Interview and videos with Mary Laver in the Mirror today. Have put the other video interviews with Penny Pepper, Sophie Partridge, Gabriel Pepper and Kevin Caulfield as linked to from the Mirror article here.

My article with all updates on the Atos mental function champions issue is here – keeping it on one blog etc.

Update August 17: 

More links will be added soon. In the meantime see:

via @c_r_g and @BMESG .

Use: https://www.torproject.org/ via @Tim_JR_Hill

And see comments below for browser reconfig advice.

Update August 12:

And so youtube has shut down my videos of the UK Uncut and DPAC occupation of Iain Duncan Smith’s weekend place. A legal complaint has been made. Sob. Interestingly, you can see the whole place on googlemaps.

Here are the videos you can’t see anymore. If you’re in the UK (they’re only blocked in the UK for some reason):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7ACptYVMDQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjtP5vNBqdY

Never mind. We seek new solutions.

See the whole story below…

Update 2 June 2013:

I’ve had a note from youtube that “an individual” has complained that these videos (and the pictures of the grounds at IDS’ house) constitute a “privacy violation.” I suppose that means they may be taken down, so please download and share the videos while they’re still there. I don’t know who the complainant is – could be Iain Duncan Smith, his inlaws, or someone else entirely. I contend that this sort of video, which shows the great wealth in which the architect (IDS) of “reforms” like the bedroom tax lives, must and should be publicised and is of public interest. The sort of inequality the videos on this page suggest should be taken note of by anyone who a) cares about equality and b) cares about the instability great inequality inevitably brings.

Update Sunday 14 April:

Here’s my longer video now of the whole day: interviews, me and others slagging Liam Byrne off on the train, which is only right, a nice turn around IDS’ sprawling grounds and a picnic out front. There’s also a section in here with Dom Aversano, the young man who started the “Prove You Can Live On £53 A Week, IDS” petition. Got a few words from him while he was standing outside IDS’ fabulous country gaff.

We should all be rich. Seriously. This place looked very good.

Point worth noting: UK Uncut got a lot of flak for partying outside Nick Clegg’s house last year – there was a lot of rightwing yap about not targeting politicians personally and so on. The response to Saturday’s action has been very different – overwhelmingly positive comments on the videos and on twitter, etc. Things have changed.

Saturday 13 April:

And here we are: UK Uncut and DPAC slapping an eviction notice on Iain Duncan Smith’s very fancy country pile in protest at the bedroom tax today.

And what a place. Room for all. Bedrooms for all, certainly. And if you want a break from the bedrooms – well, take a walk outside and enjoy the lake, the fields avec gamboling lambs, the tennis court out the back and the landscaped garden with an arch. I have decided that we should all be rich, really. If you have to live on £53 a week, this is the way to do it. The manor house and the games of cricket in the enormous back garden would really take the edge off it all.

Have got a lot more videos and interviews to upload which I’ll get to soon, so this is to give you an idea. Hats off to DPAC and UK Uncut. Ace action. ACE.

And more! So nice round the back that even the coppers took a stroll. Lawn as far as the eye could see. Didn’t really want to go home.

…as far as the political class is concerned.

Having spent some of Easter reading renowned “christian” (I do mean that ironically) Iain Duncan Smith on benefit cuts and the gruesome George Osborne bragging about his winkling out of the “undeserving poor,” I post below a discussion with yet another person who deserves social security and isn’t getting it. The man in this story is called Clifford Poole.

I’m posting Clifford’s story because I have it and plenty like it and so I might as well. I’m also posting his story – as I post them all – to make again the point that when it comes down to it, there is no such group as the “deserving poor” as far as this government (and the Labour “opposition”) is concerned. Osborne and the Telegraph and all the rest can claim that coalition social security “reforms” as they are “merely” aim to distinguish between the “workshy” and the “deserving” as the Telegraph so charmingly put it this weekend. But that isn’t true. The truth is that in the eyes of modern government, everyone (everyone outside of the financial sector, that is) is undeserving of state support. Everyone. I laugh, if thinly, when I read that “deserving” tag these days. Deserving? Ha. HA HA. I’m laughing at that. Nobody’s considered deserving out here. As I see it – and I see a lot of it – if you need or use public services, you’re considered undeserving. And that’s it.

