Coming to a computer screen near you, the final degrading step that a person who is already ground down by the benefits system in the UK has to undergo.
I have been poked, prodded, lied about, forced to travel near enough 200 miles to fight my case and now I'm called for a Work Focussed Interview. This is an interview that will most probably be carried out between me and a twenty-something slip of a girl (or man) who has had one job in their life, other than a paper-round while still at school.
The idea of this interview is to tell me that I should be doing this, that and the other to find a job where the employer will not employ me, or if they do, they will most probably ask me to leave after a week because of my disability. I mean, what employer wants an employee that has trouble concentrating in the morning and has trouble staying awake in the afternoon, needs to get out of a normal chair after about 15-20 minutes to loosen his knee joints, can hardly climb stairs (and so is a fire hazard), cannot lift his hands above his head and cannot stand for more than a few minutes.
Yet this is the indignity I have to face on Tuesday. I have to pray that I can park near the DWP office on the other side of town and that they do not want me to go upstairs to an interview room. On top of all this, I have to hope that I do not do, or say, the wrong thing and have the DWP "sanction" me. For those outside the UK, this is where the Department for Works and Pensions arbitrarily decide that I have breached their rules and stop all of my benefits. Not some of my benefits, we are talking, for a first offence (supposedly), all of my benefits. This will mean that my wife and I will have no money for food, heating or light, but we will owe our landlord £200 for the two weeks of rent that will not be paid, if not more if the council do not restart the payments after the fortnight.
The standard working period for the DWP is a fortnight, as, in the past, unemployed people had to sign on for their benefit and then get paid this often. This is not a problem for the clerks in their centrally heated offices who can mark off two weeks on a calendar easily enough. For businesses and banks this is unworkable. It seems that direct debits and the like can only be paid monthly, that is, on the same date every month, days do not come into it unless the 14th falls on a weekend, in which case it used to be paid on the Monday following.
Now, I think to normal people, the problem will be becoming obvious, some months have five weeks in them, in fact, the only month that is an exact four week period is a non-leap year February. So, although the 14th of January is on a Tuesday this year, it is not an even number of weeks from the 14th of February, and so on and so on. This means that budgeting on benefits is an amazing feat of accounting, and if the Chancellor of the Exchequer needed to do it, he would fail unless, as he does, he had a large bank balance in the black.
So, the Minister for Works and Pensions has decided to bring in a system whereby benefits claimants will be paid monthly. It has already cost £50M of lost money already to prepare the system to do it, but it doesn't work. So will future sanctions be for a minimum of a month?
The government, which, yet again, has been caught in a PR lie, is trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the public by making every claimant guilty of "shirking" and cheating the system by use of the media. This government by Upper Class Twits who only have the needs of themselves and their own classmates from Public School or University in mind. These cheats who started by preventing themselves being voted out in the first days of their filling the seats of power with a bunch of sycophantic cronies who are all filling jobs for which they have little or any qualification for.
The people are getting fed up with the austerity package they are being forced to undergo - pay rises capped to 1% while MPs vote themselves a massive pay rise; high paid people get tax cuts in their favour; power companies raise prices by 3% and train companies raise fares by 6%. There will come a time when the people can take no more hypocrisy.
