Sanctions, sanctions, sanctions

Channel 4 had a programme about the sanctions regime last night which I wasn't able to watch.  I'd intended to catch up on it today, but decided not to bother.  When the producers seek an opinion from the odious Tory front group The Taxpayers' Alliance you know it's not an impartial programme, and posts on Twitter suggest it followed the government line.
The need for truth was highlighted in an extraordinary way in a Twitter exchange this morning.  Kevin Maguire, the Mirror journalist, tweeted: "Imagine being late for work one day and the boss docks your pay for a month.  That's how benefits sanctions work."  Someone replied that he had been 7 minutes late for an appointment and was sanctioned for 3 months.  In came the journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer.  She asked, politely enough, whether he'd been late before and if he'd been given a warning before.  Someone else waded in to point out that there are no warnings in the system and that sanctions are automatic.  Back came the snappy response from Brewer: "not true".  She was asked how she knew that, told politely she was wrong and the point about no warnings was repeated.
Ms Hartley-Brewer obviously doesn't like to be contradicted.  She snarled back: "have you ever tried talking to people who work in the benefits office AND people who've been sanctioned.  It helps."  (She was obviously too cross to pay attention to punctuation.)  The respondent said that she had worked in the system and would like to explain it to her, politely.  But it was too late.  Others waded in, one with a string of obscenities which played into Brewer's hands; she retweeted it.  The polite respondent left the fray and it descended into childish name-calling.  That Brewer was wrong in her original statement was never addressed, and those who were angry and feel themselves provoked were made to look like the baddies.
And that's the trouble.  It's usually impossible to contact a journalist directly, and that's understandable.  But it reinforces the power relationship.  She has a platform.  Whether she is telling the truth about her conversations we can't know.  It seems unlikely, given that she doesn't know what she's talking about.  But like everyone on the right she can ignore all the evidence and repeat government lies.  If she has read the recent reports by various churches she has discounted them.  If she followed the evidence given in the Work & Pensions Select Committee enquiry, she has discounted it.  She prefers to believe IDS, McVey et al because to do otherwise would be to shake her faith in Conservative politics.
There are lots of links I could post, but I'll stick to just one, which is very relevant here, although it's mainly about Universal Credit.  Helen Lewis wrote this excellent piece in the New Statesman last week.
If you haven't yet read Owen Jones' latest book, The Establishment, you really should.  (A4e gets coverage in a section on outsourcing.)  We knew the gist of Jones' argument; but he provides a wealth of facts and figures and pulls the threads together to present a frightening picture.  His concluding chapter contains a hopeful picture of what needs to happen.  But it won't, and that is depressing.

Proud to work?

The DWP Press Office has been infamous for a long time.  It's staffed by civil servants who are supposed to adhere to the Civil Service Code, which says that they should have "integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality".  But perhaps they're working under the direction of the DWP's Director of Communications, Richard Caseby, who appears to have no such scruples (he's a former managing editor of the Sun).  Back in January the Press Office put out a press release referring to "welfare hand-outs", a term the Daily Mail obligingly repeated.  Then last week came this:

There was no pretence that this was anything other than straight-forward propaganda.  Objective and impartial it was most certainly not.  But I bet the intern (unpaid?) who gets to do the graphics has fun.

Today they attempted a rather different Twitter campaign, one which the Press Office didn't invent but which has decidedly sinister overtones.  It's called "Proud to Work", and it seems to be the creation of the ERSA, the work programme providers' trade body - but clearly they are all working together with this.  The DWP re-tweeted the highly dubious statement that the "Work Programme will deliver £18bn to economy".  Immediately afterwards came re-tweets of stuff from Interserve, A4e and Working Links (not on this screen capture).

What I find most disturbing about this is the "proud to work" tag.  It's subtle.  It suggests that those who are not working are not proud, have no pride.  It suggests that unemployment is voluntary, the result of lack of self-respect.  Perhaps it suggests other things to you.

