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.

Thought I’d spend a few pre-budget days rolling out more transcripts from interviews with people on the rubbish end of Tory austerity.

This one is yet another story about jobcentres and useless back-to-work activities (the transcript is at the end):

I went to one of the northwest London jobcentres last week to hand out leaflets with the Kilburn unemployed workers’ group … and I spent a long time talking to an older bloke (he was 54) who said he’d been in the jobcentre for an hour writing his CV with an adviser.

We’ll call this guy Keith. Keith was in the Work Related Activity Group for Employment and Support Allowance. He told me that he’d worked for much of his life in engineering as a fitter, but that all came to an end after a bad car accident about a decade ago. “Now I can’t do it. It’s physically impossible, because I’ll be in and around machines and all. That [accident] was the end of my engineering days. That finished me for a while and then I was really down.”

I give you this work history, because Keith reported it. I personally couldn’t care less whether people have worked or not, or what their histories are. As time goes on, I care less and less. If people are 50+, disabled and at a jobcentre, they’re a) usually in need at that moment in time, b) unlikely to get work because they’re on the scrapheap as far as employers are concerned and c) going to be written off as scroungers whether they worked all their lives or not. Those are the only relevant facts these days. Nothing else that people have or haven’t been or done counts.

Anyway, I ramble… Atos had, of course, found Keith fit for work, in a relatively recent assessment. Keith had managed to get that decision overturned on appeal. He was placed in the WRAG group for ESA. WRAG is the ESA group that the DWP wants to get rid of  – their latest move in what is a none-too-subtle campaign to eliminate disability benefits altogether, along with the concept that some people just can’t work. Because he’s in that Work Related Activity Group, Keith must turn out to the jobcentre every few weeks and engage in completely pointless “work-related” activities.

I say “completely pointless” because that is exactly what those activities are. They’re not about getting people into work. They’re about making sure that older, disabled people like Keith are constantly prodded. Nothing else. They’re just prodded. They’re not helped into decent, decently-paid work, or anything as romantic as that. They’re prodded and needled and nudged and got at, and that’s about that. Keith told me that his adviser happily conceded that the CV-writing was not about getting a job, but just an exercise to complete to meet government requirements. “[The adviser] said – “well, you done your CV and you’re covered. As far as the government is concerned, you’ve done your thing. Just do it” Keith said that he must return to the jobcentre in a few weeks’ time to participate in another “activity.” There’ll be more after that. I imagine Keith is being lined up as fodder for this or that privately-provided work course, or similar purposeless bollocks. On and on it goes. Continue reading →

This is a video I made today as Disabled People Against Cuts delivered a petition to save the Independent Living Fund to the tosser installed at 10 Downing Street. Campaigners blocked Whitehall for a time and then there was a procession to parliament:

Video transcript here.

A sad day, but people certainly plan to be back. Off to parliament again next week. Pretty good result there last week:

From Disabled People Against Cuts:

DPAC joined by Class War, Streets Kitchen, Black Dissidents & others

Announce:

Balls to the Budget

#Balls2TheBudget

Wednesday 8 July, 10.30 am
Downing St

Big balls, small balls, footballs, tennis balls, volleyballs, handballs, rubber balls, plastic balls, flour balls, paint balls, canon balls, beachballs, hairballs, furballs, glitter balls, gumballs, basketballs, garlic balls, initialed balls, personalised balls.

Get creative.

Balls to austerity
Balls to taking our rights
Balls to taking our jobs
Balls to cutting our services
Balls to bankers bonuses
Balls to cutting the ILF
Balls to Met Police
Balls to cuts to Access to Work
Balls to cuts to Social Care
Balls to the Bedroom Tax
Balls to Workfare & Sanctions
Balls to Forced Treatments
Balls to Maximus, Atos & PIP
Balls to Child Poverty & inequality
Balls to low pay & exploiting workers
Balls to anti-homeless laws
Balls to stifling protest
Balls to migrant bashing, racism & Islamophobia
Balls to cuts to Housing, Education, NHS, Legal Aid, Womens Refuges, CAMHS and much much more.

Then, afterwards – We Are Going Back.

11.30 The Lobby, House of Commons. Bring balls.

Online: Twitter from 10.30 am till yer tweeting fingers wear out
Take part online by using and sharing: #Balls2TheBudget

There is a tweetlist you can use here: http://dftr.org.uk/Songbird.php?TweetFile=Balls2theBudget

See DPAC for updates.

