welfare

April 25, 2014

Anything for a blue badge

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Anything for a blue badge.

Now the Local Council had got in on the act, sending her a forty page form to renew her blue badge.  She sighed.  Such bureaucratic heavy handedness used to be reserved for the alphabet people, the DLA, PIP, WTC, HMRC, TLA agencies.  But now, even the suits in the downtown offices seemed to approach parked cars with a cudgel.  Since when had parking become so contentious?

Yes, she qualified for a DLA exemption, and here was a copy of her current letter of award.

Yes, she had a disability, although when asked to indicate its precise nature and extent within the boundaries of the small box provided, she was unable, sorry, to provide the entire requisite details.

Yes, she had always had a disability, still had it and always would have, God save her soul from its crushing drudgery.  She would have loved to lose it, say, or leave it behind unclaimed at a lost property somewhere, but no.  Perhaps it would be fairer to indicate how, in her own words, her disability had had her.

No, her disability was not progressive, but Yes, its effects did vary though again, she was unable to indicate the full nature and extent of its variableness even within the box outlined or on the extra space provided overleaf.  How does one articulate loss, sorrow, heaviness, isolation, poverty, pain, humiliation and sheer boredom?  She did her best, indicating that there were days she didn’t feel like getting out of bed, but she had to, nonetheless; that there were times when she had to crawl, because walking was impossible.  That the wind and rain often put paid to her plans for some fresh air.  That the complexities of driving into town were only made possible because she knew a place to park nearby.

She filled in the form, doing her best to suppress mounting irritation.  She posted it off and within a few weeks her new badge came, all shiny and laminated, and with a picture of her unhappy visage on the back.  It was a valuable, vital piece of kit for travel into town, her badge of freedom.  Such a pity that she had to reveal so many personal details in order to get it.

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March 5, 2014

Brian 2

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Brian 2

“Oy! Watch where you’re going, won’t ya?!” Suddenly, there was this woman yelling at me to keep out of her way, rolling forward on the balls of her feet and standing over me, the bulk of her body blocking out the draining light of a late afternoon in August. She had a fag in her fingers and the smell was drifting unpleasantly up my nostrils, but you know, the burnt heat of it sort of woke me up. Dozing on my patch where I always sit, she had just walked up and almost past me, about to kick me and then thinking better of it. “Gerra life, ya lazy bag of shite…” she mumbled, suddenly aware of her mistake and that I was alert and not actually a dope-head. I pulled on Gazza’s chain and just waited.  Maybe she hadn’t seen him tucked under the blanket at my side, or maybe she felt caught out, but she mumbled, hocked and spat just next to me, and then moved on, taking her shopping bag, her dripping fag and her bad attitude away with her.

I am getting used to it, but after more than twelve years on the streets, and being settled here where most people know me and respect my patch – I leave theirs well alone, too – angry outbursts from stupid people are getting a bit predictable, you know? Like, I have a brain in my head, I have good eyesight, and I know all the best places to get a warm bed or a meal for under a fiver. I can spot trouble at forty paces so I’m quite savvy enough. It’s a wonder to me, that people see me sitting peacefully here, just minding my own business, but they think I’m out of it, a fuck-head, witless, away with the fairies. I’m not, as it happens, and what happened to me could happen to any of youse, too.

I was the youngest of nine children. Me mum was always after me to tidy my side of the room, to brush my hair or my teeth, wash my face, make myself neat. Though her pestering annoyed me, something must have stayed, because I find myself becoming more house-proud as the years pass, which is daft. My house is currently a static caravan looking out onto a field in Midlothian. I’m renting it, courtesy of a friend of my da’s who has two of them, and lets me have that one for me and my dog.  It looks out onto a big field at the back. And I have my pitch here, just next to the bank and down from the High Street. It is a good place to sit, though I would not call it comfortable being on my arse for hours at a time. I’m thin under my padded jacket, I know, and I don’t much like it when well fed people point that out to me, either. It’s not as if I don’t know about food, after all.

People sometimes don’t see me, like when it’s crowded, like just at this time of year when the streets are mobbed and nobody’s looking where they’re goin’. They really don’t notice me down here and I get kicked in the shins. My dog, he gets stepped on, which isnae fair on him. People throw things too, bottles, cartons of half-finished food, they just throw them down and expect the Council to collect them up and take them away. Or they leave half-finished bottles of alcohol on the sill next to my head and the smell sends me back a few years.

