Lexin

I've spent part of the morning today trying to support a member who's lost her cat. She's devastated, and probably shouldn't be at work. No doubt management would regard this as a waste of time, but people love their animals, and some total bastard – a person with no conscience whatsoever – poisoned my member's cat with strychnine.

Yes, she is reporting it to the police; her husband is a policeman. We gather that her cat was not the only moggy poisoned in this way, and there is a risk that if some animal picked something poisoned up and then was scared off, a child might pick up whatever it is and end up the same way. So it has to be taken seriously.

But my member is really upset. As I was for her – I can't help thinking that an indoor cat is much easier on the whole. I'm probably over-careful with Smokey, but I love her so much.

Very saddened by the death first of Bob Crow on Tuesday and secondly of Tony Benn today.

For those of you who have never heard of either, both were leaders of the left wing of British politics. Tony was 88, and the signs had not been good for some time, but Bob was only 52 – scary because I’m the same age, and probably in worse health.

Tony has been an inspiration to me practically since I was old enough to say his name. It was something my parents thought rather amusing that I should venerate someone simply because I’d heard him speak at meetings. When he spoke – something he and Bob shared - he was a mixture of amusing, angry and inspiring. I never missed a chance to hear either of them.

True leaders of the left, now lost to us. A very sad week for progressive politics in the UK.

I hate this government so very, very much. They would look good on a lamppost, like Mussolini.

The Spending Review. Yes, that’s what it’s about. For welfare claimants none of it is an improvement.

The key policy elements of the settlement include:
• 7 waiting days at the start of UC, ESA and JSA
• Increased requirements at start of claim, including an English language test for JSA, mandation* for CV and UJ (Universal Jobmatch) registration
• Increased signing, weekly for at least 50% of claimants
• UC claimants subject to full conditionality to verify claim every year
• Increased requirements for IS lone parents
• Looking at pilots for new ways of encouraging ESA(WRAG) to take steps to improve their health and significantly increasing requirements for claimants over 3.5 years on JSA


Seven waiting days at the start of a UC, ESA or JSA claim. Now, that’s seven days without money for the poorest people. My savings are such that I could last seven days without pay, but many people, including many poorly paid people, are skin-close to borrowing from loan sharks to keep the wolf from the door as it is.

Increased requirements for the start of claim…we may live in England, but nowhere is there a requirement to be able to speak English. Speak what you like has always been the rule.

Besides, I can think of at least one or two situations where the outcome of this would be very unfair indeed. Think of the situation of a woman who has come here as the wife of a Pakistani man. She speaks only Gujarati. He’s abusive and she leaves him, leaving the children behind her. She can’t go to family: they will shun her because she left her husband. She can only claim UC/JSA – but now she can’t because she doesn’t speak English. What does she do? Her only option is to return to her abuser, because she can’t live any other way.

It’s not that unusual a situation in the district where I live. One of my colleagues has a wife who manages a Jobcentre in central London. Where she works, about 65% of the clients don’t speak good English.

The mandatory registration on Universal Jobmatch means putting your details on a site known to be unsafe (see what Johnny Void has to say about it) and known to be glitchy, in a way which means the staff at your Jobcentre can see what you’ve applied for and harass you to apply for unsuitable jobs in places you can't travel to. It’s a rubbish idea and someone’s going to be killed, I swear it.

The rest of the ideas are appalling, too. It’s as if they think that there are jobs to be had easily which people are not applying for. If there were decent** jobs to be had, people would take them. That’s how it’s always worked in the past and it would work that way now, too.



* Is mandation even a word? I don’t think it is.

** Properly paid, not part time zero hours contracts, or weird jobs which don’t exist when you make further enquiries.

You know the theory that there are scads of families out there where there are three generations who have not worked? And they're all living on benefits? And the people in them are so used to not working that they no longer want to work?

I turns out that when researchers went out in Glasgow and Middlesborough (both areas with substantial worklessness) looking for examples of such families, they did not exist.

I'm back from sunny Brighton! I'm going to rest and watch TV for the rest of the afternoon and it will be good.

Picketing went well, I collected money for our harship fund - I don't know how much yet because I always count with a witness - but there were a couple of £20 notes put in my collecting tin.

It's always hard to know how many people crossed the picket line in my building because we have members of two other unions workting there, but I don't think it was all that many. We gave out a lot of leaflets, too.

