I should have remembered that cause and effect don’t quite work right in my universe. That publicly bemoaning the continuing uncertainty of my fate was almost certain to bring an immediate resolution.

It did. Not three hours after writing my last post, I was opening the Dreaded Brown Envelope of Doom that had fallen onto my doormat, with shaking hands… and reading in some disbelief that my personal nightmare had, for this year at least, come to a sudden end. I have, without drama or inquisition, been placed in the support group. I’m safe. For now.

Imagine what happens to a rubber band when you stretch it as far back as it will possibly go, even far enough to slightly fray the rubber, leave it there for long enough to draw blood, and then let go… that’s pretty much been my mind for the past 14 hours¹. TWANNNGGGG-G-G-G-G-G!

However, as I mentioned previously I am fully aware of how lucky I am, and fully aware that for most people the process doesn’t work as it ought. On behalf of those people still trapped in this hideous shared nightmare of Kafka, Orwell and Heller, I wish I could give you more than just my thoughts; you have them, and my anger on your behalf.

The only other thing I can offer is a word of advice, which I followed when I filled out my own ESA50. Two things, I think, were critical. When I filled in each category, I referred to the exact criterion I wished to be awarded – eg. for the social engagement question, I appended [LCW16a/LCWRA13] to my answer – so that there was no ambiguity; and I sought the support and corroboration of two healthcare professionals to accompany my ESA50. I suspect that the combination of these made the WCA entirely redundant. I won’t go as far as suggesting that everyone should do this, and certainly not that it’s any kind of magic solution. But it certainly can’t hurt; if nothing else, it lays out the groundwork for any subsequent appeal.

But if you have an ESA50 to fill in, I would urge you to seek professional help with it – whilst you still can, because I note that the Commons did overrule the Lords on LASPO – rather than relying on the words of some random anonymouse on the internet!² This is too important a thing to trust to the kindness of strangers. Find people you trust, and cling to them for dear life. I owe everything to those healthcare professionals who were prepared to stick their necks out to help me get what they were sure I needed.

1. Mail arrives a bit late here; I maintain that it was not second post, but first post, that was abolished when Royal Mail switched to one delivery per weekday.

2. I’m serious about this. You know nothing about me but what I’ve said. This could all be an invention, as far as you’re aware. Don’t take my word for anything.

Today the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill returns to the Commons, where the MPs who are supposed to represent their constituents' interests will instead blindly do their masters' bidding and vote to abolish what little, belated protection those who depend on the state’s good graces have against its worst excesses of belligerence. The government will insist that depriving millions of people of any effective right to legal redress, particularly against its own lousy decisions, is merely a financial matter, and as such the will of Parliament – for which, read the will of government, so neutered is our lower House by the corruption of power and favour – should prevail over the Lords who, owing nothing to anyone except their own consciences, rightly decided that stripping the most vulnerable of their last line of defence was an unconscionable obliteration of their human rights.

I don’t suppose there is anything that will stop the Tories from rubbing their hands with glee at finally ridding themselves of the last legal opposition to their destruction of the welfare state. I don’t suppose there is anything that will make the Liberal Democrats understand the extent to which liberalism is built upon access to legal redress, nor the extent to which their support for this measure is an absolute betrayal of every single year of their centuries of history. The Commons is a lost cause, in every way.

But the Lords is not.

Hence I make this appeal. Please, when this bill returns to you, PLEASE force a constitutional crisis by rejecting the government’s spurious claims of financial privilege. For if you will not do it for this measure, which strikes at the rule of law itself, you may as well disband and go home now, because you no longer have any further purpose in this shallow pretence of democracy. The government are not even trammelling to hide their manipulations of the political process; they are trying every underhand trick in the book, and outside of the Lords standing up and saying “No further!” they cannot be opposed as they do it. Labour don’t have the numbers, and it appears that the Liberal Democrats never actually held the principles they espoused so noisily before 2010; if they had, they would not have discarded them so conveniently.

And I say this in the knowledge that this bill will affect me directly.

As I’ve mentioned before, I am still waiting to hear from the DWP about my fate. It seems likely that I will be compelled to appeal the eventual outcome, and it has dragged on for long enough – and the backlog of appeals is large enough – that this appeal will probably be initiated, and definitely heard, after this bill has been passed into law (if the government are permitted to assert financial privilege unchallenged). I am in a relatively blessed position; I have had a little legal training – four terms of a law degree, to be precise. I have a fair idea how to construct a legal argument, I can make a decent fist of deciphering precedent, statute and regulation, and I could probably work up a decent submission to a tribunal. I’m also pretty intelligent, by objective measure, which helps somewhat.

Unfortunately, there my luck runs out. I am not good in person; specifically, I am lousy at convincing people of things unless they’re already leaning so far in that direction they need kneepads. I tend towards spite in conflict situations, even abstract ones; that was one of the reasons I gave up studying law – in a tutorial debate I found myself rounding on both the opposing side and the tutor when I thought a facile point was being made. My own side commented favourably on it, but I couldn’t look anyone in the face. And that was something that didn’t affect me at all; when I have a stake in the game, the problem is immensely compounded. The chances of my rounding on the opposing counsel, or the tribunal themselves, and thus torpedoing my own case are remarkably high. And that’s assuming I can even manage to present a case at all; the reason I’m claiming ESA at all is that I’m basically incapable of coping with any social engagement¹, a claim which would be somewhat undermined if I were to present my own case with any degree of success – but which would never be heard in the first place if I were to have the kind of meltdown that normally happens in such circumstances.

It’s a classic catch-22. If I can present my own oral appeal at tribunal, I undermine my own case; if I can’t (by far the more likely alternative), my case will be lost by default unless I am very very lucky indeed. And whilst I have had more than the average good fortune in my life, I’m not inclined to take that so completely for granted that I bank my own future on it.

