To Clacton-on-Sea, where I spent a day recently setting things up for a longer project – more on that in the coming weeks.

For now – a few transcripts and a bit of a rant.

When I was in Clacton a couple of weeks ago, I went to the CAB and spent some time with officers there. I also stood outside the jobcentre for a while, to see I could find anyone who was prepared to speak about JSA, sanctions and work experiences in Clacton.

We talked about those things and then generally about the people they hold responsible for tough times. I find this part of things interesting, especially in our burgeoning We Hate Europe era. I spend most of my time talking with people who have been badly hit by public service cuts, job losses, wage cuts, insecure work, etc, and they come from a very wide range of groups. The thing is – people don’t talk to me about European politics very much, or certainly haven’t in the past few years. Not spontaneously. Not as the first thing out of their mouths. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone mention their MEP to me. Maybe people need prompting. Maybe that will change as politicians and the press keep belting out the anti-EU message. I do hear anti-immigration talk and that usually has to do with the housing shortage – who gets housing and why, who should be prioritised for it and who is being prioritised for it. The point I want to make, though, is that I still notice people talking about the failures of the local political class, which you’ll see in the transcripts and quotes below. They talk about their immediate tormentors.

I’m guessing that it suits local politicians better to paint this part of the picture out. It’s still there, though. That needs to be said. People still talk a great deal about greedy MPs and bankers and bonuses, Iain Duncan Smith, jobcentre staff, organisations that run the work programme and companies that employ people on wages too low to live on. People make these points unprompted.

There is absolutely no doubt that this is why the political class is so desperate to turn our attention to Europe and immigrants, and why Labour is prepared – this still floors me, although it shouldn’t – to fanny around with fascism and to talk about controls instead of leading any global charge for equality. It is perfectly clear such a line is thought more expedient than taking responsibility for the fact that we’ve reached a point where a few people have everything and most other people have stuff all. We can add to this perverse picture the fact that the people who are trying to tell us how things should be are in no position to. I mean – we’re hardly going to have a balanced dialogue about distribution while people like Yvette Cooper are involved in it (I’ve just read her latest watery “article” on immigration, which is why I’m thinking about her. I usually try not to). Let’s face it. People like Cooper are not well-placed to join the rest of us in pointing the finger at MPs who milk expenses, to take an example. Which is a pity, because a lot of people are still very upset about things like MPs’ expenses. Very upset indeed, as you’ll see from the quotes below. I am not much of a strategist, but even I can see why someone like Cooper would find it much easier, and much less compromising, to rattle on about controlling immigration instead of addressing the monumental equalities crisis in which she and other politicians are implicated.

This is the sort of thing that people say to me a lot – I’ve pulled out some quotes from my articles from the past few years:

“People like us are screwed to the ground. They’ve legalised bullying. They wear suits….They’re getting away with it. It’s the fucking bankers that ought to be done for it….They’re pointing the fingers in the wrong direction.”

“The government don’t give a shit about the people. Just their friends. They’re given massive tax breaks and they’ll never spend it if they live for another 100 lifetimes. You got people at the other end who can’t even afford to put their heating on and buy some food. They’ve got to be the biggest bastards ever on the planet. They’re not kings. They don’t look after their people.”

“The expenses, you know, that some people are claiming for pornographic DVDs…. Just got no respect. The kids have got no respect now. [Leaders need to] lead by example. Right now, they’re making it up.”

You see my point. A lot of not-rich people understand that the political class wants to flush them like turds. They’re not too happy about it. Little wonder that politicians are falling over themselves to direct that anger elsewhere.

Anyway.

I’m an EU immigrant myself, so may be forced to take a break from all this soon to pack for Dublin (am here on an Irish passport). Before I go – here’s a bit more on the sort of crap that people have to put up with from the political class, as opposed to immigrants:

It’s a Tuesday afternoon and there’s a group of older guys standing outside the Clacton jobcentre on Station Road. They’re lining up at a side door, waiting to be let into some work training thing or other. Nobody seems to know exactly what they’ll be doing at the training, or why. All they know is they have to be there and that they have to line up at this locked door like they’re six and waiting to be let into school.

The first guy I talk with is an older bloke with white hair. We don’t talk for long. He is furious about Universal Jobmatch. “The worse thing I ever done is looking for a job on that computer,” he says. “It’s a waste of time. I’ve looked for about 1500 jobs on it.”

The second guy is Mark*, 45. He’s been signing on for five months. Before that, he worked in caravan parks and as a printer. He’s trying to retrain because “for the last 30 years I’ve earned my living through hard manual labour. I can’t do it now, because I’m 45 and I’m tired. That’s why I’m taking myself to school.”