Is there anything that can be done about the DWP Press Office?  Not at this stage in the parliament, I think.  There doesn't seem to be any mechanism for opposition MPs to complain about it effectively.  What it proves, however, very clearly, is that this government, and Iain Duncan Smith in particular, work closely with the right-wing press to spread lies and damaging propaganda.  If they win in 2015, it will only get worse.

Who cares?

Christian churches in this country have an honourable record, at least in recent decades, of getting up the noses of governments, particularly of the Tory kind.  I can remember a Church of England report in 1985 called Faith in the City, which really annoyed Margaret Thatcher.  The right's response is always to tell the church to keep out of politics.  And that's no doubt what they are doing now.  On Monday we read about the report of an independent commission chaired by the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, on poverty and the need for the "living wage".  This was reported in the Independent, which carried an interview with the Archbishop.  He warned that, "Millions of low-paid workers are trapped in an unbreakable cycle of poverty, and are even turning up at food banks in their lunch breaks asking for help to feed their families."  This is in vivid contrast to the government's mantra of "making work pay".  But last year IDS accused the bishops of ignoring the concerns of ordinary people!
Perhaps more embarrassing to Iain Duncan Smith, a Roman Catholic, is the intervention today of Britain's most senior Catholic cleric, Archbishop Vincent Nichols.  The Telegraph carries an interview with him, in which he says that the government's reforms have destroyed even the most basic safety net, and have become increasingly punitive.  He talks of a "crisis" and a "disgrace".  But up pops the anonymous DWP spokesperson to parrot the familiar lies (why does no one ever name this person?).
We've known for a long time that Duncan Smith tries to silence criticism on the BBC, but on Tuesday we learned that he, or his minions, tried to shut down a spoof Twitter account called "UKJobcentrePlus not".  You can read the story in the Independent.  The DWP's brand (?) and public information manager, Jon Woodcock, complained that it was set up "with deliberate and malicious intent to devalue and criticise the work of Jobcentre Plus" and that its tweets were "rude and potentially libellous".  The account was taken down.  But its creators won on appeal - and gained a lot of followers in the process.  Well done.

Why I nearly despair

I shouldn't do this.  I know it's only encouraging him, and when he knows I'm angry he'll be chuffed to bits.  But I've just seen this Twitter conversation:

Read the correspondence on this post.  You'll notice that when I thought he'd finished I said, " I hope that you'll engage with this blog again if you have anything to say."  He came back with another post which still didn't answer any of the points which had been put to him.  He then sent a comment which read, "Dear Historian,  I know you are not going to publish this, but I wanted to say that I am really sorry to hear that you want to end the discussion there.  I am even more sorry that you feel I have not answered any of your points. I am not sure what points you mean. If you just send me a list, I will definitely reply. My address is ********.  (I'm not going to publish it.)  Have a good weekend, Jonty"

He's now using this to tell other people that I have banned him.  Why should I give my blog over to him to say anything he wants to?  Why should I embroil myself in a pointless email conversation with him?  If this really is the sign of A4e being "a different company", then it's not a difference we should welcome.

And no, I won't publish any response from him.  He has forfeited that right.

Twittering A4e - and No (sorry, Know) Hope

If you look for Twitter feeds on A4e you'll get two kinds (see below) - tweets from disgruntled clients, and PR tweets from A4e itself. They've got a new one called A4eworks, where you can learn about the roadshow they're running to promote FND under the banner of Know Hope. They've gone from Rotherham (see the video here) to Middlesborough yesterday, Scarborough today, Hull tomorrow and Barnsley and Doncaster on Friday. You have to admire their courage (sort of). Of course, FND is going to be nothing like New Deal. "Flexible New Deal is a completely new approach, and it's just that - 'Flexible'. We know everyone is different and so the 'Flexible' part means that organisations like A4e are free to help you and your specific needs. Getting back into work through Flexible New Deal means the help you get is completely tailored to you and your individual circumstances. It's your own personal journey back to work." Etc. Read it all here and remember it.

I can't help thinking that the slogan Know Hope is a mistake!

PS. I apologise if I gave him the idea, but someone who calls himself highpark1 has just added his Hub pages as Twitter items. These are anti-A4e stories, all of them taken directly from other people's sites, without acknowledgement, let alone permission.