As some people know, I write about public sector cuts, so-called “welfare reform” and spend a lot of time talking with people who are on the receiving end of evil shit like the bedroom tax, social care cuts, Atos assessments and so on and so forth.

As some people also know, I’m getting to the end of my tether with it – not the talking with people, which I like, because we sit down for ages and talk about all kinds of things, but the appalling indifference of the political class to the realities of the destruction of social security (and you only need to read this Mirror story to get that). I think I’m witnessing powderkeg situations which are causing people stress that they won’t be able to cope with forever. This couple I’m talking with – we’re in contact every few days now – can’t cope. They’re having to pay the bedroom tax, they’re having to pay council tax now their benefit has been cut and they must also attend Atos assessments. They literally get a letter, or a payment demand, every week. This woman, Mary Laver, made quite clear to me that she’d consider suicide if the money that pays for her carers is cut. But the political class doesn’t give a shit. Nobody listens. Nobody who has the power to make change cares enough to speak out for it. I’m really fucking sick of that. I’m sick of a bloody commentariat which, with a few honourable exceptions, writes of the destruction of social security as though it is utterly inevitable and as though there was just one point in history (the few years after the second world war) when it was possible for politicians to advocate for social security and that we will never have that sort of chance or time again.

I’m sick of knowing that politicians across the spectrum believe that the fight for social security has been lost and has been lost forever, and that it is perfectly acceptable to view anyone who uses health, care, education or housing services as political collateral. I also hate the kind of journalist I’ve become against this appalling austerity backdrop. I feel that I’ve got to a point where I’m acting in too gratuitous a manner: that I’m here to gawp and to offer people up for others to gawp at, so that well-appointed members of the chattering classes can shake their heads and cluck their tongues and say ISN’T THIS GOVERNMENT TERRIBLE and OH LOOK AT THOSE POOR POOR PEOPLE and tweet a bit and then do fuck all about it. I think that I’m making people look pathetic when they are not pathetic. They’re being pushed into a corner and Labour isn’t prepared to fight that corner for them, but that doesn’t make them pathetic. That makes them people who have no political representation. That’s a very dangerous place to be. People who are in that place are totally exposed.

Anyway – I’ve decided to start posting more of the conversations, calls and discussions that I have with people who are going through all this and also some of the conversations that I have with officialdom so that people can see how fucked up so much of this cuts scene is and how real the agonies are. I want people to see how the average day goes.

And here is an average day from last week. I’m writing this one first because it will give you a good idea of the shit that is being talked to journalists as housing associations and their hangers-on try to justify the implementation of the appalling bedroom tax. And yes – I know that officers are struggling with this and have been put in a position where they must implement this dreadful thing, or compromise their own jobs and incomes. However – that is, in my view, an aspect to the thing that housing associations use to justify their own awful political line:

I got out of bed last Tuesday and took the dog for a walk and then I came back and that’s when it all started to kick off. My phone rang (I was expecting it to, but I watched it thrash around for a bit). It was a senior-ish person from the South Liverpool Housing Group – a housing association which is imposing the bedroom tax on tenants who have a so-called spare room.

I stayed in Liverpool for a while in March and met lots of different people who were, at that point, faced with the prospect of paying the tax. At that stage, they were still half-hoping that someone would intervene on their behalf (Liverpool city councillors and/or Ed Miliband, I guess, although they might as well have sent their prayers up to bloody Tinkerbell for all the return they got on that. Everybody knew it was useless. Everybody knew it was useless, because not a single councillor turned up to the bedroom tax meetings that were being held then to offer support. People absolutely knew then they’d been cast adrift). None of those people did intervene on their behalf, of course (I don’t count the Labour councillor flag-waving and handwringing at the March 16 protests as intervention – any politicking bellend with an hour to spare and an eye to the main chance can wave his or her hands and a placard around and say “fuck me – aren’t Tories mean”).

So now, the people I met are actually having to pay the tax.

Because we made contact then and because they know that I think that tax is a fucking joke and that I think the same of any outfit which administers it, those people who must pay the tax have been in touch ever since. They send me the letters they get from their housing associations and councils and ring and email when they get a call or a visit from the above and then I ring the relevant housing associations and/or councils and say, basically, “so are you going to evict people who can’t pay the tax, because I’m talking to people who can’t pay the tax and they want to know if they are going to be evicted as anyone would because nobody wants to be evicted, don’t you think.”

