Posted below is another transcript from interviews with food parcel recipients at Oldham foodbank on 5 December.
This interview made me wonder again where our world went so disgustingly wrong. Plenty of people wonder about that, of course, but there are times when you really ask yourself.
We have Theresa May and her gruesome cabinet playing Brexit and stuffing themselves with holiday food, and then we have people who literally eat and sleep on the pavement.
It’s unfathomable that such excess exists alongside such poverty in the modern age. We don’t need to do this. We know how to feed, clothe and house people. We have the resources to do those things. We just don’t. I can’t tell you how much I hate “reformers” who insist that an individual’s extreme poverty is entirely that individual’s responsibility. Personal responsibility is neither here nor there in such situations. Societal responsibility is the part that matters. That’s the part that is missing. We’re in a place where extreme poverty persists and is allowed to persist.
The Oldham interview was with Roy, 64.
Roy said he was homeless – not a situation you particularly want for a 64-year-old. Roy’s clothes were unwashed and crumpled, and his glasses smeared and greasy. He was working on a crossword when I sat down at his table.
“Cruciverbalism – that’s what crosswords are,” he said. “Cruci – cross. Verbalism – words.”
Roy wasn’t sure which benefits he received. He got a payment each month, so the benefit might have been Universal Credit. Roy said that he was staying on and off in Chadderton on the couch of a “friend” who charged him for the privilege (no doubt the repulsive Theresa May would say Roy’s occasional access to that couch meant he wasn’t homeless):
“He [the friend] is not a very kindhearted person. He’s always after money and I’ve got no money. [I] got some benefits. They only come in once a month. Me bank balance is now down to £1.99 … I don’t know when I get paid again. I have to go to the bank again to check me statement. I don’t know. It might be two weeks.”
Roy was waiting to speak to one of the foodbank volunteers. He hoped that she could help him find accommodation that night. He was worried about having to sleep outside, as well he might have been. Oldham freezes in winter. There was ice on the streets that day:
“The lady over there [the foodbank worker] – she’s very helpful. She’s like a careworker. I wanted to see her today, because I’m homeless outside… it’s not nice in this weather….I got evicted from me last place…bedroom tax. Got evicted for not paying it.”
I don’t know if Roy had a drinking or addiction problem. Doesn’t matter if he did. Backstories interest me less and less. I can’t be bothered picking through people’s histories for evidence that people do or don’t deserve the basics (which is the main reason anyone picks through back stories these days). Everyone deserves the basics. All that matters is the present – that there are people who live in dreadful states while others have everything. Who cares what has gone before in people’s lives?
I tell you this – I doubt Damian Green will pay this kind of price for his past.
Interview transcript (Oldham foodbank, Tuesday 5 December 2017)
“I come here at least probably once a week. People are nice, the staff are nice and the lady over there… she’s very helpful. She’s like a careworker and I wanted to see her today because I’m homeless outside… yeah… it’s not nice in this weather.
I got evicted from me last place, so…bedroom tax. Got evicted for not paying it…
See – the council come around. I lived in…the place where I was evicted from was a two-bedroom place, two-bedroom cottage flat, me and me mother.
Me mother become very ill and had to go into a carehome, so that left one bedroom empty. During this time, a council come around to insulate the loft. They went up there and it took them a week or something like that, but up in the loft, just above where the steps go, I had been saving some money out of me benefits to pay for me mother’s funeral because I knew that she wasn’t going to get better.
I was saving this money and I got it to £600. My mother had moved been moved – because of her physical state, she’d been moved to one nursing home to another. So I had £600. We have a family grave in Gorton cemetery and I was saving up to have me mother buried in the grave with my grandfather and me father. But when the council had done the loft insulation…as they were doing it, I had stuck the £600 that I’d saved… I hid it in a very little hole in the wall in the loft. Nobody could see it. Council were there doing the loft insulation… finished it.
I went up to check it and the money was still in there in the hole in the wall. Then about a week later, the council sent two guys around to check the loft insulation to check that it had been done correctly. They were up there only a couple of hours and come back down and said, “yeah, it’s okay.”
I went upstairs to get the money and the £600 had been nicked. I thought, “right I’m not paying bedroom tax now, because I have to save up for my mother’s funeral.
I’m 64… homeless.
[Last night] I slept at a guy’s house who I know in Chadderton. I was sleeping on the settee, but he’s not a very kindhearted person. He’s always after money and I’ve got no money…got some benefits. They’re not… they only come in once a month and me bank balance is now down to £1.99 … I don’t know when I get paid again. I have to go to the bank again to check me statement. I don’t know. It might be two weeks.