And that, as I say, is the situation for someone who is, frankly, likely to be brighter than anyone they’d be sharing the tribunal room with. (Oh, how completely aware am I that intelligence is not the only criterion worth a damn!) How someone who is even of average intelligence is going to cope without recourse to legal assistance I have no idea – and god help anyone with a learning disability; they should probably give up their ESA claims the second this bill is passed, because they’re not going to be able to appeal them. And how much more severe and callous are ATOS going to be once they know that next to none of their decisions will be challenged? I predict now – if this bill is allowed to pass, there won’t be a “too ill to work” category by the time Universal Credit is introduced.

The time for the Lords to challenge the constitutional abuse of the executive is long overdue. Don’t let it pass this time, please.

PLEASE.

1. The latest manifestation of this, incidentally, is that I’ve drifted away from twitter more or less completely… it’s not just face to face contact I can’t handle, it’s anything – and part of that is because I don’t know where the lines are; I come over as belligerent or trollish, and I really loathe that tendency and am unwilling to indulge it anywhere. Put simply, even participating in a forum is more emotional investment than I can afford. Internet arguments leave me feeling physically ill and emotionally wrecked – and yet I seem to fall into them as easily as I fall off a bicycle. So, no more.

Just when all hope seemed to have vanished… It occurred to me an hour or so ago to actually try and find out what, if any, the ECtHR’s findings on welfare benefits were. Two results leapt out at me. One, Stec & others v United Kingdom [2005], found that noncontributory benefits counted as possessions under Article 1 of ECHR Protocol 1 – the protocol which guarantees the right to peaceful enjoyment of one’s possessions. As this summary explains, previously the Court of Appeal had ruled (in Reynolds [2003]) that noncontributory benefits could not be held to be property, but the ECtHR’s judgement elegantly sweeps that reasoning away in a single sentence.

On its own, this judgement has considerable signficance; whilst the ECtHR has repeatedly found that the ECHR creates no right to welfare provision, a state which designs one must respect all articles of the ECHR. More significantly, it would appear to make retroactively changing entitlement very difficult indeed – as that would involve depriving a person of their property, and thus infringing their Art 1(prot 1) rights.

But its significance becomes overwhelming when considered alongside the findings in another case, Kjartan Ásmundsson v Iceland [2004]. In that case, a man in receipt of disability benefits on grounds of incapacity to do his previous job was reassessed in the face of a raised threshold of eligibility, found to be not sufficiently disabled, and stripped of his entire pension; the Court found that this was excessive and disproportionate, especially in view of the fact that whilst 54 people had been stripped of their entitlements, 689 people claiming the same benefit continued to do so at previous levels. And they awarded Ásmundsson €78,000 overall. The grounds on which they based their finding? Article 1, protocol 1 – yep, the same one that was declared in 2005 to extend to noncontributory benefits.

Now, admittedly I’m not a lawyer (although I wish to god I were on days like this!) but as far as I can see, those two rulings mean that the entire ESA migration process is illegal, has been illegal for 7 years, and was known to be illegal when it was announced. Moreover, the implications for the PIP migration process are exactly the same; and even the removal of my £10.13pw excess LHA – the basis on which I changed over from claiming housing benefit, no less! – may have been illegal, in the face of people living in properties with rather higher rents continuing to receive their full allocation of LHA. Is £530 a year worth taking the government to court? Probably not. But is the principle worth suing over? I think it is – because as I say, the government either knew it was about to act illegally, or didn’t do due diligence first.

Of course, now we see exactly why the government – by their own admission; Lord McNally protested that the amendment restoring legal aid to welfare tribunals would “tear out the heart of the rationale of the bill”, which tells everyone all they need to know about what the government are trying to pull here – are so keen to remove ECtHR jurisdiction, the Human Rights Act and access to legal aid when challenging authority in any way. If they are found to have acted illegally, based on judgements that predate their actions by several years (and I can’t see how they can possibly argue otherwise; the cases match in such detail) the likely liability for damages will more than counter any savings made by throwing people off Income Support – and stop the PIP migration in its tracks. Of course, it remains to be seen how many people will survive long enough to benefit from that compensation – or whether Britain will withdraw, or be expelled, from the ECHR before that can be brought to pass – but it is clear to me, now, that the process that brought me to the brink of collapse yesterday is quite demonstrably illegal – a fact I won’t hesitate to bring to the attention of ATOS in any future dealings I’m forced to have with them.

And of course, this is exactly the ray of sunshine I needed after the darkness of yesterday’s skies. I hope I’m not the only one.

I wrote this yesterday, when I was feeling utterly hopeless; but I hesitated to post it, because I didn’t want to face anyone telling me I was “trying to seek attention” or – well, anything else that gets shoved in people’s faces to try to force them out of discussing suicidal thoughts in public. Since then, I’ve thought “fuck it”. This is how I feel – or felt; I’ll write more on that in a bit – and I’m just going to say it. Because this stuff is real, and serious, and needs to be talked about freely; otherwise, the message is that anyone who contemplates suicide doesn’t deserve to live. I think we can all agree that’s counterproductive…

I’m not exactly sure what happened. One day I was as embedded on twitter as I’ve ever been, and the next I barely checked it all day; and the same thing happened the day after, and the day after that… and it’s increasingly looking as though I might actually have dropped off twitter for good. I miss talking to the people I know through twitter, of course, and I miss having something to do for any spare moment in any given day that placed minimal demands on my attention span; but… it feels different now, somehow; twitter suddenly stopped feeling like my last refuge, and became somewhere I had to hide from.

Except I don’t think it was really that sudden. The feeling has been building for at least the last few months; of course last November it was triggered by one too many tweetfights, but nothing like that happened this time. A combination of the sense that twitter seems to be run by people who don’t have its best interests at heart (witness Biz Stone opining that anyone who regards it as a social life isn’t using it properly; I can’t help but think that’s a warning of things to come) and a few too many days where instead of providing refuge, twitter only brought me more reasons to sink into a depression.

