Universal Credit = social control

I joined the DHSS in July 1980, just over a year after Thatcher had won her first general election. Her onslaught upon the welfare state and her tearing up of the post-war consensus had yet to begin, so the benefits system I initially worked within was the one developed over the 1960s and 1970s.

I was assigned to work on Supplementary Benefit, a means-tested benefit that to some extent could be tailored to suit a claimant's individual circumstances. One feature was that Supp Ben, as we called it, was paid in advance. For example, if you were finished from work with, say, two weeks pay, you would receive your first payment on the 15th day. If there was no final income whatsoever that needed to be taken into account, the first payment was due on the actual day the claim was made without any waiting period at all. Approximately 90% of new and repeat claims were assessed on the day they were received in our office and appropriate payments authorised.

This was the system in operation at the time of the TV series 'Boys From The Blackstuff', not noted for depicting the DHSS in a positive light, and subsequently during the 1980s the benefit system was increasingly characterised as a heartless and bureaucratic branch of an oppressive welfare state to the extent that some staff were reluctant to tell outsiders where they worked. The irony is that the benefit system of that time seems almost benevolent when compared to the current one.

Things became worse when the Thatcher regime turned its 'reforming' zeal towards benefits, replacing Supp Ben by Income Support which did not include any of the old special additions, and which was paid in arrears. Grants for essential household equipment were replaced by budgeting loans, and if there was a gap between your final income and your first benefit payment, and there usually was, you could claim a crisis loan. All such loans were subsequently deducted in instalments from your benefit.

That system, introduced by a Tory government, is the one now being dismantled by another Tory government with the introduction of Universal Credit. One feature of UC is that you can claim it whether you are in or out of work with your benefit progressively reducing the more hours you work and money you earn - for every extra £1 you earn after tax, you will lose 63p in benefits. In theory this is an improvement on previous rigid earnings rules that had meant that your means-tested benefits would be stopped completely if you worked for 16 hours or more.

However cuts to UC have made it significantly less generous. To give one example: the work allowance has been cut so your benefit begins to reduce after you have earned a smaller amount of money. Another feature is that UC is paid in arrears and you have wait five weeks before you receive your first payment. The official excuse for this is that the world of benefits should as far as possible mirror the world of employment. You can claim an advance to cover those five weeks but it is then deducted from your money over the following year, thus leaving you with even less to live on.

Switching from the old benefits to UC has both winners and losers, with those on the lowest incomes standing to lose the most. Transitional arrangements were put in place to ensure no one lost out during the switchover, but this protection doesn't cover either new claimants or people who come off UC and then reapply.

There are also various tripwires that make it incredibly easy to be sanctioned, thus causing UC to be stopped, for failing to comply with the stringent conditions. Appeals against decisions can take months – one example I heard of was 50 weeks – during which you have no money. People can end up with huge debts, and the number of evictions of people on UC is significantly higher than for those on the old benefits. Food bank usage also escalates in areas when UC is rolled out.

UC is a benefit that has changed the purpose of the benefits system from providing support to coercing people into minimum wage, or even zero hours, employment. It is easy to see how a system that produces large numbers of demoralised workers who are obliged to accept poorly-paid, often unsuitable, jobs would appeal to a government consisting of extremely wealthy business people.

Nothing I have written here should be interpreted as an attack on the hard-pressed staff who have to deliver the system as instructed. Calls for staff to be more flexible miss the point that in the civil service you have to do the job as you are told, or you will be in trouble.

I can give an example of this from my own time. One DSS job I had for a while was on the now-scrapped system of crisis loans. I was explaining how they worked to a social worker friend, who simply stated, “Well, I'd pay them all”. I told her that she wouldn't because the monthly budget was strictly limited and if it was all spent too soon, everyone would have to be refused for the rest of the month, irrespective of circumstances. If you persistently blew the budget, you'd be done for inefficiency and in the long run could be dismissed. I expect that UC staff today are under even more stringent restrictions; there is virtually no room in the system for them to manoeuvre.

Indeed, anyone who has watched the recent BBC programmes, 'Universal Credit: Inside the Welfare State' (currently available on iPlayer) will have heard a DWP staff member point out that some of her colleagues are on UC. Such staff will have been subjected to precisely the same UC regime as the claimants that they deal with in the course of their duties. This refutes the perception that I sometimes used to come across that DWP staff are well-paid and consequently cannot empathise with their public; to put it bluntly, they are not paid to empathise, but to administer the system according to instructions that are based in law, often with inadequate staffing levels and sometimes on low pay themselves.

