Thoughts on the violence with which Tories punish benefit claimants who break rules. Don’t think many claimants even get a party out of it

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I don’t usually give Tory politicians much thought, except to generally hope they all die. Partygate has roused me though, in what I feel is a very healthy BRING ME MY GUILLOTINE way.

There are 2 allegations I’d like to level at Johnson and Sunak and other party spares today.

The first one I think we can probably describe as murder. This could be hard to forgive.

I think it is possible – let’s call it a dead cert for accuracy’s sake – that Johnson and Sunak et al killed people by holding their parties and mixing with other people at them.

The lockdown concept was straightforward. You didn’t need training to grasp it. The idea was that we distanced ourselves from each other as well as we could so that we didn’t blow this killer virus around. It absolutely followed that if you met up with other people and as a bonus got pissed, you’d pick up the virus and breathe it onto whichever poor bastards had the misfortune to stray into your lethal cloud.

I know this was the idea, because I paid close attention to it. This was partly because I thought it was important for everyone’s health and partly because it was important to my chances of a lasting marriage. My (still) immunosupressed husband was on the extremely clinically vulnerable list. He got regular Stay Inside Or Die emails signed by Matt Hancock, who I now assume was penning these instructions from a dancefloor. Suffice to say that No 10’s lockdowns sounded more fun than ours.

Which takes us back to the parties.

It doesn’t take great imagination to know who’d have been at greatest risk from these parties. Inevitably, the people who take the real hits from these things are the usual disposables: people who clean toilets for and during flash parties, or people who prepare food, or people who worked in nearby shops that sold crisps and party booze, or carers and keyworkers who, during the party months, had to use public transport and/or tend to the sick and who had no choice but to breath in fumes guffed out by roaming Tory swingers and people they’d spread covid to.

There would also have been the family members of all these people – family members who shared the overcrowded and unventilated homes that low-paid people could not self-isolate in. And of course, of course – I realise that some people in these jobs might be migrant workers, so who would really be bothered counting, but still. You could kill people by holding parties and you could make a lot of other people very, very sick. A shit show even for Tory grandees.

I rant on.

Let’s move my second point/allegation – that the Tories let themselves off the hook for rule-breaking, but viciously punish people in poverty who break rules. Hypocrisy is the theme here.

To get a feel for this, let’s go to the DWP – the government department which for as long as I remember has jointly held first prize (with the Home Office, which may be edging ahead today with the Rwanda refugee-dumping idea) for the job of thrashing poor people on behalf of government.

I’ve spent over a decade going to jobcentre meetings with people at the absolute arse-end of poverty – jobcentres being places which deliver an absolute smorgasbord of opportunities for anyone who is looking to watch the state smash people in need.

The state does this by catching people out for “breaking” ridiculous rules – rules that have considerably less point to them than the Don’t Have Parties During Covid ones did.

Here, for example, is Linda – an older woman with learning and literacy difficulties, bawling her eyes out at Kilburn jobcentre. Why was Linda upset? A jobcentre adviser had closed Linda’s benefit claim, because Linda had broken the “missed meetings” rule that the DWP held sacrosanct for the very simple reason that it could trip heaps of people up on it. Linda missed 2 meetings, because she’d been very sick and had had thrombosis.

It was amazingly hard to find anyone who gave a shit about that, though. I searched for quite a while. Jobcentre advisers knew Linda well. The knew she had learning difficulties and was ill. They knew she needed on her benefits to buy food and pay rent (her housing benefit was stopped when her JSA claim was closed, which meant that the eviction threats had started piling up). Advisers knew there’d be a reason for Linda not showing up to meetings. They’d have known for sure she wasn’t at a party.

Still – the rules said that missing 2 meetings in a row meant you lost your benefits then and there, even if you were sick and disabled. Or especially if you were sick and disabled. No better way, after all, to cut the benefits bill that to stress sick people to the point of collapse. Linda was so sick that day at the jobcentre that I had to get advisers to call an ambulance. Probably as far as the DWP was concerned, things were going beautifully to plan.

If you can stand it, here’s a covert video I made of Linda crying with stress at the jobcentre. No points lost if you can’t stand it, though. It wasn’t much of a day.

But hey ho and on we go. Let’s look at some of the other below-the-poverty-line rule breakers I’ve met over the years.

Here’s Craig at Stockport jobcentre. I got to know Craig in 2018. He had serious mental health issues and struggled to dress, wash and leave the house a lot of the time. He’d been getting universal credit for about a year.

