I’ve been thinking about these suggestions that new government or leadership (whatever any of that is now) will take another look at austerity and public sector cuts, because worthies have suddenly discovered how much people dislike austerity.
A few of those thoughts:
Yesterday, I went to the South Chadderton foodbank to talk for a few hours with people who came in for food parcels.
I spoke to Emma, 31, Theresa, 50 and one bloke who’d lost his job as a cleaner after an accident and still had all his kids living with him at home.
Emma had two very young children living with her – a boy of five and a baby of six months. She’d had her benefits cut for missing a so-called “workforce meeting” that she hadn’t known about. She also had all sorts of problems with child tax credit – the HMRC was demanding several thousand pounds which it claimed she’d been overpaid back in the day. A lot of money was being deducted from her benefits – for a social fund loan that she thought should be paid off by now and other repayments and totals which she did not think made sense. She said that she was trying to live on about £105 a fortnight. That was with two little kids. Things were going about as well for Emma as you’d expect.
Theresa was in recovery and living on nothing while she waited to see if she could win an appeal against an ESA fit-for-work decision.
I took longer interview recordings with everyone I spoke to, so will post those as an update when I’ve transcribed them.
Point for now is that all these problems still rage on. I am hardly convinced that a government in chaos will undo them. I’m not convinced any government will ever undo them, if I’m honest. I don’t think a lot of people know how badly the public sector has been hit. Frontline services everywhere are in tatters. A lot of the time, you can’t even get through on the phone to council or DWP officers to ask for help with a problem or a claim. If you do get through, often as not they’ve got nothing to help with.
I know a great many people who’ve been clobbered on myriad fronts – endless ESA fit for work assessments, PIP applications which go nowhere, the bedroom tax, problems with tax credits, sanctions, council tax debts, court debts for evictions, the benefit cap and god knows what else. I am of course delighted (ha) to hear the likes of Michael Gove deliver the world of pearlers such as “we also need to take account of legitimate public concerns about ensuring that we properly fund public services,” but honest to god and really. They’ve decimated public services already. They really have. I’ve been writing about this destruction for years now, so I’ve had a good look at the mess. Where would you even start?
Kate
I wrote to you before, but you are not answering. If all you want to do is score political points go on, I am not interested. But if you want to help the homeless, this is the way to start: once you identified a specific problem let us think how the rules can be changed to alleviate solve it and start a petition asking for this change.
Larissa, I’m not at all surprised that Kate is ignoring you. The cause of all this mess is political.
You may not be interested, but that is just you. Many of us are deeply interested in the way that the political environment has been manipulated and much of the populace disenfranchised by the political elite, but sadly, there is only one way to fight back, and that is politically. You mention petitions, is that not political action in and of itself?
It’s not just about the homeless, but also about the millions of people existing in a state of precarity, who could easily find themselves homeless. Oh, and by the way, you don’t do yourself any favours, and rather insult Kate when you suggest that the specific problems of homelessness aren’t known. There are many constituent factors that lead to homelessness, and the authorities know about all of them, as do the political elite. But fundamentally homelessness is caused by people not having a home, and if it was a fundamental right, there would be very little homelessness that didn’t involve a specific choice to be that way.
You may not like it, but the solution to all these problems is fundamentally one that is political at base, as it is political action that brought us to where we are now, and it is political action that will provide the space where we can begin to deal with the issues thrown up by the Tories, of all hues, who are directly responsible for the predicament we find ourselves in.
If you’re so concerned about the perceived lack of action why don’t you start a petition and campaign locally?
I don’t detect any attempt at political point scoring on the part of Kate, and rather discern an approach of a ‘plague on all their houses’ when it comes to politicians and political parties.
Tis true! They all get on my tits. Especially at the moment.
I don’t do petition work etc. I focus primarily on the journalism and the direct action. And the politics 🙂 For now, that’s it.
Petitions may have helped us as a society to reach the point when we start considering how to undo the abuses of the state but now we need action – real action and proper action. We have to get over the stigma and the nastiness and start seeing complicated human lives as complicated human lives……….
I work out of West Northumberland Food Bank. Massive rural area. We are an independent organisation with charitable status. No vouchers, no tugging of forelock or having to have an outside agency patronising a person’s reason for needing food.