My opinion is that UC has been designed by very wealthy politicians who are utterly incapable of comprehending that some people can be in situations in which they have absolutely no money or resources to fall back on and nowhere to turn to for help. This complete failure of empathy by ministers for the financially more vulnerable members of our society provides a revealing view of the dysfunctional mindset of many of those at the highest levels of government.

But what else could we expect from a government that deliberately developed a hostile environment for migrants and who treated the Windrush generation with such uncaring contempt? I'm just glad I got out of the DWP before the UC rollout had begun.

Supporting David Baddiel: Holocaust Denial and Other Myths

Last night's documentary by David Baddiel - "Confronting Holocaust Denial" - divided opinion before and after its screening. Given the fact that any sane person knows that Holocaust Denial is ridiculous, it might be thought that such a confrontation would be superfluous. Certainly, many influential voices questioned the purpose of it. As The Guardian says:

 " Anthony Julius, who successfully defended the American historian Deborah Lipstadt in a libel suit brought by the Holocaust denier David Irving, told Baddiel: “You don’t need to give these people airtime – so don’t.”

Baddiel correctly pointed out that the situation has changed since the David Irving libel trial in 1996. Since then, social media has become a platform for the extreme right and Holocaust Deniers, giving them the airtime they craved back in the 80s and 90s.. Baddiel commented after the programme:

“Our culture is being shaped by trolls and the Holocaust deniers are a very extreme example of the trolls. Ignoring them has not worked. It doesn’t mean that confronting them will work completely but I think it’s a debate we have to have."

The only direct confrontation Baddiel had was with the Irish Holocaust denier seen above: Dermot Mulqueen. Mulqueen would once have been dismissed as a harmless nutcase and his statements in his "discussion" with Baddiel are proof of some mental derangement. According to Mulqueen, the fact that Jews buy German cars proves that the Holocaust didn't happen (!!!). He also sang a bizarre song in which he rhymed "Mercs" with "Auschwitz perks" - it should be seen to be believed.

Rupert Hawksley, in The Independent, commented:

"The pair had an unproductive, ill-tempered discussion. And it’s that word, “discussion”, which is so problematic. It indicates legitimacy on both sides, something which Holocaust deniers do not deserve. By arguing with Mulqueen, Baddiel unwittingly acknowledged that there was an argument to be had – when there isn’t."

Maybe, maybe not. After years of keeping a weather eye on the far Right, my only criticism is that Baddiel, who lost many relatives in the Holocaust, tried to engage meaningfully with an obvious idiot. The more intelligent - and thus more sinister - Holocaust deniers, such as David Irving and Richard Verrall, would have been better opponents to challenge, as they have a veneer of intellectual credibility. Defeating them in a debate would have achieved something positive, as was proven when David Irving failed in his 1996 libel action against Deborah Lipstadt. The film "Denial" recreates this event, and is of itself a convincing refutation of Holocaust denial.

Baddiel might have had some fun in confronting the Holocaust denier above - Richard Verrall, who wrote a notorious pamphlet published in the 1970s: "Did Six Million Really Die?". Verrall wrote this poisonous tract under the pseudonym "Richard E. Harwood". At the time, he was a senior member of the National Front, and the NF for years denied that the true author was Verrall. In 1983, the Canadian Criminal Court prosecuted the book's publisher, Ernst Zundel (another Holocaust denier), saying:

"The pamphlet Did Six Million Really Die? does not fit with received views of reality because it is not part of reality".

Indeed not, and Baddiel acknowledged that there have been successful legal actions against Holocaust deniers, but, as he explained to Anthony Julius and Deborah Lipstadt in the programme, since those two main court cases, the Holocaust deniers have gained a wider audience on social media. David Irving, in particular, boasts of his following on YouTube. I believe Baddiel to have been right in his attempt to expose the disturbing amount of online neo-Nazi propaganda, most of which is unutterably vile, and he had an interesting exchange on this issue with Richard Allan, Facebook's director of policy in Europe. From The Guardian again:

"Allan told Baddiel: “We have a policy on hate speech so direct attacks on Jewish people will come off the platform. But to make the wrong statement about the facts of the Holocaust – ‘I do not think the Holocaust happened’, or ‘I think the Holocaust happened with this number of people dead or that number of people dead’ – may be permitted on the platform.”In response, Baddiel said Holocaust denial was “a direct way of saying Jews are liars, Jews have tricked the world for their own gain, Jews are the most evil, pernicious race that exist. It is hate speech. There’s no other conclusion.”