I was born in Clayton. I’ve got cousins somewhere, but they’ll all be getting on and they don’t live anywhere around here. Like – some in Canada, places like that, so I haven’t seen them for years. Don’t know if they’re still alive.
When I got evicted from where I live, the council sold everything – all my belongings, everything. They just sold everything. They just came one day and pick up everything they can carry, so all I had was a backpack with a change of clothes in and a sleeping bag. Then I went – I went to stay the night at friend’s house, which was six doors away. In the morning, the van was removing all me equipment and all that – all me furniture, important sentimental things like me mother’s violin. That was from the 18th century. They took everything – all me scuba-diving gear, all me family photographs… things that mean a lot. [They] changed the locks on the door, so I couldn’t get in, so I was left just homeless with the backpack.
Can’t remember when… I used to write things down in my diaries, but they took all that as well. I don’t know – maybe about 18 months ago [unclear] or something….been sleeping in the park, or on the park bench. You know, in warmer weather.
I’ve got a guy now who says I can stay there at his place, but he keeps wanting money off me.
I’ve known him a few years – not as a good friend. He knows me from when I used to live in Moston. He, he used to go down … I don’t know…
Got a pound left in the bank account. I’ve got 60p. I go to the Asda where I can buy a sandwich or a cold pie for one pound, see, so that has to do me.
Societal responsibility indeed, except that the Tories don’t believe in the existence of Society, apart from Camoran’s so-called “Big Society”, which was justa cynical euphemism for dismantling the State. I know how Roy must feel, down to a few pence in the bank, I’m in the same boat in that respect, except at least I do have a roof over my head. Got no gas though. It was turned off two weeks ago due to a leak & I’m still waiting for the plumber to return, been left with no heating apart from a little electric fan heater I borrowed from the foodbank. I was relying on my JSA being in the bank today but it hasn’t come. It’s normally due tomorrow but the Jobcentre said it would be paid a bit earlier over the hols. That’s screwed me up because I have a direct debit going out today for debt payments, £9.50 in total, but there’s nothing in the bank to cover it so I’ll get a £35 bank charge, which means I won’t be able to buy enough food etc. over the coming fortnight, & won’t be able to pay my Council Tax on time. What a start to the new year!
Fuck’s sake this is inhuman. This shit can’t go on. It can’t.
I know, it sucks. Life is a bag o’shite. I just have to console myself with the thought that at least I’m not homeless. Hopefully my JSA will come tomorrow, i.e. on its normal day. Why the fuck they said it would come early, and why the fuck I actually believed them, I do not know. Maybe the bank can waive the charges. As for the gas problem I’ll just have to keep on at the landlady & the plumber. If it’s anything like the boiler problem last year, took 3 months of living with no hot water before it got fixed. In the meantime, I have to focus on doing my jobsearch in order to avoid getting Sanctioned….
Keep your chin up Trev, don’t let those Tories grind you down. It’s a joke, they haven’t kept up their side of things, your payments. But there’d soon be trouble if you didn’t keep up the jobsearch. It’s all just extra hassle to get people off benefits.
cheers mate,it’s all a bit ofa pain but I’ve been thru some tough times inthe pastso I’msurei’ll survive somehow:)
I always contact them if a payment isn’t in my account by the time the post has been delivered. These cunts, say any errors you should have told us about MAY, more likely WILL cost you £50 when they find out about them.
I got every penny back when the DWP said I had been overpaid about 10 years ago, first, they said £170+ then £160+ even though they were only paying me £41 a week. I contacted them when they claimed £41 a week was correct, but when I finally got the printout from a SAR I threatened court if they didn’t refund the £170+ & the £160+, I also demanded payment for stress and error but as I was in hospital when the money went in I couldn’t be sure if I got all of it plus compensation.
Threats of court when they know they are wrong and are just trying it on can scare the crap out of them .
Trev.
Did you get your payment mate??
I hope you did Trev!!
Please take care mate & look after yourself!!
Ritchie
Yes Ritchie, thanks, it came thru on the 29th, ie the normal date NOT early as the Jobcentre had told me (hence the confusion). No Bank charges for being overdrawn have been deducted as yet, unless it goes on next month’s statement, I’ll have to wait & see but might have got away with it. Happy New Year!
