Whatever happened to sense?

It has been shown time and time again that the current state of the Deliberately Wasted Potential (formerly known as the Department of Work and Pensions), along with its plans for the future, is both woefully inadequate and badly lacking in terms of actually meeting the goals it exists to meet. One only has to look to common sense to fully get an idea of what these goals are, as well as highlight exactly how terribly they're performing. Way back in the post-war years, the government set up some basic legislation that would ensure that people in the UK would not fall into endless spirals of unemployment, social exclusion, poverty, sickness, plus a whole line of other things that really shouldn't be an issue. At least, they shouldn't be an issue in a country that has a well balanced economy and a chancellor who can do sums more challenging than 2+2. Of course, the economy isn't well balanced The entire country seems to be leaning on the financial industry, rather than having some solid industries that might continue to thrive in, and help heal, a domestic moneypocalypse, such as manufacturing and export. (Thanks, iron lady, for replacing 'steelworks' with 'steal: works!'). Iain Drunken Stiff (and, by proxy, our very own Green Goblin, George Osborne) can't seem to calculate the difference between 100% (the percentage of people on welfare who will certainly be affected by cuts, reforms and clampdowns) and 0.7% (the percentage of people on welfare who are actually cheating the system) [ http://opinion.publicfinance.co.uk/2013/01/fact-and-fiction-on-welfare-spending/ ]. Well, If IBS (EDIT: sorry, that should say IDS. One is an untreatable pain in the backside that gives you diarrhoea and nausea, and the other is a medical condition they can give you pills for) needs a hint... 100% is a pretty big number that means 'all of it', and it's rather a lot bigger than 0.7%. 0.7% is the rat you can hit with a hammer. 100% is your house. Well, Mr Smith, if you're getting the big hammer out for that rat you've found, by all means, you can employ me to redecorate your house for you.

Or maybe you can't. For a start, I don't have the relevant degree to be able to pick up a paintbrush. I also haven't spent 5 years in university, studying to be a professional burger-flipper (or in today's terms, a 'crew member', because cooking and selling burgers for minimum wage is a lot like manning a starship. It's continuing mission: to give everyone diet-induced heart attacks. To seek out new meat sources and set up shop everywhere where there might one day be a hungry person. To boldly go where every fast food chain has gone before). I'd ask for training, but while there are experts arriving at Heathrow daily, there's really not much point helping the 7.7% of the UK's workforce [ http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/unemployment-rate ] who aren't in work gain skills that will actually get them work. Training from the job centre. Pipe dream. This is problem number 1. Getting people into work.... failed.

Onto the actual cuts and reforms. This should be fun. Universal Credit will be a single monthly payment that basically brings together all your existing benefits [ http://www.dwp.gov.uk/policy/welfare-reform/universal-credit/ ]. How bad can it be? A single monthly payment for people already struggling to get by on £142 a fortnight might potentially be a little bit bad for those people. Oh, I forgot to include housing benefit, so they'll get substantially more than that. So no longer will some of the taxpayer's money be going direct to landlords, it'll be going to the people who are most likely to prioritise finally being able to feed themselves over paying the rent. I'm not saying people on benefits are bad with money. In fact when you factor in how much money they get with how much they technically need, I'd say the vast majority of them are pretty good at balancing a budget. Unlike the chancellor. Anyway, being handy with a budget is a little irrelevant when that budget mysteriously gets bigger. Especially when you have a spare room. If your rent is £100 a week and you have an extra room, you're only going to get £85 a week to pay your rent with. The other £15 comes out of your already stretched £71 a week income, meaning that before long you'll hit the jackpot and activate homeless mode. Not having an address has a tendency of negatively affecting a person's chances of finding work, applying for universal credit, and a whole host of other things considered important to the upkeep and maintenance of a human being. Either that or you move, giving up your spare bedroom, along with the ability to offer any guests a bed to sleep in. Tackling homelessness.... failed.

The wonderful world of workfare. Recently deemed illegal [ http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/02/workfare-ruled-illegal-only-narrow-terms ], workfare continues to be the flagship idea for the government (to be fair, this was Labour's long before the Tories grabbed the reins) to tackle long term unemployment for those without skills. On the surface, it looks ok. People do a bit of work experience, to gain skills, get back into a working mindset and many other cool and interesting things that might be a bit helpful. What actually happens is people get forced into doing work that's irrelevant to anything they'd want, under threat of sanctions, and can be doing it for up to 2 years. Unpaid. Unpaid work is fine if it's voluntary (i.e the person wants to be there, doing that work and chose it personally). Not so fine if it was either that or go without food, when the work is hell. Especially when out of 20 people working there, 18 are on minimum wage and the other 2 are on less than half minimum wage (benefit money is designed to just about cover the minimum costs of living. minimum wage is substantially higher, although given how it also just about covers the minimum costs of living, it all gets confusing from there). Of course workfare is illegal. To make it legal, forget looking for new rules and stuff and being inventive with paperwork, either pay people for the work they do, or make these voluntary schemes actually voluntary, instead of the voluntary choice between a carrot and a stick. I'm not a rocket scientist but even I can work out where there's ethical issues here. Just to add my own demands in here, why not reform workfare to be completely open with regard to industry, and attach training for nationally recognised qualifications to it? That way, people will be able to re-train via workfare, in an industry of their own choosing, thus answering problem number 1. Still take away the carrot and stick stuff, though, seriously. Blackmail doesn't belong in an equal society.

