It’s Grim Up North
I’m not sure what the “plus” meant in the title of the Jobcentre Plus. Perhaps it was the two addicts asleep in the doorway when I arrived at 9 a.m. last Thursday morning. They would be the added value in my whole JobCentre experience; two weather-savaged men listing at ten degrees from the vertical like they were in a state of synchronised sedation or syncopated somnolism.
How I found myself in such a grim part of St Helens (imagine Wigan but less affluent) at 9 a.m. is a long story but it probably began a month earlier when my sister tried to kill me in the A&E department of the local hospital. One moment she was sitting in a wheelchair having experienced confusion and faintness. The next she turned her head like she was Linda Blair possessed in The Exorcist. She looked deep into my eyes and told me I was evil. Not only that: we were both in Hell, I was a serial killer, and she was very sorry but she had to protect herself.
That’s when things began to turn ugly.
Apologies, again, to the male nurse she kicked between the legs and the security guard she took out at the knees. I’m not proud and yet I am slightly impressed that it took five fully grown guards to hold her down as she screamed about damnation and pleaded for God to save her. After a two-week stay in the hospital, the doctors diagnosed what one excitedly told us was “a very very rare condition”, a form of the already extremely rare Cushing’s Disease involving a brain tumour that had bled and caused the religious mania. I felt strangely honoured to have witnessed something only recorded a couple of times in medical literature but, at the same time, my life has seen too many sustained dramas since December when my mother died in the same hospital.
A poet friend of mine asked me yesterday if I felt scarred by the episode. Other than the still visible marks left on my arm where my sister had clawed into my bone thinking she was saving herself from Jeffrey Dahmer, the most shocking part was that she told the Devil that I (being me, not the serial cannibal) deserved to be in Hell since I drew a book of cartoons promoting atheism. She also added the Guardian cartoonist Martin Rowson, the World’s 41st best standup comedian, Stewart Lee, and the host of Mythbusters, Adam Savage, to the list of atheists condemned to the hot place simply because they count me among their biggest fans. The Devil could take us all, she screamed, so long as he saved her, Prince William, and the former breakfast TV presenter, Natasha Kaplisnky.
Yes, it was surreal but perhaps it was also prophetic. Three weeks later I was in my personal hell, waiting with the drug addicts for the JobCentre Plus to open its doors. It’s probably a testament to my mental strength that I’ve not had a breakdown but, I admit, I’m pretty desperate for some good news even if that’s unlikely.
You see, the government in their infinite wisdom have chosen this moment to do away with Working Tax Credits, which had been a great support to the creative and freelance markets in the UK. They’re folding us into Universal Credit scheme (hence my JobCentre PLUS! appointment), which seems like a clever bit of efficiency, but it means big changes in the way freelancers are treated. Creatives might have been happy to struggle on very little to do the work we love but the government are less happy. Now it’s about sustainable jobs. At some point, this story will break through to the national press. The government are taking a scythe to the creative grassroots, the very people whose efforts become the stuff of magazines, newspapers, websites, films, books, TV, and theatre. Maybe they’ll be happy when AI does all our work.
My predicament is slightly different. Slightly worse. My sister now needs care, which I, as her only relative, need to provide. I’ve spent a week filling in the 44-page PIP form which seemed designed to torture the sick and incapacitated, even more than it tortured me. I love writing. My PhD is in English. Even I struggled to fill it in. I hate to imagine what others find.
Should she be deemed sick enough for help (it would be shocking if she isn’t), then I will be caring for her and I will get the honour of paying for that duty. The cost-of-living crisis has been hard. My income was diminished and has now been diminished further as I fall deeper into the benefits trap. Anything I earn will be taken off what I can claim at a rate of 55p for every £1 I earn. This is called the ‘Universal Credit Taper’. The government’s own website describes it best.
“The Universal Credit earnings taper rate is currently 55%. This means that for every £1 you earn over your work allowance (if you are eligible for one) your Universal Credit will be reduced by 55p.”
That’s effectively a tax of 55% for caring for my sister.
55%.
