Oluwaseyi & Me

This year, I need to get off the dole.

I was notified that my phone appointment with the Universal Credit Claim Review agent might last up to 90 minutes. I couldn't predict exactly how the conversation might proceed, but I was sure it would begin with a perfunctory inquiry as to my state of well-being.

Oluwaseyi, a Delivery Partner in Team 06 of the Virtual Jobcentre Plus, is invariably polite, prefacing every message via my online Work Journal by stating his hope that I am well. Anticipating his inevitable opening question, I prepared the following summary:

I am a 63 year old man who has been unable to work for thirteen years since being maimed. I am in constant pain from my injuries, which is exacerbated by cold. I cannot afford to heat my flat and each winter hits me harder than the last. This year, I have developed a weird pain in my hand which could be arthritis. I only have one hand, so I can't not use it.

So, I am cold and in pain. I am poor with no prospect of material improvement. I subsist at the mercy of a system that demands I spent 35 hours a week in a futile search for employment, while being harassed by you. That is how I am, thanks for asking.

No doubt Oluwaseyi will protest that, far from harassment, 'this appointment is to review your Universal Credit claim, discuss the information you have already provided and for you to provide further evidence'. To this end, I am advised to 'make sure you have access to any documents you have already provided during the interview', which means four bank statements and my passport.

I can't afford to travel anywhere, but I was persuaded to renew my passport last Spring because ID verification was becoming too difficult without a valid one. I also gave in and got a smart phone. It was dirt cheap. Using the passport and the new phone, I easily verified my identity to open a new bank account. As I did so, I heard a spectral whoosh! and knew that I'd been sucked more deeply into the shitstem.

'This will help us to make sure you're getting the right payment', said Oluwaseyi’s notification, ominously. I assume I have been flagged for fraud and am now to be interrogated in a telephone call that might last up to 90 minutes. I can't imagine what Oluwaseyi will find to talk about, or what insights he may have derived from my bank statements. While I await his call, allow me to relate my experience over the past dozen years, which has brought me to this point.

I should begin by saying that my experience of the benefits system and the people who operate it has mostly been benign and, at least initially, I was grateful. However, my involvement with the Department of Work & Pensions commenced in the early years of Austerity, the policy introduced by the Con/Dem alliance government that came to power in 2010 with Ian Duncan Smith at the controls, determined to reform the welfare system and introduce Universal Credit, which I've now been receiving for seven years.

Over all the time that I've been claiming benefits, I've witnessed numerous official initiatives, the goal posts being moved so many times during one period that the benefit advisors - now called 'Work Coaches' - could barely keep up. My very first advisor, when I was still categorised as unfit for work and claiming ESA - Employment Support Allowance - was a very helpful gent of the old school. Clyde let me know in increasingly unsubtle ways that he wasn't happy with the changes in his workplace and eventually opted to take early retirement.

My background is as a writer and I've never not written, but for the decade before I was maimed, the only paid work I did was as a manual labourer, indentured under a peculiar process of personal development. (Subscribe to this Substack to learn more.) Since the one indispensable qualification to be a handyman is a pair of hands, I would have to find a new line of work. I have no paper qualification, so we agreed I needed to acquire one, aged 50.

I figured my future might be in proof reading and copy editing and I identified a course that would give me a recognised professional certificate. But then I had a Work Capability Assessment in which I scored zero: there was absolutely no impediment to me seeking work, full-time. I phoned Clyde and told him. He suggested I appeal. I said I couldn't see the point because it wasn't a marginal call; it wasn't as if I was a couple of points away from being deemed not-so-fit for work. Clyde sighed and said, in that case, our conversation was over and I would be starting a new conversation with his colleague, Robert.

I told Robert I had identified a course that took X weeks and cost Y pounds. Robert told me that they didn't have Y unless I could guarantee there was a job at the end of it so I could pay them back and I didn't have X because he needed me to start applying for jobs immediately. I was 50 years old with no qualifications and a sketchy work record. What jobs did Robert suggest I apply for?

That was not his problem, Robert informed me, not unkindly. His job was not to find me a job, he said, but actually to save face for the DWP Minister by attempting to implement their nonsensical policies. The conditions being imposed upon claimants and the people who were supervising their claims may be impractical, but they went down well with Daily Mail readers, he told me, cheerfully. Need I say that Robert stuck it out for the duration and copped his full retirement pension entitlement.

A few weeks later, I encountered Clyde in the street. "Mr Cronin!" he greeted me. Being old school, Clyde did not presume any fake intimacy. One thing I have come to resent about the DWP is how they persistently infantilise one by using first names. "How is life under Job Seeker's Allowance?" he asked, slyly. It was awful! Completely pointless. I was being obliged to apply for jobs that I would never be considered for.