Update 28 June 2015:

Join Disabled People Against Cuts on Tuesday 30 June at 11.30am at Downing Street as they deliver a petition calling for government to protect disabled people’s right to independent living.

From Disabled People Against Cuts:

“ILF recipients, campaigners and Allies will meet outside Downing Street to hand over petitions calling on the Prime Minister to protect disabled people’s right to independent living. Over 25,000 signatures have been collected online (supported by the brilliant video made by the stars of Coronation Street) and also during the Graeae Theatre Company’s 2014 UK Tour of The Threepenny Opera.”

Follow @Dis_PPL_Protest on twitter for updates.

———————————————————————————————————-

Updates from Disabled People Against Cuts:

Why the ILF closure is threatening disabled people’s social care packages and how the DWP has lied about local council capacity for funding care for disabled people with the highest support needs.

Read the letter to MPs that disabled people stormed parliament to deliver on Wednesday.

Original post:

To parliament then today! – where disabled campaigners took the police by surprise in a very big way. Disabled campaigners occupied parliament’s central lobby in protest at government plans to close the Independent Living Fund in just a week’s time. The ILF is a fund that profoundly disabled people rely on to pay for personal assistants and the extra carer hours they need. Needless to say, this government thinks the ILF should be closed and disabled people cast adrift.

More pictures and videos at Disabled People Against Cuts here.

The police panicked when this occupation started and they got heavy. There must have been about 50 coppers? – Perhaps more. They did hurt a couple of people – I heard one copper say very clearly that the police were trained to use pressure points.

They also grabbed my arms and yelled “She’s filming!” when they saw the camera. The arm-grabbing is the reason why some of the video is shaky. I had to take the SD card out and shove it into my sweaty old bra. Still – on we go. The police threatened pretty quickly to confiscate my phone and camera, so I beat it out of there to get the pics out. Not really feeling the love today, as in #lovethepolice. Etc.

Some pics uploaded now below.

Video: disabled people occupy parliament’s central lobby (includes shot at the start of a copper lifting one guy’s wheelchair to swing it around):

Police start to get shirty:

Disabled people start to occupy the hall and police work out what is going on. Then they get heavy (they were grabbing my arms at this point, so the video is shaky towards the end:

Campaigners in the central hall:

Police start getting heavy as disabled campaigners occupy the central lobby in protest at ILF closure:

Occupation of central lobby continues:

Another video, showing police presence… had to use the phone for this as the camera was about to be confiscated.

Wonder if/when this will end in a sanction.

Let’s start at the beginning:

On Monday, I headed to over the river for a trip to a North London jobcentre with a guy I call Eddie in these stories. I’ve known Eddie for about a year now, I think. Eddie’s a 51-year-old man with learning difficulties who has been out of work for more than five years. He worked as a kitchen assistant for most of his life, but his last job ended in about 2010. He’s signed on for JSA since. He talks a lot about wanting another job – “I should be going to work now, not going to this stupid place [the jobcentre]” – but it is pretty obvious he’s struggling on that front.

I suppose there are explanations for this, although I get tired of having to cast about for explanations for unemployment. I get sick of having to somehow justify people’s situations when they are out of work. I don’t know people’s entire back stories and I generally don’t want to know. I only know that people are where they are and that most people have been many things by the time they’re 50.

Eddie is getting older and his health isn’t great. He’s diabetic and injects insulin three times a day. He spends a lot of time at his GPs’ surgery, or getting bloods done, or seeing consultants at the hospital. He doesn’t always present well these days: more often than not, he’ll have food down his front of his clothes and tiny sores on his face and he’ll wear the clothes with the foodstains more than once.

He’s become more defensive and cantankerous in the year that I’ve known him. He speaks a non-stop, belligerent stream: he says that his neighbours are noisy drug addicts “up banging on the walls and shouting all night”, jobcentre staff are useless, that the landlord who owns Eddie’s tiny studio flat is hopeless and won’t fix things when they break, and that England was fine until it was ruined by immigrants (Eddie’s parents moved here from Jamaica before he was born. He describes himself, often, as “British born and bred”). He isn’t tragic, or pitiable, or pathetic, or vulnerable. He’s opinionated. He’s tough. He’s been around. He’s older and he’s probably not first choice for hard, low-paid manual work anymore. I’m not entirely sure that he wants to be. He speaks fondly of his working days, but seems to fear a return to the sort of work that he did. Perhaps he feels that he is out of that race now. I would say that he is stressed. He seems to hate change and he fights it. He’s ageing and knows how that is likely to roll. Don’t we all. Getting older probably isn’t so terrible if you’ve got golf and good health. It’s another story when you’re at the GP a lot, but still expected to grind your last working years out in a kitchen for £7 an hour (if you’re lucky), or for your JSA (if you’re not). I know we’re all supposed to be grateful for the chance to slog at hard manual jobs for stuff-all money until we drop dead, but I can see why someone would rather not. I would rather not myself. The older you get, the less you’d rather. “I could do that work in the big kitchens when I was younger,” Eddie said to me last Thursday when we went to have a coffee after his JSA signon appointment. “I couldn’t do that now.”

