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The Labour Party's secret war against the poor

For about a year now, I have been doing part-time, temporary work. For 7 weeks of that time in all, I have been on the dole, and for all of it on Housing Benefit. My experience of dealing with these agencies has been a nightmare.

I am going to go into some detail about Housing Benefit - apologies to the reader, for inflicting this on you, but I only want to give you a brief, unpleasant, taste - the details would take a book, and it would not be good for your health.

I think I have spent several hundred hours trying to sort out my housing benefit - writing letters, visiting neighbourhood offices, photocopy shops (to copy letters), my building society (to find out if payments were made) etc. It's as big a waste of time and energy as it sounds.

The main feature of Housing Benefit is a complete inability to process information from the client, whether concerning a change in one's claim, a request for information or a complaint. Most letters to Housing Benefit are neither replied to or acted on. This includes letters in response to requests from Housing Benefit for information, often information that has already been given several times. (The situation is much the same with giving information at a neighbourhood office - it is passed on, but there is rarely a response) Any response takes 3-6 weeks, and it is impossible to know beforehand if one will be obtained at all.

This lack of response can grow to ludicrous proportions when you receive a technical overpayment. What do I mean by a technical overpayment? If you submit information about a change of circumstances, it takes Housing Benefit about a month to process the information. Sometimes it is never processed - I am still waiting for a payment for two weeks I was on the dole at Easter, despite submitting evidence twice. When it is, you are sent a demand for a repayment within 6 weeks. The first time this happened, I wrote and asked if it could be deducted from my current payments. I didn't receive a reply within that period, so on the last day, I paid up. However, two days later I received a letter saying that the money had been deducted. It took me a month, and 4 visits to a Housing Benefit office and to my building society to see if the money had been paid, to recover it. During this time I had to write letters to my housing co-op to tell them why I was still behind with my rent.

Anyway, next time this happened I had learned my lesson. I submitted a request for a deduction of the overpayment from y current payments in several ways - by letter to (central) housing benefit, by visiting a local H.B. office and I think in a letter to a councillor. Ironically at this time I had written to the then leader of the council, Jeremy Fraser, in praise of an H.B. officer who was such a dramatic exception to the norm that I thought she deserved a medal. In response to this I received a letter from Phil Burnett, head of Housing Benefits, saying he wanted to invite me to a Benefits forum. This was very different from the cursory, disinterested way a previous complaint of mine about another council officer was brushed off. However it was rather spoilt by the arrival of another letter next day threatening me with court proceedings about the overpayment. I wrote back to Phil Burnett about this, tacking on a request for information about how my benefit had been assessed over the Christmas period. This latter information (which was incomprehensible) was sent, but the main content of the letter was ignored, and I continued to receive threats. I finally managed to find the right person to ring, who sorted it out with a few keystrokes. And the invitation to a housing forum - hey - how did you guess? - it never arrived!

The problems I have had with the Benefits Agency regarding their inability to process tax information and resulting in my always paying emergency tax are similar, although they have taken up only about 20% of the time spent on Housing Benefit.

I have written to various politicians - both Labour and Lib-Dem - about these problems. I took great care to be clear and succinct. The replies (I didn't always receive repies - except (yes, you're so perceptive) - close to the election) - went something like this:-

blah blah blah - I have looked at your case. It seems to be O.K. I hope you will agree that the officers concerned have acted properly etc etc

Sometimes I wondered if they had read beyond the first paragraph of my letter. These replies bore no relation to reality. It was as though they were saying "we don't give a monkey's"

The effects on my life of this continual pressure and frustration have been considerable - I find that I am always stressed out and have very little free time. I had wanted to learn to play the tin whistle, to learn a martial art (I was mugged about a year ago) and to try my hand at freelance journalism (this is the only article I have had time to write all year)

The time stolen from me has prevented me from applying for other jobs and prevented my participation in my housing co-op. That and the fact that I am always in rent arrears affects my ability to obtain transfers or re-housing.

How does the Labour Party come into this tale of woe? Very simply - Southwark is a Labour council and the membership of Southwark Labour Party put forward the candidates who become councillors and tell them which issues to address. If there was the slightest political will to sort out Housing Benefit - or any of the other council bureaucracies - it could be done, at the cost of course, of sacking some bureaucrats. With the Benefits Agency, it was of course Conservative Party responsibility prior to the elections, but let's be clear about this; the membership of the Labour Party is largely composed of state bureaucrats and other middle class professionals - the kind of people who work in benefit offices. The Tories did actually exert some kind of control over these people, and in my experience you were treated much better under Major than under a Labour government, but I already see signs that the knives are out for those on the dole. These kind of bureaucrats can be extremely sanctimonious about how much they care about the poor, but in their day to day dealings with us the patronising rudeness, lazyness and casual incompetence is quite incredible.

I used the words "secret war against the poor" in my title. I do not mean it is a war that has been deliberatly planned, at least not at a ward level, although nothing that Peter Mandleson, Alistair Campbell or their cronies get up to would surprise me in the slightest. Rather benefits, especially Housing Benefits, have been allowed to degenerate into social agents of oppression and psychological torture. The holes they gouge in people's lives are simply ignored. After all these people on benefits are always complaining about small problems unworthy of the concern of the comfortably well off. It is a war by default, not by design. However I can't help feeling it is rather convenient for Labour Party members to have this grinding process going on - it forces into the poor into ill-paid, exploitative work and fritters away their lives, preventing them from organising to oppose oppression. It is secret because it is never reported by the media, who mostly support the Labour Party.

The old Labour Party (I was once a member) used to be partly about empowerment and soldarity - this was expressed in community and trade union involvement, but those values have been gradually undermined and now thrown out by the New!!! Blairite nomenklatura. The continual undermining of trade union and community based struggles in the last 20 years has laid the foundations of the crime and social breakdown we see today. For the poor, crime has replaced politics - there is a realisation that political opposition, based on what Orwell called "common decency" has become futile against the modern monolithic state and its semi totalitarian social and military power, and in the "emergency society" of the inner city, punctuated by alarms and sirens, many people are forced to break the law in small ways to keep their heads above water.

Funny how we got rid of communism and democracy triumphed (what do you mean you hadn't noticed) but yet the nomenklatura have taken power. And like big brother himself, they're always right.