Have you ever unintentionally broken the law?
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.
If there was a biography about you, what would the title be?
I remember when I was chatting to someone at a pre-departure reception, prior to going to the JET Programme in Japan and they asked me about my career path. I told him that I didn’t have a career path, I had a career maze! Hence, my biography would be called Through the Maze!
My jobs in order have been Non Marine Policy Clerk at Lloyds Insurance, Admin Clerk in the RAF, a range of casual jobs via Parkinson Staff Bureau including administrative support for various building and construction firms, tea boy at British Gas for a couple of weeks, casual work at Leeds Castle, Admin at the Unemployment Benefit Office in Chatham, a term teaching Business Studies and Economics at a private school, venue support at Kidderminster Town Hall, the JET Programme in Japan, store assistant at Argos in Morecambe, Native English Teacher in Hong Kong, casual work at an EFL organisation in Sydney Australia, and finally various jobs in London as an EFL / EAP teacher with 6 months in Saudi Arabia nearly two decades ago fitted in to pay off our debts from my Masters.
So, I can definitely say that I have had a huge range of employment experiences and that every single one has benefitted me as a person. I have learnt something from every single one and done my best for every employer even if it wasn’t good enough.
One of my aims this year is to access my creative self. It hadn’t started well (!) but today, for the first time this year I settled down and wrote a short poem reflecting my current thoughts about my new self post full-time work. It’s probably not up to much but I thought I would share it and perhaps start a new strand of blog entries. See what you think
My Identity
Who am I now?
I ask myself often
No longer defined by what I do
Not sure who I want to be
Thinking in circles as I chase my new identity
I know who I was - a teacher
I know who I see now - a husband and father
I don't know myself as me
Did I ever know myself
Thinking in circles as I chase my new identity
Do I have to choose a role?
Can I function without one?
Who am I now?
I ask myself often
Thinking in circles as I chase my new identity
What were your parents doing at your age?
When I look back at myself when I was younger I realise that my approach to life was very much socially prescribed. For someone born in the mid 1960s, it was clear targets to hit, namely the house, the marriage, the children and the career. Alongside this a man was a regular pub goer while the woman was taken to the pub on a Sunday ‘for an airing’!! Had I followed that approach to life things would have been very different. However, it was the lifestyle that my wife and I aspired to in my twenties. At pretty much every stage of my journey through my teens and twenties I was subconsciously, and occasionally consciously, trying to follow my Dad who was successful in work, popular outside and seemingly set for a long and happy retirement, although the jury was out as to whether he actually would ever retire because he hated being idle. Sadly he never had a chance to find out as he died of cancer at the age of 60, the age I am now. He was diagnosed around his 60th birthday in January and died in July. Between those two events I was offered the chance to go to Japan as an Assistant Language Teacher. I left the UK on July 23 having said goodbye to him the previous day. He died on July 26 and I didn’t go back for the funeral because he told me not to. As he pointed out with his usual directness, me coming home for the funeral wasn’t going to do him any good and it wouldn’t do me any good! It was at that point that my life path and his completely diverged. Yes, I did end up with the marriage, 35 years and counting, the children, four of them with the oldest being 32 at the moment, the career, 30 years in EFL and EAP and counting, and the house, which we moved into 8 years ago. None of the landmarks were achieved in the order that my Dad would have recognised and none of them would have suited him, but he accepted that I was a very different person. The one thing he was most pleased about, and would be even more pleased about now, was my marriage to Janet who he thought was great. The differences is there very clearly but so are the similarities. Our aims were the same but our ways of getting there were very different and dictated by opportunity, personality and the very different times we lived in.
If you had the power to change one law, what would it be and why?
This is one of the most interesting and difficult prompts for quite a while. I had to decide whether to be light hearted or serious. That wasn’t easy, because I don’t want to turn my blog into a polemic but equally I want to talk about things that matter.
The law I would change would be to do with elections at all levels. I would ban donations to individuals or parties over £50,000 per annum. It would, at a stroke, remove a huge amount of power from vested interests like financial institutions, oil companies, media tycoons, tech companies and unions to control political decisions. I have included unions here not because I am antagonistic towards them, quite the opposite in fact, but because you cannot make an exception for anyone or any organisation no matter how much you agree with them. If, for example, David Attenborough wanted to donate £1 million to the Green Party, he should be prevented from doing so. He could, of course, set up a trust to donate £50,000 per annum for 20 years.
Huge donations have led to a huge level of corruption throughout the world. Look at the last decade or so in just about every country for proof. Hardly anyone believes in or trusts politicians to do the right thing because we know that they are, pretty much without exception, dependent on and corrupted by their paymasters. They are in politics for what they can get out of it not for what they can do for society. These huge donors are allowed to distort the political system and buy influence and until they are stopped the political system will get worse and worse worldwide and continue it’s current course towards cruelty affecting as many people as possible and power and influence for the few who can afford it.