And yet, I suspect depression itself is a part of it too. I’ve consciously withdrawn from twitter… much as I gradually withdrew, over the space of a few years, from life itself. (I may talk about what led to that in a blogpost to come; it’s still excruciating for me to think about.) But it feels as though something more fundamental is slipping away from me. Not hope, exactly – I guess I’d call it the hope of hope returning. I know I have a tendency to obsess somewhat about politics, but I can feel my options closing off; I can feel my continued existence becoming less viable with every passing day. I just can’t cope with the thought of compulsion; I’ve never been able to – it was a standing joke as I was growing up that the only way you’d get me to help with the washing up was to make it clear that I didn’t have to – and yet, every day brings with it more tales of heartless, thoughtless, boundless enslavement by the government of its most desperate and vulnerable citizens – sorry, subjects, for that is how we’re treated. It hasn’t touched me yet, but I’m due to hear from the DWP any time soon… and unless they put me straight into the support group without forcing me to “submit” (their words) to an interview so rigged as to make Winston Smith’s interrogation appear a model of even-handedness, I simply don’t see how my continued existence is viable. Everything I am, everything I hoped, is being pulled out of reach – and I don’t know whether I am falling or simply being abandoned.

But I do know that at present, twitter is just too much for me to cope with. Hell, even the cats are too much for me to cope with; the responsibility of caring for them, and the fear that I may very soon find I am no longer able to do so, the thought that I might have to give them up, is crushing me; if it becomes a reality, it will kill me. That’s not me being melodramatic – I just wouldn’t be able to live with myself, imagining them missing me. The boycat is nearly 17, and looks increasingly frail, and has always been extraordinarily closely bonded with me; if I were to rehome him, I think I’d be killing him as surely as if I took him on a one-way trip to the vet myself. Not that I’ve ever truly recovered from the death of his brother, almost three years ago now – or more precisely, from the decision to put him down when it became too clear that his liver was terminally failing. I don’t know how to get over things, or to forgive myself. And yet, I’m also becoming irritable with them, irritable to the point that I’m scaring myself… and the mental images of me inflicting harm on them aren’t helping either.

I should probably ask someone for help. My psychiatrist has been quite clear about ringing the crisis line if I need to – but there’s only one thing that will help me; I need to be left alone, free from pressures and anxieties, to do my own thing. (Besides, I’m not in danger of doing anything that the rest of the world would use disparaging terms to describe, however rational a course it seems to me, whilst I still have the cats; and anyway, I’ve always been hopeless at asking for help. I just can’t force myself to ask, nor can I articulate my needs – or cope with the disappointment of realising that what I need isn’t something anyone else is prepared to deliver. This society is focused almost entirely on the idea that people should provide exclusively for themselves, but constructed in such a way as to guarantee that nobody actually can; we are all expected to be perfectly networked and completely self-sufficient at the same time.)

Unfortunately, I live in a society that won’t let me just keep out of its way – and I cannot live in the society this one is becoming.

I just don’t see what my alternatives are any more. I don’t see myself having any. And I’ve run out of places to hide.

We can’t say we weren’t warned.

For a while now, a few extreme Libertarians¹ have been formulating a model of a state which only exists to collect taxes, and purchase services with those taxes on behalf of those who paid them, using its weight as the market’s biggest purchaser to achieve the best deals possible. According to those theorists, the market is the best and only mechanism for getting anything done; public service is both immoral (because it unfairly affects the market) and inefficient (for without a profit motive, there is no drive to rationalise), in an irredeemable way. There is nothing that should not be put out to private tender, and precious little that cannot. The state’s role is only to commission services and collect the means to pay for them, not to provide those services itself; the state sets the policy, and the market provides the mechanism. Of course, nobody took it particularly seriously, or those who proposed it, given that a particularly dull 12-year-old could easily spot the fundamental flaws in such a proposition.

And then, in 2010, the UK held a general election that nobody won – and it didn’t take a genius to see why; nobody trusted any of the parties to actually govern the nation in the best interests of its citizens. But this being Britain, and steeped in millennia of imposed authoritarian privilege, it was decided that we could not possibly function without a national government, and the Tories and Liberal Democrats hastily (we thought) cobbled together a coalition. This much I’ve mentioned before. I’ve also mentioned that the coalition they carved out was not a steady-as-she-goes agreement to run the country cautiously, carefully, and in the national interest; it was an end-run around democratic accountability, an agreement to make radical, far-reaching changes to the basic structure of this country’s defining institutions. We’re only just beginning to see the full picture now.

I mentioned before that for the Tories, this is about permanent Conservative hegemony. What I didn’t mention is that these are not the Conservatives of old; in conjunction with the right wing of the Liberal Democrats, who are precisely the extreme Libertarians I mentioned above, they have conceived an agenda which will not only ensure that no future government has any choice but to implement Libertarian principles, but will render democracy itself largely pointless, as everything for which the state should be held accountable is gradually farmed off into private hands. This is Thatcherism on a month-long coke bender, and the shape of it, already unmissable, came into full view when the Guardian announced this week that the police are about to be privatised. The police have previously been firmly off-limits from whatever upheaval the government du jour has seen fit to inflict on the rest of the public sector; after all, who else would deal with the social backlash? But this government no longer sees a problem; even services such as criminal investigation and street patrols can be farmed off to “independent contractors”.

In fact, it’s worse than this – as is so often the case, the future of the state is currently becoming the present of the welfare system. The much-heralded Work Programme (and for now we’ll overlook the fact that it appears to be quickly tailspinning into the oblivion of abject failure, because we can be sure the government will take a similar approach to the concept of oversight) is demonstrating that commission itself will be commissioned; a few large “trusted” (bribes were exchanged, blood oaths signed – what’s not to trust?) providers – you can already name the usual suspects – are charged with the responsibility of providing the service (in this case, the channelling of people into sustainable jobs) however they feel they can do it, with no supervision or regulation – and more importantly, no recourse for its victims, and no accountability to the state. Payment will, we are told, be “by results” – which is a remarkable feat, given that they are essentially being asked to work miracles, by funnelling 3 million people into jobs which, essentially, don’t exist.² The situation is a recipe for widespread fraud and corruption – a chicken which is currently on its way to roost with the emerging A4e scandal.

