The Best of Times: The Worst of Times

Welcome to Stoke-on-Trent, February 2017.  Suddenly, it seems, the eyes of the world are on my adopted home town again and not for the reasons some of us might have hoped.  At the same time as the campaign to gain the accolade City of Culture 2021 is swinging into action, so is a bitter by-election battle, with the reprehensible UKIP attempting to parachute their newish leader, Paul Nuttall, into Parliament via the protest votes of disgruntled voters in Stoke Central.  With the kind of irony that's almost typical of anything linked to Stoke-on-Trent politics, the by-election only comes about because the seat's former Labour MP, celebrity historian Tristram Hunt, is vacating it to take up the role of director of the V&A, suggesting there's not enough culture hereabouts to satisfy his tastes. 

Much has been made by Labour's opponents that it's not just a prestigious but a lucrative role, although surely it's disingenuous to suggest that someone with Hunt's interests, background and (probably) enviable financial security would have done it for the money.  I haven't always had a great deal of time for his particular style of soft left, let's-not-upset-the-Daily-Mail politics but, frankly, good luck to the lad.  The odds are that one of the three Stoke seats will vanish with the next set of boundary changes anyway, so parachuting out when there's such an exciting opportunity is a 'no-brainer'.  Anyone trying to make anti-Corbyn capital from it (yes you, BBC Radio 4 News!) was, to quote The Last Leg, being a dick. 

Anyway, the upshot from all this is that, instead of being weighed up as a potential City of Culture, Stoke-on-Trent is now being branded "Brexit Central", a small-minded city suspicious of outsiders and resistant to change.  In case anyone from outside the area wonders what kind of a place this is, there's a tendency to trot out an unhelpful reminder of the bad old days when there were nine BNP councillors in the council chamber.  Media coverage reinforces that with sound-bites of market traders backing Trump, or parochial locals claiming to be unaware that a by-election is even happening.  The reaction of any arts professionals viewing is more likely to be to #binthebid rather than #backthebid. 

Those disconnected voices are, perhaps, those of the very people any City of Culture programme most needs to reach.  It's going to be a challenge to do so, however, especially if they do end up electing a UKIP MP likely to dismiss any such proposal as a pipe-dream of the "liberal metropolitan elite."

And, if you're reading this blog, "liberal metropolitan elite" probably includes you.

Being Daphne Randall

I have to own up to being quite a lazy writer.  While some authors invent fabulous fantasy worlds, others seek to inhabit characters very different from themselves, stepping away from their own age or gender, following an unfamiliar career path or living in another time.  Much patient research and scholarship is called for, as well as great empathy and imagination.

I haven't, to date, done so much of that.  Although the 'Welfare Rights Lit' books have multiple viewpoints, the principal characters lead lives that, at least to some degree, intersect with my own.  I housed the Walkers in a town I knew well and in a type house I visited time and again as a housing officer, often to assess the benefit entitlement of people just like them, and not so far removed from our own friends and family.  The Solent Welfare Rights Project is a parallel universe version of an advice centre I know and love, staffed by people sufficiently unlike my former colleagues to save embarrassing them but doing the same work in much the same way, with the same commitment, humour and self-sacrifice.

As for Daphne Randall, principal protagonist and narrator of 'Grand Union' and the forthcoming 'Daphne of the Four Counties', I might have made her a Geordie lass with a penchant for strong beer, lively shades of hair dye and a certain Stokie bloke, but I've also made her (another) middle-aged voluntary-sector worker and a narrowboater, settling her into a world I know well. 

If that's cheating, I'm afraid I'm a cheat!

Himself and I enjoyed a very Daphne-esque Christmas/New Year, afloat around South Cheshire and North Staffordshire, firstly pottering up to the foot of the Bosley Locks then, on a journey I could picture Daph and Harry making together, through the Harecastle Tunnel to Stoke, crunching through the ice to Etruria en route to Stoke City's home fixture against Watford.  Going out, it was quite a fun activity, although the noises from under the hull as slivers of ice rattled and scraped under us, were rather terrifying.  As a Southampton native, I tend to work on the principle that boats and ice shouldn't mix!  That was certainly the case on our home run, when we found the ice tougher to crack, having been smashed by other boats during the course of the week, only to have refrozen in awkward chunks glued together by a cold rain.  At one point, close to the site of the old Burslem Port branch, I feared we would find ourselves stranded, Endurance-style, unable to make further progress and it took some ice-breaking with the boat hook to enable the stern to swing far enough for us to take the turn.  

