On this government’s ideas about cutting benefits to drug and alcohol users unless they agree to treatment:

Don’t think that punishing drug and alcohol users cures drug and alcohol addiction. If only.

I’ve reposted below a transcript from an interview that I did in 2013 with a guy in Stroud called Darren. When I met him, Darren was trying to beat a years-long heroin addiction. I have a number of interviews with people with serious addiction problems who I’ve spoken to over the last five or so years – people whose supported-living hostels were closed, or who were in and out of street homelessness, usually because they had serious mental health and addiction problems. The Marah organisation in Stroud introduced me to Darren. When I met him at a drop-in lunch, he told me that he’d walked from Cheltenham to Stroud to escape the Cheltenham drug scene. He was living in a tent that Marah had given him, if memory serves. It didn’t sound as though he was having the greatest time in the world. Nobody does when it comes to addiction.

So…this notion that you can push, threaten, or somehow menace someone out of addiction: the main reason that I doubt that’ll work is because I’ve tried it. Everyone who has an addict in the family has tried it. A lot of the time, you try very hard. You certainly try many things. You scream a lot and deny money and affection, and all the rest of it. You run away and come back. You go to Al-Anon meetings for Families Of, decide the key to coping is to change yourself and get nowhere much with that. You do all of these things and often reach commitments, and even as everybody is agreeing to those, the person with the addiction problem steps out of the room and goes off and gets slaughtered.

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…that they all know exactly how bad things are for people who need social security. Their surgeries must be full of people who can’t meet the rent, have been sanctioned, must live in shitty housing, are being treated badly at jobcentres, can’t get support workers, or enough carer hours, or can’t meet an energy bill, or have massive forms to fill in to claim a benefit and so on. They must absolutely know how things are.

I can say this, because I know a lot about the way these things are myself. I get heaps of emails and contacts from people who need help with these things. I’m just one blogger and and I can’t keep up with the number of people who need some kind of help. I’m not even sure what to tell people anymore. People just get angry if you suggest the CAB. They say that they’ve tried and the CAB is oversubscribed. I don’t even reply to some emails these days, because I just don’t know what to say and I end up making a sort of non-decision to do nothing. I haven’t got anything helpful to say. Everyone I know who works in these areas – paid workers, volunteers, campaigners – is overstretched beyond belief. I talk about it with people all the time. People burn out all over the place.

MPs know this. They see it. People who need social security don’t just disappear because parliament tells a small voting public that they should. I find that the more people government strikes from the Deserving list, the more people get in contact for help. Everyone who is on the ground knows that. Pity there’s nowhere to take that knowledge.

Here’s yet another post about the crappy callousness with which the DWP treats people it finds fit for work and throws off disability benefits…

We’ve heard plenty of stories like the one below in the past few years and I imagine we’ll be hearing more of them as more and more people on the Employment and Support Allowance disability benefit are forced to look for work. At jobcentres recently, I’ve found more people who were either on ESA and recently found fit for work, or who are in the ESA work-related activity group (the group for sick or disabled claimants who are thought capable of some type of work in future and of attending work-related activities*) and being forced to attend the jobcentre for work activities, even when their jobcentre advisers happily concede that those work activities won’t lead to jobs. These few people don’t make a trend, of course, but I’m inclined to think they suggest a direction of travel – a DWP crackdown on people in the ESA work-related activity group and ESA in general. As you’ll know, George Osborne targeted new claimants to that work related activity group in his July 8 budget, so ESA is certainly in his sights. I already know people in the ESA Support Group who have received letters telling them to attend work-focused interviews (the ESA support group is for sick or disabled people who are supposed to be excused from work and work-related activities). I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again and why not: I think the government’s ultimate plan is to eliminate disability benefits, as well as the idea that some people just can’t work.

Anyway, I do sometimes wonder what the fallout from a crackdown on sick and disabled claimants in the ESA WRAG group will be… I can say this for sure: the DWP continues to remove benefits from people who have mental health conditions in a particularly shitty and cold-blooded way.

