No fear?

The letter that I’ve been dreading for a year finally arrive at the weekend. It came on a Saturday, of course, and I’m sure the British government do it on purpose to add that bit of extra suffering to an already awful situation. You can’t even seek any advice as everywhere is closed. There hasn’t been a day since the Tories got into power in 2010 that I haven’t been under attack in some form or other and this is just another manifestation of that.

There is one small consolation to this (well two really) in that I am no longer terrified of the post-person. For the last year, for six days out of every seven, I have not been able to relax until the post has been and gone; and this could be as late as three pm. It’s hard to imagine that much uncertainty and anxiety and just what it does to you, mind and body, as it is impossible for autistic people to shut that off. Every time I heard footsteps on the communal stairs I would stop what I was doing and try and listen for indication that it might be the postie, bringing me bad news. That has now stopped at least.

I also won’t be getting any bad news on my birthday this year, so that is a bonus too. Sadly, I already have that bad news; erm, yay?

So, some of you might be wondering what this bad news is. Particularly the hate readers out there (yes, I know you read this) who love to hear about my troubles. Well, I am one of the last lucky few people to be on Working Tax Credits rather than the appalling Universal Credit system. Like many people who work in Britain, I’m not paid anywhere near a true living wage and being self employed, the utter bastard not paying me is me. New Labour’s concession to making neo-liberalism work was to subsidise the wages of many of the countries workers; it was basically a subsidise bad employers rather than encouraging staff to unionise and get better pay from the companies paying New Labour donor money. Whilst not ideal, at least it had a level of dignity to it, the money appeared in your bank account and the world was a bit less crap. When the Tories came to power, they weren’t having any of this dignity for workers malarky and so work and pensions minister Iain Duncan Smith and a bunch of cronies from right wing think tanks thought up Universal Credit and a decade later, it still barely functions.

At the heart of UC are ignorant assumptions, it assumed that poor people do low skilled work that is paid in regular amounts weekly or at least monthly and that everyone is basically lazy and trying to screw the system. Claimants are required to fill in and online diary detailing exactly what they have been doing to get more and better paid work and if they fail to show up for an interview on time or attend some daft course or other, they can have money deducted from the pittance that they receive. The staff running this system have targets for the amount of people that they need to ‘sanction’ every month and, as people are generally pretty honest and hardworking’ the reasons for these punishments become more and more petty. Because of this, people starve, people get into debt, people become homeless and people die and then the figures are buried and every attempt to have them brought to light is met with obstruction after obstruction. Suffice to say, the system is not autism friendly.

Like many autistic people, I am very mentally and emotionally fragile, we have phones, we hate dealing with new people and we definitely hate high stress and confrontational environments. We also have sporadic working patterns because just one random encounter can wipe us out for days, if not weeks, we are six times more like to be unemployed than the rest of society and we are much more likely to experience bullying wherever we work. Now imagine a person like that having to go to an intimidating building, followed by security guards to answer trick questions designed to take away our vital support money… It’s not going to turn out well is it?

There is one small ray of hope now for someone like myself and I am less stressed about it all than I would have been a month ago. Since Rishi Sunak announced the general election and he has managed to mess up at every point during the subsequent campaigning it is looking incredibly likely that the Labour party will be in power. This gives someone like myself the chance that while they aren’t actually a socialist party any more, at least they will drop the evil stuff.

So whilst I am no longer terrified of royal mail stuffing packets of pure evil through my letterbox,I am now scared to death of being bounced onto a system that could leave me penniless and differently homeless. I guess that’s a busman’s holiday of sorts for me. Whoop de do!