Cut Out Living Without Welfare Jeremy Seabrook
To Barrie Blower, in homage and friendship.
First published 2016 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com Copyright Š Jeremy Seabrook 2016 The right of Jeremy Seabrook to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Left Book Club, founded in 2014, company number 9338285 pays homage to the original Left Book Club founded by Victor Gollancz in 1936. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN
978 0 7453 3618 3 978 1 7837 1803 0 978 1 7837 1805 4 978 1 7837 1804 7
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Contents Series preface vii Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 Welfare cuts: the wider context 11 Being there: a sense of place 20 The fall of industrial male labour 30 Benefit fraud 38 A fate foretold 45 Sheltered accommodation 52 Zubeida 55 Azma 60 Kareema 64 Born at the wrong time 69 Abigail 73 Adele and Clifford 79 Graham Chinnery: zero hours 84 Andrea 88 Carl Hendricks 92 Arif Hossein 96 The idea of reform 105 People with disability 115 Amanda 119 Belfort: survival 127 Lorraine: in the benefits labyrinth 132 Jayne Durham 140 Paula 144
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Violence against women 150 Faraji 154 ‘Doing the right thing’ 159 Grace and Richard 160 ‘It can happen to anyone’ 166 Andrew 168 Lazy categories 172 The secret world of ‘welfare’ 175 Self-employment as a refuge 177 Joshua Ademola 178 Dayanne: the right thing and the wrong result 185 The roots of alienation 190 Imran Noorzai 194 Farida: the duty of young women 199 Welfare and mental health 208 Alison: the loneliness of being on benefit 213 Kenneth Lennox 218 Marie Fullerton 223 Gus: a heroic life 228 Stolen identities: epitaph for a working class 233 Conclusion 239 Further Reading 245
...those whom God doth punishe with povertie, let no man seeke to oppresse with crueltie —An Ease for Overseers of the Poore, published anonymously in Cambridge, 1601
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People with disability During the 1980s, when much manufacturing industry was closing down in Britain, unemployment was high. It became expedient for the then Thatcher government to conceal the true extent of worklessness. This was achieved, in part, by registering many people as sick or disabled; a category which removed people from the workplace without transferring them to the already swollen ranks of the unemployed. Many were indeed victims of stress, depression and anxiety; or older workers, exhausted or physically damaged by a lifetime of heavy manual labour. The criteria were not applied with great severity, since the principal function of the statistics was to hide the catastrophic loss of industrial employment in those years. Rectifying this became part of the project of the Coalition government from 2010 to 2015, confirmed by the subsequent Conservative administration. Many people psychically and emotionally wounded by the loss of their life’s work, and the diminishing of all they had done and contributed to the wealth of Britain (the story of the miners’ strike and its defeat speaks for itself), are, of course, now well beyond retirement age. But it has been the government’s objective to ‘tighten up’ or ‘crack down’ on those who have, allegedly, or in fact,
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abused the system, since this forms part of their rhetoric of emancipation: people with disability, for instance, do not wish to remain ‘stuck on benefit’ for an indefinite period. It is true that most people want to contribute some useful skill or ability to society; the more so, since the experience of people with disability often gives them insights and understanding which others do not possess. There is everything to be said for facilitating the passage of people with disability into the labour force according to their capacity. But this becomes oppressive when the priority is a lowering of numbers receiving benefit, putting pressure on people who are vulnerable, lack confidence, or are too weak or frightened to compete in the labour market. ‘Incentives’ to get people into work have been outsourced to private profitmaking entities, whose very existence depends upon their ‘success’ in cajoling or threatening people into employment, many of whom cannot perform the labour which they have been passed as fit for by Work Capability Assessments. These are crude and mechanistic judgements, and take little account of the situation of those they judge. This has also been supported by government rhetoric about people feigning disability in order to avoid doing a fair day’s work. It is a short step from this – a campaign, noisily and maliciously pursued by the press, much of which is now apparently an elective arm of the government information service – to a belief that the disabled in general fall into the category of idlers and scroungers, to be placed alongside crooked characters uncovered by the media who are found to be refereeing football matches or taking part in gymnastics displays while in receipt of benefits for back pain or injuries sustained in a car accident.
