Are their problems “extremely complex”?
Wherein lies the complexity?
What is preventing Kelvin from working?

This article highlights a nexus of poor government policies, towards drugs and their woeful lack of support for ex-soldiers especially . Of course, while I am also frequently astounded at the liberties taken by social services, it sounds like this situation might not represent one of their worst decisions.

I don’t think this negates the conservatives wish to tackle benefit dependency, however. No one is denying that there is anyone with a “simple” life. Everyone’s situation is complex. But generally speaking, benefit dependency is not helping these circumstances and some of the worst victims are the benefit recipients themselves as society sends the message that they are good for nothing. If you pay people to be poor, you will get more poor people.

Kate, Did you speak to anyone with any redeeming features? A drug addicts sob story is not going to gain anyones sympathy.

How about providing more testimonies?

A drug addicts sob story is not going to gain anyones sympathy.

Why not? Is a drug addict a lesser human? All people are flawed, ultimately, right?

Fair enough Sunny, but sympathy and empathy have limits, and I have little sympathy for those who have fucked up their own lives through any form of addiction.

cjcjc:

Are their problems “extremely complex”?

More than likely.

Wherein lies the complexity?

You want their life story, because that’s where the complexity lies…

What is preventing Kelvin from working?

No skills? No employment opportunities for people who don’t have skills? Literacy problems? He may well even be an addict/former addict himself?

Where do you want to start?

No one starts out in life with a desire to become a drug addict and a member of a social underclass – understanding how and why people wind up there and what you can do to prevent it, there’s the rub.

Well, I have some sympathy for them. Maybe I’m just a sucker.

“No skills? No employment opportunities for people who don’t have skills? Literacy problems?”

Are all the eastern europeans working here skilled?

The fact that hundreds of thousands of new entrants to the UK labour market have found jobs rather puts the lie to the “no opportunities” line.

Even if you don’t sympathise, it is worth understanding, right? So we can work out what to do about it. Something wierd in human brain wiring seems to connect understanding to sympathy. If anybody tries to work out what makes a criminal or terrorist tick, the Daily Mail pounces on them for sympathising with the bad guys.

Hi all,

Yep, I did speak to a number of people with a few redeeming features, so I’ll post those interviews as well over the next little while.

There’s no doubt that the two people described were pretty hardcore, and I can see why readers have problems finding the human element in them, but I think the point I’m trying to make is the one Joe Otten’s raised above – that it’s worth trying to see if we’re capable of some understanding, and then if we’re capable of discussing solutions.

The thing is – so many of the people I spoke to for these interviews had terrible problems – addiction, mental illness, etc. I don’t think it’s enough to say that they need to pull themselves together. I would like it to be, but I don’t think it is. Addiction makes it very difficult for people to pull themselves together without a great deal of help. I don’t think people choose to live in the gutter like these two – I doubt very much that was something they ever aspired to. The addiction put them there.

What I hope is that the liberal left has some capacity for sympathy and for discussing complex solutions to very complex problems. It’s not enough to write people like this off as losers and to simply threaten them with the loss of a benefit. I doubt they’d care, and when they’re high, I doubt they’d even realise.

The Conservatives and the Daily Mail argue, as we all know, in the simplest terms – ie, drugs = bad, immigrants = bad, paying your way = good. They appeal to the worst ad least sympathetic aspects of us. The thing is – it’s not that simple. It’s my experience that some people are born with the addict’s gene and struggle to make anything of themselves without real support. I don’t imagine that that they’ll get that support with a Conservative government. I’m not convinced that they’re getting it with a Labour one.

The people above are at certainly at the low end of things, but these are exactly the sort of people who are long-term unemployed. Drugs, mental illness – those are among the reasons that people are long-term unemployed. I think sometimes that the rest of us think that long-term unemployment is somehow more pleasant than this – that your average long-term unemployed punter is an overweight BNP voter who has a council flat, collects the dole, sells pot, beats the wife and generally has it pretty good.