These days, I’m talking to people whose physical impairments are so extensive that they can’t move, or even feed themselves unaided – but they’re still facing the sort of service cuts that will make their lives impossible. Actually, it’ll be worse than that. It is absolutely fair to say that the health, and probably the lives, of people who currently receive, for example, Independent Living Fund money for extra care hours will be compromised if they lose that funding. There can be no other outcome if, as recipient Mary Laver says in this video, care funding cuts mean you’re left sitting round in your own urine and pressure sores for hours each day.

I mean nothing patronising when I say that I’ve wondered why these people are even in frame for cuts. The answer is that they’re in frame because everyone is. There will be no exceptions. Social security will not be “reformed” for modern government until it is entirely obliterated and/or passed to the private sector for a final bleeding (if you want to experience an example of that in real time, just follow Barnet bloggers like Mrs Angry – she’s writing very regular and detailed updates on the unfolding disaster that is Barnet council’s already-catastrophic and costly attempt to outsource all services. Alternatively, just google Privatisation and NHS).

“This is ridiculous. How much plainer could it be? This government are out to destroy us all,” observed Steven Sumpter on twitter last night. I don’t often lift tweets for stories: I think lifting tweets is lazy journalism. But that one was on the money. Government is targeting people who absolutely should not be targeted – people who will pay a very high price for it. I really don’t give a damn who thinks that is an unacceptably emotive statement. I’m seeing enough of all of this with my own eyes to know the facts. And anyone, just by the way, who thinks that this government will stop its plundering at the homes and bank accounts of people on benefits is dreaming. There are days when Cyprus doesn’t seem very far away.

So we go to Clifford Poole. Clifford is a Liverpool man who has greatly inconvenienced the welfare-slashing political class by developing an industrial injury. He is also a victim – as many now are – of the government’s April 2012 decision to time-limit eligibility for contributions-based employment and support allowance to a year.

We’ll get to that. Let’s start at the beginning of this story – it’ll give you an idea of the perverse manner in which these things are sneaking up on people now. It’ll give you an idea of the way things unfold when people lose their jobs. Clifford was a painter and worker in the shipbuilding industry for years. ”I’ve always worked on the industrial side, which is a lot heavier with shotblasting and paintspraying.” He used needleguns and chipping hammers and as he says – “they vibrate like hell. It’s a handheld gun. All the vibrations come through your hands and arms.” The upshot of this for Clifford has been terrible pain in his hands and arms, which he manages now, to a degree, with sleeping pills and morphine. The symptoms range from “numbness to tingling to shooting pains.”

So. Clifford “first went sick from work in February 2010, with the pain in my hands.” The effect on his income was immediate. “Probably before that I was earning between £480 and £520 a week after tax. Obviously, Beccy (his wife) is working, so we had a reasonable life – nearly two grand coming in after net. When I come onto the sick in February, I’ve gone from £480 a week down to £67 a week on statutory sick pay. By the time September come, when my statutory was due to run out, you’ve lost a lot of money. You’re losing over £400 a week, which put more pressure on Beccy.”

When his statutory sick pay ran out in September 2010, Clifford contacted his local benefits office.

Clifford says that the benefits office told him not to apply for employment and support allowance until January 2011, because he didn’t have enough recent national insurance contributions for a claim (he’d been laid off in 2008).

“So I said – “look. What do I do now? I’ve got no statutory sick pay from work.” The benefits officer said “your wife works (Beccy was working part-time in the betting shop then – that’s the job she still has). I said “what’s that got to do with anything?” I said – “look, I’ve worked all my life and now I’m injured.” She said – “well, you’re just going to have to try and get crisis loans.”

That meant, Beccy says, that they had to try and survive from September to January on “my wages, which weren’t very much, because I was only doing about 24 hours a week. We were still paying all the rent.”