So pleased for you Trev, that makes a nice change hey!!!
Let’s just hope that in 2018 this bloody useless government start to actually open their eyes & see what they are actually doing to the people of this once great country mate.
But, somehow, I very much doubt it & yet again, the Rich will just get richer, and the poor will continue to just be ignored mate!!!
But here’s hoping So, happy New year to you too Trev! All the very best to you mate!!!
Ritchie
What in the wold is this government doing to people what for make money why they are too many Roy’s in this world what ever happened to humanity Teresa may you are a disgrace
Well Sarah.
Theresa May believes that the many thousands of homeless doesn’t actually mean that they’re living on the streets does it!!
So in her book, it’s not a problem!!!
I don’t know what world this fucking witch is from but, doing what she has now done to the people of this country, I’m so ashamed & embarrassed to say I’m British!!!
People years ago would’ve either been hung or burned at the steak for what this Bitch has done & the most frustrating thing is, she gets away with treating the people of this country worse than animals!!!!
She is one evil twisted Bitch that needs to be stopped!!!!
Here’s a very astute article on Red Pepper about what the Tories are doing to people, and why, and where we are today in this mess, well worth a read if Kate doesn’t mind me posting the link (?):
https://www.redpepper.org.uk/this-isnt-the-end-of-austerity-its-a-new-age-of-cruelty-economics/
Don’t mind at all. Post away!
It’s like a deliberate culling of the unwanted in society. And here again we are hard on the heels of the Americans with their mass poverty and government unconcern.
This is still a wealthy country. Why do things have to be made so awful for so many people ?
This is what happens when the government decides to turn away from it’s own citizens. When they operate a deliberate policy of reducing welfare to the absolute minimum, based on political theories of non-intervention by the state. The weakest fall by the wayside, and the government no longer even pretends to care.
Very true John ! And they call themselves Christians !
This is one of the worst parts of all this, the way that ignoring cruelty and unfairness is just becoming normal. But ther is one way to stop all this, and that is for the public to stop voting Tory, again and again. All you’ll get is more of the same.
I’m still suprised by the lack of public anger over all of this. I know it’s there, and I think the tide is beginning to turn, at least about the disabled. But its incredible what the Tories are still getting away with, when you think about it. Who gave them the right to do all this ?
Yes I find that difficult as well. Maybe people don’t realise how things are for many others or maybe they also think that people who must live this way somehow deserve it.
i think it’s perhaps because Society has become more fragmented, & distracted. The lines were more defined in the past, in a simpler world. Even the Left have fragmented, look at the rifts in the Labour Party. And rampant Consumerism seems to have resulted in a de-Politicized Proletariat.
People are stunned really by all that has happened. The speed of it, and the way the support systems have just collapsed. Trouble is they get used to it. Like foodbanks and all the people you see sleeping rough.
Helen
You’re so right what you said!!
It’s about time the people of this once great country stood together & said “enough is enough” I for one would be well up for That!!!!
To throw this evil Bitch out of power would give me so much pleasure!!!
Disgusting that there are £12 billion pounds of Welfare Cuts still to come over the next few years. An unpleasant time-bomb that ‘Generous George’ Osbourne left behind him, before he retreated into revenge journalism.
And this is from services already cut to the bone. Now the Tories are going to suck the last bit of marrow out as well. But not before they’ve fed as many as possible through the mincer of Universal Credit.
And the bankers who started this ? Laughing all the way, well, to the bank.
Along with their Tory masters, and their puppets in the right-wing media.
There needs to be some serious activism in 2018 on the welfare cuts.
Demonstrations, and a co-ordinated campaign about these real issues.
Not just who has or has not got a job, but about homelessness, and people going hungry. As basic as that.
And not about getting trainers and free ice-cream, but doing something about these cuts and Universal Credit.
Social security, for that is its real name, not ‘welfare’ as the Tories have tried to re-brand it, should be for everyone. Like medical care.
When you get picked up by an ambulance they don’t ask, ‘does this person deserve to go to the hospital ?’ They just take people in because they need medical help. As it should be. One of the worst things the Tories have done over the past few years is to introduce this, deserving / undeserving nonsense into everything. Where people are judged as morally fit to receive social security, or not. Food, shelter, medical care and a basic income for essentials should be available for everyone.
Not rationed out on the basis of some theory of moral character. These things are far more important than that.
Very well said
Jeremy Corbyn needs to stand aside and let Father Christmas do the job.
Then it would be Christmas every day.