That may well be the case in some cases, and I expect some of the long-term unemployed do live very well off the rest of us, thanks very much, but I think also that there are a lot of people out there who don’t work because they’re beyond it. The people above were beyond it. I think they’re still human, though. And so are the rest of us. I don’t believe any of us is in a position to write anyone off.

Apart from anything else – how can any of us be sure that one of us, or one of our kids, or whoever – won’t end up in a similar situation?

Kate, I agree with what you write and I did find myself sympathising with these two. I’d say that I did in part because I don’t think they wanted to end up where they are- and that the way that their lives have turned out owes a lot to things that they may have desired but did not want. Its difficult to explain but I do understand their way of thinking. I think often that people face as Unity describes really serious problems- problems that we know nothing about because of our limited ideas about them- furthermore those problems can inhibit working in a job. Social anxiety for example can make people have panic attacks as they enter a room. Drug addiction is something that often people cannot control. Ex-soldiers as well often have problems readjusting to civilian society- that’s a phenomenon that isn’t thought about enough and at some point I mean to write an article for LC about it. Jettisoning people though is the wrong thing to do and you are entirely right to argue that.

Good interview.

Kate,

Good reporting, somewhat in the Studs Terkel style?

I agree with Jennie and Gracchi. I felt sympathy for them too.

This is a problem that seems intractible to me. If folk want to drink or drug themselves to death, is it liberal to stop them?

Whilst I had sympathy for the mother in losing her child, would I want the child returned?

I don’t think I would. Though see below:

Although arms length adoption does preclude any reconciliation with a ‘cleaned up’ mother, so that seems a step, by the state, too far.

Though given the recidivism – horrible word – that addicts exhibit, perhaps a clean break is in the child’s best interests.

So, it is the child I care about in their story, not them.

And that is not right either.

Have you ever considered working for ‘Moral Maze’?

Which is merely to agree with you that there are no simple solutions to complex issues like this.

“It’s not enough to write people like this off as losers and to simply threaten them with the loss of a benefit. I doubt they’d care, and when they’re high, I doubt they’d even realise. ”

Sounds like win-win to me!!

I am getting tired of the “no simple solutions” mantra.
As a result of which no-one is offering any solutions at all.

People react to incentives: carrots and sticks.
It is not at all clear why Kelvin in the interview could not get a job.
(Kate – any particular reason?)
Time limit benefits.
It has worked in the US – pioneered by Clinton.
There is no reason why it cannot work here.

cjcjc – The welfare reform in the US was pioneered by the Republican Party (Clinton signed Newt Gingrich’s bill, having vetoed two previous versions). The latest research (e.g. Life after Welfare – Persistence of Poverty) suggests that for vulnerable people, many of them dropped out completely and were left with neither benefit nor work, and it was the support to overcome barriers to employment, not the sanctions, which led to most of the increase in employment. This was during a period of economic growth – even the people who support it admit that US style welfare reform requires a growing economy and doesn’t work in times of recession. One result of all of this is that more than 1 out of every 100 Americans is now in prison.

There are some really good and successful schemes which help people who have addictions and other problems get jobs and stay in them. One tricky problem, which advisers and people who work on this struggle with is the fact that a majority of employers in a survey said that they would not consider employing anyone who has mental health problems. It doesn’t matter how hard you punish people if employers won’t hire them.

I also think a million times more highly of Natalie and Kelvin then I do of someone who spends their time pontificating in the way that you’ve been doing about a subject which they know nothing about.

The left always assume, rather simplistically, that because a problem is “complex” (and I don’t agree that this one is) it requires a complex solution. Why should it ? “Complex problems” is just an excuse to pontificate and maintain the status quo – which benefits the agenda of the state and its agents.
The “complex” problem these people have is that they are unemployed, state dependent and drug addicted (in that order) the solutions are not complex, get a job, get off benefits and get off drugs.

Don – your million times high regard for that dysfunctional couple and disdain for me may make you feel better about yourself, but it matters not a jot to me, while – far more importantly – doing nothing for them.

A lifetime of benefit dependency. A high price for them to pay in order for you to stake your claim to the moral high ground, don’t you think?