Baddiel examined a league table for Holocaust denial which showed that while 6% of Britons think the Holocaust never happened, the figure rises to 82% in the Palestinian territories that border Israel. A London-based academic attributed this to a reaction to repression of the Palestinians by Israel. I demurred at this, as, while acknowledging that the Palestinians have a case, a lie is a lie, and Holocaust denial is just that.

The most affecting ( and effective) moment in the programme was Baddiel's meeting with a Holocaust survivor, Rachel Levy. This dignified lady, well into her 80s, spoke movingly about how she was separated from her mother and her siblings upon arrival at Auschwitz; she never saw them again. Transferred to Belsen, a girl of 14, she saw her last remaining relative die and survived herself only by a miracle. The stories of actual survivors, such as this, have a greater impact rather than attempts at dialogue with warped individuals like Mulqueen. People such as Mulqueen, Verrall, etc, are not rational people, and even when their silly beliefs are refuted, they carry on believing them anyway.
This is not to say that I believe Baddiel to have been wrong in what he set out to do; I just think that he should have kept his temper when talking with Mulqueen (to be fair, he acknowledged this). Quoted in the Daily Mail, Baddiel says:
." I think it's important to understand however mad Dermot seems, we're not shooting fish in a barrel here, people believe this s***." 

There, I think, we can discern a more effective way that Mulqueen could have been tackled. Baddiel, understandably enough, given his feelings,  did not employ the most potent weapon in his rhetorical armoury: his gift for satire and comedy. Instead of trying to engage this lunatic in rational discussion, he could have held him up to ridicule, exposing Mulqueen as the contemptible buffoon that he is. 

To conclude, I refer you to the title of this post. The "other myths" referred to are the ones I wrote about on January 30th: the "Bible Burning myth" and the "We Knew Nothing myth". In our final assessment of these two delusions, and Holocaust denial, we should ask: who benefits from the myths? And the answers, I believe, are easy to locate. Briefly, the Bible Burning myth implied that the Nazis were anti-Christian and were opposed by the organised German Christian faith groups. The aim, you see, is to portray the German churches as victims of, and opponents of, the Nazi regime. Nothing could be further from the truth, but this is not the place to discuss it. "We Knew Nothing" lets all the WW2 German population off the hook for Nazi war crimes. Again, this is nonsense: the Nazis had widespread popular support - not total support but a majority large enough to intimidate the active German opponents of Hitler and drive them underground.

Lastly, who benefits from Holocaust denial? Who profits from the activities of Dermot Mulqueen, David Irving, Richard Verrall, Ernst Zundel and all the other self-styled "revisionist" lying deniers of the Holocaust? We could say anti-Semites, but they are like that anyway. We could point the finger at the Palestinians, but, I believe a fair and just settlement of their grievances would see a drop in their Holocaust denying. No, the only beneficiaries of Holocaust denial are the neo-Nazis, who are rising from the deep all over Europe - even in countries such as Poland, which suffered so much from Nazi occupation in WW2. We must not take our eye off the ball here. Baddiel made mistakes in his programme, but it was still an important documentary that we should all watch. Holocaust deniers are propagandists for the Nazi revival. We must recognise this, and be vigilant. "First they came for the Jews…" 

Jonty Bravery and a Recurring Theme

Readers of this blog, occasional or regular, will look at the title of this item and say:

 "Oh, no, he's at it again - banging on about violent mental health patients!". 

Indeed I am, and make no apology for doing so. The need to comment on this issue remains as strong as ever, even though I have made an effort over the last year or so to avoid the subject. The man in the picture above - Jonty Bravery - has brought home once again the need to return to the problem of violent psychiatric patients. Whatever his mental health problems may be, I shall stop naming him by his full name; there was no bravery in this youth's vile crime, so I shall refer to him as "JB".