As I say, we were warned. Oliver Letwin told us that by 2015, the NHS would no longer exist. Clearly, neither would state education, welfare provision, or even the policing system. That silly thought experiment of a few insane Libertarians? Well, they’re in charge now, and they’re trying it. And because of the utterly anachronistic, inadequate constitution of this tinpot country with delusions of grandeur, there’s absolutely nothing that can stop them.

In 2015, what the political parties will be fighting over is nothing more than who can negotiate the best group purchases for the few people who still pay tax. They won’t be accountable for any of those group purchases, of course, should they go wrong, because they don’t deal with mechanism, and it’s not their fault if their policy wasn’t implemented correctly. All the state will do, all it can do, is award contracts to the lowest bidders. Who will pocket an unlimited amount of tax revenue, and then be left to their own devices when it comes to deciding whether to even bother doing what they’ve been paid for at all… and that’s assuming anyone tenders for contracts whose payment is contingent on delivering the impossible.

Dear readers, I give you Grouponarchy – the state of the future.

1. A note on the word “Libertarian”, and why I capitalise it. Once upon a time, “libertarian” was a synonym for “anarchist”, and if I recall correctly one preferred by anarchists themselves, because it avoided the potential for confusion between anarchism (a non-hierarchical political system) and anarchy (what happens when a government collapses). Then the right wingers got hold of it. Free-market fundamentalists intentionally set out to landgrab the term “libertarian” for themselves – and they succeeded… and poisoned it forever; because the greatest irony of their philosophy, which can be crudely but accurately categorised as “all the freedom you can afford”, is that it is the ultimate in naked, unconstrained authoritarianism. Wealth no longer indicates power – the two become identical; and those without are stuck without any means of redressing the balance, or even the recognition that there might be a balance to redress. The misappropriation of the name “libertarianism” was the free-market fundies' first Big Lie, and showed them how to succeed in the future. And since they’ve removed all meaning from the word “libertarian”, I believe it should be treated as any other proper noun with no intrinsic meaning is treated – and capitalised.

2. That 450,000 figure you hear a lot of? It’s a snapshot – it’s the number of jobs available at any given moment, not the number of actual unfilled vacancies. And not only is it no higher than one might expect of an economy where every job is basically filled, it’s actually rather low – suggesting that people are holding onto jobs they’d really rather not have, because they’re too scared of not being able to find another one. In other words, our economy currently has a negative number of unfilled positions. Needless to say, this ain’t good.

I’ve just read your article here (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jobs/9106618/Fewer-sickness-benefit-claima..., and you seem to have got yourself into something of a muddle about the differences between JSA, the two ESA categories, who’s appealing what, and what “fit for work” means. Let me explain:

• Nobody awarded ESA, in either the work-related activity group (WRAG) or the support group (SG) is classified as “fit for work” or “able to work”. Those placed in the WRAG are considered to be those who, with the right level of support, might only be able to consider returning to a suitable position one day. This is actually supported by the rather lower incidence of people being referred from the ESA WRAG to the Work Programme; most ESA claimants are simply not in a position where they could even consider it.

  (However, if you read the publicly available criteria for the claiming of ESA (available from this page: http://www.dwp.gov.uk/employment-and-support/ – click the link for the ESA214 document), you will see that many people who are placed in the WRAG will never be able to return to work, practically speaking. I am sure that if you were to ask your contacts in the HR field, you would find that most of them would run a mile from employing almost anyone exhibiting conditions qualifying for ESA.)

• Those people who are found “fit for work” are no longer eligible for ESA. They must make a separate claim for Jobseekers' Allowance – and a considerable number of them are refused because they are patently too ill to work. These are the people who are appealing their decisions; the most recent statistic shows that fully 85% of people found “fit for work” are appealing their decisions, and of those, 40% will win their appeals. In contrast, far fewer of the people placed in the WRAG appeal their findings. So whilst I understand the confusion that caused you to make it, your assertion that the appeal rate is holding up referrals simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

I trust this assists you to resolve your confusion. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to ask. Or you could, you know, write another hilariously misinformed column…

disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and this is not a legal opinion

The government’s imposition of mandatory labour on JSA – and, in the future, ESA – claimants has been detailed in various other places, as has the fact that it would appear to be a prima facie violation of ECHR article 4 – the one that prohibits servitude. Sadly, courts do not tend to be amenable to “but it’s obvious, Your Honour!” arguments – even when His Honour would readily concede that it is obvious; something more substantial needs to be sought.

And I think I might have something. I very quickly stumbled across a case from 2005, Siliadin v France (PDF), which concerned the insufficiency of French law criminalising indentured servitude. The facts of the case are not directly relevant; to very briefly and potentially inaccurately summarise, Ms Siliadin had come to France aged 15 and been employed by a Mrs D, who confiscated her passport and didn’t pay her, but did provide reasonable food & board. Mrs D “lent” Ms Siliadin to her friends the Bs, who decided to keep her on as an unpaid nursemaid and worked the crap out of her. Ms Siliadin mentioned this to a neighbour, who reported the couple to the authorities, and they were duly prosecuted under the French law at that time – articles 225-13 and 225-14 of the Criminal Code. (In 2003 those laws were changed, to clarify and to strengthen the penalties.) The wording of those articles is interesting. Article 225-13 stated, until 18 March 2003::

It shall be an offence punishable by two years' imprisonment and a fine of 500,000 francs to obtain from an individual the performance of services without payment or in exchange for payment that is manifestly disproportionate to the amount of work carried out, by taking advantage of that person’s vulnerability or state of dependence.

And article 225-14 stated:

It shall be an offence punishable by two years' imprisonment and a fine of 500,000 francs to subject an individual to working or living conditions which are incompatible with human dignity by taking advantage of that person’s vulnerability or state of dependence.

The courts found (eventually) that article 225-13 had been violated, but that 225-14 had not, and awarded her compensation for the stress caused and back pay; Ms Siliadin appealed to the ECHR, asserting that France’s law gave insufficient protection against her exploitation. The Court agreed, finding that it is not enough to merely outlaw slavery; the State has a positive obligation to protect people from falling into a state of servitude. In this case, she was entitled to see those people who had enslaved her convicted under criminal law.