Imagine if MP’s incomes were taxed by the same rule: that MP’s salaries were reduced by 55p for every pound they earn from second jobs. Jacob Rees-Mogg (and large parts of the Tory Party) would cough up kittens if anybody dared suggest a tax that high. But, of course, we’re not on the right end of the pay scale to make enough noise about the unfairness of it all.
The current highest tax rate in the UK is 45% for anybody earning over, roughly, £125,000. But as a carer where I don’t earn a fraction of that, I’ll get to keep 45p out of every pound I earn as writing for a living.
I came away from the interview feeling suitably broken. I have another interview next week to chat with a “work coach” about my opportunities. I have four degrees including my doctorate. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that perhaps I didn’t choose this life. I would rather be doing other things (and live in other places) but I have a responsibility to care for a sister with a long-undiagnosed but now finally diagnosed brain tumour.
At St Helens bus station, I wait for a bus to take me into Warrington, where the cinema has become my safe space but will soon be sacrificed in the name of belt-tightening. I found myself staring at a young man wearing big, thick, black-rimmed spectacles, which had the extraordinary effect of magnifying the tattoos on his cheeks on either side of his nose. I’ve read Lord of the Rings enough times to recognise Elvish. I couldn’t stop looking at them to the point that I suddenly realised he was staring at me staring at him. I feared for a moment he was going to hit me and deservedly so. Perhaps I’d have welcomed it as a suitable coda to my miserable year. But he didn’t. I managed to stop staring and looked at my watch. I would be glad to get out of St Helens. It’s a town like the guy with the facial tattoos. Neither wear their privations lightly. On my walk to the JobCentre (Plus), I’d walked past every kind of refuge and shelter. If there’s a form of harm one human being can inflict on another or upon themselves, there was reclaimed office space dedicated to helping them. Drugs, sexual abuse, spousal abuse, rape, self-harm, homelessness, suicide… There was a place for everything and yet no place for me. There never is.
I’ve been trying to write an article for Reaction for weeks about the arts provision in the North West. Perhaps because it’s so close to me, I’ve struggled. I attend open mic nights at the Shakespeare North Playhouse which is perhaps the only (or maybe just the best) custom-built place for spoken word in the North West. They used to have two open mic sessions a month until recently when they cut it to one because of financial cuts. I was told that “financial cuts” meant a few thousand pounds a year to keep the second night going. I’d have paid it myself if I could. It was proving popular despite the building’s somewhat unusual location. It provided an important outlet for creativity in the wider region. Yet it had to go, perhaps because it didn’t pay lip service to any of the causes that have become intimately bound up with “arts”. In London, art can exist for no other reason than it’s art. Here in the North, art has to have a social function to attract grants. It has to deal with “experiences” of specific kinds: health conditions, privations, struggles, or identities
This is a problem and not simply because as a white, heterosexual, northern, working-class guy, I feel marginalised because not one of those identities in isolation feels in any way marginal. No, the problem is that we all reflect what we see in the society around us. What hope is there for any child growing up in a town that provides no proper arts provision beyond examples of abuse? What if the only art available reflects the misery of life rather than providing inspiration about the better experiences that life can afford us? “An exhibition by service users Of Age Concern” boasts the new photographic exhibition in Liverpool’s Open Eye Gallery. “A movement for youth-led mental health” is the theme of Manchester’s HOME gallery. Meanwhile, Manchester’s Art Gallery has launched “Uncertain Futures” which “seeks to address the inequalities facing Manchester women over 50 relating to work and worklessness.” If you’re in Manchester, also don’t forget to check out the Menopause Bus Tour Choir in partnership with The Lowry.
Friends always tell me to write about the North, which I loathe almost as much as I loathe the phrase “it’s grim up north”. I always found the suggestion condescending, and the notion that “the North” must by definition be “grim”. I’m a writer born, raised, and living in the north but I am not a northern writer. Except I’m beginning to doubt that. I am where I am and it’s hard not to reflect the world around me. It’s hard not to be diminished, squeezed on all sides until, slowly but inevitably, I am ready to lie myself down outside the JobCentre. Plus.
@DavidWaywell
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