As we know only too well, JB committed the heinous crime of tearing a six-year old French boy from his mother's arms and throwing him from the 10th floor of the Tate Modern on the 4th of August last year. After his arrest, said the BBC in December, he told the police: 

"I wanted to be on the news, who I am and why I did it, so when it is official no-one can say anything else."

It is nothing short of a miracle that JB's victim survived, albeit with life-changing injuries. He is still unable to stand, says the BBC now, but can open his left hand, and is saying his words one syllable at a time. We can only hope that he makes the best recovery possible. There is a Go Fund Me page to raise money for his family, found at:

https://uk.gofundme.com/f/medical-funds-for-tate-tragedy

When I have written about this issue previously, the cases examined have followed a similar pattern: a mental health patient has been released into the community to kill for the first, or even the second time. The mental health mandarins have expressed perfunctory condolences, "lessons have been learned" (we are told) and the victim's families are left to mourn the deaths of their loved ones. Then it happens again, somewhere else. This case has been different in that, thankfully, the victim has survived and that media scrutiny has been intense upon the care system that was supposedly looking after JB.

 We have seen, for the first time since I became interested in this matter, a whistleblower come forward to expose alleged deficiencies in the system that cares for these dangerous individuals.

For, if the whistleblowers are correct, JB was a very dangerous individual indeed. Incredibly, he lived in a flat in Northolt with a team of six carers, who were with him, in paired rotation, round the clock. His whistleblower carers have told the press that he was manipulative and violent; they were instructed not to say no to him in case he became aggressive. It is reported that his carers were unable to stop him from shoplifting when out on accompanied visits, and that he was already on bail for two previous assaults. It beggars belief that he was still being allowed out on unaccompanied trips.

I actually feel some sympathy for the carers, who were faced with the daily risk of assault from this unpredictable individual. I am amazed that JB was not confined to somewhere like Broadmoor anyway, as he was clearly capable of serious violence. And was it right that so many staff were tied up to cater for one patient? Had he been incarcerated, they could have been better deployed elsewhere.

Most concerning of all, as we know, is the fact that JB had spoken a year before about his plan to push someone - even a friend, if possible - from a high building. The whistleblower, "Ollie", as reported, made a tape of JB's plan. It is a chilling experience to listen to this tape; even more chilling to think that "Ollie" claims to have informed his supervisors of JB's plan, but that his employers, Spencer and Arlington, now claim to have no knowledge of any such report. 

Something went wrong somewhere, and, as Alison Holt says:

"A terrible sign of a broken system is how some experts will see the claims that Jonty Bravery's warning that he wanted to kill, went unheeded... His is a rare case, but some point to the wider pressures on the system that supports people with mental health issues, autism and learning disabilities in the community. "

Quite right - but we are left wondering: how many other JBs are there out there? Again, I have written about such people before, and I never cease to be amazed at how often they are not detected (or worse) before they kill or attack innocent members of the public.

"Worse", in this context, means that sometimes these murderous mental health patients are released into the community and kill again. Nicola Edgington is the prime example. If JB is so "difficult" and manipulative, he may well be pronounced "cured" one day and set free - perhaps to attack again.

For me, this case will resonate for a long time. The Tate Modern is one of my favourite places to visit in London, but, from now on, I will never be able to visit without thinking of one deranged individual, a falling child and a mother's primal scream.

Remaining Thoughts of a Remainer

Back in the 60s, Roger McGough wrote a poem titled "Why Patriots are a Bit Nuts in the Head". It begins with these lines:

"Patriots are a bit nuts in the head

because they wear
red white and blue tinted spectacles
(red for blood,
white for glory
and blue ... for a boy)"

The scenes of nationalistic celebration seen as the clocks chimed at 11 o' clock last night to mark our exodus from the EU reminded me of this poem and caused me to endorse its sentiment. I didn't stay up to watch the gloatfest of Farage and his acolytes in Parliament Square. I went to bed feeling sad, and woke to more of the same. Not for the first time, I have found myself wondering: "How did we get into this mess?". Not for the first time, I thought about David Cameron's fateful decision to hold that stupid referendum in 2016. It brought him personal disaster, losing his post as PM after the referendum and earning opprobrium from most Remainers - best expressed most famously by Danny Dyer. My only observation is that Cameron did not have to call the referendum, and I often wonder what life would be like for us now, had it not taken place.