The key point here is that article 225-13 would already, arguably, have outlawed workfare in this country. We have in place a legal definition of what should be considered a minimum payment for work carried out, in the form of the minimum wage legislation; and it is clear that anyone claiming money from the state is certainly dependent on the state. And in awarding a claimant ESA, the state has themselves designated that claimant “vulnerable” – specifically, unfit for work. (More generally, the attachment of conditions to the awarding of benefits, when a claimant has no other means by which to survive, could be argued to be an assertion of the claims of ownership – the state has awarded itself broad discretion to interfere in the most intimate details of claimants' lives.) If French law, which already outlawed this and provided for imprisonment and a fine, could not be considered to be sufficient protection, then it may reasonably be assumed that the baseline of what is considered servitude has been established across all ECHR signatories.

So the court would be confronted with evidence that not only was an ECHR state not complying with its positive obligations under article 4, but it was directly violating article 4, as established by case law, itself – and moreover, seeking to extend legal protection to those organisation whom it had contracted to enslave people on its behalf. I don’t think the British government would be able to defend itself against such an assertion at all.

Moreover, note that there is no disagreement that Ms Siliadin had her basic needs met; she was housed, clothed and fed by those who enslaved her. Not well, but she was. This is what state benefits are paid for; they are considered to be the minimum required to live on. Therefore it follows that they should not include an obligation of work, and that any imposed obligation of work should be considered as unpaid.

Of course, the government will attempt to rely on the “civic duty” exception, which was clearly intended to cover insitutions like National Service, which are compulsory for all – but the problem the government will run into there is that it does not impose such a civic duty on every citizen – only those who make a claim for suppport in order to avoid destitution. Moreover, the avoidance of civic duty would reasonably be expected to meet with criminal sanction itself. It does not; the individual is merely deprived of the means to obtain the basic necessities of life. (Moreover, not adequately compensating people for the performance of such civic duties itself presents problems with other parts of the ECHR, most notably article 2, the right to life itself.)

And that is why I consider workfare – or, in fact, any such programme which takes a substantial amount of time and effort and is considered mandatory for those receiving benefits – to be a violation of ECHR article 4, and therefore illegal in British and international law. The extent to which the provision of an inadequate unconditional welfare system violates article 2 is a discussion for another day…

For quite some time now, it has become obvious that the impact of the Coalition government upon British institutions will be unfavourably compared, for as long as such things are remembered, with the impact of a Boeing 747 on a hapless goose in its flight path. A concerted attack is being made on pretty much every part of the welfare state: schools are being ransacked by Michael Gove, determined to liberate every school from the pernicious arms-length management of local education authorities and bring them to a place of independence, subject only to the micromanagement and tyrannical whim of one M Gove Esq; Andrew Lansley has clearly been planning the best means of obliterating the NHS for many years, and is now being given an uninterrupted run at putting it into action, even at the cost of Cameron’s own reputation for honesty; Ken Clarke, supposedly on the left of the party, has been charged with ensuring that access to justice is only open to those who can afford it, and has swung all his matey, jocular inattentiveness behind that very objective; Iain Duncan Smith, who spent several years after his abject failure to persuade even his own party of his merits as leader working out who was the best proxy for his revenge and alighted without too much thought upon single mothers, has been given an excuse by that latter-day Lysenko of welfare, David Freud, to both remodel the benefits system along the lines of the Spanish Inquisition and ensure that an entire tier of the workforce will be replaced by a five-million-strong pool of indentured servants; George Osborne, like a black widow at the centre of government’s web, determined to isolate every green shoot of recovery the economy might accidentally manage to nurture and carefully, surgically, uproot it and salt the earth on which it grew – the list continues… It is tempting to assume that there is a single overarching plan unifying all of these disparate terrorist campaigns against the Britain that was built in the wake of the Second World War, and more to the point, the wake up call of realising that a nation so like our own could fall prey to its own darkest, basest impulses as easily and completely as Germany had. This author has been known to advance a number of suggestions, from the separation of humanity into a wealthy elite and a slave caste, to the preparation for an imminent disaster of which the population at large has little grasp and even less readiness.

Unfortunately, this author tends to overcomplicate things, and ascribe intent where there is only effect. For all the chaos that each of these wrecking balls will cause, every single one is a symptom or a side effect. I’m not saying that there isn’t an overarching plan to the Tory rampage, but it has nothing to do with ideology; in fact, its scope is simultaneously far pettier and much more destructive than the above suggestions, so obvious and logical that I only realised what it was this morning.

Permanent, unchallenged Conservative government. That’s what this is really about.

That’s all it’s about.

Yes, Cameron has found ideologues in almost every field to do his dirty work. It gives him deniability; he keeps the ministers at arms' length, and when it all falls to pieces, long after anyone can do anything about it, he’ll be able to merely shrug, say he wasn’t properly kept in the loop, pass the buck and demand resignations from all concerned. But to imagine that he doesn’t know what the effect of their free reined ideology will be, ideology he only tangentially shares, is to imagine that he is an utter idiot. He is not. Every strut of the ideology serves a purpose – which is why the ideologues have only been placed in areas which have traditionally been regarded as Labour’s stronghold areas. Areas where the Tories have never had anything to fear from Labour – crime and policing, defence, business – are filled with pragmatists and placeholders. And, of course, his most likely challengers any time soon will be those very same ideologues who have all been set up to fail.

But in the short term, the only thing on Cameron’s mind is destroying Labour – not just at the next election, but as an electoral force at all. The NHS is almost a guaranteed vote-winner for Labour; the only way Cameron could even come close to achieving a victory in the last election was to promise (with his fingers crossed behind his back, obviously) that the NHS was safe in his hands. Of course, it isn’t – the consensus is now all but universal that Lansley’s bill is designed to ensure that by the next election there will no longer BE a National Health Service; but that was the point. If the NHS no longer exists, Labour can’t use it to gain electoral advantage; even if Labour somehow manage to rescue victory from the jaws of victory in 2015 (rather than the certain defeat they seem determined to keep fishing for), the fact that the NHS is in the process of collapsing like a square mile of dominos whose corner was kicked over by Lansley as he turned out his office light for the last time will become Labour’s fault. Gone forever.