He wasn’t getting much of it when we met, though. He was on a sanction that day – he’d been sanctioned twice in a row. The rules Craig broke to get sanctioned? Bloody ridiculous. The first sanction was for breaking the sick note rule. He was supposed to take a sick note to the jobcentre, but was too unwell to go. Craig was often very unwell. I can’t actually remember what the second sanction was for, but I do know that it was hot on the heels of the first. The first sanction went from January to March and the second from March to June. Probably another missed meeting thing. What I can say with confidence is that it wasn’t for wilfully spreading a killer virus that he’d sucked in at a banned party.

Let’s crack on. Anne, in her 50s, was also at Stockport jobcentre that day. Anne had been sanctioned for missing a meeting the day after she’d been in hospital. She called the jobcentre to let advisers know she wouldn’t be in, but nobody passed the message on. Or they chucked the note in the bin. Rules are rules, after all. Anne was certainly paying for her transgression. She was getting £40 a week in hardship money, instead of the usual JSA riches of £72 or whatever it was. That was going about as well for her as you might imagine:

“”I’m on Pay As You Go [for] gas and electric – ten pound a week on them two. Then you’ve got £30 a week on food… I even had to borrow £4 off her [Anne’s daughter] to get up here about my money [the bus ride to Stockport jobcentre from Anne’s place cost about £4]. I went to the bank on the Wednesday and I thought “Oh No.” I didn’t even have the £4.”

People had appealed these sanctions, but as you know – good luck with that. Better idea is to create a diversion by sending people in need to Rwanda.

To this blog’s most recent rule-breaker then: N, a young mother of 2, whose story I’ve been writing about this year.

When we started talking at the start of this year, N was homeless, pregnant and about to be evicted (with her toddler) from the homelessness hostel she lived in. Her transgression? – she said No to a flat that her council told her to move to. She had good reason to say No. The flat was a ground-floor place with a shonky front door that she thought her abusive ex could easily break through.

Still, the council clung to its decision to evict her from the hostel for saying No even after N’s reasons for saying No were explained. Sad to threaten to chuck a woman with a toddler and a newborn onto the street, but there it is. How else do you get through to people in poverty, really. They must be held to the rules.

46 thoughts on “Thoughts on the violence with which Tories punish benefit claimants who break rules. Don’t think many claimants even get a party out of it”

  1. God I’m so sick of this country and its evil fascist regime. And as if all of the above wasn’t bad enough the Tories have just announced that migrants who cross the Channel will now be flown to Rwanda. WTF. Fucking Rwanda.

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  2. Oh dear God, oh dear God, oh dear God. Just can’t even begin to understand how people can think and behave this way. Destroying people. How do they live with themselves? Do they enjoy it? Malicious.

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  3. When I attended the Jobcentre on Tuesday I saw a notice in the window saying that the y will be shut on Good Friday but it said underneath that you will still be able to do jobsearch on their website. The cheeky bastards. If they think I’m doing any jobsearch over Easter Bank Holiday weekend they can think again. Happy Easter everyone. Enjoy eating chocolate and hot cross buns! (I’m not supposed to eat either).

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    • Happy Easter to you as well. Great news re: being able to do jobsearch today. Those bastards just never disappoint.

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  4. The longer this abuse of we who are so vulnerable goes on, the longer I despair that people have just turned hard, and don’t care about the pain and despair caused by this terrible excuse for a government!

    It’s so typical of tories, that they create this, so that we’re so beaten by it all, that we can’t fight them, as they steal everything our parents and grandparents fought so hard for us to have.

    I’m absolutely dreading them restarting the changeover, where they will be forcing those of us who are still on Legacy Benefits, onto Unversal Credit, as I know it’s just an exercise to get even more of us off of benefits, and forced into searching for jobs for 35 hours a week – when we all know that any job that so many of we disabled could do, would definitely not last longer than it took for our health to drop badly – for me, that’s about 10 minutes of just moving!

    It hasn’t been this bad, for the vulnerable, since Hitler took over Germany – or, in the UK, since Victorian times!

    Wishing you all as happy an Easter as you can manage 🙂

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    • Sunak’s shame about the wife’s tax status didn’t last long then.

      Nice to have a heated pool tho innit. Maybe the rest of us can go and warm up in it.

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      • I can’t afford to go to the launderette this fortnight so could maybe do a handwash in his pool. Seriously I’m down to one quid and I’m not even Sanctioned, wtf?

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  10. If people anywhere across the country are voting Labour it’s probably out of sheer desperation rather than anything to do with Keir Starmer’s leadership. And will anything change? Does anything ever change for people at the bottom of the pile? From Thatcher to Blair, Brown to Cameron, Clegg, May and Boris, they’ve all failed us and fucked us over, as has every single government from at least Heath onwards. 50 years of bollocks, lies and skullduggery while the rich get richer and everyone else fights over a crust.