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Hate crimes against people with disability have reached record levels. According to the Crime Survey of England and Wales in 2012/13, 62,000 disabled people said they had been victims, although less than 2,000 of these had been recorded by the police, of which only about a quarter resulted in conviction. A much wider incidence of low-level harassment and discrimination was reported, while it was estimated that the phasing out of Disability Living Allowance would remove the benefits altogether of well over half a million people. It is one of the great ironies that a new Conservative administration should want to undo the mischief of an older one, now that the earlier act of deception has served its purpose; and beneath the rhetoric of ‘emancipation’ lies a darker story of coercion and punishment. It requires very little in the curiously understated semaphore of public communication in Britain to hint at the exclusion or outlawry of one group or another; and people with disability have often found themselves, to their astonishment, classed under the expanding category of the ‘undeserving’ in society. In any case, astute and adaptable, the government has discovered more sophisticated ways of concealing the true extent of unemployment and underemployment; this time by encouraging an upsurge in ‘self-employment’, much of it sham or ineffective, but enough to take perhaps hundreds of thousands of people off the unemployment total. And if they are not claiming ‘benefits’, many qualify for in-work tax credits, and are, in effect, subsidised by the taxpayer, that heroic figure of the Right, burning with resentment at the waste of his (the taxpayer is a male icon) money on the extravagant and undeserving, or on causes far from his heart.
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Perhaps it is partly in reaction against the policy of the Thatcher years, which the Conservatives now perceive as having been too ‘lenient’ on disability, that this group now seems to have been singled out for particular punishment. In October 2014, Lord Freud, Welfare Reform Minister, incautiously expressed the view that there is a group in society who are ‘not worth the full wage’, and might be paid as little as £2 an hour. His giving voice to this insight threw some doubt on the concept of the ‘compassionate Conservatism’ ostensibly espoused by Cameron. The disability charity Scope, together with Demos, have published research showing that by 2017/18, 3.7 million people with disability, both those in work and those not working, will lose £28 billion in benefits. A combination of cuts and restrictions to Employment and Support Allowance, the replacement of Disability Living Allowance with Personal Independence Payments, the capping of rises to benefits and tax credits, along with local authority reduction or abolition of council tax exemptions, will further remove those already on the margin of society from full participation. The DWP argues that the ‘targeting’ of benefits will be more efficient; an expression which makes benefits sound like a weapons system rather than an arm of the welfare state (see www.demos.co.uk/ press_releases/destinationunknownapril2013). In the budget of July 2015, further ‘savings’ in this area were foreshadowed. The Employment and Support Allowance has been allocated to two distinct groups: those incapable of working for the foreseeable future (the Support Group); and those for whom future work is possible (the Work-Related Activity Group). The ESA for the latter group is to be reduced
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in April 2017 to the equivalent of Jobseeker’s Allowance, which will cut their benefit by about 30 per cent. Undermining the security of people with disability creates more problems than it solves, in terms of emotional and psychiatric disturbance, anxiety and depression. Iain Duncan Smith persistently couches his intentions in the most benign terms. He reverts to the assertion that ‘work is good for your health’. It is true that most people, including those with disability, want to contribute to the work of society; it is of a piece with the rhetoric about ‘liberating’ people. But we have seen how compulsion is used. When Duncan Smith insists that support is there ‘for the most vulnerable people in society’, he follows it with a distinct menace: ‘We must not stop there. We need to be relentless in our efforts to get more people into work and off welfare.’ The word ‘relentless’ quite properly strikes a chill into many people with disability; the more so since the stigma of being a ‘skiver’ hovers over all claimants, and some employers are not necessarily exempt from prejudice against those who suffer from physical or mental disability. Employers may ‘give’ people work, but this does not turn them into charities.