Take this latest example. At one of the Northwest London jobcentres a couple of weeks ago, I spent time talking to an older woman I call Mary in this post (this woman did say I could use her real name, but I decided not to at the last minute here, because I’m getting more and more nervous about DWP vindictiveness to claimants). Mary was not in a very good way. Mary said that she had long-term mental health problems and had receiving ESA because of this. She’d been on the benefit for about six years. Mary said that she had been in the ESA work-related activity group until very recently. A few days before we met outside the jobcentre, she’d received the letter which you can see below – the letter which told her that she was no longer entitled to Employment and Support Allowance. She’d been found fit for work after a June work capability assessment. Her last ESA payment had been made on 2 July – just a couple of days before we met. She was obviously very concerned about that money ending – as anyone would be – and had no idea what to do next.

“They didn’t give me nothing [at the work capability assessment] – zero points. I got my letter, but I’m doing this with mental health problems. I can’t read and write very well.” As you can see below, the letter that Mary just received from the DWP told her that she’d get no more money from early July and that she’d better pull finger and start looking for a job: “you should start looking for a job straightaway.” If she couldn’t get a job straightaway (and it seemed unlikely that she would at that very moment, given her age and history) the letter gave a number to call to make a jobcentre appointment. That was the end of that. Other than those mostly useless pointers, all this letter offered was a few of the DWP’s now-unavoidable odes to the joys and supremacy of work: “we know that most people are better off in work,” and blah blah blah. These letters are as sanctimonious as they are unhelpful. There’s a repulsive smugness about the DWP when it pulls the rug on people in these situations.

Which is the thing. I’m not talking about Mary in particular here, or her history. I don’t know enough about her history to go into it. I’m talking about the system Mary is stuck in, the way this bureaucracy behaves towards people who use it and the assumptions it makes about those people. I’m talking about a system which removes people’s small incomes at the stroke of a pen, and the amazing callousness that the DWP shows when it throws people with mental health problems off ESA. There’s no “We Get That Mental Health Conditions Are A Real Thing” going on in this letter, or even “We Get That Stopping Your Income Might Devastate You.” The assumption in this letter is that people who are found fit for work have been taking the piss and that everyone who is found fit for work is robust enough to deal with a major blow like a sudden and total loss of income. This, presumably, is how the DWP continues to “fix” people with mental health conditions and indeed to “fix” anyone who claims a disability benefit. Forget about eligibility for a minute, or whether or not people are “deserving,” so-called (nobody’s deserving as far as this government is concerned, so that conversation is barely worth faffing around with). The point is that this is how people are handled when decisions to stop their income are made.

Sightings of letters like this one and of people in Mary’s situation reeling around outside jobcentres are among the reasons why I await the outcome of Mike Sivier’s request for benefit deaths statistics with interest. There’s absolutely no concession in the above text-heavy letter to the fact that the sudden stop of ESA might have a very bad effect on someone with mental health problems, or that such a letter might make those problems worse. There’s certainly nothing at the front of the letter about help to sign on for jobseekers’ allowance for some income in the first instance, or help to navigate the difficult path to jobseekers’ allowance, or how someone who once claimed ESA might deal with JSA’s difficult, demanding and punitive jobsearch regimes (I don’t count the provision of the Jobcentre Plus phone number on page 2, or the warbling on about Work Coach help at a jobcentre as immediate and intensive support). For her part, Mary was going to try and appeal the fit-for-work decision: “I’m on medication,” she said. “I’m going to my doctor now to get the letters.” I gave her my number and have her address: hopefully, we can catch up and find out how things went. Suffice to say for now that I expect to see more and more people clutching these letters outside jobcentres as Osborne and the boys target ESA – and the people who collect it – for destruction. Cute, innit.

