Saints, Scroungers and Movie Reviews

I shouldn't have done that. You know how if someone says 'don't look, it's too horrible!' you instinctively do, and then feel sick, repulsed or degraded and can't get the vile image out of your mind?  That's what reading Daily Mail articles is like.

Why, then, did I give the tiniest, weeniest damn what Toby Young had to say about I, Daniel Blake in his review for that ghastly rag?  I've read and heard plenty of positive, promising reviews and it's not as if the Daily Heil was ever likely to do anything other than a hatchet job on it.  Indeed, Young went out of his way to slate the film and - the bastard! - put in a load spoilers without any prior warning too.  Why would he worry about that, though?  His readership won't go to see it anyway; they'll draw their conclusions about it from his own wise words and insightful analysis (clears throat ironically...).

I'll pick the bones out of Young's critique shortly but I should start by confessing that I haven't actually seen I, Daniel Blake yet.  It isn't showing here in Stoke during its opening week which is odd, when we probably have a disproportionately high number of 'Daniels' here and a growing number of displaced 'Katies' too.  I'm sure one of the multiplexes will squeeze it onto one of its smaller-than-your-own-TV screens in due course.  The excellent Stoke Film Theatre at the University has it later in November, probably just before it's out on DVD or on Film 4.  In the meanwhile, I wait in anticipation (and with almost unrealistically high expectations) to see it.  Welfare Rights Lit - the Movie.  Go, Ken Loach!

But back to Toby Young and the Daily Mail.  Apparently, Daniel Blake isn't a 'real' benefit claimant because we don't see him 'drinking, smoking, gambling or even watching television'.  In short, he's too 'good', too far removed from the Benefits Street stereotype, to be credible.  Young also can't believe that someone recovering from a major heart attack could be found 'fit for work' (happens all the time, dude) and he doesn't believe Blake can't immediately appeal when he gets the decision (he can't - see below).

I'm guessing it may be some tome since Toby Young was last employed assisting clients with ESA appeals (me too, actually, thanks to the removal of Legal Aid funding for us pesky do-gooders), but there really are a great many paragons of hard work and respectability who fall ill and are, quite wrongly, found 'fit for work'.  Some of them don't drink, smoke, gamble or even watch much TV.  Some of them have hobbies like carpentry, tend nice gardens, help their neighbours, volunteer for their communities and dress smartly for their tribunals.  They maintain the standards we are encouraged to believe only 'hard-working people' care about.  I even met one chap on incapacity benefit who spent the years of his enforced early retirement building a fantastic model railway while campaigning tirelessly, and ultimately successfully, for better full-sized rail services for his community.  To nick a classic line; 'Reader, I married him'!

Some people wrongly denied their benefits are Daily Mail readers.  Yes, even they could be Daniel Blake!  When I was doing regular appeal casework, I was always being told ''They're right to clamp down on all those shirkers, but I've worked all my life and I'm genuinely ill!'.  They had seen and believed the 'Saints and Scroungers' and 'On the Fiddle' programmes about benefit claimants swindling their way to a life of luxury because the system was too soft, so how the hell could this be happening to them?

How indeed?  (Clue - it isn't the fault of immigrants either...)

Confidentiality rules prevent me sharing too many details of my Daniel (or Daniella) Blakes' health problems but they included people trying to recover from heart attacks and strokes, serious brain injuries, complex fractures to their limbs, progressive conditions such as MS, as well as profound mental ill health.  I assume that Mr Young's knowledge of the ESA system is so good that he's already aware that you can have completely lost the use of your dominant arm and hand - or even actually have lost the arm and hand entirely - and still not have 'limited capability for work'?  'Common sense' - that precious commodity of which the Right believe they have a monopoly - may tell you a person is not fit for work and never in a hundred years is going to be offered a job, but the Work Capability Assessment's points system, devised by Civil Servants with secure, steady, office-bound lives, tested by an ill-trained, hasty or bigoted 'health care professional' and considered by an over-worked, under-trained Decision Maker, insists they are.  Time and again, the DWP fails to properly consider the 'exceptional circumstances' route to entitlement - Regulations 29 and 35 to those in the know.  Both medical assessors and Decision Makers frequently overlook their power to declare that a claimants health at serious risk if not found to have 'limited capability for work' if they slip through the awkward gaps in the points system, Daniel Blake style.  Real people have died as a result and DWP internal enquiries flagged this as an urgent training need, and yet it is still happening.