"I did try to tell you", Clyde said. "Had you appealed, we would have had another six months together to work something out."

Naive as I was at that early stage of my life as a dole scrounger, that had not been clear to me. Clyde suggested, I might still qualify for ESA. I didn't think so, because the appeal period had passed. "You might qualify under different criteria", said Clyde. Like what? "You might be profoundly depressed", he told me. "Nobody could blame you, not after what you've been through." Then he got a bit closer and whispered, "And nobody can prove that you are not."

Likesay, I was naive. Not unlike Daniel Blake, albeit less fragile. Plus, I had come to see what I had been through as an extreme spiritual initiation, so I wasn't about to start misrepresenting myself. In the Summer of 2014, I began to experience extremely peculiar sensations, starting with a smouldering heat in my sacrum. Don't talk to me about kundalini! At first I thought it might be my kidneys, because I’d had dialysis in hospital, but the test showed no problems. Finally, a friend I’d made along the path told me, quite casually, that I was experiencing acute Ascension symptoms. "Like we all do", she said with a smile.

Subcribe to this Substack and you'll read more about Ascension and the process of physically embodying a new paradigm. Not that I understand it, intellectually, but I am going through it and thereby achieving an intuitive comprehension of WTF is going on.

For the past decade, I have experienced a range of physical phenomena which I prefer not to call, 'symptoms', as that might indicate there is something wrong. Nothing is wrong. I'm not too comfy with, 'Ascension', either, as that has religious connotations. Evolution is happening, that is all.

I mention this so you understand that I have a mystical full time occupation which is very demanding, often debilitating, but neither recognised nor remunerated. As such, my employer isn't going to let me be distracted by actually being hired for any of the jobs I am obliged to apply for in the material world.

The Universe permitted it only once, briefly, in 2023, to alleviate the Restart pressure. Delivered in my case by Get Set UK, Restart, is a governbent initiative to immiserate claimants so that we'll do anything to avoid more tedious meetings and futile box-ticking exercises. I took a part time minimum wage seasonal gig in the ticket booth of a tourist attraction.

Get Set is part of, or linked to, Ingeus, an Australian company that runs various employment and health programmes for the DWP. As a private enterprise, its main purpose is to generate income for its shareholders. Its secondary purpose is statistical sleight-of-hand, enabling the governbent to be seen to be doing something to help people back into work by funneling public money to a private company.

My experience of Get Set basically paralleled what happens at the Jobcentre only, rather than a Work Coach, I saw a succession of Employment Advisors. Often, the Employment Advisor was a Work Coach in waiting. Of course, everyone would rather be working directly for the governbent because those jobs are well-paid and secure, with a generous Civil Service retirement pension.

I have unsuccessfully applied for numerous Civil Service jobs. I even did a short course at Southwark College in how to more effectively apply for Civil Service jobs. One of the others on that course was a Nigerian guy, as I assume Oluwaseyi to be. We re-encountered one another some 18 months later, attending a presentation at London Bridge Jobcentre Plus last September, when they were recruiting Universal Credit Jobcentre Work Coaches to cope with an ever-increasing workload. The number of people claiming PIP shot up (sic) in 2021, the Year of the Vax, and has carried on creeping up, but the connection cannot be admitted.

Not-Oluwaseyi - an artfully-barbered gent from Peckham with a sartorial penchant for distressed denim - told me he'd applied for 17 Civil Service jobs since we last met, but felt he was edging closer to success. I hope he performed better than I in the Situational Judgement Test, to assess one's aptitude for the position of Work Coach, as explained in the job description. On 25.10.24, the DWP regretted to inform me that, having carefully reviewed my responses, they would not be taking my application any further.

By that time, as a client of the Jobcentre, I had become embroiled in a Situation with my Work Coach, which led me to register a formal complaint on 14.10.24. I won't go into the details. Suffice it to say that my complaint compared the Coach's job description with my experience of being coached by her. I have had no official response to my complaint, ten weeks later, but on 05.12.24, Oluwaseyi notified me via my online work journal that my claim was being reviewed. No doubt it’s just a coincidence.

Before complaining about her online, I remonstrated in person, finally telling my Coach I was going home from our meeting to lodge the complaint. Her response was to say, "that's fine"! She booked our next appointment for a fortnight later, first thing on a Monday morning. But, on the day, she was absent.

Instead I saw the chap who is now my Coach and appraised him of my complaint, which is basically that I was not being seen as an individual, a mature man of diverse experience and developed perception, but a redundant white man in late middle age who is good for not much.