Continue reading →

Is this the beginning of the end of Disability Employment Advisers at jobcentres?

Last week, I went to a North London jobcentre with a disabled man who was meeting with an adviser to agree his claimant commitment – the contract which sets out the number of jobs this man will search for each week and so on. We met with the Disability Employment Adviser.

A bit of background: DEAs are onsite jobcentre officers who are trained to support disabled JSA claimants and to direct disabled people towards disability-friendly employers (assuming that such employers still exist). Meetings with DEAs can be hard to come by, presumably because DEAs are in demand and a lot of disabled people need their support. The man I was with had waited well over a month for the appointment that finally took place last week. It was a relief to get to that meeting and to begin to set up the relationship with the DEA. Disability Employment Advisers can sometimes act as a kind of buffer between disabled people and sanctions. They note if someone has learning or literacy difficulties, or other problems that make jobsearching hard. DEAs are not always perfect, but they’re better than nothing. A relationship of some kind can be helpful.

Except – there’s not going to be a relationship of any sort with this DEA, or any DEA at this jobcentre. It seems there’s not going to be a DEA there at all. It emerged that this DEA was leaving in a few weeks and that the job would not be filled. “I’m not going to be doing this job for too much longer and they’re not replacing my role,” the DEA told us. This person said that there would be no DEA at this jobcentre “as far as I am aware.” The guy I was with was a bit shocked to hear this. He’d previously signed on at at a Northeast London jobcentre where the DEA working there had probably saved him from sanctions a couple of times. That DEA understood his literacy problems and knew that he struggled with online jobsearching, because he couldn’t easily use a computer or email. Things weren’t great at that jobcentre and the DEA certainly had ups and downs, but the overall picture would have been a lot worse without that person there and generally onside. Continue reading →

Let me tell you a bit about waiting:

One day last week, I took myself right across London to attend a jobcentre meeting with a woman who has some support needs. The woman had been told to come in to meet with a so-called work coach. She wasn’t too sure what this meeting was about. The jobcentre had organised the meeting a couple of weeks back and the woman was concerned about it. You could say that the thought of the meeting had been weighing on her mind for some time.

Not that anyone could care less about that. When this woman arrived at the jobcentre, she was told that the work coach wasn’t at work that day (ha ha – yes, the irony) and the meeting was cancelled. The woman told me that nobody rang her to let her know the meeting was off, to save her the trouble of coming in. Another date for a meeting with the work coach was set for a few weeks’ time. That means she has another month to wait and to wonder what the work coach wants with her. You could say that’s now weighing on her mind.

I can’t tell you how often this sort of thing happens to people who must use these barely-functional, so-called services: appointments changed at the last minute, meetings pushed to new times which claimants aren’t told about, work programme sessions cancelled a few hours before the event, or claimants travelling all the way to the jobcentre to find that the person they expected to meet is nowhere to be found. It is no exaggeration to say that these things happen on an amazingly regular basis. There’s a real departmental contempt to it if you ask me: a right old “unemployed people deserve punishment, not the normal courtesies” from the DWP. I suppose we’re also seeing an annihilated sector now: not enough staff, hopeless communications between jobcentres and outsourced work programme and workfare companies, and morale so low that organisations barely have a pulse.

The problem right now is that the political and media classes care even less about deteriorating public services than they did before the runup to the election. I didn’t actually know that was possible, but it is. There’s nobody around to take any of these problems to – in an official sense, at least. There never was, of course – social security has been destroyed in equal parts by a vicious coalition government and a fantastically weak Labour opposition, and neither was ever inclined to race to the aid of people who attend jobcentres – but at least you could see what you were up against when parliament was formed and abuse someone for it. Occasionally, you’d even find a mainstream media editor who understood that there was a world outside warped political cycles. Now, commentators are cheerfully foretelling an age of instability while we’re exposed to a post-election, months-long and extremely rubbish game of thrones. That concept sets my teeth on edge – not because I want a government particularly, but because it shows that the ruling class is arrogant enough to believe that it can take its sweet time to bash out deals to its own advantage. There’s absolutely no sense of urgency there. It must be great to live in a world where you can destroy other people’s much-needed public services, then let those services deteriorate even further while you haggle for the power to destroy more. Little wonder that people are taking future planning into their own hands.