After an Atos face-to-face assessment in January 2011, Clifford was awarded ESA – but “it all fell apart in December that year. “I went for another assessment. I’d passed all my others – but this time, I got zero points. As soon as I walked in the room, I knew. It was just 40 minutes of degradation and humiliation. They know that if you turn around and say anything, they’ll just remove your money and everything. They know they’ve got the power and they know they’ve got the government backing them, so that was that. Everything started falling apart.”

Clifford appealed the fit-to-work decision and got an ESA payment – at the reduced rate people get when they’re appealing that Atos decision – while he waited for his appeal to be heard. He won his appeal and was placed in the ESA work related activity group. “That was fine, because they knew I was trying to get back to work at that stage.”

Then it all fell apart again – and this time, for the duration. Clifford got a back-payment which covered the months when he received the reduced-rate ESA – and then the payments suddenly stopped. He quickly found out that he’d fallen foul of the government’s new 365-days time-limit rule on contributions-based ESA.

“I rung them up and said “can you tell me why me ESA hasn’t gone in?” They said “you’re not entitled to any.” I said – “but I’ve won my appeal.” They said – “yes, but you’re on contributions-based ESA and the law changed in April. You only get it for a year.” Unfortunately for Clifford, his year was up.

The upshot is that he now has no income. “Now, everything is coming out of Beccy’s wage. The more they take off me, the more Beccy has to work and Beccy is not on a high income job. The situation is that in the last three years, I’ve gone from earning about £500 a week down to £67 pounds down to nothing. Beccy will get a bus at 6.30am in the morning and she doesn’t come in until 11pm at night. She does hours and hours of overtime.”

Beccy also does a lot of work at home: “because of his hands, I cook all the meals. I’ve got to do everything before I go to work. I had to buy a travel kettle for when he’s home on his own, because he can’t lift our kettle. The only thing we’ve had is an adapted shower fitted. That’s been an absolute blessing. That was due to our GP.” And just to add to that – this month, it seems Clifford will lose the small amount he received in Disability Living Allowance. He was entitled to the low-rate DLA care component, but his welfare rights advisor has told him that rate is at risk when DLA is replaced with the personal independence payment. So that’ll be it for Clifford. “That’s my repayment for working,” he says, wryly.

Indeed. There are, as I say, no “deserving poor.” Doesn’t matter if you’ve busted your hands and arms at work, or have a long history of severe mental illness, or have serious physical impairments which mean you need round-the-clock care. Doesn’t matter if you just happen to have a tiny spare room in your council flat, or if your grownup children have learning difficulties and need support services, or if you require medical help from time to time (as we all probably will). As I say – if you use public services, you’re undeserving. That’s the end of the story for you.

“I think that it has to do with how we judge what is valuable in terms of being a nice, Tory work product,” writer Penny Pepper (who happens also to be fighting for the Independent Living Fund which pays for the 24-7 care she needs to live and work independently) told me when we talked about this in January. “Do we deserve to get out of bed? Do we have to take part in some crazy ideologically-driven competition [for resources]? It’s sickening.” It certainly is.

It is particularly sickening in light of the fact that there’s no political opposition putting any sort of case for social security. There really isn’t. There really, really isn’t. This year already, I have sat and tried not to hurl as I’ve listened to Ealing councillors blither on about “having heavy hearts” as they have cut much-loved services for people with learning difficulties. I heard the same sort of crap at this year’s budget-cutting meeting in Birmingham as that council wiped some £120m from services for the next year. I stood outside Liverpool town hall with irate locals in March as councillors there did a similar thing. I attended bedroom tax meetings in Liverpool where people asked point-blank why councillors weren’t supporting them and “where are the councillors? Why aren’t they here?” (the answer was that councillors were at the town hall making massive budget cuts, with heavy hearts. And in front of more cameras, I imagine). I sent a bunch of questions to Emily Thornberry asking why she and Labour weren’t being more helpful to people like Mary Laver and Penny Pepper in their fight to keep the Independent Living Fund. That was about two months ago. I haven’t heard anything back. Now we seem to have Ed Miliband making vague statements via Liberal Conspiracy about voting against the bedroom tax – but I’m not even sure what he means by that. Does he mean he wants every Labour council meeting to propose “that the bedroom tax is shit” and then have everyone shout Aye? Is he telling Labour councils to all refuse to evict people who fall into arrears? Is he just talking any old crap? Pity we’ve run out of time to find out.