I related how my previous Coach had suggested I take a short course in IT at Southwark College to learn how to do email and use a search engine. I told her I'd been doing that since she was in nappies. She bristled and accused me of "age-shaming" her. "You don't know how old I am", she protested. "You are in your early thirties", I replied, "as I was when the world wide web was invented."

I related what Robert had said to me a dozen years previously and how my experience since then had confirmed his cynical analysis. All I had to look forward to was at least four more years of this bullshit, if they don't extend the retirement age before I get there, or offer me assisted suicide, which may save the taxpayer a few quid.

"What would you rather be doing?" asked the Coach. I would rather be scraping a living from my writing, as I did quite successfully until my life took a left turn in my late thirties and I careened down the tangled path less travelled. Hence, this Substack, which I hope eventually to monetise.

Oluwaseyi informed me that the first step in the Claim Review process was to verify my identity. One might consider this procedure otiose, given that I am required to attend fortnightly face-to-face meetings with my Work Coach, who might easily ascertain that I am who I purport to be. But I was obliged to submit a selfie in which I held up my passport or driving license alongside my face. Not an impossible demand in the age of the smartphone, so long as you have two hands, but somewhat inconvenient for me.

At my next Work Search appointment, I asked my Coach to take my picture, but the resultant image was rejected. Although it was clearly me in the passport photo, my fingers obscured some of the text as I held it up to the camera. Bureaucratically, it was unacceptable and it was not within Oluwaseyi’s remit to exercise any discretion. He told me to do it again.

I bridled. Paddling into the Substack eco-system, the quality of my reading has improved and I am grateful to Doomberg for introducing me to Stafford Beer's concept of POSIWID: the purpose of a system is what it does: 'As Beer correctly pointed out, if a system constantly fails to achieve its stated purpose, then its purpose is an unstated one, no matter how often politicians or business leaders insist otherwise.'

I had assumed the purpose of this additional bureaucratic imposition to be merely the latest re-arrangement of deckchairs on the Titanic as HMS DWP sails into an economic iceberg, but now I detected an element of systematic sadism. After all, as any fool knows, this planet is ultimately run by extra-dimensional energy suckers who farm us for loosh. Not that loosh is always bad, so long as you use it creatively and don't let them feed off you.

'I am physically incapable of fulfilling your preposterous demands’ I protested via my Work Journal, but I had no reply. At the next scheduled work search review meeting, I asked the chap who was standing in for my Work Coach, who had taken off for Christmas, to assist me by taking another photograph that satisfied the exacting criteria.' Here I am:

Steal this identity, why don’t you.

Who benefits from Oluwaseyi's intrusion into my affairs? What are his chances of catching crafty fraudsters with secret caches of cash in this ham-fisted manner?

Oluwaseyi’s action serves no purpose other than to irritate me and so, POSIWID leads me to conclude, that is the objective: to generate negative emotional energy. In fact, the entire benefits system, certainly since its reformation at the instigation of IDS, the political equivalent of irritable bowel syndrome, is predicated upon fear: do what we say or you will be sanctioned. A 'sanction' is when they take your money away for a specified period, to starve you into compliance.

After he unexpectedly quit on 18.03.16, IBS had the nerve to go on The Andrew Marr Show and criticise the Cameron "government's austerity programme for balancing the books on the backs of the poor and vulnerable", as if it was nothing to do with him, describing this as divisive and "deeply unfair... It is in danger of drifting in a direction that divides society rather than unites it", he said, predicting the inequality that Gary Stevenson now talks about as the cancer in our economy.

I had lost touch with Robert by the time IBS slunk back to Kerchingford, but no doubt he chortled at the news that this was one DWP Minister who had made such a mess of things that his face could not be saved, so he quit.

Robert and Clyde - not their real names - were of a noble breed now vanished from the DWP. Sir George Iain Duncan Smith, on the other hand, knighted in the 2020 New Year Honours, continues to exert his baleful influence. He runs a right-wing think tank, the Centre for Social Justice, whose advisory board includes Fraser Nelson, the right wing journalist for whom Britain's Benefits Scandal is topic of particular interest.

I can't be arsed to watch Nelson's Dispatches documentary - I got the gist from The Canary - but I did note one comment on TwitteX pertaining to a column in which he suggested Universal Credit (UC) is a de facto Universal Basic Income (UBI). I don't entirely disagree with him. UC does provide the infrastructure for UBI. All they need do is remove the work search commitment and requirement to visit the Jobcentre, unless one actively desires a job.

