One day a woman was admiring my new outfit and smiling, casually said “careful someone might phone the DWP” making a phone call gesture (because of course that someone might be her).
My blood ran cold, in that moment I really disliked that person and will think they’re scum forever. This is not the first or last time this has happened, that people jump to this response in relation to something like nice clothes is disturbing to me but apparently acceptable to others. The fact that I’m on disability benefits is clearly never far from their minds and weaponising it against me isn’t either.
Another time a friend queried whether I should be spending my benefits money (£25) on a massage, y’know shouldn’t it be for things like food and leccy? She didn’t know anything about benefits, my benefits, why I get them or anything else but thats ok she entitled to question me about it.
The idea that they are paying for you so they have the right to police you, that “taxpayers” rhetoric has really worked in a very deep rooted way. Its not my money, its theirs.
Every time this happens I find myself justifying to myself why I bought new clothes, why I bought a massage, why I needed them, because I’m doing it too.
I’ve been investigated for fraud twice, once in the 90s when legislation changed in April and suddenly lots of people where committing fraud so we had to report en masse to the fraud dept. And a second time around 2010, I say second time but it actually lasted for 6 yrs. I was summoned to the fraud dept, was questioned and had to give a statement, I was told “90% of people who come into this room end up in court”. I didn’t, I still have no idea what fraud I was accused of, why and more importantly who reported me. For 6yrs I received constant forms to fill in and random phone calls; someone would say their name really fast, so I couldn’t catch it and then bark questions at me “how much money did I have in my account? How many times I had I been abroad in the past ten years (with outgoing/incoming dates). They always refused to repeat their name or give me any details such as a phone number.
Could you do that? Tell someone how much money you have down to the last penny on demand? Do you have the dates of all your travel over the past decade memorised? Tell a stranger that phoned you without warning?. I had to. This was also information I already provided multiple times.
It was suggested, by welfare rights, that the DWP had a vendetta against me, that it was purely malicious, I had the option to take action but by that point I didn’t want to poke the wasps nest any further. I depend on the DWP for my survival. The harassment abruptly stopped when I moved onto PIP & ESA.
I should add that I’m in the Substantial Risk group as I am “a danger to myself and /or others and must be supervised at all time”. It doesn’t protect you from the abuse of the DWP.
I’ve been dismayed on social media at how many disability benefit recipients including activists suggested in response to the “my Aunty gets PIP but I know shes faking disability” posts, with “Oh you should report her then, that’s on you”. When I suggest “how about we mind our own business” people got very defensive and pissed off at me because I’ve committed the sin of having unwavering solidarity with all my fellow benefit claimants (real or fictional) and perhaps highlighted their lack of.
We are not only conditioned to accept that there is extreme wealth, with all its idleness, greed and corruption, to admire & aspire to it, but also to focus on each other instead, punch down or across, but never up. Focus on the minutiae not the big picture. Across class antagonism is an invaluable, no, essential tool of the state and it will do anything to maintain it.
We are also conditioned to accept that there is extreme poverty, but unlike wealth, it must be monitored, scrutinised and policed. Your neighbour might be spending money on something the state might not approve of. Your poor friend on benefits might be the undeserving kind of poor. Its up to you to decide that, no evidence needed, you must be the eyes and ears of the state.
And so the DWP panopticon has tentacles reaching out into the wider society, we are taught to act in the interest of the state at all times, we become its unquestioning agents. In collusion with and fawning over our benefactors who are also our oppressors. Its so engrained in us that that to question or challenge it is considered itself an act of antagonism, I’ve been accused of policing what people can say because this is also part of the conditioning; to accuse dissenters of the v thing you are being told to do.
We are expected to carry and enact the DWPs pettiness and spite. Poor people against poor people, because are all poor, the taxpayer and the scroungers together, we are all poor and making someone else poorer, won’t make you any less poor.
Its never OK to encourage people to report someone for benefit fraud, not as a joke, not a gotcha, to highlight hypocrisy, to make a point, never. For a myriad of reasons its not ok.
Just mind your own business
It can destroy someone’s life, it can cause someone’s death.
Recovery in the Bin 