I haven't got a plot lined up for a story where Daph makes a similar trip, though it might make a good 'short'.  Plans following on from Four Counties involve a spring voyage through the Black Country, a summery sojourn on the T&M and an autumn on the Llangollen, though not necessarily in that order, with an epic Pennine expedition mapped out in sketchy notes too.  Now I've bought a little inverter and should be able to recharge an electronic notebook while afloat, I hopefully can get writing while we're on the move this year, instead of returning home with random thoughts in paper notebooks, so look out for more Daphne Randall adventures soon!

Coming Soon...

After much dithering (which sounds as if it should be a Cotswold village), I am almost at the point of releasing a second '4mph thriller', with doughty boat-dweller Daphne Randall again on the trail of modern-day villains, aided and abetted by some familiar, and some new, characters. 

The Kindle version of 'Daphne of the Four Counties' is available to pre-order here.  There will be a paperback version out soon too, subject to a final proof-read - which as always, I would urge people to buy via CompletelyNovel or your local tax-paying Indy bookshop, rather than Amazon.  I attack them with a clear conscience still, since I've noticed that, despite others being tagged more helpful and a more recent highly positive review, Amazon have a one-star slating of 'Severe Discomfort' pinned as top review for that book.  Not helpful to The Cause at all...

The question that arises whenever I finish a book is 'where to next'?  To which I have to add 'and with whom?' as, while I have notebooks full of navigational and nature notes for more Daphne Randall adventures, I can also imagine countless plotlines for the stalwarts of the Solent Welfare Rights Project.  I had resolved to keep on boating and leave the 'Welfare Rights Lit' be until Universal Credit was fully rolled out in southern Hampshire but it seems implausible that the team wouldn't be at least as busy right now, handling DLA to PIP migration and the cut to the Benefit Cap.  I'd also like to eavesdrop on their conversations about Brexit and The Donald, Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May.  There are personal stories to pick up too, though I can't speculate on those without chucking spoilers about like confetti at a wedding (though that would have to be sustainable, bio-degradable confetti...).

Meanwhile, The Lady Eowyn is moored close by, waiting to cast off for more unexpectedly eventful cruises along ostensibly tranquil waterways.  I've a rough-and-ready plot sketched out for a tale with the working title All Along the Rochdale, with some more changes to the crew, and an equally lock-filled sequel crossing back over the Pennines on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, with Daphne falling in and out of work, and love, along the way.  Then she'll be off around parts of the BCN for a gritty little mystery, down the Trent and Mersey to Shardlow for something altogether lighter, and picking up clues to cold cases along the Llangollen.

If I stick to my one New Year's Resolution - of spending less time scrolling about on Facebook and/or Twitter and more actually writing - it's all possible.  After all, Grand Union was the work of just one month, in which I was working slightly more hours than I am currently contracted to do. 

I just need to get on with it...

Saving Daniel Blake

In my previous post I slated the Toby Young/Daily Mail review of I, Daniel Blake, which was taking a bit of a risk as I hadn't actually seen the film then.  However, the odds of the Daily Mail being right about something multiplied by the odds of Toby Young being right about it too...  So not that much of a risk, eh?

Anyway, I have now seen Ken Loach's superb drama and cannot recommend it enough.  The film manages to be warm and uplifting, yet also strikingly bleak.  Unlike the hated Mail I'm not going to include spoilers, but will admit I'm not as brave when plotting my own characters' misfortunes as Ian Laverty has been here.  The performances from the two principal actors are outstanding - so convincing that you seem to be witnessing the real lives and conversations of friends and neighbours, as they spiral into despair and desperation.  You can see Daniels and Katies in the early morning queues outside advice centres from Newcastle-upon-Tyne to Newquay; or rather you can where those services still exist. 

I expected to be moved to tears and to anger, despite knowing more than most about how benefit cuts and sanctions impact on the lives of sick and disabled people, and so it proved.  Stoke Odeon set the mood for the scenes of fuel poverty by apparently not bothering to put the heating on in tiny Screen 10.  Midweek, with little publicity, there was only a small audience, which was a pity as this film deserves to be seen by everybody.