Of course the hundreds of Daniel Blakes I've encountered in my years as a benefits adviser haven't all been likeable, upright characters.  They've included addicts and thieves, child abusers, wife-beaters and neo-Nazis but, however unsavory their past or present, if they had been wrongly assessed as 'fit for work' when proper analysis of the facts and application of law said they were not, I would advise and represent them accordingly.  Justice and the means to live are not, at least in a civilised society, the sole preserve of 'nice' people. Sadly, after years of claimant-bashing TV, it's difficult to imagine a cinema audience taking too complex a character to their heart so, if Daniel Blake does prove on viewing to be a little too saintly to be 'typical', I can understand why the film-makers might have erred on the side of niceness.  When I wrote Severe Discomfort I tried to make Lyn and Terry Walker, my central claimant couple, slightly flawed yet still sympathetic.  Anyone who reaches the end of that book and isn't rooting for them has failed my Empathy Capability Assessment.  While most reviews suggest it worked, others felt their negative views on claimants vindicated by the characters' shortcomings.

I'm bracing myself for some necessary over-simplification of the benefit regulations in I, Daniel Blake, something you can avoid with 500 pages of a novel to play with, though too much legal corner-cutting leaves a get-out for defenders of the current system - that the film is inaccurate so can be disregarded.  Unsurprisingly, this is part of Young's attack.  He is critical that the film suggests say Blake cannot appeal his 'fit for work' decision without first getting a call from the DWP decision maker and says this is false.  It is, but not in the way Young wants us to believe.  The reality, since October 2013, is actually worse than this.  Prior to appealing to an independent tribunal, a claimant has to request that the DWP 'reconsider' their decision.  Only when the 'mandatory reconsideration' has taken place, perhaps weeks or months later, and the claimant has written notice of the outcome from the decision maker, not just a phone call, can s/he lodge an appeal with the Tribunals Service and, with a 'sick note', go back on ESA at the basic assessment rate.  ESA claimants found 'fit for work' can only 'sign on' for JSA during the reconsideration, unless signed off by their GP with a completely new medical condition or by providing medical evidence that their existing condition has significantly deteriorated.  As DWP cut-backs remove skilled staff, 'reconsideration' is becoming little more than a rubber-stamping exercise or worse, a delaying or deflecting tactic.  See this blog for an in-depth critique of the process.

It's also troubling me that the movie might lay the blame for all this misery at IDS and the Tories' door, when ESA was actually a New Labour creation.  Even the stricter descriptors and 'migration' of Incapacity Benefit claimants to ESA which started in 2011 was signed off when Yvette Cooper was still Secretary of State at the DWP.  When, in 2015, Rachel Reeves said Labour wasn't the party of 'people on benefits', she wasn't kidding.  They hadn't been for years.  Ironically, then, Toby Young is cheering for measures to supposedly put the 'workshy' back to work which were none of his party's doing. 

Young is quick to point out that cuts to 'welfare' are popular and mocks the film for suggesting communities might co-operate to support claimants.  Paradoxically, both are true.  I've advised in Foodbanks and met helpers who are fully behind both austerity and benefit cuts, in principle, but appalled by what they add up to in practice.  Even people who get riled up by stories about benefit cheats will willingly rally round friends and neighbours who fall victim to those cuts, just as someone might express strongly prejudicial and negative views about 'immigrants' and yet get on perfectly well with a Polish work colleague or have the greatest respect for their Syrian cardiologist.  When the abstract 'them' becomes someone you know, everything can change - but only if people appreciate that their mate isn't the exception but the rule.

Or, to put it another way, that #WeAreAllDanielBlake.

Fifth Friday (and Saturday, and Sunday...)

This is one of those rare weekends when, even if you aren't sure Welfare Rights Lit is your thing, you can stockpile the entire Social Insecurity series on your Kindle for nothing, just in case it is.


Severe Discomfort, in which you're introduced to Lyn and Terry Walker - who are neither heroes, nor anti-heroes, merely disabled people getting on with their lives until someone decides they're benefit cheats - is free today (29th July), along with the sequel/second half of the story, Continual Supervision.  If you enjoy these, or if you have genuine, constructive criticism you would like to share, please, please do a review - either on Amazon or Goodreads.  You might also like to track down the Solent Welfare Rights Project on Facebook and say 'hello' to the (entirely fictional) team. 


Do tell your friends about the books, so they can download them free too - next on 5th August for SD and 12th for CS.  You could even suggest your MP reads them!

You can catch up with the Walker family and their advisers a couple of years on in Limited Capability - a sometimes grim but ultimately uplifting tale of Employment and Support Allowance assessments - with all three episodes free on Saturday, and individually on consecutive Saturdays throughout August.


