Of No Benefit to Anyone

Yesterday I was writing about my career maze and I mentioned my casual work. This was back in the mid 1980s and at that time, you were entitled to sign on for unemployment benefit if you had previously worked. I was 21 at the time and I had been employed by Lloyds Insurance and the RAF. So, I went to the Unemployment Benefit Office and signed on to get, from memory, about £35 a week. Even in those days, this would not get you very far at all with my rent for one room in a house being £25 and a diet based on cereal and Savoury Rice accounting for another £5,leaving me with £5 a week together with whatever money I could win from the pub quiz machine! Fortunately I was pretty good at it and waited until there was a reasonable prize, a skill that usually netted me another £10 a week on average.

Even then, the middle and upper classes were joining the government in demonising anyone on benefits as lazy and living well off of the back of ‘hard working people’. As my experience indicates, this was rubbish then and it’s rubbish now. As for the argument that, as fraud, it is a massive amount of money taken out of taxes, well it’s barely a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of money taken out of the country by high earning people who avoid and evade taxes to a massive extent and then spout rubbish about colonisation from their tax havens surrounded by huge luxury.

So, when I was offered £150 for a month’s work, cash in hand, I negotiated with the person who was offering the work and asked that I could take a day off on each of the two days when I was due to sign on that month. This was agreed and I kept the £150 plus the £70 for signing on and was able to buy some small presents for friends and family that Christmas which would have been impossible otherwise. I feel no guilt for doing what I did because the benefit law was one designed to make things as difficult as possible for the poorest in society while allowing the richest to ignore the tax laws that applied to them.