Then I went and had breakfast and now I'm home. I wanted to go to the rally, but I'm in too much pain.

People in the UK will have noticed (one hopes) that there was a strike on yesterday.

What people don't tell you about being an activist when you step forward to share the burden is how much it's going to bloody hurt! Every bone aches and I thought when I got up this morning that I wasn't going to make it to work. As it is I'm limping around like a limping thing that limps – and I didn't make it all the way round the march.

It was thus

I got up yesterday morning at what felt like the crack of dawn, and made it to the picket line at just after 7am. Our enthusiastic young member, Comrade L, preceded me and he had the leaflets to hand out so that was good. I had the collecting tin for the Hardship Fund, which I proceeded to deploy: I shout "Hardship Fund!" at scabs and members of other unions alike, for all the world like that bloke in Monty Python shouting 'Albatross!'

At 10am we decided we'd had enough – which was good as the security guard at our building came out to try to limit our numbers. As there was only six of us, we were rather peeved, but not as much as we'd have been if he'd tried that trick at an earlier point in rather than just when we were heading off for breakfast.

After breakfast we made a move towards the march assembly point at Lincoln's Inn Fields. As soon as we arrived we all spied other friends in the movement and split up. I touched base with an old friend, the secretary of the first branch executive I was on, who's left the Ministry of Magic for a full time job in a teacher's union. So that was enjoyable. I was noodling around wincing at the noise when a bloke came up to me, asked me if I was in PCS and said they were looking for people to be interviewed on Radio 5 Live. I agreed (what was I thinking of?) and went along with him.

I don't know if anyone caught it, probably not, but I thought I acquitted myself quite well on radio. I made the point, as did one of the teachers who was interviewed that our pension schemes were looked at with a view to affordability within the last six years and are scheduled to reduce in cost as a percentage of GDP over the next fifty years. This is also the point which tripped up a minister in an interview on Radio 4, so that was interesting as none of the people interviewed on R5Live had heard the earlier interview at that point. We'd been too busy picketing.

I also made the point that despite what the government may be saying, this strike was the best supported that I have ever been on. We had significantly fewer people crossing our picket line than we've had before, even from other unions who were not balloted for action.

Guilty

It took a long time for the march to move off, and it was hot and I was starting to feel rather ill. I don't do well standing in any case. So when the march reached Aldwych, I'm afraid I bottled out – I thought I was going to faint, which would have been humiliating so I slipped out and went to sit down. By the time I felt well enough to move, the march had long gone so I went home, feeling a bit guilty.

Interestingly, people seeing my "Coalition of Resistance" tee shirt stopped to talk to me about the march and the strike, asked why we were doing it and actually listened to the points that I made. This included two staff from London Underground. So I didn't feel it was a complete waste, even though I missed what sounded from Twitter like an excellent rally.

I learned, though, that I can either picket (which I'd done for nearly three hours) or march, but not both. Both means too much time on my feet and I really can't cope with it.

Counting the money this morning we raised £143.44 for the hardship fund. So not bad.

I am not a doctrinaire defender of the last Labour government. I think Tony Blair should be in prison, and Gordon Brown will be damned by history for his role in deregulating the banks – the real cause of this crisis. But to claim that this crisis was caused by Labour “racking up debt” is simply false.

A blog entry that's well worth reading by Johann Hari.

I am up to my eyes in preparations for the March for the Alternative on Saturday. I spent all day doing union-type-things around personal cases, then signed off for the day. And then spent an hour putting leaflets on my colleagues' desks.

Weirdly, the very senior managers were very polite about taking a leaflet and asked me about it - what was it, when was it, what were our aims, etc, but some of my more junior colleagues were quite sniffy. On the other hand, I could hear discussions breaking out about it as I moved between desks, so leafleting did serve a purpose even if no extra people come along. A surprisingly large number of people said they were coming, so I was heartened by that - estimates of the numbers expected on Saturday range from 250,000 to 1m. Obviously, the more the better.

I'm going to start from the disabled persons starting point on St James's Street; I looked at the map of the route and realised quite quickly that I'm just not up to doing the whole march. It's huge! What were they thinking of?

I'm back from my trade union's annual conference...and about to settle down in front of the TV and watch something which requires 0.01% of my attention span.

This is because after 4.5 days of sitting on hard and uncomfortable chairs listening to speeches that start "President, Conference, Comrades..." I really can't do with anything which might be hard work.