All of which is a long way of saying that blogging here will probably be light until next week. I aim to fully re-engage when we reach that post-election point (we usually reach it pretty fast) when our political heroes are wiping their butts on their current manifestos and waving at us in their rearview mirrors. That’s the time for political engagement in my view – when you see the real agendas.

Will still be available on twitter, although probably not much. I actually can’t take the bullshit. There is no doubt I will kick the screen in if someone else tries to suggest to me that Labour is the only answer. Labour can’t even bring itself to agree to keep the Independent Living Fund. With or without government, we’re still nowhere on social security. At all.

A few more thoughts about the trashed earth left by a political class currently seeking election to parliament:

I’ve just been listening to a recording I took at a northwest London jobcentre meeting a couple of months ago. I was there with an older man who has learning difficulties and who is claiming JSA.

It wasn’t the greatest jobcentre meeting I’d ever attended. The jobcentre adviser and the man I was with had an angry, if one-sided, confrontation – raised voices, exasperation, sarcasm, accusations, the works.

The man complained that the work choice providers at a course he’d taken had done little to find him work. The adviser said that the fault was his. She said the work choice provider had suggested several jobs for him and that it was not the provider’s fault if the man didn’t get the work. “It’s not up to them,” the jobcentre adviser said testily. “It’s up to you and what you bring to the job.” The jobcentre adviser accused the man of exaggerating his concerns about the work choice provider. At one point, she said to the man: “What is it that you want them to do? Do you want them to take you by the hand and take you to the job and get you the job?” No mention was made of the problems that make things difficult for this man – his deteriorating health, his literacy problems, the fact that he can’t use email, or computers, or that he finds change extremely difficult to handle and to navigate. He is sometimes defensive and can resist when told to make a change. His first response is often No, but there are reasons for that. You’d think that those reasons would be recognised and understood. They weren’t that day. Things were a little one-sided, as I say. Continue reading →

I attended a Maximus work capability assessment with someone this week and was intrigued to note that there was no Maximus branding that I could see outside the building, or in it. Maybe all the branding was lost, or still on the printer (there wasn’t any branding on the callup letter the person I went with to the assessment received either, now that I look at it). Outside the building, there was just a line on the listings boards which said Assessment Centre (I’ll put a photo up shortly when I can get it off my phone). Inside the building, there were a few notices with references to the Centre for Health and Disability Assessments, which I think is the official euphemism for “Place Where Maximus Carries Out Loathed ESA Work Capability Assessments.” Intruiging, as I say. Made me wonder if Maximus is trying to distance itself brandwise from this extremely unpopular aspect of its offering and/or to make its assessment centres hard to spot. Who can really say.

Anyway – have started to attend these Maximus face-to-face work capability assessments now. I’ll be publishing in detail on them after the election, when I know which MPs to pressure with the evidence I have.

Suffice to say for now that I remain amazed by the utter pointlessness of the whole WCA process and of the face-to-face assessments in particular (pointless for the person going through the assessment, that is. There’s plenty of point to it for Maximus – between £590m and £650m over three years and a presence in the UK, as the Guardian reported earlier this year). The people on the receiving end of it don’t do so well. The person I went with this week has very serious mental health problems – so serious that he really has hardly left his house this year. For this week’s face-to-face assessment, he had to drag himself miles across town to the assessment centre (a family member set aside the afternoon to do the driving) to attend an appointment where he was asked to talk about his mental health for a time and then told to briefly lift his arms and legs. Regarding the possibility of a home visit for assessment – I’ll get into the topic of home visits another time, I think. I’d make the general observation now that home visits can present people with a whole new set of concerns. A number of people have raised this point with me over the years. Not everyone wants government or government-funded officials poking around at their place. I sure as hell don’t.

And anyway – the key point here is that this guy’s GP and usual medical consultants could easily have carried out this assessment. Maximus at home or at an assessment centre is entirely unnecessary. The WCA is outsourcing for the hell of it, like privatisation usually is. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again – this outsourcing of disability benefit assessments to private companies like Maximus is for the benefit of private companies like Maximus and for governments that are desperate to show they’re tough on benefit claimants. Millions of pounds are being pissed away to those ends. Whoever gets into government will be made to answer to that. In a big way.