The last in the series, Claimant Commitment, in which the characters find themselves in the Coalition-era of sanctions and the Bedroom Tax, is free on Sunday, and in individual instalments on successive Sundays throughout the month, except for Part 2 which I can't programme free that day as it starts a new Kindle Direct term that day, so that one will be free on Saturday instead this time!

Grand Union, the 4mph thriller, isn't free, as the (real) benefits team need biscuits more than ever right now as we go onto short-time working and await the outcome of another funding bid.  Depending on the weather, I may get a lot of gardening done in the next few months, or a lot of writing, or a little of each.  Either way, a new Daphne Randall adventure is well on its way.

Benefits, Books and Brexit

Waking up to a changed world...?

I realised a couple of days ago that it's over a month since my last blog post. It's not that I have writers' block or nothing to say.  On the contrary, there is as much to talk about as ever, whether it's the apparently increasingly unstable and disquieting state of the world or, more happily, the progress of my latest Daphne Randall adventure (working title now Daphne of the Four Counties).  The problem is more that things have been moving so quickly that, no sooner have I started to collect my thoughts into a post, than events seem to have overtaken them. 

The Brexit vote was certainly a shock and not the result I had hoped for.  Whatever the flaws of the EU, the principle of European unity and co-operation is something I have long held dear.  That the Leave campaign succeeded on the back of a staggering weight of untruths is, perhaps, every bit as depressing as the actual result.  'Post truth politics' is, apparently, this season's look.


We'd voted postally several days before and cleared off for a week afloat, mooring at the glorious Bugsworth Basin on the Upper Peak Forest Canal on the day of the Referendum.  After a busy day cleaning and painting our boat we had an evening stroll around the basin, listened to the Radio 4 ten o'clock night-time news, including a report that Nigel Farage had conceded that the Remain camp had probably managed a narrow victory, and settled down contentedly to sleep.  Early the next morning, I put the radio on again, to news was of crashing stock markets.  A crowing Nigel Farage declared it 'Independence Day' but appeared to have not a clue what to do next.  Tim Farron of the LibDems decided it was somehow all Jeremy Corbyn's fault.  Before breakfast, the Prime Minister had signaled his resignation.


In the run-up to the vote, and since, I started to pay more attention to these little blue plaques...

With UK politics still running in Game of Thrones mode, this one seemed a good example to share although I could have used the one from Bugsworth Basin, or one of several scattered along the Ironbridge Gorge or even the one in the Citizens Advice Bureau building where I work.  I'm sure the Brexiteers will be quick to point out that if we aren't paying in to the EU, we'll have more of our own money to spend on projects of this kind.  Really?  They've already admitted there won't actually be £350 million extra per week for the NHS, so where exactly are the funds going to come from now for regional cultural development?

Perhaps I should ask the new Culture Secretary?  After all, she is the MP for our neighbouring Staffordshire Moorlands constituency! 

For the 'Do-gooders'

I would have been fifteen when I made up my mind that capital punishment was a 'bad thing'.  It happened quite suddenly at the end of a house assembly at secondary school, in which a fellow pupil and I had been chosen to debate the whether it was right or wrong.  I had never really given the subject much thought although both of my parents thought it should never have been abolished - which it finally had, about ten years earlier.


I let my opposite number pick her side first - she picked 'against' so I got 'for' by default.  Our house-master, who I will call 'Mr Curry', although that wasn't his name, primed us both with arguments and evidence to support our cases.  From the start, I felt that he gave my opponent more and better ammunition, including details of the Derek Bentley case.  I started to wonder if I had ended up on the wrong side.

On assembly day morning, my classmate and I delivered our little speeches to the bored hordes of our house with all the awkwardness self-consciousness you might expect from a couple of fifteen-year-old girls and absolutely no rhetorical skill whatsoever.  Mr Curry thanked us both and sent us back to our seats where I waited to hear him give a better explanation of why capital punishment was wrong.

He didn't.  Instead, quite unexpectedly, he launched into an emotive argument about why it was right and just, focusing on how he would feel if anyone killed someone close to him, especially his own young children, and how he would want that person dead.  I waited for him to qualify that with an observation that law shouldn't be made on the basis of raw gut instinct, except he seemed very much of the opinion that it should.  There was no attempt to present a properly balanced, reasoned argument; no comparison of murder or violent crime rates in countries with or without.  There wasn't even a feeble, faith-based 'Eye for an Eye' attempt to do so.  It was an ugly appeal to embrace revenge.  Coming from a teacher, it seemed completely wrong and shocking.  I expected adults in positions of responsibility to present logical arguments supported by solid facts or moral ones exhorting us to be better humans.  Naively, perhaps, I still do. 