Three things beat me:

1. How is it that people writing here do not seem to be acquainted personnally with people on benefit who have difficult, complicated lives- a group which in my experience includes quite a lot of those on long-term benefits?
2. The simple cases, the system deals with pretty well. The cheats do not get away with it as easily as they used to. But the difficult cases are still there as they always were and there seem to be more of them. A system which organises effective. continuing, reliable but not permissive personal contact remains theonly way of coping with their problems. Why do we seem to have less and less such elements in the system?
3.”The Conservatives, THE LABOUR GOVERNMENT and the Daily Mail argue, as we all know, in the simplest terms, i.e. drugs = bad, immigrants = bad, paying your way = good,” Why do the words I have put in capitals fit so naturally in the sentence? LibDems or Greens do not fit there.

I’ve been on benefits myself, as if that means anything.

Difficult, complicated lives?
Were these imposed upon them by force, or did they – do they – have any choice, any agency, any responsibility at all?

cjcjc @ 15,

Probably, quite a short lifetime.

I don’t think folk like that are claiming any sort of high moral ground. Not that you were explicit, exactly.

Correct me if I am wrong.

It was donpaskini @13 to whom I was referring wrt the moral high ground.

I recently interviewed a number of people who’d been on benefits long-term. …
They struck me as an interesting combination of intelligent and…

How can someone be be both smart and helpless?

If they are as smart as all that, what are they doing to improve their situation?

>Are their problems “extremely complex”?
>Wherein lies the complexity?
>What is preventing Kelvin from working?

@1 & others On ‘complexity’, work, etc

I’m an addict and I’m responding to your troll. I have been an addict for the last 39 years since I was 12. Unlike Kelvin and Natalie I have a job and unlike both of them I have kept my children. Unlike them, you may not realise I was an addict if you met me.

Lets talk about complexity first. I have to deal with the complexity of ‘normal’ life like everybody else and that is hard enough. On top of this, every day is also informed by addiction. Either trying to be straight or dealing with the consequences of using. Rehab, withdrawal, the incredible effort of keeping a habit going, funding it and trying to lead a ‘normal’ life (from your Daily Mail troll point of view – got a job, whats the problem). No lifetime of benefits dependency here. On the contrary.

However. Being an addict, I’m very aware of *just* how quickly I could find myself sleeping rough behind Deptford Church, and that has been true for years. Depending on what postcode you ‘live’ in you are either lucky with rehab and addiction help or you aren’t. If you can’t get help you may end up like Kelvin & Natalie. Even with help you might. People like them are seriously disadvantaged and circumstances make ‘simple’ things like getting a job extraordinarily difficult. Where does the employer send the acceptance letter? Ever lived in a hostel? I doubt it, or you wouldn’t come up with glib comments like ‘What is preventing Kelvin from working?’. Would you employ him?

So what is my point? I’m very very lucky. I’m educated, earning, loved and hopefully articulate. Kelvin & Natalie might have one out of four of those advantages, many have none. We have something in common though which from the sounds of it you don’t. We are addicts. I have enormous respect and sympathy for anybody who is in their situation because life is very very hard at that level. Why are we addicts? $64,000 question. Genetic? Hereditary? Chemical imbalance? Mental health? Abuse? Money? And we all chose this horrible enduring nightmare. FFS…

Reading these comments on a ‘liberal’ leftie site I’m just staggered by the apparent ignorance and lack of care some of these commenters/trolls show. ‘I’ve been on benefits’. Big fucking deal mate. Try doing some voluntary work with your local social services community drug and alcohol team and speak from a position of strength. Of course, I making the assumption that you haven’t had too much contact with the Kelvins & Natalies of the world, but I’m basing that on your comments.

>How can someone be be both smart and helpless?

>If they are as smart as all that, what are they doing to improve their situation?

It is the combination of circumstances that conspire. Being on benefits is hard enough. Throw in an addiction issue, perhaps follow up with abuse and a few other nasties and however smart you may be, life can get too hard. You may no longer care

* huge round of applause for Narc’d *

Nice post narc’d.

