Confessions of a layout benefits scrounger
Workshy layabout scrounger here without a real job and, what’s even worse, not even looking for one.
Look. I can’t linger because I have the bloody Cabinet on my back… again. Jeremy Hunt is loaded for bear and Laura Trott has the bloodhounds out. How she managed to find one of my old socks I do not know but the dogs now have my scent.
The point I wanted to make before I make a dash for the nearest fast-moving steam is that I wish life were as easy as Laura Trott seems to think it is. The chief secretary to the Treasury went on Sky News on Tuesday to make a bold statement: “Ultimately there is a duty on citizens if they are able to go out to work they should,” she said. “Those who can work and contribute should contribute.”
If only life were that simple, Laura, and I pray that you never experience any crisis in your life to make you realise how profoundly stupid you sound.
It’s not just that the old benefits lie is the crassest tool in the politician’s playbook or that there’s a repellent cynicism about this whole narrative. Whenever the Tories get into trouble, they look for a minority to demonise and there’s none better than those people at the very bottom who would be unlikely to vote Tory (if they bother to vote at all). Ideally, it should also be around a problem that their voters don’t think deeply enough about to understand. And they of course use loaded language continually. It’s the “hardworking people” mantra because who, really, stands up for layabouts, the lazy, the shirkers? Nobody.
And nobody should.
But the problem is that deciding who is and who isn’t a shirker is a difficult business. These tar brushes tend to get the black stuff over everybody, and I should know. I’ve been covered in the stuff enough times in my life and through no fault of my own. It’s only a few years since the government came after me because a company they hired, Concentrix, deemed that I was a benefits cheat. It took me three months (and the involvement of my local MP) before they accepted that the woman I was living with was not my “wife” and we shared the same surname because she’s my sister who also happens to be extremely unwell.
Things have hardly got any better. My stress levels had already been through the roof this year, but I caught my breath and my heart beat a little heavier when I heard the rumours about the next crackdown. You see, I’m stuck in the middle of one of these situations where my sister is too sick to work (barely well enough to live even a sheltered life) and we are waiting for somebody in the system to decide how sick she is and, by extension, determine how awful life is about to get for me.
And, please, believe me. I take no pride in recounting biography like this. I just want to write comedy and make people laugh. I want Private Eye to accept my cartoons. I want to finish my next book and find an agent or publisher willing to read it. These are the things that I dream about. Yet my life is also something else and there is absolutely nothing I can do to change that. I’m trapped by my sister’s condition as much as she is.
And, no, this is not a lifestyle choice.
As you might know, if you’ve read previous columns, my sister recently suffered a bad psychotic episode whilst we were waiting in the local hospital’s A&E department. She attacked me, believing me a killer, and it took five security men to control her as she proceeded to kick and punch, scratch and scream about hell, damnation, and her desperate need to save Natasha Kaplinsky and Prince William from the fiery hell to which she was quite happy to condemn me, Stewart Lee, and the Guardian cartoonist Martin Rowson. (It sounds ridiculous, but I swear it’s true. All these details make complete sense: I’d been talking about the fact that Natasha Kaplinsky is now President of the BBFC whose name you see before every movie, whilst Lee and Rowson are two favourites of mine.)
My sister was in the hospital for nearly a month during which time they’d diagnosed a “Cushing’s crisis” precipitated by, well, that’s where it gets confusing. At the time there was talk of a “bleed” but the consultants and doctors told her not to worry. They knew what the problem was (even if they never explicitly told her what it was) and promised that although they would discharge her, they would get her right. All we knew was that the cause was probably a small tumour on her pituitary (which we already knew about given she’d been treated for it many years earlier) which had possibly grown, which would explain all the problems she’d been having, including recent bouts of double vision.
So much for the medical side.
My sister’s condition has been getting worse year on year and I’d always cared for her. I wasn’t officially her carer because I was already caring for my mother. I cared for the two of them (for which the government kindly tax me at 55% for anything I earn as a freelance writer). And then our mother died in December last year, and my carer’s allowance was stopped the moment she died, I then became an unpaid carer, struggling to earn whilst having to be there for my sister 24/7. After the recent incident, we agreed we needed to make this official. With the help of people at the Brain Tumour Support (a great charity which genuinely helped me during a difficult month), my sister has applied for PIP and I have to wait for that decision before I can apply to become her carer.
Now, I’m not sure how amid all this my sister is meant to “do her duty” and take a job. She lives with constant pain, can’t walk far, uncontrollably high blood pressure, extreme insomnia, flushing, nausea, fluctuating eyesight, headaches, and a few ghastlier symptoms which discretion suggests I shouldn’t list. She has also been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, though she hates to mention that since one GP told her it’s “not a real medical condition”. And I guess what the government would say is: well in that case she’ll get PIP and you’ll be able to be her carer and the system works as intended…Now let’s focus on the shirkers instead.
Well, true. Except two weeks ago, my sister had her outpatient appointment with the doctor who had promised her that despite sending her home they wouldn’t be forgotten, and they knew what was wrong with her and not to worry.
Now they tell us that they have no idea what was wrong with her, they’ve discharged her, and so, in addition to every other symptom, she’s crying, depressed, and deeply fearful for the coming weeks. She also fears that the psychotic episode is forgotten, as was the explanation given in the hospital (which made complete sense given her history). The new “explanation” makes no sense, medically or logically. And, of course, I’m also worried because if that happened again when we haven’t got five security men to control her. Well, I hope you get the point.
More to the point: I wish Laura Trott would get the point.
Deep breath.
It’s a story I hear so often. A friend of mine works quite high up in the NHS and after telling them my story, they muttered to me, almost confessionally, that one of the biggest problems in the NHS is the “communication problem”. Partly it’s workload but it’s also simple disdain. Too many doctors assume that patients aren’t bright enough to understand their conditions. My friend recounted a story from early in their career when they’d begun to use a model of the human body to explain a patient’s problem.
“No use telling me anything, doc,” said the patient and then quite proudly tapped their forehead adding: “Thick as pigshit.”
Hardly a useful metric by which to judge the entire country yet that’s sometimes how it feels. Doctors and consultants don’t tell patients a thing or what they do tell them is rarely the truth. One doctor will say one thing one day and another doctor will say something else the next. I have long since given up believing what I’m told.
Last December I was in the same hospital when a doctor told me that my mother had cancer and that it was terminal. The next day another doctor told me she didn’t have cancer and it was just a blocked bile duct. On the third day, the first doctor told me that it was indeed cancer. My mother died a week later. Another “communication problem”.
None of this helps patients who are then thrown out into the world and expected to describe their problems to an assessor working for the DWP who is under pressure to clear as many claimants as possible.
Am I workshy? Hardly. I work every hour I have and even when I escape – writing in coffee shops and movies are the only reasons I’ve remained sane – it’s still work or work-related. My situation today is wondering how I can find £600 to pay for a private MRI for my sister to see if we can confirm what the hospital had themselves confirmed one week and then dismissed the next, just so we have more evidence for the upcoming assessment hearing where I’ll no doubt be asked about questions about my wife, and I’ll have to explain she’s my sister, that I really would love to have a career and not be worrying about her, and that despite appearances, I’m not as thick as pigshit.
But sorry. Have to rush. I can hear the bloodhounds and this time I fear they might well catch me.
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