That is exactly what happened last week. Some tenants in south Liverpool who I have come to know made contact to say that there’d been housing officers in their street in the company of a uniformed individual who they thought was a copper (South Liverpool Housing was at pains to point out to me later that the person in the uniform was a community support officer and not a copper, but I have to say I didn’t really care. The point was that people saw the uniform and felt a fear).

Anyway, the housing officers and the uniformed person dropped letters through the doors of people who weren’t home.

The letter said  “We note from our records that you have failed to make any payments towards the bedroom tax. It is important that you contact us immediately to make payment arrangements. We have tried to visit you today to discuss this with you in more detail and to provide you with some options to consider. Please contact us to discuss the impact of the bedroom tax on your household or to arrange a suitable appointment.”

So I rang the HA and sent a bunch of questions (six) about this letter and this door-to-door visiting thing they’re doing with people who “must” pay this shit tax and the HA came back and said that I could speak to someone on Tuesday morning about it (Monday was a bank holiday). I thought about that and decided that I didn’t feel like waiting that long and that I’d be posting the story about the letter before Tuesday, so I went back and told them that and I said something like “how about you answer a couple of the questions before Tuesday as I’ll be posting before then.” I said that because I did not and do not feel that there is all the time in the world to spare on these issues and also being told to wait just generally makes me feel like I don’t want to wait. They agreed. So they came back and told me that the door-to-door visits were part of a regular community event called Walkabout Wednesdays – this is where HA people head out into the community and talk to tenants.

And so I put this in the article:

“SLH was at pains to explain that last week’s home visits were nothing unusual – that the Pay Your Bedroom Tax Now letter-drop merely coincided with a regular community meet-and-greet exercise that SLH calls…. “Walkabout Wednesdays.” That’s one interpretation of last week’s event. Another interpretation – it’s certainly one that went through the minds of our tenant contacts (and our minds, for that matter) –  is that tenants are being doorstepped for this bedroom tax money, a mere month after the tax was introduced. A demand for money is a demand for money, whether or not it is delivered on Walkabout Wednesday. People are very concerned that they will lose their housing over this tax. They’re certainly not confident that they’ll keep their homes.”

Which brings us to my phone ringing last Tuesday morning at 10am and me finding this senior SLH person on the other end of it. I was sitting there on my bed smelling like dog and thinking – I wonder if this guy knows that I’m sitting on my bed smelling like dog. Maybe not.

He seemed a genuine and reasonable guy, but this is the problem in this day and age and this is the point that I must make as clear as I can – ALL of these people seem so genuine and reasonable and even appealing. They seem genuine and reasonable and appealing to an extent that no person has ever been in real life in the history of our species.

This is an age – a long one, mind, as this has been going on for as long as I can remember – where smooth talkers and professional calmer-downers and de-fusers are detailed off to “handle” bloggers (not mainstream journalists – they’ve already been de-fused and handled to the point where they no longer need to be de-fused and handled) and to make vile and unreasonable policies like the bedroom tax and the collection of it sound not only eminently reasonable, but like an okay day out.

And so it was with this guy. He talked for ages about Walkabout Wednesdays and how these meet-and-greet events were held regularly to keep in touch with vulnerable (I hate that word) tenants and make sure they were all right and so that people could raise any issues and talk directly to their housing association so on and so forth… and then he also said that last week’s Walkabout Wednesday simply presented another very good chance for the housing association to catch up with anyone who was affected by the bedroom tax and to remind them that if they hadn’t paid it, they should come in and talk about ways to do that and that he wanted to make the point again that the housing association didn’t agree with the tax, but since it had to be collected, they wanted to talk to people about the best ways to go about that and how to help people budget and so on and so on and…Jesus wept. I’m telling you. These people can fucking speak. Time just wafted on and on with this pleasant, intelligent, reasonable and appealing (We Don’t Like It Either – type statement) male voice on the end of the phone pouring oil and pouring oil and I could feel myself being Borged. I had to force myself to snap out of it. Then he had a go, gently, at the paragraph (the one I copied above) I had written. Here is is again:

“SLH was at pains to explain that last week’s home visits were nothing unusual – that the Pay Your Bedroom Tax Now letter-drop merely coincided with a regular community meet-and-greet exercise that SLH calls…. “Walkabout Wednesdays.” That’s one interpretation of last week’s event. Another interpretation – it’s certainly one that went through the minds of our tenant contacts (and our minds, for that matter) –  is that tenants are being doorstepped for this bedroom tax money, a mere month after the tax was introduced. A demand for money is a demand for money, whether or not it is delivered on Walkabout Wednesday. People are very concerned that they will lose their housing over this tax. They’re certainly not confident that they’ll keep their homes.”