He says:

“There’s about 468,000 jobs across the UK, yet there’s two and a half million people unemployed, so if them jobs was filled tomorrow, you’re going to have two million people going to the jobcentre, fighting over them. But they don’t tell you that. You have to search and find out yourself. You go onto Universal Jobmatch and they monitor it. They can see what you’re doing, because you give them a government ID number. It’s effectively a virtual chip. They can see all your job search that you’ve done to look for work. I think that what they’re forgetting about is the miseries that they are causing.

“Basically, I’ve signed on for five months. I’ve taken myself back to school. I’m doing IT. Last week, they informed me that you’ve got to sign on every week now instead of every fortnight.

“I’ve only been in Clacton for three years. I’ve only worked in the caravan parks – it’s seasonal work. Prior to that, I was a printer for seven and a half years. [For the last 30 years] I’ve earned my living through hard manual labour. I can’t do it now, because I’m 45 and I’m tired. That’s why I’m taking myself to school. I’ve always pined for a desk job, but I never really believed in myself, so that’s why I’ve taken myself back to school. I’m doing some IT stuff and hopefully will have the confidence and skills to look for a desk job. It’s all IT now. But unfortunately, I’ve had to be here [at the jobcentre] while I’m doing all of this. Hopefully, that’ll be it.

“There is work round here. I think there is. There are jobs, but I think most of it is zero hour contracts and things. You’re going in and you’re not being paid and then they might not take you on.”

Then Mark makes the point that so many people do. He talks about unfairness on the local scene:

“When you look at things like “we’re all in it together” and all of that,” he says… “MPs can spend money on getting their curtains cleaned. So it’s swings and roundabouts. The MPs need to have either an increase in wages and [us] say – look, that is your expenses. It comes out of your wages just like everyone else. They pay their bills and all their running of their car, their shopping and their whatever [out of that]. No expenses. It’s eliminated.”

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I spend the morning talking with Clacton CAB adviser Tom, 28. He manages food voucher allocation (“we give out ten or 20 a week”) and an emergency essential living fund which has replaced crisis loans. The CAB has converted a small storage cupboard in the yard into a phone booth which people file through the office to use. “The job centre got rid of their phones,” Tom explains. “So somebody comes into the JCP and says “I’ve got no money. I need to deal with this.” They say – “go over to the CAB, use their phones and deal with them.”

He says:

“And so they have just cut off any support that they had for people. [Benefit] sanctions are a real problem. The biggest one we get is that they didn’t receive the letter. Some of the people we see don’t have a fixed abode. They’ve been in the night shelter.

“Debt is a massive problem down here. Another one is that people lose their job and it takes them about eight weeks to get their benefit started. They are left with this big gap. One of the things is that somebody gets a job and doesn’t get paid for a month. They stop their benefit and they have a whole month of where they’re completely skint. They have to do the whole thing of coming in here [to the CAB] and using the foodbank and the essential living fund just to live in that month. You’d think that if the government wanted people to get back into work they’d say “we’ll pay your benefits right up until you first get paid.” People need to get to work. They need to buy uniforms. They need to buy their lunch. They need to do all of these things.

“We see a lot of zero hours contracts. Their work isn’t secure. Round here, there’s a lot of seasonal work.

“We see more young people than older people. I don’t know if that’s a generational thing – that older people are less likely to ask for help. We’ve got the nightshelter around the corner and they are mostly younger people. They all come here en masse every day to use the phones, because the jobcentre won’t let them. We had to have a rule that they can’t come in until one o’clock when we’ve done with our normal advice service.

“The nightshelter is hostel accommodation. People are allowed to stay there for about six weeks and somebody from the local council office will go down there and try to sort them out.

“[We get] people leaving prison – mostly Chelmsford, to place them when they leave. They don’t support them. They give them an allowance that they can leave prison with and that’s that. You’re on your own. You can find your own house and find your own housing benefit – but we’re going to move you away from your family and friends… If people don’t find anywhere after six weeks in the nightshelter, then they’re [basically] on the streets. We’ve got a lot of homeless people in Clacton. We see some of them here and we try and help them. There needs to be something for these people, but that costs money.

“I hate people moaning without solutions. There are several things [we could do]. Give everyone a standard wage. Just give everybody a flat amount of money and get on with it. I think they should bring everyone up to a certain level and then the sky’s the limit once you do that. There should be incentives, but there should be a minimum that everyone should have that can’t be sanctioned or taken away, so that they don’t have to rely on us or the emergency funds.

“People pay for it. Everybody pays. So – why not just have a proper system?”

———————-

Exactly.

*name changed

First story from outside the jobcentre: Kilburn
Second story from outside the jobcentre: Neasden
Third story from outside the jobcentre: Marylebone
Fourth story from outside the jobcentre: Kilburn