Consider also welfare. Labour have always, inextricably, been associated with welfare; even their best efforts to sabotage that, in the dying days of New Labour, haven’t managed to dent that perception. And whilst the trend of public opinion has been whipped in the last decade against having a benefits system at all, which clearly scared Labour into voluntarily relinquishing the position – and so losing the support of those who depend upon it, whilst gaining no ground whatsoever with those who saw it as an unnecessary burden upon the good rich folk of the nation… stupid Labour! – as time passes, recession turns into depression, and more and more people come to depend on a fast-vanishing welfare state, the subject will once again become popular… unless, of course, no party is prepared to support it – which is where we are now – and anyone who might work towards creating such a party is kept so busy with bureaucracy, frantic efforts to find non-existent jobs and arbitrary crippling sanctions, not to mention homelessness and starvation.

And the number of people depending on what’s left of welfare will increase. Workfare is already eroding the minimum-wage unskilled sector, from which much of Labour’s remaining support would have been expected to derive; it’s not a stretch to imagine than in a year or two, there simply won’t be any minimum wage jobs, as workfare has entirely supplanted them – and that as many as ten million people are in that sector of Universal Credit which used to be covered by JSA, most of them doing the same jobs as they would have been doing otherwise, but for the same amount of money they’d get in benefits. Moreover, moving them all to a unified benefit system will have the effect of ensuring that the number of people farmed out as indentured servants can never be precisely calculated; there will simply be no distinction made between unemployed, underemployed, or enslaved. And more importantly, no hope of escape.

But why will this affect Labour? Well, two reasons. For one thing, people on benefits tend not to vote (unless they’re pensioners – hence the ridiculous proposition that someone aged 64 is a drain on society who must be forced to find a job, but the same person a year later is a valuable member of society to be rewarded for a lifetime of devotion to hard work), and the votes they aren’t casting would have tended to go to Labour. Whether that’s sensible or not is moot at this point, for reasons I’ll come to later, but there it is. And secondly, the effect of the welfare reforms, in the short term, will be to push people who are likely to vote Labour out of expensive areas of the country and into increasingly crowded, increasingly desperate ghettos, preserving the leafy suburbs for those who can vote Tory with a clean conscience, safe in the knowledge that they’ll never have to come face to face with the disastrous effects of the social policy they’ve advocated.

I could continue – the same pattern is being repeated with every area that might directly or indirectly affect Labour support. The policy on Scotland is the most interesting. Obviously, the Conservative Party operates under an historic commitment to the principle of unionism – and yet, Cameron appears to have done everything within his power to push Scotland away from the union, or at least into the welcoming arms of Alex Salmond. Why? Because Scotland is a Labour stronghold, and Labour are also implacably opposed to Scottish independence. Cameron’s insistent refusal to contemplate a three question referendum will scarcely hurt Salmond, but neatly triangulates Labour’s support away; Labour would stand four-square behind a devo max option if one existed, but without one they must stand with the status quo, forcing Scotland to choose Salmond if they want any hope of self-government. In the process, Labour’s 40 Scottish seats would also fall to the SNP in 2015, possibly even allowing a Tory majority government to buy Scotland off with home rule in 2016 and get those seats out of Westminster for good. Again, it’s not about Scotland – it’s all and only about ensuring that Labour are no longer a viable electoral force.

I say again, this is unbelievably petty behaviour. And it’s no good at all to reflect that Labour has felt much the same way about the Conservatives for the last 15 years, or that the Conservatives have been heading this way for three decades; a calamity has befallen our parliamentary system. Somewhere along the way, the parties have forgotten that they are supposed to have the same interests at heart – the good of the entire nation, not just the parts of it that voted for them – and come to see each other as not merely wrong, but an enemy to be annihilated.

The first rule of the fanatic: when you become obsessed with the enemy, you become the enemy.

Labour became obsessed with the Tories, but after 18 straight years of Tory rule that was somewhat unsurprising; they had almost completely lost confidence in their own ability to press their arguments, even in the very principles they had come into politics to press home. Somewhere along the way, they began to believe that they had to become just like the Tories if they were going to get anywhere near power again; that made them attractive to people for whom Thatcherism was a dogma too far, and those people who might ordinarily have been the centre-right wing of the Conservatives found themselves the mainstream of Labour, and found in Tony Blair their archetype.

It turns out that deals with the Devil are rarely formulated to the advantage of the mortal party.

But the Tories, deprived of 13 years of their birthright by a Labour party determined to steal all their best clothes? This warranted revenge. This warranted any action, even the destruction of the British Isles itself, to prevent such a travesty from ever again coming to pass. The aristocracy the party had disdained from Heath onwards were embraced once more, to restore the Party to its Manifest Destiny; remember that these are not people who suffer crises of confidence. These are people for whom the notion that they were born to lead, to own, to order, to direct – to dictate – was drummed into them from their earliest days, in an environment of isolation from the parental tenderness and support which might have dissuaded them from a life of unthinking entitled sociopathy. We are theirs by right; they know this in every fibre, and how dare we question them? In their eyes, we have abused our power to choose our own government, and like errant fags they will beat us into submission and deprive of the power to make the same mistake again. And if we suffer, even if some of us die – that is the price of our error. They can’t help this; it is nature’s way, as they saw every time they went hunting. They are the riders; the useful simpletons who do not trouble themselves with thought when advocating policy are their hounds and horses; Labour are the crafty foxes who must be stamped out – and us? The poor, sick, disabled, unskilled, disadvantaged, underprivileged?

We’re the fieldmice they trample into the dirt as they track their quarry.