Reading these comments on a ‘liberal’ leftie site I’m just staggered by the apparent ignorance and lack of care some of these commenters/trolls show.

Well, I can’t ban right-wingers from coming here and discussing issues. Keeps us on our toes I guess. And it reminds us why we’re on the left and not hanging out with the Tories.

The right-wing Tory press point their hairy fingers at the underclass, their creation, and curse them for malingering; but when people have no skills, poor literacy, poor housing, traumatic histories, mental health concerns, addictions, no ambition and no hope; well, then hanging round with your mates petty crime, prison, watching day time TV and shagging seems fairly reasonable behaviour with just £50 per week dole/fag money. An early death is guaranteed but the holidays are shit!

‘Well, I can’t ban right-wingers from coming here and discussing issues. Keeps us on our toes I guess. And it reminds us why we’re on the left and not hanging out with the Tories.’

Good call. I think this especially whenever when cjcjc comes on. It’s kind of like watching a pimply and inarticulate schoolboy trying to desperately to get attention by hitting girls he likes with his schoolbag.

“It’s kind of like watching a pimply and inarticulate schoolboy trying to desperately to get attention by hitting girls he likes with his schoolbag.”

Too kind.
And I always enjoy looking up to you lot, so comfortably ensconsed on the moral high ground – is there enough oxygen up there?
It’s win-win for both sides!
How boring would it be if every comment was just “great post”?

“The right-wing Tory press point their hairy fingers at the underclass, their creation…”

“Why are we addicts? $64,000 question. Genetic? Hereditary? Chemical imbalance? Mental health? Abuse? Money? And we all chose this horrible enduring nightmare. FFS…”

Yes, that is the $64,000 question.
I’m sorry, but I believe that people are moral agents who can and do make choices.
Not automata, created by the press.

“from your Daily Mail troll point of view – got a job, whats the problem”
That’s kind of my view, yes.
Of course the problem is prohibition – which I oppose.
Legalise and divert cash spent on the lunatic “war on drugs” to treatment.

That, unfortunately, is not the Daily Mail line.

>Well, I can’t ban right-wingers from coming here and discussing issues. Keeps

Absolutely not! Sorry, didn’t mean to imply that. It would be good to explore the repeatedly raised accusation of the ‘moral high ground’ when social care issues are discussed.

Unfortunately neither Kelvin nor Natalie are likely to contribute to this thread. Why not?

Let’s get some stuff out in the open.. Yes I’m a small C conservative..

But I don’t bitch about paying tax for my nephews education or my dad’s healthcare… These things deserve more funding…

However the emergence of the underclass with their state funded lifestyles is a cancer eating away at this country.

In broad terms the human existence is driven by purpose – get an education then a job then a family yadda yadda.. or whatever your choice might be.. but it’s your choice and the choice to do bugger all should not be one that can be selected at will…

The dole engenders a life of.. “fuck it.. nothing I do makes a damn bit of difference, I’ll smoke me fags and wait for the next dole cheque..”

Lo and behold if these people dont go slightly bonkers… and where we really see the effects are on theiri kids who are brought up with no moral or societal framework, drift into petty crime and then they’re the next headline, killing someone for random kicks becuase “nothing I do makes a damn bit of difference”…

Throwing more money at this is exacerbating this, and more fundamentally is starving the funding from areas (healtchare, education, the army, the police, that do deserve funding..

You may thnk I’m another heartless Tory creep… but you’re guiding an underclass of millions to hell on your golden road of (utterly misguided) good intentions…

Johnnydub, I don’t think anybody here is promoting membership of the underclass. I suggest that this debate typically generates more heat than light because there seems to be a fallacy of finite responsibility at work. If the individual is responsible for something it is taken that the society and government are not, and vice versa. And this is cobblers.

Take the prisons. They are largely full of illiterate mentally ill drug addicts. Not so many calculating criminals who thought the risk of a prison sentence would on balance be worth taking. Why is this? Because we get the punishments about right but we completely fail with literacy, drugs and mental health. If got those right instead, and didn’t bother to punish people properly, the prisons, I suggest would be full of calculating criminals instead.

