Bet he bloody doesn’t.

Food for thought this week at Stockport jobcentre – how do you support yourself if you get sacked?

“You don’t”, looks like the answer to this one. Well – you can if you’re Boris Johnson and can repair to the family pile, unwind with a Gordon’s and soothe the hurt for the next decade by frittering your various slush funds, but we’re hearing today that the party is slower to start if you don’t have the pampered arse background, etc.

We’re talking this morning at the jobcentre with Gary, who tells us he lost his driving job at the start of April. April was also the last time that Gary got any money to speak of. He says that he’s been doing a bit of window cleaning here and there, but he generally gets a handful of change for that, rather than anything vaguely in the vicinity of a living wage. So – it can a while between cocktails for Gary, unlike Boris. Gary had to move in with his dad to stay housed, but even that fallback may not turn out as well as Boris Johnson’s various housing options, because Gary is facing eviction.

Needless to say, the DWP has mostly jilted Gary. Haven’t quite got round to googling this yet, but I imagine that getting the sack when you’re a pleb is a hanging offence, so they’re probably teeing that up. Certainly, the DWP is being furtive in its relationship with Gary. Gary says he applied for universal credit in April, but that that was his last meaningful interface with the department. He hasn’t heard anything useful from them since, despite messaging them and messaging them and messaging them, etc.

He certainly hasn’t seen any money. He’s still waiting for a DWP decision maker somewhere to actually make a decision about his sacking and whether or when he can get any universal credit and what the rules are and so forth. Had a poke around online and I think people who are sacked have to wait some random length of time to start getting universal credit – 13 weeks, or 91 days or somesuch, depending on the reasons why you lost your job – misconduct, etc. Couldn’t quite tell which officious twat decided that was the figure to pull out of the privy – doubtless some diehard policy nut who decided that sacked members of the lower orders needed to repent for at least 3 months and more, and sleep in and eat out of a skip during that time to really feel it, etc. Such is the vengeful DWP and our vindictive political class. Never thought I’d write this line, but you’d probably get more mercy from the Church. Anyway – whatever the rules, nobody’s telling Gary.

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Actually – let’s not.

We’re back at Stockport jobcentre:

First thing that happens – a security guard who over summer has made a keen, if hopeless, effort to befriend our protest group hurries out the front to pass on a dire and utterly vague warning. He’s done this a couple of times over the months – trotted out to alert us to some potential drama or other which I’ve never had enough coffee to get my head around.

“If you see the doors shut, it would mean something is going on,” the guard says, pointing meaningfully at the jobcentre doors. “It would be a good idea to move your protest… it’s your safety I’m worried about.”

My first thought is Sanctions – as in the jobcentre is planning to sanction someone who will (rightly) take it so badly that the jobcentre is planning to restrict the audience*.

Could be a repeat sanction for someone who didn’t respond too well to earlier ones. Jobcentres have long had an intriguing habit of laying repeat sanctions on people who are most likely to struggle to manage, or even remember, jobsearch commitments – which is, of course, why they keep getting sanctioned. These are people with addiction problems, mental health problems, prison histories and/or chaotic lives after years in care and in prison. The DWP seems to have this idea that even if you sleep in a ditch half the week, you should be up at dawn to log your commitments in Trello. Less mention is made of the fact that people haven’t got much support for learning ways to keep to the DWP’s meaningless routines, because the Tories have spent 12 years binning support. A lot of the people I speak with can barely read.

Let’s face it, too – even when you’ve done the right thing, the assumption will be that you haven’t. For instance: I’ve been talking in recent times with Barry, who has been in and out of prison for about 13 years, and totally at sea since he last left jail 4 years back. Barry says his most recent sanction (there have been a few) came about because the DWP said he’d failed to attend a work course that he was actually at.

“They said I hadn’t turned up, but I was there. I got the guy [who was running the course] on the phone to the jobcentre and he said “Barry’s been here.” There followed the usual one-way conversation where you try to explain and explain and explain, and begin to half-feel you’re on mute. I’ve done this with people more often that I care to recall – sat in a jobcentre office trying to get the DWP to see sense about a sanction, or even a wrongful claim closure. You talk on and on, and the DWP stares at you in silence like it is measuring you for a coffin. It’s like spending a morning trying to justify a new food to your cat.

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