What defeats me, though, is why the Liberal Democrats have elected to go along with this catastrophe. I am aware that as many Lib Dems as Tories see Labour as a party that is no longer fit to govern and should never again be allowed to hold power, but as far as I was aware most of them felt exactly the same way about the party they now permit to dictate their future. Do they believe that in the absence of Labour, they will once again reclaim their historical position as the default opposition – that with Labour out of the way, it is only a matter of time before they once again have the chance to govern alone? If so, they’re living in dreamland; after 2015 they will be a footnote in history, barely meriting a mention, and the history of the Liberal Party will end – as, frankly, it did – in 1922, with the fall of Lloyd George. Perhaps they simply aren’t aware of what the Tories are doing, or more likely, just don’t believe that any party could so callously disregard the national interest in favour of ensuring its own agenda? God knows, but I fear that’s a popular position – and just 35 years ago, it would have been unthinkable. Remember what I said about pensioners voting more than any other group? They grew up in a world where both parties were committed to common principles in the national interest and regarded each other with a generosity one affords to one’s well-intentioned, if somehow sadly mistaken, peers – and if even some people of my generation don’t understand that that world no longer exists, how can those who remember fighting for its creation?

But there it is. Every institution that has defined British life for the last seven decades is going to be shredded because the Conservative Party want to ensure that their right to rule the country is never again threatened.

As far as I am concerned, there’s a name for that.

Treason.

As anyone who follows me on twitter knows, I’ve just received my ESA50 – although the nice people (haha!) at the DWP gave me a month’s notice of it first, which didn’t do wonders for my Christmas, but there we go. Since it popped through the door, on 31 December (yes, thanks ATOS, and I hope your New Year’s Eve champagne turned to vinegar in your mouth too), I’ve been in a state of more or less constant wibble, as one might expect from someone who’s had lifelong problems with anxiety… but the main question on my mind isn’t whether I’m going to make it through the WCA. It’s actually whether I should tell the DWP to go fuck themselves and ask their friends at HMRC for some money instead – in other words, start a business and claim tax credits on the grounds of self-employment.

So in this post, I’m going to lay out my reasoning, as fully as I can, and ask those I trust for their thoughts on the matter. If you’ve come here to troll or flame someone, kindly fuck off now and get a life, preferably one that doesn’t leave you feeling so inadequate you have to pick on vulnerable people who are already facing not having an income or a future. Everyone else, read on.

So. Here’s the thing. According to the government’s criteria, I should be eligible for the Support Group of ESA. Specifically:

(13) Coping with social engagement

Engagement in social contact is always precluded due to difficulty relating to others or significant distress experienced by the individual.

Because it is. The condition I attach to my continued participation on twitter is that nobody I know from twitter will ever meet me in person (or even know what I look like, or as far as possible, my real name). I have no social life, I don’t know anyone in Sheffield, and making new friends is rendered just about impossible by the fact that once I’ve met someone the first time (which is quite hard enough!), and even if I really enjoyed meeting them the first time, I’d rather move house than run into them a second. (I had to change vet once because the same receptionist was always there – and yet I can’t use the PDSA, even though the anonymity would be great, because it’s too crowded and noisy and scary and it panics me out. Which is a bit of a bugger…)

Unfortunately, there’s a catch 22, and I’m sure all of you who are familiar with the ESA process will have spotted it instantly. Yep – the very thing which renders me eligible for ESA makes it almost impossible for me to cope with the process of getting it; and if by some miracle I do make it to, and through, the WCA without fleeing or breaking down in tears and wibble, that’ll be taken by the DWP as prima facie evidence that I don’t have the problem that I, my counsellor at the Asperger Service and my psychiatrist are all more than happy to verify, under oath, that I have. “Fit for work. Go away.” At which point, I have to sit waiting for 11 months for an appeal I’ll certainly win (well, almost certainly – there are some nightmare stories emerging from tribunal hearings too), only to be greeted by the whole process starting all over again because the DWP take the date of your last assessment, not the appeal, as the start of the countdown for your next assessment. With appeal times running into a year, and assessments being done at most annually, the end result is something that appears almost designed to continually persecute those people that the DWP has already been found to have mistreated.

And whilst that system does need fighting, and contesting, and preferably destroying in the ECHR – I ain’t up to it. I might manage one fight. Having to start a second one as soon as the first is done is more than I can cope with.

More to the point, it’s not even what I want to be doing with my life! If I’m going to be expending that much panic and effort, I’d rather be doing something constructive with it. Hell, I’d rather be doing something profitable with it! Like building synths. Now admittedly, all I know about soldering is not to hold the hot end, and it’s been about 18 years since I last prodded at an embedded processor (although far fewer since I wrote any assembler code) – so there’s a lot of work I’d have to do in order to get going, and it’d be months – possibly a year or more – before I could realistically expect to sell anything. But I’ve long been a bit of a synth geek; I’ve always been happier with the notion of hacking bare metal than trying to work out all the layers of cruft and dysfunction other people dump on top of it; I have ideas buzzing around my head all the time that I need to do something with; and I have the strongest sense that if I don’t give it a good go now, the chance will evaporate altogether. If I start down the road of trying to claim ESA, getting stuck in the appeal cycle, and being stressed out of my mind every year, I fear I’ll never again find my way out of it.

Whereas, if I were to just say “fuck it” and hop off the merry-go-round now, I could start ploughing time into it – I need to find somewhere to work, which entails either clearing out one of the rooms in my flat or finding a relatively cheap office or workshop space to hire; but once I have that, there’s no reason I couldn’t plough at least 30 hours a week into it – and claim working tax credits. Plus the disability element, to which I’m entitled on the grounds of

…is unable to form normal social relationships.

Which, see above – yeah. And HMRC don’t force you to jump through stupid numbers of hoops to meet that qualification, either; they’ll ask for a letter from your consultant. Which is, of course, what the DWP should be doing, rather than faffing about with stupid-arsed tests that seem designed for the explicit convenience of those who cheat the system, at the expense of those who are legitimately and cripplingly disabled, but not quite in the way ATOS' computer system will recognise… but common sense has long been absent from government policy.