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Alison: the loneliness of being on benefit Alison is in her mid-fifties: a woman whose pleasant manner and smart appearance give little indication of the suffering beneath. On the walls of her comfortable flat are pictures of her family – many of them now dead or lost – and photos of her cat, her main companion. Alison feels defeated. She nursed her husband for ten years until he died in 2001. He had no pension. Partly as a result of her bereavement, an older experience of depression has recurred. ‘I can’t work for health reasons. As well as depression, I have a stomach disorder, and psoriasis which, when it comes out, is disfiguring and so painful I cannot bear to have any clothes near it.’ The Department for Work and Pensions has told her she should work. She looked after her husband from when she was still in her thirties. He had three strokes, each one worse than the one before. They had no insurance. When he died, Alison was still under 45, and missed out on a widow’s pension – what later became bereavement allowance – by two years. She got £22 a week for the 12 months after he died. She couldn’t hold a job, immobilised by psoriasis. She was in and out of hospital with this auto-immune condition, linked both to arthritis and depression.
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‘I’m getting £150 to £160 a fortnight. Being poor only makes all other misfortunes worse. My son died recently, a heart attack at 40. As a result, I also lost my grand-daughter, who has been adopted by people who live on the south coast. My father also died of heart problems when he was 60. There has always been that weakness in the family. ‘Being on benefit is hard and degrading. I’ve only ever had one holiday in my life, and I am nearly 60. I went to Spain once with my son. The benefits officer said everyone should have one holiday a year. He said “Why don’t you save up one pound a week?” How far would that get me? Your income is squeezed all the time. The rent has gone up, and I have to pay something towards council tax. I’m lucky if I have £10 a week for food. ‘I also have to pay the bedroom tax. I can’t afford it. I don’t care if they put me in prison; at least I’d get shelter and three meals a day. I don’t care anymore; that is how I feel inside. My son looked after me. He was receiving severe disability allowance, but when I had no electricity, he gave me the money to heat one room. It is all much worse when you are on your own. I’ve no one to turn to now. I have to carry all my burdens alone. I pop pills all day – I take Prozac and sleeping tablets. Sometimes I feel suicidal. ‘When my husband died, I received no help at all. I nursed him and I nursed my other son, who is also ill, schizophrenia and manic depression. He has dementia, and has been in a residential home for the past 15 years. He comes here on Saturdays. It’s company. Just having someone here. ‘Loneliness is the biggest killer. I have no real communication with anyone. I have one sister much older than I am. She looks after her husband, who has Alzheimer’s. My three brothers are workaholics – all they think about is work and
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money. I looked after them when they were small, because our mother was taken to a mental hospital when I was nine. One brother went in the army and another worked as an electrician. They took care of me until our mother and father had gone; after that, they stopped. My mother was a permanent invalid. One day, I remember, my father tried to kill himself. That was when gas could kill you. We had gone to bed. My brothers were asleep. I could smell gas. I got up and found my father unconscious, with his head in the gas oven. I broke the window and called an ambulance, and they got him to hospital. ‘If I sound angry and bitter, this is because I am. I can’t go anywhere. If I take the bus, it costs £4 a day for the fare. If I were fit, I’d walk, but I also have mobility problems. ‘We are an unfortunate family. My mother lost her first son when he was five years old. Now I have lost my first-born. History repeats itself. Of course, poverty aggravates it. Some people have killed themselves over benefit cuts. The rich don’t understand. ‘With our benefits being cut, I feel like I’ve been robbed. I was robbed of housing: I had been living with my son who died, but then I had to move out of the house. It was too much: his girlfriend, Ella, didn’t do a lot, because she is bipolar. Then Social Services took the child away. I can say without exaggeration that my heart is broken. Every night I think “Let God take me in my sleep, I have nothing to live for.” ‘Without money, you can’t do anything. I would love to go to Birmingham to look round the shops. Stop off and have a cup of coffee. It sounds pathetic, but it’s true. I have only used my washing machine once since I’ve had it, because I am afraid of using electricity and hot water. I have a bath only once a fortnight, the rest of the time, I wash down. I should be having