Are you congenitally stupid?
Well Jeremy Corbyn, so this is Christmas and what have you done ? Another year over, and another just begun.
Bev, be real – Corbyn is useless, and most of his own MP’s don’t want him as leader. Including my local MP. If Corbyn stays as leader, drifting uselessly along, then they are going to lose again in 2022, 2027,2032 etc.
Its got to be said, Jeremy Corbyn is not a great performer in parliament.
He struggles to get his points across. And when he does they seem to be technicalities rather than real argument. He’s not a particularly good or articulate speaker. He means well, in a sort of muddled general way, but its not enough.
Even when the Tories are in trouble, on Brexit, Universal Credit, whatever, he just can’t do it. And a lot of people just can’t see him as Prime Minister.
Just like Ed Miliband and Neil Kinnock.
Agree with that. The Tories are reeling everywhere but I get the feeling it will be one of their own who take them down rather than Corbyn.
Pingback: 64, homeless, sleeping on a couch that a “friend” charges money for…the Tories should rot in jail for all of this | Kate Belgrave – leftwingnobody
I agree that Corbyn is not terribly effective in Parliament but it would be difficult for anyone to make any inroads simply because the Tories lie and lie and lie. Corbyn is what we have and we have to work with him.
I like Corbyn, but feel as both a Green Party member and a member of Unite the Union’s Community Section — aka ‘Unite Community’ — that there is currently too much of a ‘love in’ between McCluskey’s dubiously ‘democratic’ leadership of Unite the Union and Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party: Unite Community union branches are currently being instructed to attempt to recruit more members into the Labour Party.
For Labour’s current branding slogan — ‘For the many, not just the few’ — to work in reality, I believe Corbyn’s leadership should embrace Proportional Representation, and not cower from it.
And Jeremy Corbyn keeps asking Theresa May for her agreement to some point he is trying to make. Then when unsuprisingly she doesn’t agree, he’s lost. And just stands there looking as if he doesn’t know what to say next.
Theresa May is not called the ‘Maybot’ for nothing by the press, so Corbyn is not facing some great parliamentary speaker. But even so he just flounders about helplessly.
He also seems strangely innocent, even naive at times.
I remember earlier in the year when Corbyn was making some laborious point to parliament. About a meeting he had attended. He looked round at the benches and gallery, and said ‘And do you know what he said to me ?’ Pausing and raising his eyebrows in his trademark ‘serious’ look.
Quick as a flash some mischievous Tory shouted ‘Who are you ?’ And the whole parliament collapsed into laughter.
Harold Chambers:
And that’s all they would do!
“Collapse into laughter” that is.
Either that or start jeering like the kids that they all are, until the speaker calls for order on the classroom full of children! or, most of them would be falling asleep as we all see so very often!!! Or playing on their phones, as we yet again all see so very often!!
All of the above while disabled people of this once great nation are struggling to live & eat, all while people are sleeping rough on the streets dying of starvation or commiting suicide as they just cannot see any way out!!
It’s pathetic, totally pathetic & thats the behaviour that we all see while in the REAL WORLD outside Parliament suffers, from those running this country!!!
No wonder were in the Fucking mess were now in with tossers like that running this now useless country!!!!
If all you ‘ good people and ‘pretend good people’ got behind Corbyn the socialists would win the next election.
So in other words, after the Miliband debacle. The bacon sandwich, the nasal problems and the monumental idiocy of the Edstone, Labour are just going to line up behind an unpopular leader and hope for the best ? Comrade, I tell you now it won’t work.
The MSM have already done their worst to discredit Corbyn. They have nothing left. We’ve heard it all. Repeatedly.
And so did the homeless, the disabled and the unemployed. They cried out to Labour under Milband and did they get a response ? Just the sight of Labour MPs voting under orders for the 2012 Welfare Reform Act.
Monika, it’s not about being ‘pretend good people’, it’s just that Labout have let us down badly in the past. Milband was hopeless. Labour abstained from voting against Tory Welfare Reforms. Miliband wouldn’t back strike action. Rachel reeves & Liam Byrne used exact same rhetoric as Tories – promising to be tougher on welfare than the Tories, etc. Why does anyone have to be “tough” on Welfare? Where’s the compassion? Then there’s some of us who remember Blair/Brown days of ‘New Deal’ – 13 weeks of daytime Prison for the unemployed or else a Sanction. I did New DEeal at least 3 or 4 times, it was hell. Sat in an overcrowded stinking classroom from 9 – 5 for 3 fucking months for the sake of it. That alone is enough to put me off voting Labour, and is in fact the exact reason I didn’t vote for Miliband, well that & the fact that Labour HQ at the time told me that they fully supported the use of Benefit Sanctions and saw then as an “vital tool on helping people back to work” Fucking bullshit. Same as Tory cunts. Having said all that, I would be prepared to give Corbyn a chance, as the first real Leftie Labour leader in decades. But I don’t hold out much hope of things changing.