Update Monday 15 April 2013:

Had a call from Sean and Maggie this morning. They’d just had a call from Wellingborough homes, their housing association. The HA officer asked them why they hadn’t paid the outstanding bedroom tax amount (for them, the tax is £11.21 a week). Apparently, that HA is trying to get people to pay up front to “prevent them from getting into arrears.” I’ve spoken with Wellingborough HA to ask about this and also asked them to tell me exactly getting into arrears at that HA will mean for people. Will it mean eviction? I’ll post their response when/if someone calls me back (they said they’d get back to me by the end of today, but haven’t yet).

Update Friday 19 April:

Have spoken to Wellingborough Homes about this. They did make calls to people on Monday morning to remind them about the bedroom tax. They say they’ve identified about 700 people who are liable for the bedroom tax and that people will have to pay it, as there are simply not enough flats for people to downsize to (they said that they were building more and increasing the borough’s stock of flats to “address this issue” to an extent. In the meantime, though, people have to pay. They do take legal action to recover outstanding rent and that can mean eviction, but WH said its aim was to try get people to work with advisors at their local free financial advice service before that point was reached. That means people sitting down with a money advisor, looking at their weekly costs and so on and trying to find points where household savings might be made. WH said eviction on arrears is ultimately a matter for the courts: the HA was putting its energies into preventing things going that far.

Time will tell how that pans out. The tax is not removed from the equation, though, which is the bottom line. It is added to the equation. Anyway – that was the HA’s response on procedure. What we need, though, is a political response, so I’ve asked to talk to board members. We need to know whether the board considered reclassification, or if it would write off bedroom tax arrears if people simply can’t pay and not evict if it comes to it. You can see from this heavy-handed proceedings letter (sent by a different HA to a tenant in another part of the country) the sort of court costs that people start facing even when they’re in arrears for a very modest amount of money. It seems unlikely that people can afford those costs when they’re already in rent arrears.

What a mess this is already. We’re just two weeks into this appalling tax and people are already getting calls about parting with money that they don’t have and/or opening their lives to money advisors to try and find items that they might cut from their personal budgets. The conversations I’ve had with officers here and there suggest that some of them are stressed by this and housing benefit changes generally: they’re sort of doing a quasi-bailiff job already. None of that matters, of course, to people who are getting calls first thing on a Monday from people who tell them that they’ll have to pay up and that it’s better to pay up sooner rather than later if you don’t want to risk your home. Sean and Maggie told me that they’ll try and pay the tax, but they’re not going to find it too easy, as you’ll understand when you read their story below.

MPs, councils and housing associations need to answer to this. They’re enabling this shambles and you can see already how it’s unfolding on the ground.

————

How this story began:

This post is a discussion and transcript of an interview with Sean and Maggie, a couple in Northamptonshire. I’ve known Sean and Maggie for some months now and have visited them at their house. They live in a small, two-bedroom housing association flat in a block and have been there for 11 years. They’ve been a couple since 1997. They met in a residential, independent-living home.

Sean has Asperger’s syndrome and Maggie has schizophrenia. Unfortunately, the political class does not give a stuff about either. Sean and Maggie are being attacked on all fronts. They say that local support services have gone, or are wildly oversubscribed and too stretched to help them. Atos calls Sean in to face-to-face assessments for employment support allowance that he can barely cope with, they’re liable for the bedroom tax, because they have a small second room in their flat, they’ve been issued with a new council tax demand, because their council tax benefit will be cut from April, and they’re worried about further cuts when the personal independence payment replaces disability living allowance.

It is not unusual for Sean to send me emails which say: “I can’t cope with any more. Why don’t they give us a lethal injection to end our fucking misery?” I imagine the answer to that question is “government here prefers slower methods.”