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two baths a day because my skins risks getting infected with the psoriasis. ‘I’m a proud person. But I feel that all through my life, I’ve had everything taken away from me – my mother, my first son, my other son and now my granddaughter. When I was young, I wanted to be a model. I was pretty. It was my ambition to model for a clothing catalogue. And now I’m threatened with court and being left without a roof over my head. And I can’t do anything about it. ‘When I was a child, my mother used to say to me “When you are old enough to meet a nice man, you’ll marry and settle down.” The one I got was a swine. He was a drinker and he used to knock me about. I divorced him while the children were still young. I was with him eight or nine years. My second husband was a lovely man. He was a twin, but ever since birth his heart had been weak. He had seizures at times throughout our married life. I often thought he would die. I was with him the same amount of time I was with my first husband. Two different worlds. ‘I had a house then, which I prefer. In flats, you are enclosed. My cat is my chief companion. If it died, I think I would kill myself. My cat is my life … Do you mind if I smoke? I stopped smoking, but the day my son died, I smoked ten cigarettes. I was violently sick. I shouldn’t. I have asthma and have to use an inhaler. ‘All my ailments are genetic. My father worked all his life as a long-distance lorry driver. He never claimed a penny from the State. People in the street who were better off used to offer us things, but he wouldn’t take anything from anybody. We had a piano in the living room. My father sang in the choir. My brother’s daughter has inherited his love of music. I don’t know
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where my brother lives … I take after my father … Anyone down and out he would offer a meal. ‘I have been in a psychiatric hospital with depression. I have Income Support and sickness benefit. I applied for a Personal Independence Payment. [This was refused in the first instance. It then went for ‘mandatory recommendation’, which means that the Department for Work and Pensions will reconsider its decision, before an appeal to a tribunal can be made. There is no time limit on this process.] ‘I did have a boyfriend after my second husband died. He was younger than I. He was a great help. But we drifted apart, after eight or nine years. That seems the length of time my relationships last. It was when I was nine that my mother was taken away … My boyfriend saw his sister die. She left a child of four. After that, we moved apart. ‘People tell you that life is what you make it. It isn’t. It is mostly what happens to you, especially if you have inherited disabilities. I had chronic psoriasis as a baby. I also had it when the children were small. I take diazepam to make me relax and to help me find sleep. ‘It seems my family is living under a curse … It’s a funny thing, but a gypsy did curse me. One day, I was crossing a busy road with my children and our dog. I was walking slightly ahead of them. Suddenly I heard the screech of the brakes of a lorry and a scream. Before I could turn round, I cried out “Don’t let the children die, let it be the dog.” The gypsy heard me and cursed me. She was a real gypsy. They looked after horses in the fields. I have often wondered if I have been living under that curse. ‘I believe in God. I believe in life after death. I have seen people who have died, who have come back. A boy who died
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on the railway came to see me. And a week before my mother died, she swore she saw my father sitting on the end of her bed. “He’s come for me” she said. I believe you go to a better life when you die. That has been my only comfort. I also nursed my father before he died. He had cancer of the pancreas. I was 26 or 27 … The time when I needed him most.’ Alison has had counselling, but she didn’t continue with it. She rarely goes out. In the long, lonely hours, she tells over the loss and suffering of her life, which have become, to some degree, her identity. Benefit ‘reforms’ can only add to her unhappiness, which they duly do. Is this a predictable result of government action, or merely a by-product of ideologically driven ‘policy’, from the consequences of which those who implement it are carefully shielded, both by their wealth and by a set of beliefs which, in their way, are as fanatical as those of any religious zealot? Alison was the most deeply unhappy person I met. Even if she had not felt herself persecuted by an unforgiving system, this would probably have made little difference to her underlying feeling about life, and would, of course do nothing to alter her experience of loss. But it might have provided her with modest space for a less cramped existence, and the possibility that she might diminish the pain of being, which scarcely needs gratuitous augmentation from those elected to govern us, which they do by the light of a meagre and fading wisdom.