So, as well as punishing – dealing with those who make the wrong moral choices – we should help those who are so dysfunctional that they are barely making choices at all. Only with the combination of people making choices and the wrong choices being punished, will we make progress.

Instead we have this sterile argument where the left focuses on the responsibility of the government and state, and the right on the responsibility of the individual. Both easy arguments because both are right, but neither diminishes the responsibility of the other in the slightest.

And so we have the same in welfare. Blame the victims of poverty or blame the system. The point of blame in both cases is to deny the other responsibility.

I’m going to guess that a lot of people commenting on this have never worked with trying to help people in these kinds of situations. 9 times out of 10, you can offer them every opportunity in the world and it will still make no difference to their lives. Sure theres 1 in 10 who will manage to at least slightly turn their lives around, but in the end you can’t change someones life for them, it has to be something that comes from within, and the amount of money and energy poured into these areas are simply not working at the moment and are a complete waste.

Why are people so opposed into making people work for their benefits? Is there something so wrong with asking someone who is entirely un-employable to do some community service, even volunteering with people in hostels and on rehab programmes, perhaps reading groups of kids with parents who have addiction that can’t do it themselves, there are so many ways they could contribute to society rather than just taking.

>How can someone be be both smart and helpless?
>If they are as smart as all that, what are they doing to improve their situation?
It is the combination of circumstances that conspire. Being on benefits is hard enough. Throw in an addiction issue, perhaps follow up with abuse and a few other nasties and however smart you may be, life can get too hard. You may no longer care

Narc’d, Taking this comment at face value, being on benefits is a difficulty in itself. This is a problem we can easily solve by disallowing their claim to benefits. We can at least remove one problem from these poor people.

Obviously you do not mean that. You are regarding the fact that someone is on benefits as proof that something terrible has happened to them. But I am asking what that terrible thing is.

And people do not give up because life is “too hard”. No one fights so hard as a man who is starving, except , perhaps, a man whose children are. They give up because struggle is pointless, which is not at all the same thing. If I have no money and no one will give me any, I will certainly take whatever job is going, illegally below minimum wage if necessary, like illegal immigrants picking strawberries. But if I lose a pound in benefits for every pound I earn, then work is indeed pointless.

Under such circumstances, I have no direct control over my income, and might as well give up.

On the other hand, I still have indirect control over my income. I may still be able to induce the powers that be to grant me with further benefits, in cash or in kind.

The sort of person they reward, is the sort of person I must endeavour to appear to be.

To add to the ending of that last post, it is the nature of human beings that they tend to become the people they imitate.

After more than twenty years of experience working with those approaching dependency upon drugs and/or alcohol and the willfullness with which they pursue their ‘pleasure’ despite the clarity with which the consequences of their self-destructive behaviour are presented to them, I have finally come to the conclusion that to a large degree such behaviour cannot be ascribed to misfortune, but is largely due to the choice of the individual. Many of my co-workers would publicly deny this most vehemently, but in private my own experiences suggest a large minority, maybe even a majority, agree.

bernie.

I’m pretty sure I’ve said this elsewhere, but accomodating an addictive personality seems to me to make sense. Sure, they will die young, but accomodation would mean that they didn’t have to be criminal about it. Y’know, robbing folk blind and such like.

This entire arguement seems to me to be based on criminalising something that should be a matter of choice.

You wanna die young? Your local pharmacy can take care of you!

Very Darwinian, I’d have thought.

Bernie,

I’m trying to make another point as well, which we haven’t really addressed in this thread – what should we DO with people in these situations? Do we just cut our losses and have a cull? Do we just cut people like this loose altogether – no support, no money, no rehab (even if most people start using again after it)? Or do we put an emphasis on better rehab, support and training programmes, etc?

I decided to start getting out there and talking to people like Kelvin and Natalie for the very simple reason that I dislike the way that people who are on benefits are targeted by politicians who wish to appeal to less-pleasant aspects of human nature and score a few political points. It’s flippant and tediously opportunistic. It’s not about creating something better – just about making the rest of us resent each other a little more. It’s all very dreary. You’ll see I began this article with a reference to a one-liner on the Conservative party website – a one-liner that I thought was too glib for this subject.