Nigel Farage and other Brexiteer pundits delight in ridiculing what they describe as "Project Fear" - i.e. the warnings of the dire consequences of Brexit. That paragon of compassion, Ian Duncan Smith, is one example. In The Telegraph in 2018, he thundered:

" Hardly a day goes by without another scare story about the UK failing to get medical isotopes, facing a shortage of medicines, or British aircraft not being allowed to land in the EU"

IDS didn't mention that the Leave campaign had its own "Project Fear" - mostly about EU migrants. The rise in hate crime after the Referendum was not a scare story - it happened (and is growing). It's not a scare story that many EU nationals in the UK are worried about their status - they are.The two violent deaths that happened after the referendum campaign began - Jo Cox, M.P, and Duncan Keating - were not a scare story - they happened. The deep divisions in UK society, between families and friends, within workplaces and political parties, were not part of a scare story either - they happened. The Independent commented on this issue:

"More than one in 20 Britons (6 per cent) say they have fallen out with or stopped speaking to a family member and almost one in 12 (8 per cent) with a friend because of rows over Brexit, according to a new survey".

To me, the consequences of the Brexit fiasco are already disastrous, and I see no reason not to expect things to get worse. I can only shake my head in bewilderment at the way IDS, Farage, Johnson, et al, ignore these factors - perhaps they just regard hate, death and division as collateral damage.

One Brexiteer who I find especially irritating is the oleaginous Mark Francois, M.P. seen above. He is the darling of the Daily Express and delights in rubbing into Remainers that we have lost. I watched as much as I could endure of his performance on Channel Five's Jeremy Vine Show yesterday. In a heated exchange with Remainer Femi Oluwole, he said:

"They (the public) told us to leave and that's what we're going to do. It's called democracy"

Showing my age here, I can attest that when a politician like Mr Francois talks about democracy, the will of the people, etc, he means when the result of a vote is acceptable to him. We can only wonder what Mr Francois, IDS and Nigel Farage, etc, would have been up to now, had the referendum vote gone against them. What they really mean by quoting the results of the referendum and the election is this: "You lost, we won - now shut up!". We Remainers owe it to ourselves not to shut up, but to continue scrutinising the consequences of Brexit. 

For the results of the Referendum and election are not a victory for democracy - they are a victory for the populist Right. The extreme right are already growing in confidence, and we can expect increased activity of all kinds from them, now we have left the EU.

Other particularly nauseating items that Brexiteers constantly call for are "unity ", "healing wounds" and "stretching out their arms" to people who disagree with them - such as myself and all Remainers. Speaking for myself, I shall rebuff all such approaches. The thought of being in a hug with Farage, Francois, IDS or Anne Widdecombe is sickening to me - but that's just my opinion. No, the Brexit divisions have gone too deep to be healed, and will continue in one form or another. The majority of younger voters voted Remain and, perhaps at some time in the future, will reopen the debate about EU membership.

As for fellow Remainers, I can understand why you may be downcast at the present time, but I see a light shining towards us, and it comes all the way from Switzerland. 

I actually opposed (no-one noticed) the EU Referendum because referendums are not always progressive or beneficial to humanity. The prime example of this is shown in Switzerland, where they have a number of referendums every year. Until 1971, all-male referendum voters denied women the vote. Then:

"On 7 February 1971, 65.7% of male voters across the nation agreed women should be allowed to vote in federal elections, 78 years after New Zealand (the 1st), 53 years after Germany, 27 years after France and 26 after Italy. That same day, the four cantons of Aargau, Fribourg, Schaffhausen and Zug fell into line, giving women there the vote at a cantonal level." (Swissfact)

This vote had gone against the women of Switzerland numerous times before. I have no doubt that an unctuous Swiss equivalent of Mark Francois, after each defeat, taunted them by saying:
"Calm down, dears! That's democracy.  The (male) people have spoken, you lost, get over it!".

To their immense credit, Swiss women did not give up, but kept on fighting. Some of these redoubtable ladies, now grannies, can be seen in the picture below. I find them inspirational, and don't intend to give up criticising Brexit, Farage, and the far right. As Ziglar said: "If you learn from defeat, you haven't really lost".

Some inspirational ladies of Switzerland, who campaigned for the right to vote.