centre, in fact that is the address. This has security staff, mostly Polish, but outside the JobCentre entrance there are no visible staff, no entrance foyer, you go into a narrow stairwell with a small steel doored lift much like in a block of Council flats.

Up on the 2nd floor is a large open plan area with a security guard near the doors. There is a standing receptionist at a sort of desk where there is always a queue. There are a number of machines which are operated while standing, like at a gambling machine, that have screens to show vacancies. If you request a print out it comes out on a paper roll much like toilet paper.

After the inevitable wait, your name will be called, you have to be careful not to miss this as if you do it is deemed that you have missed your appointment. This can effect you benefit. This is easily done as the seats are a good 6 or 7 metres away from the desks. These interviews are now being done weekly. There is no option but to agree to attend, even if largely pointless, because the threat of withdrawing benefit always hovers in the background. The interviewer will bring up a few jobs that may match your usual occupation, but often they are only distantly related given that there is no specialist knowledge that the person behind the desk has with you or your field. The staff are acting out the role of a recruitment agency while not actually being a recruitment agency. Similarly one is acting out the idea that this is where one goes for a job lead, when in fact you are there to ensure that the miserly benefits are paid. I have never obtained a job through a JobCentre, only through direct applications. There are professional recruitment agencies, but even they only act as middle-men. They are parasitic on the real economy. Its simple, either jobs exist or they don’t. Agencies thrive in good times when recruiters cannot be bothered to recruit direct. In bad times agencies wither away and JobCentres pretending they are recruitment agencies is faintly ridiculous.

When my father died I was claiming benefits. I informed them and had to delay my next signing date. When I went in and made the advisor aware of this she still persisted in asking me what job searching I had done in the preceding week. I explained that this was not what was uppermost in my mind during the weeks leading up to my father’s death and his funeral. This is the degree to which the staff stick to the prevailing absurd rules and fail to treat people with a degree of dignity and as individuals.

The increasing amount of conditionality on the already inadequate level of benefit is further undermining any form of what was termed social security. When people feel insecure they often look for others to blame for their position and, rather than the people who have the power to improve their security and increase their inclusion in the wider society, will pick on other vulnerable groups and individuals. It is quite clear that the rising levels of unemployed combined with inadequate levels of provision produce tensions in societies. These can and do turn into violence against others, often the most recent arrivals in the country. Discord, crime against the individual and less security for all, both the haves and the have-nots is the outcome. This is being seen in the rise of the BNP and at flashpoints such as in Birmingham city centre recently. Why this point has been reached, where the benefit system has been run down operationally and let fall way behind adequate levels of provision during a period of a Labour Government is a tragic falling.

Here I wish to quote Paul Nicholson, the founder of the admirable Zacchaeus 2000 Trust, a rare voice of reason and humanity in this neglected debate.

" There is a naïve belief in Whitehall that coercion by destitution works. Nevertheless hungry people and others with no prospects of work or no right to work do not jump the way intended. So the prisons and the hospitals fill up with poverty related crime and ill health. The tax payer’s money would be better spent housing and feeding the destitute and observing international commitments. "

Here is just one of the numerous articles that this country has signed up to : European Commission, Joint Report on Social Inclusion ; Employment and Social affairs 2002

Page 27 [ 5 ] Guaranteeing an adequate income and resources to live in human dignity. The challenge is to ensure that all men, women and children have a sufficient income to lead life with dignity and participate in society as full members.

I can state with absolute conviction and highly stressful personal experience that our current welfare system does not enable a Citizen of the United Kingdom to do so.

You will soon realise this is a fact if you try to exist solely on the current level of JSA without access to any other funds. Try it Mr Bercow, Mr Duncan, Mr Cameron, Mr Brown and whoever is the current Minister in charge of the Department for Work and Pensions.

Meanwhile banks are still able to harass and bully people who have little to no way of repaying debts, charge excessive interest rates, and refuse to acknowledge that anything they have done was unfair or punitive. In my case I have been identified as ‘ in hardship’ yet the Co-Operative Bank plc has refused to repay a penny. I then went to the Financial Services Ombudsman, filling in yet another set of forms and they have simply agreed with the bank’s position. To even get to this stage of a decision from either has taken more than six months.

I am currently selling off my record collection to make ends meet, which they still don’t.

While the NHS has become an institution that both major parties now agree must be maintained in principle as it is a common good and should not be undermined by part - privatisation, the social security system, the very name of which has been erased, has been undermined and continues to be turned into some preposterous low-budget copy of a recruitment agency. The arcane, complex series of rules and means testing over amounts that may be provided and the increasing conditionality are taking it even further from its basic purpose. Crucially this further confuses and distances it from the simple necessity in a civilised country of providing a basic modest level of income to which all law abiding members of that society should be entitled. Surely this is what any Government that could claim to be aiming for a fair and more equitable society must address, and if the Labour Party continue to dream that everyone is middle class now and that no one is in need while the Conservatives still remain self-serving charlatans at root, witness Alan Duncan’s real feelings about the perks of being an MP and The Speaker John Bercow’s recent appointment of 100K + media advisor, the future looks very worrying indeed for a very large number of British Citizens and therefore for the whole country’s well being.

I may emigrate to Poland, which was a line in of a typically deranged Fall song, but now sounds quite sensible.