*Update Monday 20 July: sentence with * changed from “thought fit for some type of work” to “thought capable of some kind of work in future” as original could be interpreted as “fit for work” as in a WCA decision to end an ESA claim altogether. Also added “and of attending work-related activities” inside the bracket, as agree with commentator below that the work-related activities requirement for WRAG should be made clear as part of that sentence. Good ESA WRAG definition here.

So…

Just after the general election this year, I stayed in Dorset and visited the Soul Food kitchen in Weymouth at breakfast-time one Friday. Soul Food does meals for people who have benefit problems, or who are in and out of street homelessness. I spent a lot of time with people there a couple of years ago. When I visited in May this year, I recorded an interview with an older woman who I’ll call Leanne for this post. Leanne was a wheelchair user: cerebral palsy, she said. We talked for a long time. She spoke about the government’s harsh application regime for employment and support allowance. She talked about her social housing flat, which she said she’d been living in for years. She revealed a deep dislike of the social care types who she seemed somehow to answer to: “ I’m always told I’m spending other people’s money,” she said. Anyway, since we’d just had a general election, I thought I’d ask Leanne who she’d voted for. She told me that she’d voted for the Tories. “Doesn’t make any difference,” she said.

I don’t know why I’m telling you this story, except to say that life rolls this way outside of twitter. I meet up with people and they say things, and there we are. I speak to a lot of people who genuinely think of political engagement as a luxury enjoyed by other people. Their own minds are busy elsewhere: mainly caught up in a series of run-ins with bullying bureaucrats as far as I can tell (“I’m always told I’m spending other people’s money,” etc). That’s where the main action is. People read the papers and follow the news, but they don’t imagine for a second that their experiences count towards anything that goes down there. I think that’s why this latest wittering about Labour as the party of welfare has not engaged me. It seems a while since people I hang out with talked about Labour as social security champions.

As you’ll likely know, last week disabled protestors held another demonstration against cuts to disabled people’s funding: the #Balls2TheBudget protest outside Downing Street, on Westminster Bridge and then outside parliament.

I thought the police might get pissy at this protest, because they were so badly shown up when Disabled People Against Cuts successfully occupied the central lobby at parliament in protest at the ILF closure a couple of weeks ago. And the police did get nasty. Things were okay-ish when protestors carried out the ball-throwing exercise at Downing Street and then closed down Westminster Bridge to protest at cuts, but the police mood soured very fast when people blocked the roads outside parliament. That change in tenor was noticeable. The coppers started to shove protestors around and they pulled down the Balls2TheBudget banner that people held across the street. It was almost as though a message had been sent from our glorious leaders to shut the demonstration down outside parliament right at that moment:

In this video, a copper tells disabled protestor Sam Brackenbury that his carer will be arrested if she stays on the road. Charming:

This video shows the amazing moment when Labour’s Sadiq Khan bolted as he happened upon DPAC protestor Andy Greene who was in his wheelchair and surrounded by police. Four people were arrested for highway obstruction during the protest. Greene was one of them. Khan’s failure to respond in any way whatsoever really was remarkable. He couldn’t find a single word to say about the situation. You’ll see in the video that he just stared at everyone, then legged it. That’s the Labour party for you in these fraught times: disabled people block roads in protest at government slaughtering of social care funds and screwing of disability benefits, and Labour MPs can’t bring themselves to look, let alone to stop. Still, everyone got the message. Nothing says You Lot Are On Your Own more eloquently than Khan’s total non-contribution here:

Thanks a bunch for that, Sadiq. Very helpful.

The arrests were eloquent in their very nature: I think we can confidently say that the establishment had decided to up the ante against these protestors after they occupied parliament on 24 June. That won’t stop people. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we’re seeing something important here. This isn’t just noise for the hell of it. Disabled people are taking the fight for social security to government because they have to, and the louder they get, the more vindictive government gets. Meanwhile, Labour flinches from the sidelines… and continues on the fast-track to oblivion. Everything is escalating – everything except the Labour party, I guess, which appears to be leaving the picture altogether. I’m not sure how this one ends.