I was a drinker, but it wasnae that did for me. Not really. Yes, I was mixing my drinks, drinking at work, but it was the coke that finally got tae me. One mistake. Really, that’s all it was, because with some drugs, ye just cannae dae it the once and expect tae leave it. It comes efter ye like a cloud of promises that make your mouth dry and your body sweat and your eyes see things that areney there. That’s the worst, the not feeling right and not knowing how long it will tak tae feel solid again.

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March 4, 2014

Brian

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I’m just sitting on the window ledge – smooth, warm marble, generous deep recesses and near the ground so I can comfortably rest – having a chat with my pal. I think his name’s Brian. I’m around most Thursdays and Sundays and now that summer is slowly coming out of her shell I like to sit here with my face tilted up to the sun. I can see why Brian likes it too – it’s is a great spot for being warm. When I reluctantly rise to go, I leave a few coins or a five and then I’m on my way. On the return leg I try to remember to turn back and wave goodbye, but with the thinking going on in my head, sometimes I forget.

It was his dog that I first saw, a barrel-chested black Staffie with a great big grin and a tail that wags so hard, he skites all over the place when he comes to say hello. I’ve always liked Staffordshire Bull Terriers. My mother had one, Susie, who was so excitable that Mum got rid of her. Anyway, I like this fella, who does the same dance with his back end when he is pleased. Took me ages to realise it was a boy, not a girl. But that is me. Always slow to know these things.

Brian is about my age, I guess. Just something about the flecks of grey in his hair which, despite being so badly cut, is thick and shiny when it has just been washed. The sun catches it, and it’s good to see him looking like himself. He looks better with his hoodie off his face, less caught up inside his poor clothes.

Anyway, one morning we were sitting just having a chat, and two young men came up, abruptly stopped and stood opposite us. They were moaning something unintelligible about getting together, being pals and doing stuff. Not looking at me, just at Brian and waving their hands about. From his spot on the ground he quietly looked up at them and said little. Nodded, agreed, doing nothing to aggravate them. He looked so vulnerable sitting on the ground, but if he was anxious, he hid it well. Maybe the dog concealed under the blanket at his side helped with that. I said after they left, “Pissed, you think?” and he said, “A bit of the other….”

How vulnerable the homeless are to being abused. Almost every encounter is with someone standing over them, in front of them, above them. I am glad I was sitting near him that morning, watching the strange interview.

After that, the whole story came out. How he’d had a great life, the fancy car, the big house, a wife and kids and a great job as a chef with a top hotel making obscene amounts of money. He had it all, and I asked if it was a slide into booze…Naw, though he was drinking, it was one mistake with drugs. Cocaine. Just the word terrifies me. Not a great idea being a chef in a kitchen with sharp knives when the paranoia starts to bite either, he said. It didn’t take long to lose the job, the car, the wife and the kids, though his daughter still comes up from South to see him when she can. It takes her twenty-four hours travelling on the bus. She stays the weekend and then she’s off again on another long bus ride home. I said she must love him very much.

I caught myself tearful later on that week, wondering what I might do to help. Would he prefer a large sum, or a smaller weekly amount, I asked? He is realistic, and said that he would prefer the small weekly amount, or it would all just get spent very quickly. So it’s harder to leave the street then. But maybe he would not want a job with a pay-packet. He gets bored easily and he likes being at his pitch, meeting his regulars and having his independence. He can take his dog for a walk in the middle of a sunny day whenever he likes. What will it be like for him when he gets older, though? I wonder about that as I get to the car and drive home.

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March 3, 2014

The Welfare State

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The Welfare State was conceived as a cushion to protect those affected by disability, poverty and misfortune. It is not coincidental that it was introduced in the aftermath of World War II, as it became recognised that disability and illness as a result of the war effort were not necessarily anyone’s particular “fault”; and to compensate returning servicemen and women for disadvantage in the job market.