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    • Precisely. I know I’m supposed to get excited about councils going Labour, but given that I spend a lot of my time going nowhere with Labour councils trying to sort out housing for people who have nothing, I’m not hugely inclined to party. People get excited about Labour gains on twitter, but that might as well be Pluto for all the difference it’ll make to the people I’m working with.

      At best, they’re probably slightly less shit, but that has never really grabbed me as a sales pitch.

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      • 21st Century Britain and people are still sleeping in mouldy bedrooms, and struggling to afford heating or to eat, and are in constant risk of having their already grossly inadequate State Benefits stopped. Any Council or Political party out there actually bothered?

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    • Good words Trev. I’m quite incredulouos that Tories can come out with such drivel and the Opposition lets them get away with it unchallenged. As far as I’m concerned, the difference between the Tories and Starmer’s lot can be measured with a fag paper, and as Kate says, it comes to something when we find ourselves hoping for something that’s just slightly less shit. I love this graphic, which for me, says it all: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS5eCjk0xHi5cHx_2szYI3qvypupVH51pTjBg&usqp=CAU

      I think Oscar Wilde had it about right when he wrote this:

      “Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing.”

      I can’t imagine what those 30p meals are like, but I suspect they won’t be very apetising and I imagine the portion size wil be miniscule.

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  14. “Cost of living crisis: Critiquing the measures to maximise income – Policy in Practice”

    “In the recent Queen’s Speech the government announced that its priority is to help ease the cost of living crisis for families yet it offered no new practical support. The measures to maximise income previously introduced leave many families without enough to meet their essential costs. This raises the question of whether or not the social security net is meeting needs. Tylor-Maria Johnson writes a three part series looking at Universal Credit and how its impact is limited by a combination of policy features and austerity measures that expose many households to significant financial challenges”
    Continues…

    https://policyinpractice.co.uk/cost-of-living-crisis-critiquing-the-measures-to-maximise-income/

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  16. The cost-of-living crisis, compare and contrast…

    A Pensioner with Cancer eating one meal a day and a widow cuddles the dog to keep warm:

    https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/cost-of-living/devastating-reality-yorkshire-cost-living-24012959

    Whilst there are a record number of Billionaires:

    https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/sunday-times-rich-list-2022-24003429

    https://www.news.sky.com/story/amp/sunday-times-rich-list-2022-uk-has-a-record-number-of-billionaires-12617181

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  19. So I went to the Jobcentre this morning and was given two jobs to apply for, one as a Retail Assistant at Primark, a place I avoid like the plague, and the other for a Customer Service Host at Dunelm. I have no previous Retail experience apart from a 4 weeks unpaid Work Placement at Pets At Home 6 years ago that consisted of standing around looking awkward whilst pretending to clean the shelves. I have no Customer Service experience unless you include volunteering at the foodbanks. I know nothing about clothing fashions. I’ve only ever been inside a Dunelm shop once in my life and found it rather frightening and overwhelming as I know zilch about posh trendy household interior stuff at insanely inflated prices. I have no experience of cash-handling or using a til. At the end of my work placement (Skills Conditionality scheme) back in 2016 I provided feedback saying what I had learned, i.e. that Retail work is not for me. Obviously no one at the Jobcentre reads any such feedback or makes a note of it.

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  21. So much for “levelling up”. This just goes to show how many poor people don’t even have a bank account or are so desperate for cash. Either way, two hour queues at a pawn brokers resembles a scene from 1929 ffs not 2022.

    Two hour queues outside Yorkshire pawnbrokers as people desperate to cash £150 council tax rebate cheques

    “A Rotherham pawnbroker ran out of money with people waiting in two hour queues to cash their cheques”

    https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/local-news/two-hour-queues-outside-yorkshire-24206404

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  22. LOL ?

    “Thank you for applying to the Employment Coach position at Maximus UK.
    Unfortunately, Maximus UK has moved to the next step in their hiring process, and your application was not selected at this time”

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  28. More Jobcentre closures and a reduction of Work Coaches (after numbers were doubled post Lockdown). DWP, arse or elbow?

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  29. Hi, shows that Tories haven’t learned how abysmal their policies against welfare benefits claimants is, nor homelessness, penury and poverty caused by themselves since coalition then Tories post coalition!

    And now re chancellor J. Hunt what was announced short while ago, proves their contempt for poor, homeless, able bodied and disabled people too.

    A tsunami of homeless people looks certain under Tories, with DWP wanting to be able to access bank accounts details to see what claimants are spending on is yet another big brother policy by this rancour of a government.

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