The Work Programme. Sounds fun, really. A load of very handsomely paid private organisations masquerading as charities (presumably for tax reasons) offering to take on swathes of unemployed people (presumably for unemployment figures reasons) and get them jobs. This is a scheme that definitely works. It works as well as a TV does after a bath. 2.3% of the time [ http://www.leftfutures.org/2013/01/the-work-programme-still-worse-than-useless/ ]. Actually I think the TV would have a better success rate. But what do you really expect when practically all the support for people to find work is gone, and these private businesses 'help' you find work by.... making you do exactly what you do at home every other day of the week. Seriously, they sit you in front of a computer for 2 hours a week to look on the internet for work. So essentially the DWP pay these people to do... nothing, really. Oh the irony. Taxpayers' money being squandered on booze and nice TVs. Ok that was sort of an assumption, but I think if I was on 22k a year [ http://jobs.cdguk.org/ ], I'd probably nip down the pub pretty often before watching Newsnight on a brand new 48" behemoth.

But of course, there's always a backup plan. Workfare is failing, the work programme is failing, what shall we do next? I know, how about revamping our websites? Well yes, of course. All our jobseekers want to do for a living is be drug runners, sex workers, or identity fraud victims [ http://johnnyvoid.wordpress.com/2012/12/09/could-universal-jobmatch-mean-government-enforced-sex-work/ ], so why not? 'You WILL apply to be a prostitute, or you will be sanctioned' I could apply to be personal intelligence sales staff, working in partnership with international agencies based primarily in Nigeria and China, selling personal info and bolstering the biggest industry in the UK at the moment. Fraud. Although the thing about fraud is that it's a pretty specialist industry. If you're very good at it, and steal billions of pounds, you're a credit to the economy, and you get to have a chat with your mates in the Commons. If you can just about fraud up a couple hundred here and there, you're a criminal.

I noticed that Atos were Olympics sponsors. Kind of a good thing they weren't organising it, otherwise the paralympics would have suffered from like 80% of the athletes being disqualified for being alive. 'you're not disabled, look at you. You're breathing!' Turns out it doesn't matter whether you keep your legs in a box under the sink, as long as you still have a pair of legs you can drive a tanker, or at least do 9 hours of customer service a day while giving everyone your norovirus-coated plastic hand full of change, before finally your alzheimers and dementia kick in and you have no idea why you're even at work, so you go home and promptly get fired, and then can't even get your benefits back because you're intentionally unemployed. Of course you can be a telesales operative, you're only completely deaf. With all the prosthetics we've had to give you since your accident, the customers are all afraid you might try to assimilate them. Depression? You call that a disability? There haven't been any cases of Morrissons employees hanging from the rafters...... yet. Well, Atos people, this is because disabled people have been quite sensibly not required to work until now. There are good reasons for this. If a doctor says no, it means no. If a penpushing two-bit chartered accountant with a money saving agenda and a smug, slightly deranged, sadistic grin decides the doctor is wrong... the doctor is still right. Listen to the GP. That wasn't difficult for the 60 or so years pre-Atos. It shouldn't be difficult now. meanwhile that ties in well with all these cuts, because instead of spending billions on some overseas company carrying out assessments, they could rely on the NHS, which already has its own budget for doctors to do doctory stuff... like declaring that sick people are sick.

Anyway, on to solutions. As I said already before, it would get more people working if the few jobs that are left weren't slowly disappearing out of reach. Also if employers employed more people instead of advertising jobs where you have to be able to everything from answering phones to juggling live grenades one-handed while sweeping the floor, standing on your head, dancing gangnam style and typing a suicide note for your boss. All in all, an injection of cash into schemes that actually give people skills and get them jobs, rather than spending billions into black holes that only train people to get angry. As for housing, keep paying rent to landlords, not tenants. Paying it to the tenants is a sure-fire way to free up the housing market by making everyone homeless, so no. Fix the website, too. Workfare can work, but needs radical amounts of reform, not a little itty bitty tweak or two.

Final thought: After reading newspaper reports of people living on taxpayers' money, and getting themselves in loads of debt from booze and parties, I thought 'oh ok... Cameron and Osborne?'. Then it turned out to be yet another barrage of class warfare stigma. Apparently the plebs are revolting. Not nearly as revolting as the ministers, for sure.