That compassionate understanding has been gradually eroded and lost as the old world of privilege and opinionated politics has reasserted itself. The wealthy have always punished the poor, justifying in harsh policies and political rhetoric the belief that poverty is punishment for fecklessness, feeble character or moral defectiveness. And so we see a move towards increasingly punitive and divisive assessments in terms of which its claimants are required to justify their claims – and highlight their suffering – rather than having their needs assessed objectively according to enlightened benchmarks that signal poverty or incapacity. The old-world view in which the rich punish the poor and reward themselves is being reasserted.

A retrogressive tax system is revealed. The bedroom tax is cruel and falls most sharply upon the poor and disabled; PIP introduces tests for mobility and personal care that are almost meaningless; and yet, our MP’s can claim the most exorbitant “expenses” and take umbrage when legitimate public scrutiny suggests their self-awarded compensation schemes are excessive or dishonest.

Different rules now apply in dishonesty. If you wish to be excused, make dishonesty glaring. If you want to get caught, filch fish fingers for the kids’ tea. Righteous indignation sounds loudest from those upstanding members of the establishment who themselves enjoy the most lavish privileges and exemptions. That was the state of play that Welfare reforms were intended to mitigate. Instead, we have a situation in which the most abject poverty is not only tolerated but, in a deliberate policy to divide and conquer, is now blamed on those who live in substandard housing and eke out a living on the minimum wage.

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December 12, 2013

Knock her back

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Knock her back

It is a still, bright morning so I decide to get a quick breath of air before breakfast. As I carry more recycling outside to my box awaiting the kerbside collection, the air around me smells sweet and fresh. While negotiating our high front step and smiling into the low sun, I twist my knee rather painfully, which takes me by surprise. This seems to be a new problem. Waiting to admire the cool morning quietness, I tumble backwards and land with a squawk in the patch of tidied-for-winter dwarf primroses that our downstairs neighbour carefully plants each year to catch some warmth against the brick wall. I hope she does not see me and conclude I am being careless.

Later in the day, while I am getting out of my car in town, I trip over an ancient paving stone and fall again, this time grazing my forearm. If you care to look, you will notice that our forearms are not particularly well padded. But that pain is nothing compared to the sheer agony of the painful knock to my left hip which follows, an impact that goes right in to the bone but leaves no external marks, only, after a few days, spectacular bruising. That agony is so intense that, mute and praying, I am frozen into disbelief, waiting to regain my breath and some small enthusiasm for movement. I walk rather gingerly for a while afterwards.

Falling is fairly routine, especially outside on unfamiliar ground. I wonder if the damage inflicted by two sudden and unpredictable falls – sore feet, sore neck, aching joints and painful wrists – is a fair price for the freedom of getting out and about.

The new assessments for Personal Independence Payments (which replace DLA) measure our lives against a series of set questions, but, as with most tests based on a lengthy form and a cursory examination on the day, little account is taken of impacts which spread like spores through the body after the main event. If our able-bodied colleagues who examine us fell the way we do, they would be in hospital and would probably feel entitled to sue someone for compensation. We manage, just as we always have, and for our efforts and stoicism it seems that we are to be punished with questions asking whether we can sit, stand, walk twenty metres and so on – how little we can manage before we surrender the unequal struggle and sign ourselves up for twenty-four /seven incapacity.

The most frustrating things about disability are that it comes with extra pain, with extra humiliation and with extra costs, which we are less able to recoup by joining your average labour market. Of course, it is no longer politically correct to suggest that work place discrimination is a problem, but that doesn’t mean that a level playing field has magically appeared from the lumps and tussocks that constitute the average barriers to workplace employment. For now, though, it is these extra costs of disability that assessments should focus on, rather than the precise or exact nature of what we can and cannot do, which is difficult enough to articulate at the best of times.

It is a double loss that we, and many other marginalised groups, try so hard to be like other people and then find our efforts rewarded with misunderstandings, when what we would most value is a fair assessment of the costs of living near the margins. I don’t care if my neighbour has insomnia and three legs. I am not interested in whether one may be shorter than the other two. That sort of interest is mere prurience. But I would be interested if her three legs disadvantaged her in finding work and meant that walking took her twice as long as her two-legged contemporaries. The effect of disability on “normal” life is what matters, not the precise nature of our incapacities. These should remain a private matter for us to manage as best we can. The costs of these incapacities are the only legitimate concern of social welfare assessments.

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