That’s just a fact. A demand for money is a demand for money, no matter how sweetly that demand is presented. I would actually say that the fact that some people seriously believe that it is possible to present a demand for money/a threat to housing in an endearing way is off the planet. But still –

This guy thought me calling this Walkabout Wednesday a “Pay Your Bedroom Tax Now” letter-drop was a little bit unfair, or something like that. I was just sitting there on the bed and I thought – Unfair? FUCK UNFAIR, brother. I am so fucking sick of this. Unfair is being tapped for £14 a week when you’re on a benefit so that a cunt like George Osborne can splash our money out on a meadow for himself. It’s as simple as that. It really is as simple as that. There is no grey area here.

And so I told this bloke that there was nothing unfair about my interpretation and that people who were being chased for money for this tax were perfectly entitled to take a view of that pursuit. If people look out of their windows and see several housing association officers and a person who looks like a copper and then they come downstairs to find a letter which says they owe money and must contact their landlord immediately to arrange to pay it – then they’re perfectly entitled to feel that they’re being doorstepped for money they haven’t got. They’re perfectly entitled to feel threatened. Hardly matters if the person who delivers the letter has the human touch and is a scream at parties or offers to “help” if you come into the office to talk about finding the extra money for the bedroom tax by making cutbacks to your gas and heating bill and other necessities. There’s no way to sugarcoat what is happening here. I rent privately and if my landlord said he was putting up the rent and then turned up with an officer a month later to ask where it was, I’d think – FUCK. I wouldn’t be thinking – hey, Walkabout Wednesday. Ace. Walkabout over here, comrades. Give me a letter telling me I’m fucked. And please – come again. I appreciate your visits. And sure – a lot of housing officers will be having a shitty time enforcing this. I know that. Some of my best friends are housing officers. I really mean that as well – some of my best friends ARE housing officers. I used to work in council and was active in the union and there were a lot of housing stewards who I knew across the boroughs who were and still are great friends. They hate all of this. But they don’t try to tell me that they’re doing their best with it, or that they’re trying to make it as painless as they can. They tell me it’s shit, that they feel their job now is basically to make people homeless and that we’re doomed.

So that was that call. That’s the sort of thing those people say. They are masters at massaging the shit out of situations which are made only of shit. It’s a skill and it’s a skill that people pay for.

But then my phone rang again. It was Sean, a man from Northamptonshire who I’m regularly in contact with. He has Asperger’s syndrome and his wife, Maggie, has schizophrenia. I went to his Atos assessment last year. They literally get a smack in the face from government every week now (I’ve seen their paperwork – it’s quite something). In the last month, Sean and Maggie have had bedroom tax demands (they have one “spare” room), a council tax demand (their tax used to be covered by council tax benefit) and then on Tuesday, Maggie got a letter from the jobcentre saying that she would be moved from incapacity benefit to employment and support allowance, which means that she will probably be called to an Atos assessment at some point. She was, naturally, terrified. She was so frightened that she couldn’t talk to me about it. I ended up speaking with Sean instead.

The thing is – and this is the part that I’m going round and round on – I don’t know what to do. I’m very happy to talk to people and to publicise their problems if they want that, but I’m not a welfare expert, or an advisor and so I’m not helping people very much, or very well. I can direct people to the CAB, or their local welfare rights advisors, if there are still any around, but after that, I don’t know what to do. If councillors aren’t interested and “welfare reform” is the only political game in town and government restrospectively changes legislation to beat decisions which may just have given a few people a bit of breathing space, what are people supposed to do?

And the thing is – often, now, people are worried about making themselves and/or their issues known to people who are perceived to be in any sort of position of authority, or part of the “machine.” Housing associations tell me that they’re trying to “help” people budget and to tell people to contact them if they’re having problems with rent and other costs – but when people who are having those problems hear that, they just snort. And who can blame them? These are the same associations that are sending them payment demands.

What a fucking mess. Seriously. And that’s just a couple of hours out of one day. Most of my days as a journalist are like this now. I honestly don’t know what to do with this information.