And that is what we have: “scrounger” rhetoric and vicious targeting dressed up as the miracle cure. We all know how this will end for those exposed to it. It can’t be long before government begins to insinuate that mental health illnesses like schizophrenia are best addressed by throwing people out of housing and off benefits – that all someone with Asperger’s or schizophrenia needs to do is pull themselves together, find a job and get out for a bit of fresh air. Sorted. The scrounger subtext pretty much writes itself from there: “why waste money on drug therapies, psychiatry and decent, stable housing when all people with serious mental health and cognitive problems need is a kick in the pants?” That’s certainly the reading Sean and Maggie take from the tax and assessment demands that pour in these days with their post. They did not, just by the way, cause the financial crisis. They’re paying for it, which is different.

In December last year, I accompanied Sean to his Atos face-to-face assessment for ESA. He found the whole assessment process worrying and threatening and he wasn’t able to get much help through it. We spoke at length in the months leading up to the assessment. He was obviously frightened and unable to settle. He sent me a lot of emails and we spoke on the phone many times. He wanted Atos to record his assessment, which Atos did in the end, but it took several months of cancellations and reschedulings to arrange that.

At that time, too, he’d been disturbed by the Newtown shootings in Connecticut (he is British, but grew up in America, in the area where the shootings took place) and he had tried to find someone to talk to about it. “I did try to get help from the healthcare around here in regards to the shootings,” he emailed to say, “but they responded that “everyone is upset” and unless I said I was suicidal, they would do nothing.” He did say that the Samaritans were helpful and talked with him.

After his Atos assessment in December, Sean was placed into the ESA support group, which gave him some breathing space – although not for long. And that’s the point. There isn’t much breathing space for people in Sean and Maggie’s situation now and soon there won’t be any at all. Every day, the government hurls in another grenade – another letter, another call to assessment, another demand for money that people haven’t got (no matter how the government screams that they must find it) and another threat to another service or benefit. I know, and Sean and Maggie know, and we all know, that those letters and demands will keep coming until everything has gone.

There is nowhere for Sean and Maggie to go: no Labour party to appeal to, no “name” politician to advocate with any sort of passion on their behalf and/or behalf of the notion of universal social security, no political commitment to the notion of the right to housing or incomes for people who aren’t born to money. It’s all very well for MPs to speak ad infinitum about “acknowledging” mental health problems, but that means nothing if they refuse to salute the universal social security that’d make improvements possible. The financial sector sails on with its bailout money, tax breaks, brass neck and bonuses while people in Sean and Maggie’s position are pursued and pursued and will be trampled in that rush: their tiny ESA incomes, their housing, the council tax breaks all hoovered by the Beast. There’s no work for them and no suggestion that work, or any source of income, will be found. They’ll be hounded and screamed at as scroungers until nobody cares how they end. They’re already targeted by kids and neighbours for looking and acting “differently.”

Last week, Sean got in touch to say that he and Maggie had “received the notice of the bedroom tax and they are giving us 30 days to appeal the spare room. I do very much plan to appeal. Our room is not “spare.” It is my study/hobby room and for storage. No one sleeps there. They want to withhold £14 a week and I just hope there is a form letter, or if someone could write a very [sic] letter, so we have something to stand against this unjust charge. We also had a council tax notice demanding £77.88 when before it was covered with benefit. We need legal advice and a really strong fightback with appeals and legal challenge. They would have us on the street or in our grave at this rate. It is ruining our relationship and our very existence with this irrational inhuman attack on our lives.” Sean says he’s also concerned about the phasing out of disability living allowance and the phasing in of the personal independence payment.

So.

I hope Fred Goodwin is happy. And warm and well-housed. Because he and the financial sector are, of course, the real victims in all of this. Or something.

Anyway.

An afternoon discussing it all at Sean and Maggie’s house:

Sean: I had [behavioural] problems from about the age of six. My symptoms were social issues – not playing well with others. I was very protective of my things. If someone snatched something away from me, I would react violently.

We emigrated to America when I was a child. I grew up in a small New England town which was very conservative. If you weren’t like they were, you were seen as very much an outsider. I already had a strong English accent and I got picked on for that. I had a terrible stutter (what you call a stammer over here) and it took years of speech therapy to help correct that, but under stress it returns.