Back in the 1970s, our politicians were passing anti-discrimination and equality laws which put them well ahead of public opinion, just as their predecessors had been when they abolished Capital Punishment - and corporal punishment in our schools - despite being derided as 'do-gooders'.  Fortunately for many innocent people wrongly convicted since, and many guilty ones willing and able to rehabilitate, MPs in the 1960s didn't wait on the whims of focus groups.  They argued and legislated out of conviction.  MPs still do, of course; the introduction of Civil Partnerships and, more recently Equal Marriage, being cases in point.  However, there are also times when principles are sacrificed to perceived political expediency; the Labour Party I joined in 1987 jettisoned so many that, even before the Iraq War, I had left it.

As campaigning in the EU referendum restarts after the respectful pause to remember murdered MP Jo Cox, I can't help but be reminded of that 1970s morning assembly.  Too much of the campaign has looked and sounded like Mr Curry's ranting.  With staggering hypocrisy, the usual suspects in the right-wing press filled their front pages with tributes to Jo Cox, nudging their anti-immigrant stories to the inside pages and muzzling Katie Hopkins and Richard Littlejohn for a moment, lest one of their bile-filled rants against 'lefty do-gooders' spoil the mood.  They will have every intention of resuming normal service as soon as possible but, perhaps as a tribute to Jo Cox, perhaps for the victims of the Orlando shootings, or simply to show that we are better than our capacity to hate, we must tell them we want better.  If you see hate speech against anyone lurking in the comments column of your local paper, on social media, in your workplace or down the pub, don't collude with it, call it out.  Support your local 'do-gooders' - better still, be one.

A watched pot never boils...

Biscuits are back on the menu!

I've posted previously about both my ineptitude at marketing and my general awkwardness when it comes to self-promotion, so I should probably celebrate the fact that I seem to sell or give away more books when I don't try to promote them that when I do.  I seem almost to have a knack for 'anti-marketing'.  Events this weekend have made the point rather dramatically.


I've been away from home and regular Internet access for a few days which, as luck would have it, coincided with the 'first Friday' (and Saturday and Sunday) when the first episodes of the 'welfare rights lit' stories are free to download, and also with a 'Grand Union' giveaway to coincide with the Etruria Boat Festival.  I managed a few tweets from work lunchtime Friday that 'Severe Discomfort' was free and a couple of friends kindly shared the usual Facebook/Amazon link but, otherwise, marketing was even less organised than usual.  So you can probably imagine my surprise, when checking sales figures on my return home, to find that on Saturday - the day after a 'Severe Discomfort' freebie day which shifted only single figures - more than thirty people decided to actually buy the book.  Hardly a level of sales to make the best-sellers lists but, for a three-year-old self-published novel in an obscure genre that can go weeks without a single paid download, that's both quite encouraging and completely inexplicable.  I hadn't even linked my tweets from the day before to topical hashtags so, even if #universalbasicincome or #don'tbelievetheDailyMail were trending, it wouldn't have helped.


I had a Google about to see if there had been some unexpected kindly review or reference, or even a slating from the Daily Mail Book Club (a truly terrifying concept in itself), but I've seen nothing to explain this little flurry of sales.  I can only hope that some of them turn into reviews and recommendations.  At least Stoke-on-Trent CAB's beleaguered staff can look forward to biscuits for what remains of my current contract, after a few months of relative drought.  Since that's possibly as close as six weeks away, success as a writer would be both welcome and well-timed, though I'm not relying on this trend to continue or planning to give up the day job - not if the Big Lottery gives us a reprieve, at any rate.


While not remaining at such dizzy heights, sales of 'Severe Discomfort' are now at 45 for the month, about 44 more than average, after just six days.  Quick readers amongst them can grab 'Continual Supervision' free of charge this Friday.  I should probably be generous and tweet this fact widely, even if it has a detrimental effect on the 'Beverage Fund'.  Either way, I shall be shopping for treats for my colleagues tomorrow!

I, Lyn Walker...?

It's hard to describe just how excited I am that a film about a bloke wrongly found fit for work and struggling with the bureaucratic demands of the DWP has won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year.  Ken Loach kicking the arse - and conscience - of the Establishment, 50 years on from Cathy Come Home, really couldn't come soon enough.  I could be be sulky and say that there's probably nothing in "I, Daniel Blake" that I haven't been writing about for almost five years, but that's to miss the point.  Without a massive lucky break, as an unknown writer I was never going to do much more than preach to the converted and make a few people stop and think - Ken Loach's movie might just convert mass public opinion and change Government policy.