Conspiracy theorists view UBI, inevitably paid in a programmable CBDC, as part of the global Panopticon, along with digital ID. I don't disagree. Obviously, if Sir Tony Bliar is pushing for it, the imposition of digital ID is to be resisted, but last year I felt obliged to pay for a new passport, even though I'm going nowhere. Personally, I think a UBI would free claimants to pursue more creative activities. As it goes, my Work Coach is permitting me to count the hours I spend on this Substack against my work search commitment of 35 hours per week.

Fraser Nelson thinks people are incentivised to claim disability benefits, which is contrary to my experience as a recipient. Liz Kendall appears to agree with him and the malevolent Labour governbent is intent upon an overhaul of PIP, via a much-delayed Green Paper to be published in the Spring. No doubt I can look forward to another assessment conducted by a recent graduate with a medical degree and a shed load of debt, to see if my hand has regenerated or I’ve learned to hop on my reconstructed foot. In the meantime, Liz is focused on UC, recruiting Oluwaseyi to review my claim.

After the second photograph was accepted as proof of my identity, Oluwaseyi condemned me to an interrogation by telephone, supposedly to ensure that I'm 'getting the right payment', which surely means in the hope of catching me out as a benefits cheat. Since the evidence I had submitted showed I’m not cheating and I am who I say I am, the only reason I cam imagine that Oluwaseyi wanted to fuck with me is for the delicious thrill of cruelty.

Not that I am blaming Oluwaseyi personally; it's not him who gets off on tormenting me. I understand that he's only doing the job, for which the selection process deemed him temperamentally suitable. Had my application been successful, I would be in his shoes, persecuting people like me for £33,979 per year, plus pension credits. My mission would then be to prevent the taxpayer from being defrauded by finding some pretext to stop paying people like me, or Not Oluwaseyi, my natty Nigerian friend from Southwark College, assuming he has once more been unsuccessful at jumping the fence.

Flustered by my stiffness, Oluwaseyi issued the standard concentration camp guard's disclaimer. He's only following orders dictated by the dark forces that are becoming ever more overt on our planet. Rampant evil is inescapably obvious, even to those who are not being slaughtered in Ukraine and Gaza, actions which are fully supported by our malevolent governbent. I find our robotic current Prime Minister to be the most soulless servant of Satan to have occupied that office since his idol and archetype, Tory Blur. Indeed, Sir Keir is Sir Tony, sans wealth and taste.

Our phone call lasted 50 minutes. It was being recorded, so I spoke to an imaginary audience of spooks as Oluwaseyi asked questions and took notes, to be assessed by the DWP's Secret Police. As such, Oluwaseyi, learned a few more arcane details of my life story than were strictly relevant to his enquiry. Not only does he now know the name of my first pet, but also the circumstances of that kitten's arrival on Twelfth Night, 1968. (Stick around this Substack, etc...)

After a few stumbles when he called me 'Rousel' - which is OK; I would have mispronounced his name before I heard him say it - Oluwaseyi exhibited sound situational judgement by politely referring to me as, 'Mr Cronin' throughout our conversation.

He assured me there was no connection between the review he was conducting and my unanswered complaint. I had not been especially targeted for this investigation. They are going to get around to everyone on UC, he said, although I'm not clear whether he referred to the 2 million of us who are unemployed or the 7 million who claim UC to supplement meagre incomes from doing exploitative jobs. Either way, it’s a colossal undertaking that is bound to cost more than it saves.

Reading from a script, Oluwaseyi repeatedly warned me about the consequences of giving him incorrect information about monies I might have squirrelled away. This prompted me to recall an undeclared bank account, the e-savings a/c that I used to pay my income tax from when I was in what I now appreciate to have been the privileged position of being a tax payer. I have no access to it, but found a screenshot from when I closed its sister account last March, which shows a balance of 28p. Good thing that didn't slip my mind.

Oluwaseyi wanted to know the purpose of what he categorised as 'large' cash withdrawals. I didn't think that was any of his business, but he insisted. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer to carry cash. All too soon, I expect, benefits will be paid in programmable digital currency which may be used only for the purchase of approved items. Then Oluwaseyi will know precisely where all my money goes. He also asked about my PayPal account, with which I buy stuff online. I pointed out that, if I had money there, I wouldn't have to make payments to it from my current account. Still, he wanted to see proof.

The call ended with Oluwaseyi asking me to submit PayPal statements to prove I’m not running a business, plus the screenshot of my redundant savings account. 'You must complete this to-do by 10 January 2025. If you do not, it may affect the amount of money you receive.' As usual. Such is life on the dole these days. I need to get off it.