They said I was lazy and stupid, because you know – with the Asperger’s, I have dyslexia and dyspraxia and several other issues which just makes reading, writing and maths difficult as the letters move and dance around on the page and make it hard to focus. I could not get the letters small case “d” and “b” right and I still have difficulties to even spell my name. “Ae” I got mixed as well.

It was terrible for my education and life and they just said I was just stupid and lazy. My dad said the same – that I was stupid and lazy. When I was about 42, I was finally diagnosed with Asperger’s. It was the condition that affects everything – your social life, your relationships, I’ve never had that many friends. I try to get along with people, but they have a hard time to understand me.

Maggie: It is incredibly isolating. I’d never tell the other people who live in these flats around here (about my schizophrenia), because I don’t know how they are going to react. They would probably run a mile.

Sean: When I went to meet you from the train station (they both met me today at the station when I arrived), that was the first time I’d been out for a month.

Maggie: People abuse us.

Sean: We’ve had trouble with kids coming around here throwing rocks at the windows. It was endless calls to the police to end it…. as far as cuts, around five years ago, it was the Labour government that cut the groups for local mental health users, both support and social. It was nothing to write home about, just bingo, bottle drives and a fish and chip supper once a month, but it was something. That’s now just a distant memory.

Maggie: I was born in Northampton and I’ve been in Wellingborough since 1980. I was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1997. It’s hard to tell the difference between what’s real or in my head with paranoid schizophrenia. Seeing things that aren’t really there. Hearing voices in your head and things like that. Suspicious of what people are thinking. Not knowing what’s real and what’s not. I first had my breakdown when I was 21. I’m now on daily medication. I was sectioned in 1997.

I go out shopping, but I don’t really like it. It is hard, going out. If you have schizophrenia, you see the world differently. You are very suspicious of people. So, it’s hard when I go out, but I force myself, because I think if I don’t go out, I’ll feel isolated and I won’t be able to cope with anything and deal with everyday life.

Sean: This country is dead. It’s taken over by greedy, selfish and inhuman [people]. They removed us both from the local community mental health service, because they didn’t have enough doctors, so they cut half the patient list. Mental health services have been decimated.

Maggie: We’re actually supposed to have a nurse and a social worker. They don’t even have enough doctors, let alone social workers.

Sean: There’s a waiting list there and we’d have to go through it all over again. We are getting no support. I never get physical, but it is verbal, calling each other…

Maggie: You’re more verbal than physical.

Sean: We’d like to be able to have a psychiatrist. But they said if things go wrong, just call the police. I’m not going to call the police on Maggie, because they called the police on her the first time round when she was sectioned.

Maggie: They treated me like a criminal (when I had my first breakdown). They put me in a cell and I freaked out quite a lot. They were sitting down with me and trying to calm me down and things like that. Then they took me to a hospital in Kettering. They were giving me all these injections, to sedate me. There was a doctor in there and he was asking me all this stuff and the sort of thoughts I had.

It’s hard to remember that far back. I was saying things about the government and he was trying to get me to say if it was real, or if it wasn’t and I couldn’t tell. I was really delusional and paranoid. The medication helps. That’s about all they do. It just sort of bloats you. They just give you the medication and send you on your way. If you go a while without a crisis they assume you are okay.

Bedroom tax

Late last year, Sean and Maggie had a call from their housing association to ask if they’d be able to pay it.

Sean: We said “we’ll have to. We don’t have a choice. We don’t want to move out of here…” I’m not moving out of here. The [spare] bedroom is about as a long as this hallway It’s a walk in closet.

Maggie: It’s like the one I was in before this one.

Sean: That was shit. You couldn’t open the door with the bed it in and you couldn’t make the bed without sliding and pulling the bed towards the door. It was like being a fucking hamster or something…. They will have to come in with the police and drag me out, or they remove me in a body bag. They’re ruining the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, many much worse off than we are.

Just think back how this mess started -it was the greedy, incompetent banks that made this mess. They still get massive wages and bonuses and we get the shite end of the stick.