The Kelvins and Natalie of this world continue to exist, whether the rest of us like it or not. This thread would suggest that the rest of us don’t like it, and that there isn’t a lot of sympathy for people who can’t stay off the gear. The thing is – they’re still there, and will continue to be there. They cost us a fortune in police time, social services resources and god knows what else. Ignoring and resenting them doesn’t make them go away. It doesn’t make the rest of us any better, either, and I wonder how much money it really saves.

It’s interesting, though, that people think that those born with the addict’s personality can easily choose whether or not to use. I never thought that choice was easy at all.

I’m disabled after a massive fall at work, standing on top of a 96ft Oil tank on a refinery I leaned back and the hand rail just gave way, I remember being on the floor and tried to speak and the blood was in my mouth I could not swallow I could not move. It was a bright day sky was blue and I remember thinking I’m F*cked. The ambulance crew were not trained for rescue and lifted me with out putting a spinal board under me and I remember thinking this is dying it’s not bad and it went black. I woke up in hospital with doctors pushing needles into me and a tube down my throat and a doctor saying stay with us, stay with us. I just passed out when I came around my legs were in plaster. my arms my body wrapped in a sort of plastic band. I was told they could not find anything which was not busted, including my spine. Doctors said to me your in a mess but it’s not as bad as we though do not worry. Six weeks later I was told I’d caught MRSA, I remember hearing the doctor say to my wife, it’s not looking good, perhaps you should get ready for the worse. Next I remember the maggots which they placed onto my legs, they then decided it would be best if I was asleep a week later I came around, they sat me up that was eight weeks into my accident, I had my first drink and my first food. Doctors then said we had to remove all your teeth because you broke your jaw so badly they had to re set it. Six months later I was taken out of bed to a room in which a nurse placed needles into my legs and put an electrical current through my legs into the muscles because I had lost so much muscle. I started to then sit up in bed but had no use of my legs, I had a Catheter into my penis, and a bag strapped to my legs for my bowel.

I was taking to a nurse when the next thing I remember was a doctor shoving a tube down my throat and blood every where, I had a fit then a stroke, and a blood vessel had ruptured in my throat. six weeks after that I was up again sitting in a chair when a doctor said look you have a lesion of the spinal cord you will never walk again, when he walked out I reached up broke a light bulb and cut my wrists.

I could go on but just to say I spent eighteen months in hospital, and spent long periods now just having injection pain killers and respite care.

I’ve lost the use of my bowel. my bladder, my legs, Sex is nothing anymore. I was 28 years old.

A year ago I was asked to attend an interview for the pathways to work, the bloke a spotty faced little twerp said being disabled is not a reason to sit at home, he was eighteen perhaps nineteen and was trained so he told me as a medical adviser.

He said you can work so they told me I must go through six interviews, at my Pathways to work meeting spotty looked for work for me, he said how about handing out baskets at Asda, hold on we have a job here for a painter and decorator, taxi driver, or perhaps window cleaning, now before you say your a lier my MP wrote to the DWP for me, I was called back into the pathways to work to be seen by a doctor, he sat in the chair and said what bloody idiot called you for a work interview.

In October this year, we will have a new benefit called ESA, I will be losing £12 from my massive £87 a week, I will need to undergo another medical if I pass this one I will be told to get benefits I will need to undergoing training to do voluntary work.

Now then I will accept that if a person can work he should, I’d love to work, but I’ve serious problems due to my condition for example I will fall asleep at anytime, if the pain gets to severe I will have a fit, my kidneys and liver, my bowel and ,my bladder have all moved within my body cavity.

SO tell me gents who in his right mind will employ me, make no mistake I will never ever work a 40 hour a week or a 30 hour week. I even now spend one week a month in respite care.

Believe me I wished and still wish I had in fact died.

To make it better, I( was asked last month why is it people do not work when it’s obviously an excuse.

I earned £35,000 a year, I had just been promoted onto the football league linesman’s list , and I would give this up for £87 a week are they mad.