If it doesn't, things will continue to get harder for benefit claimants.  As if the current sanctions regime isn't cruel enough, under Universal Credit sanctions can become twice as punishing, with 'hardship payments' now loans and recoverable at the same rapid pace from regular monthly payments as overpayments due to fraud.  'In-work conditionality' extends the relentless pressure to search for work on pain of sanctions to our lowest- paid, part-time workers, recently cynically repackaged as an inducement to help them 'progress' in their careers.  The lower 'Benefit Cap' will mean that most jobless families with three or more children will receive too little housing benefit to cover their rent, even in areas where housing costs are cheapest.  And benefits for disabled people continue to be cut too, both by changes to the law and through what sometimes appear to be deliberately vindictive medical assessments.


Worst of all, the DWP management appears to learn nothing from human tragedies.  Having spent much of last week looking through the heavily redacted internal enquiries prompted by benefit change-related deaths, I didn't expect to find identical mistakes still being made in a recent set of appeal papers - but they are.  Decision-makers are still overlooking basic legislation, failing to consider medical evidence from previous claims, failing to request additional medical evidence where contractors' assessments are inadequate or contradictory.  It is only a matter of time before this claims more vulnerable victims.


I would love to leave my fictional characters where I left them at the end of 'Claimant Commitment' and concentrate on narrowboat thrillers for a while, and I shall, for now.  But, if they were real claimants, at some point quite soon they would have to grapple with PIP, Universal Credit and further WCAs, with a new contractor using the same staff and software as Atos. 


Perhaps someone could persuade Ken Loach to put his retirement plans on hold so we can make a mini-series?


Severe Discomfort is currently free to download for Kindle on the first and fifth Friday of every month and the rest of the 'Social Insecurity' series to a regular timetable.

Amicus Curiae (or 'Would the real Tom Appleby please stand up?')

I unexpectedly found myself wearing my 'tribunal suit' yesterday, appropriately (if accidentally) accessorised with a ladder up the left leg of my tights in proper Sally Archer style.  I don't rep for the CAB in my current role and it must be at least five years since I was last at our local venue; I was stepping into the breach as a favour for another organisation and, to be totally honest, grabbing an opportunity to see a PIP appeal in action. Confidentiality demands that I share no more details and anyway, I don't know the result, though I'm cautiously optimistic.

I had wondered whether there might be a Presenting Officer in attendance, since the rep who had asked me to help out with this case had encountered one at another recent PIP appeal.  This was unusual as POs tend only to appear for especially contentious cases, although there was a recent DWP announcement of  extra funding to provide them specifically for PIP appeals.  Understandably, reaction from the broader welfare rights lobby was hostile - this article from the excellent Dr Frances Ryan encapsulating the general sense of unfairness.

I'm inclined to share this concern although, if these new Presenting Officers adopted the ethos once prevalent in the role, they could be more of a help than a hindrance to unrepresented appellants, denied properly-trained advocates by cuts to Legal Aid and advice service budgets.  Although it suits my stories to (minor spoiler) cast PO Tom Appleby as one of the DWP 'good guys' it involved no great leap of the imagination for me to do so.  When I first started representing at appeals in the later 1980s, POs weren't simply the DWP's man (or woman) at the table.  Their role was to be a 'friend of the Tribunal' and they could - and often did - speak up for the appellant's case.


In response to a comment I made on Dr Ryan's article that POs could be a force for good but I feared the new intake might be cut from rather different cloth than their predecessors, I was pleased to see the following:


"I was a PO in the 80s and my training stressed that the role was one of amicus curiae. I would review the papers for every case and if I was confident the law had been applied incorrectly to the facts I would tell the tribunal so, referring them to the appropriate law, including case law if necessary. If there was time I would speak to the original decision maker and ask them to revise their decision to save time. That's what POs were supposed to do. I'd probably be sacked for it these days."


The writer's nom de plume xck33l gives no clue as to his/her home town or gender but I couldn't help imagining that it might be a softly-spoken Yorkshireman.  Or, alternatively, a well-spoken protocol droid.


If the new breed of POs are to bring consistency and fairness to PIP hearings, it is vital that they be allowed to exercise the freedom and integrity of the old guard of POs and not be fettered by targets for tribunal 'wins'.  On those terms, it would actually be rather a good job for some of the many benefits specialists thrown out of work by the loss of Legal Aid - as long as they could stay one step ahead of the Social Justice Ambassadors, of course!