I don’t think its just the media as far as Labour / Corbyn are concerned.
Many people are not very happy with their performance, and would prefer some more direct action. Look at Universal Credit. Corbyn won’t say just scrap it, and start again. He knows full well its basically a punitive system designed to force benefit claimants into work by using harsh sanctions. It wasn’t so long ago that Rachel ‘Ruthless’ Reeves was crowing that Labour would be ‘tougher than the Tories’ on benefit claimants. Now they are luke-warm on Universal Credit. Labour zig-zag this way and that trying to position themselves, yet with no real direction. People don’t know what Labour stand for. They are still not trusted on the economy by the wider general public. A fact not helped by their enthusiasm for Marxism. Yet they won’t engage in the sort of serious opposition to the Tories that they should be undertaking. Its six of one and half-a-dozen of the other.
Me mother become very ill and had to go into a carehome, so that left one bedroom empty. During this time, a council come around to insulate the loft. They went up there and it took them a week
I was saving this money and I got it to £600 the money was still there.
Then about a week later, the council sent two guys around to check the loft insulation to check that it had been done correctly. and the money was gone.
I find this utterly disgraceful for workers that are entering a persons home what people save or have to the side should never be touched in the first place.
I suspect hed had a go at the council about this but as no proof lost the case I suspect anyone else in this situation would be so livid no one from the council entered the property or was watched like a hawk after this fact
Happy New Year Kate ! And long may your blog continue.
The best place to find out the truth about what’s happening.
And the real effects on people of the austerity / welfare ‘reform’ programme.
Many thanks Jeff and Happy New year to you too! Thanks for your reading and comments xx
The mention above of further ‘welfare cuts’ to come reminds me of hearing in discussion with Romayne Phoenix — when she was Chair of Coaliton of Resistance Against Austerity — that 80% of the public cuts agreed under the terms of the ‘bailout’ had yet to be implemented. (That was at least six years ago.)
Picking up on Roy’s comment about the foodbank worker ‘being like a carer’, I wonder whether in his back story he might have had a council-funded care worker, and subsequent cuts in council budgets and thus council-funding had led to meeting his support requirements became regarded as superfluous? (Disability Equality Trainer Michèle Taylor said in 2004, “The word ‘requirements’ is more powerful than ‘needs’ because it connotes both rights and responsiblities.”)
I anticipate that one of the reasons things are likely to get worse in England & Wales over the coming year is that council services are being run down to the bone; Hereford’s CAB is already on skeletal service, and central government funding of local authorities ceases entirely from 2019!
I also wonder how long charities such as Citizens Advice, Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Child Poverty Action Group will capitulate to the Tory idea that Universal Credit is ‘a good idea’? They seem to be saying that so as to not appear to be ‘politically motivated’ in their opposition to what is going on under this government, and not sufficiently referring to the fact that a sanction on ‘Universal Credit’ as an omnibus benefit is often an omnibus benefits sanction brought on by a lack of bargaining power. (‘Claimant Commitment’ should really stipulate what supports the claimant will get and why, so as to accommodate the predictable ways that the DWP side of things will be screwed up, for example. In contract terms, this Government shows no ‘consideration’ for claimants.)
In 1976 the Grunwick Strike started after an articulate worker from an ethnic minority was advised by her local CAB how she and her colleagues could join a trade union in order respond to sweat shop photographic development laboratory conditions in a blazingly hot summer when her demand for her employer’s services was boosted by recommendation of ‘Which?’, and most British people were out sunning themselves. Would a CAB be able to get away with giving out such advice in 2018?
Roy referred to bedroom tax, which seems to have come in alongside imposition by local authrities of a measure of council tax on those too poor to be taxed. In 2015 the Hereford Times reported:
“ALMOST 27,000 people have been issued a summons to attend court for not paying Council Tax in Herefordshire since 2012.
“It means Herefordshire Council is owed more than £2.5 million in unpaid tax – and issuing the summonses has cost it an additional £2.3 million.