Initially, the benefits geek in me was wary that some aspects of the story were going to be over-simplified.  The conversation heard in the background of the opening credits didn't resemble any Atos/Maximus medical assessment I've ever sat in on - our local Healthcare Professionals ask oblique questions about a claimant's 'typical day' rather than quoting the descriptors and infer their points and abilities from those answers, often entirely incorrectly.  But it works, of course, as a way of explaining the assessment criteria to the uninitiated.

As a benefits specialist, I wanted to see Dan's interview with his welfare rights adviser, to hear their conversation explaining how Dan's failure to score 15 points was neither here nor there, because Regulation 29 should allow him to be deemed of 'limited capability for work' due to the serious risk to his health of finding otherwise (a scene for the 'Director's Cut'?).  That's important, because the DWP's own investigation into claimants' suicides revealed systemic failures by Decision Makers in applying this regulation.

It was, however, a nice touch to make the adviser/representative a wheelchair user.  After all, nobody is saying disabled people can't work; the need is for the right jobs, in respectful workplaces, for those capable of and ready for them.  On the other hand, if there are real reps out there talking as confidently of success before tribunals as Dan's man, they are tempting the fates something rotten!

I knew Ken's team had really done their homework when the 'shite music' started.  No offence to Vivaldi, but you won't find a benefits adviser or claimant in the country who doesn't hate 'Spring' from the Four Seasons with a passion.  I have read bundles of appeal papers, drafted submissions, chatted to clients or colleagues and drunk gallons of tea to that soundtrack, waiting so long for someone to pick up that, when they do, I've almost forgotten what I needed to ask about.  It irritates and demoralises in equal measure.  How much worse it must be hearing it on an endless loop when you're down to your last couple of quid of credit and chasing a long-promised payment.  When (very minor spoiler) Dan's rebellion against the DWP included a demand they change the tune, I cheered quietly.  It's the little things, as much as the threats and sanctions, that eat away at the souls of real Daniel Blakes.

I have met many Daniel Blakes, like the man described in this post.  Although "Jeff" was fully fit for work and would never have declared otherwise, he too fell foul of a Jobcentre jobsworth who treated him with contempt as an unemployed, uneducated man, rather than respecting and supporting his efforts to find work in an unfamiliar and rapidly changing world.  Like Loach's hero, the system cut off his income before he could argue or appeal, putting him through hell before he got to tribunal. However we want to change the benefits system, that should change first.  

It isn't too hard to imagine how much less harrowing Daniel Blake's lot would have been if, after his 'fit for work' decision, he'd been allowed to stay on ESA pending his reconsideration and appeal.  Ironically, until October 2013, that was exactly what did happen if you appealed a 'fit for work' decision.  Then some bright spark invented 'mandatory reconsideration' and decided that, unless you had a new disabling condition or medical evidence of significant deterioration in your existing health problems, you would have to come off ESA at that stage and, in most cases, claim JSA instead if you needed an income. Since then, we've seen thousands of people wrongly assessed either compelled to 'do a Daniel' and go through the wearing motions of job-seeking when they aren't fit for it, struggle without funds because they can't cope with that, or get lost in the system because they think 'signing on' is an admission of wellness and will count against them in their appeal. 

If the DWP don't change the decision and your case goes to appeal, it is then possible to go back onto ESA - so why force the break in claim at all, except to drive sick people off of ESA or discourage their appeal?  Needless stress for claimants and pointless work for DWP staff could be avoided, if ESA remained in continuous payment throughout the whole process.  While I can dream of an unconditional Citizens Income, in the short-term, perhaps we should campaign hard for this simple reform. 

I watched I, Daniel Blake with my husband.  Twenty-five years ago, he claimed Invalidity Benefit after a heart-attack ended his career as an ambulanceman.  It came through, without a glitch, on the basis of a GP certificate, until he felt well enough to end his claim and seek lighter work.  There was no half-baked assessment by someone completely unqualified to offer an opinion, no hasty totting up of points by a harassed Decision Maker, no bullying at the Jobcentre, no suggestion from Government or media that he was 'scrounging' - in short, no needless, dangerous extra pressure during his convalescence.  Seeing, through Daniel Blake's eyes, how much things had changed, upset him deeply.  He too would have been found fit for work long before he actually was.  I'm sure he would have tried, just like Dan to meet his Claimant Commitment.  I don't like to think about how his story would have ended.

#WeAreAllDanielBlake

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!