Final final thought: They say if you want a job done properly, do it yourself. Like this if you want to see me replace Mark Hoban as minister for employment. I'm serious.

A Collection of Thoughts

I have high hopes. My goals are seemingly impossible to achieve. My better judgement tells me to give up, but by doing so, I would change the odds quite dramatically. Instead of having extremely little chance of achieving them, I would have zero chance. My aim is simple. I wish to eliminate injustice and poverty, and bring about a future where all people have equal opportunity and equal access to that which they need to reach their goals and meet their needs. I believe this is completely impossible to do, but as long as it remains something that is neither unthinkable nor undesirable, its impossibility is, in my opinion, a temporary state. In other words, it is impossible now, but I feel that enough work, determination and people seeking the same common goals would create a basic mindset in which it would not only cease to be impossible, but become likely.

To eradicate poverty, we first need to define poverty and isolate its causes while working on tackling its effects. The United Nations definition of poverty sums it up quite well:

“Fundamentally, poverty is a denial of choices and opportunities, a 

violation of human dignity.  It means lack of basic capacity to participate 

effectively in society.  It means not having enough to feed and cloth a 

family, not having a school or clinic to go to, not having the land on which 

to grow one’s food or a job to earn one’s living, not having access to 

credit.  It means insecurity, powerlessness and exclusion of individuals, 

households and communities.  It means susceptibility to violence, and it 

often implies living on marginal or fragile environments, without access to 

clean water or sanitation

Already, this definition, signed in 1998 by the heads of all UN agencies, conflicts with the generally accepted view of what poverty is. Most people seem to consider poverty as something limited to other countries, far away from where they live, and thus none of their concern. This view limits poverty to its extremes, notably in isolated communities in Third World countries. The UN definition, however, is clearly visible in every city, in every country, the world over. Even in developed countries, with wealthy cities and high GDP, there are people who struggle to keep their homes, their jobs and their families. Even where there are welfare schemes to give people the means to keep themselves alive, there are people who cannot access those services, which themselves are often not effective in bringing dignity and inclusion anyway. Though they keep people alive and well, often it's only to remain in an endless cycle of poverty and exclusion.

My point above about welfare schemes highlights a bigger point I have to make. Eradication of poverty cannot take place by simply 'throwing money at it'. The money helps people, yes, but it does not bring them anything but an extension of their time. A person with no job and no skills cannot get a job by merely having a bit more money, they need the relevant skills first. The very first sentence in the UN definition quoted above highlights a lack of choices and opportunity, also. Would this include career choices? Employment skills offered here in the UK are currently limited to very few sectors, mostly retail and the most basic data entry. I think the most demoralising thing a person can be told is that they will never be able to access the skills they want for the job they want, and that if they want to be trained, they will be trained for a job they have no choice but to take. Actually, they do have a choice, but the choice is either to take it or no longer receive the money that keeps their basic needs met.

People in poverty are often looked down upon by others, if not for their inability to escape or manage it well, then for taking support given to them by governments. This is just two examples of how poverty in developed countries causes social exclusion. It is also becoming increasingly more difficult to escape poverty, while the exclusion does not decrease to compensate. More and more jobs demand higher and higher entry requirements, so that someone who could have easily taken a job twenty-five years ago would be refused the same job now. Although that person's skills and experience would not be different, they would not have the relevant qualification for that job, as the requirement changed.

I believe it can be fairly straightforward to address this employability mismatch, but it would require a radical change. I often do promote radical change, but this is one of the least radical of my ideas. I am of the belief that everyone; old, young, disabled, not disabled, big and small, is capable of being productive to society in some way. Not only capable, but constantly producing positive output. I refer mostly to hobbyists, anyone who helps their friends or family, strangers on buses who ask the driver to open the door again for the elderly lady who didn't manage to get off the first time. These people are valuable, but because their value does not directly translate to a qualification, it goes greatly unrecognised in terms of employment. However, personality traits and interests are what makes a person individual, and employment is supposed to be all about matching individuals with jobs. Where it is neither practical nor totally possible to put one's entire attitude and personality on a curriculum vitae, that well-trodden path to employment misses one of the most crucial factors an employer should face. Meanwhile, an employer whose vacancy requires a working knowledge of the role may miss a hundred  excellently matched individuals based on them not arriving with that working knowledge, but who knows whether they might have the intellect to acquire that knowledge within a day of starting? What I propose here is a re-working of the employment system where all candidates spend time in a role, gaining experience and making themselves known to the employer, before the decision is made whether to hire them or not. Many officially recognised qualifications, which cost money to attain, would be obsoleted by this trial system, along with the need for interviews and CVs. It would also put people who are in poverty on a more equal and inclusive standing when applying for work.

In the above paragraphs, I have only touched upon a very small few examples of one tiny factor in poverty. I have not explained very much here at all. However, I feel I have said enough for one night, and would like as much feedback as possible before perhaps continuing at some later date.