“The figures, revealed to the Hereford Times in a Freedom of Information request, show that the number of people receiving a summons has increased each year and has fuelled fears that proposed cuts to the county’s Council Tax reduction scheme would impact those already living in poverty or on low incomes.
“Claire Keetch, chief executive of the CAB, said: ‘Help with paying Council Tax is only given to those on very low incomes and the amount of unpaid tax in 2014/2015 is nearly three-and-a-half times as much owed as that in 2012/2013.
“’This suggests that people are finding it increasingly difficult to pay since that help has been reduced.'”
Hereford’s CAB services have since been savagely cut by the Tory county council and Hereford Times news coverage of Council Tax debt seems to have been terminated.
Now though, Scottish councils are piloting an unconditional Universal Basic Income, and it is not only Scots who should be interested in what happens via those trials.
In closing, I would add that although I was never deemed disabled enough to require council services on account of my disability, the information I received in 2011 via a ‘psychological report’ following diagnostic tests conducted by LB Camden’s Learning Disability Services far exceeded anything I received via ‘helping you back to work’ services since 1977. Under those ‘helping you back to work services’, however benign the Civil Servant I encountered, I was always classed in their terminology as an ‘overstayer’ in the benefit system, rather than a person whose entitlement to additional supports should not be limited by arbitrary rulings.
(SMART objectives — Simple, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-limited — all to frequently come out as what I describe as Spurious, Managerial, Arbitrary, Random and Terminal, as I argued in a Post-16 Educator article in 2008.
In the local library today, doing my jobsearch. An elderly lady 80+ wanders in looking confused and not knowing what to do. She’s using a broom ( seriously ), as a walking aid. She tells the librarian that her carer has not turned up from the agency, and she doesn’t know what to do. Lives alone, so only thing she could think of, where their might be people to help was t the library. Tory Britain today, don’t get old , don’t get sick. The librarian has to phone the agency and arrange a carer to visit her.
Dave G.
Probably because the old ladies carer had to visit her local foodbank my mate!! Joking aside it’s probably the truth!!!
What a fucking sick country this country has turned into! When all the Tory MP’s are worried about are filing their expenses monthly, its so depraved that they should be made to pay for their crimes against humanity!!!
Why isn’t this Witch in Prison for the crimes she is committing against human beings!!!!!!
It’s so totally fucking sickening that I feel physically sick whenever I hear that evil Witches name!!!
Right on Dave ! Its when you hear about things like this you can see how far it has all gone. All very wrong, and yet on and on it goes.
I just wonder why the queen hasn’t stepped in to tell the Bitch running this country to actually “STOP” & “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH”
Why isn’t this happening???
Why isn’t our Queen doing something??!!!!!!
Surely it’s her responsibility to tell this evil Witch to stop persecuting the people of this country!!!
I got told earlier on Twitter to stop being so “dramatic” ive not had a reply from that person since my reply was that on Xmas eve at 11.p.m I was delivering food to a food bank where there were people younger than my 16yr old daughter, queuing for food, freezing, just needing someone to talk too & something to eat!!
The Bitch running this country has now brought it to it’s knees, Its breaking my heart seeing what is now happening to the people of this once great country. There is now nothing at all “Great” about “Great Britain” anymore!!!
I couldn’t actually speak on the way home on Xmas eve because as a 49yr old man, I would’ve broke down in tears!!
Ritchie, there needs to be much more dramatic action about what has happened, not less. That is the trouble, a lot of people who don’t claim benefits think its all being made out to be worse than it is. If anything its a lot worse, because many instances just don’t get heard about. And good for you for helping at the foodbank. Where I am sure you see the reality of things as they are.
The libraries have been a godsend to many people over these last years, and I don’t just mean for the books. You have people with no internet connection at home, who have to use it to jobsearch. Then all the people like the lady mentioned above, who have nowhere else to go for help and advice. On benefits, housing , debt, homelessness, all kinds of things. So many of the council advice places have closed now, leaving people with nowhere official to go for advice.
I keep on hearing this about the internet. Well a lot of people don’t have computers, can’t use them, and don’t have the internet either !
All credit to the library staff for this. Where I live they have been really good.
You see them helping people who can’t use computers make online applications.
Explaining official forms and other stuff to them. makes you wonder what would happen without it.
Pingback: A rise in the number of rough sleepers? Bet those shocking numbers don’t show the half of it. Look at these two guys. | Kate Belgrave