So why not try for ESA, stay on it for as long as I can cope with doing so, and then plan out this at more length, rather than rushing at it like… well, like someone who’s just had their income source taken away and needs to do something now so they can eat? One reason: Universal Credit. It’s going to replace ESA, JSA, LHA and tax credits with a single unified, and very VERY poorly designed, benefit. It has two merits – a unified benefit withdrawal rate (which is unfortunately marred by setting it at a stupidly high 65%, which will screw over everyone relying on the 39% withdrawal rate of tax credits), and the removal of the possibility that people will be found too “fit for work” to receive ESA but not available enough to receive JSA and be therefore left with nothing at all (although unfortunately the sanctions system proposed by Inane Dickwad Shite will end up having much the same effect, because guess who will be the primary targets for sanctions?). Set against that its failings are… well, an exhaustive list would require a separate post, and I’d rather not be derailed at the moment. Suffice to say that I want to stay out of its clutches as long as possible, and moving onto tax credits right now would enable me to do so, as from what I’ve heard existing tax credit claimants will be the last group of people moved over to UC – at a point somewhere after the next election.

Admittedly, I could probably wait until next year to do this; after all, it doesn’t look as though UC is going to arrive for a while yet, thanks to the Lib Dems finally discovering one of their last remaining vertebrae and the sterling work of the cross-bench and Labour peers (although no thanks whatsoever to Labour’s MPs, who have sold their souls to Gallup; Liam Byrne in particular is so execrable in his role shadowing IDS that it’s hard to conjure up a worse choice, and Ed Miliband himself appears from his response to Dianne Abbott’s recent faux pas to have adopted the leadership style popularised by Sir Mortimer Crisp in the worryingly prescient “Whoops, Apocalypse!” Expect John McDonnell to find himself instructed to build his own cross in 2014…). But the longer I give myself as a run up, the more likely it’ll be that I won’t need to claim any benefits at all by the time I’m (steam)rolled onto UC – and in this day and age, that is surely the goal to strive for! Certainly, I never wanted to spend my life on benefits. The fact that I can manage pretty well on the income provided by benefits is a testament to my own frugality alone; in no sense whatsoever should it be used to support the contention that benefits are in any way generous. They fucking aren’t.

Of course, the question should be raised – if this is such a great idea, why have you not done it in the three and a half years you’ve been on ESA? Well, because an awful lot of my mental energy was expended worrying about whether or not I was going to lose my income, and saving as much as I could in order to gather some minimal insurance against that eventuality. Basically, knowing as I did that IS was coming to an end, and that jumping off it to try something which didn’t work would result in my having to claim ESA made it more worthwhile to sit tight, save all I could and not jump until I was pushed.

Well, I’ve been shoved now; I’m at a point where I’m having to apply for ESA anyway. There’s no benefit now to my not trying something; I’m pretty much at the floor of the risk valley right now. If I try something now, and six months or a year down the line I have to chuck it all in and try for ESA again, I’ll be in no worse a position than I am right now. I might actually be in a better position, if 2012 is – as I think it might be – the year people actually, finally realise what has been done to disability benefits in their name. Especially if some vast scandal breaks around the DWP and ATOS, which I suspect is more likely than not. Also, the Harrington reports, having failed to produce any recommendations for new mental health descriptors this year for no readily apparent reason, might actually come through with one next year (though yes, I do anticipate reading those new recommendations over a nice plate of pork wing); if they do, the WCA might actually cease to represent the impassable barrier it is at present for people with mental illnesses or cognitive disabilities.

And yet – to be honest, I’m not ready, and I’m scared of failing; whilst I think I have good ideas, I don’t really have much of a clue how to go about putting them into practise, and there’s every chance I’ll beaver away for six months or a year and end up with sod all to show for it. Moreover, my concentration sucks, and I’m really scared of not being able to concentrate well enough, for long enough, to actually fulfil the 16 hour a week requirement for WTCs. And I’m somewhat scared of losing the safety line of passported benefits when it comes to things like housing and council tax benefits or prescription charge exemptions. That’s the other reason I haven’t done anything before; I haven’t been ready. But perhaps I need to accept that if I try and wait until I feel ready to do this stuff, I’ll never do it, because you can’t think yourself into confidence – you have to try stuff. I’ve always been crap at that… and maybe the only way I’m ever going to discover that I am actually ready to do something is to leave myself no choice BUT to do it.

There’s also the question of whether I can actually get tax credits for what amounts to an indefinite period of R&D. Literally speaking, the stated requirement is that the work be done in order to return a profit, which appears to cover me. But with the HMRC deciding that its efforts are better spent chasing small businessholders who are honest, diligent, and powerless enough to bully without limit, rather than trying to get tax out of vast multinationals that can offer its chairman a very cosy retirement indeed… there are minefields in that direction as well. I suspect that as long as I accurately declare my earnings and can document having worked for the number of hours I’m claiming for, I’ll be OK – but some kind of confirmation on that front would be useful. I know, I should just ring them and ask – but that’s scary, which is why it hasn’t yet been done. (Again, that’s another thing on which I’m just going to have to bite the bullet, because if it turns out I’m stretching the definition too far, I’m kind of buggered. But I’ve heard of anecdotes of people claiming tax credits whilst they work on their first novel – which, as far as I’m concerned, is absolutely what tax credits should be there for! – so I’m hoping I’ll be OK. …But please, don’t say yea or nay to it unless you can demonstrate that you’re in a position to know – for example, an HMRC employee dealing with WTCs; I need certainty right now.)

So… yeah. That’s the choice I’m facing – and as the deadline for the ESA50’s submission approaches, the choice becomes ever more urgent, ever more clearly defined, and I find myself leaning ever more firmly towards the self-employment option. But I know I have a tendency to run away from things, and I’m scared that this is just another example of that. So I’m asking for advice. Help me make this decision! It’s too important for me to face alone. (And sorry about posterous' comment system – feel free to email advice instead.)

Care of Zoe Williams' TV review. Dear Ms Williams: Leaving aside the fact that the spelling looks weird and wrong, “spectrumy” is not in fact a polite way of saying “weird”. It is a derogatory term used by people who are middle-class enough to realise that using “autistic” as a polite way of saying weird is unbelievably fucking offensive, but not quite decent enough to understand that it’s the desire to call people out for being weird that’s the fucking offensive part of it. You’re better than this, so kindly desist from the language of New Bigotry. Thanks awfully.