Open letter to Chris Grayling

Dear Christopher Grayling,

I’ve just read this Telegraph article (can’t find strength to find the actual piece you wrote). Let me start by saying I disagree with the concept of unpaid work experience full stop. I would love to say that my work experience thus far has been paid, but it hasn’t. HMRC’s reluctance to sort this out – when they know which companies are doing it, when these companies are extremely easy to find out about, and when these companies don’t even pay expenses – is indicative of how very little consecutive governments over the last decade or so actually care about individuals. In fact, it’s telling that this neat little industry arrangement benefits huge corporations, and governments can retain their confidence.

I digress. I am against the “Workfare” scheme because it is not about improving the individual at all – it is about providing a source of free labour for organisations – at the expense of the taxpayer, no less! I am currently on Job Seeker’s Allowance and I have been tactfully informed that I “may as well” apply for any jobs going at the centre (ones with literally no connection to what I have done in the past, no connection to my degree, and of no use to me or my career) because I will be forced to take something that comes up in a few months, or I risk losing my benefits.

“Short term work experience placements lasting a few weeks are of immense value to young people looking to get a foothold on the job ladder”

They are rarely of value. I don’t see how working in Tesco stacking shelves – for which other members of staff are paid – is going to be of any use to me when I am looking for a job in journalism. Do you? Especially not when you consider that I have already worked for a large supermarket chain for over a year. I worked there when I was doing my A Levels. I later worked full-time for my local authority. I have worked. I have experience. I am the opposite of workshy, Mr Grayling, but having been to university – something all young people are now being funneled into regardless of suitability for their career needs or wishes – I have graduated and found the economy in a devastating state. I have worked for free in many, many places over the last 8 years, in pursuit of the career I want – but I just don’t think that working for Tesco in exchange for money which I already receive is reasonable or at all justifiable.

“The critics are job snobs. The Guardian newspaper publishes stories attacking big retailers for offering short-term unpaid work experience placements for young people. But that same Guardian newspaper advertises on its website – yes, you guessed it – short-term unpaid work experience placements for young people.”

It’s not snobbery. Nobody is against anyone working for Tesco – the issue is that they are unpaid, but also that they are mandatory and thousands of people nationwide are being forced into work experience schemes that are not relevant to their line of work. You must realise that these unpaid work experiences are hugely harmful:
a) these workfare people on JSA are performing a function that could be performed by another member of staff, therefore they are actively harming the job market and exacerbating already-dire unemployment rates by reducing the amount of paid work available.
b) in the time that these people are working unpaid, they cannot look for jobs that are actually in their line of work, so they are effectively breaking their own contract with the job centre to comply with what the job centre says.

The work experience you mentioned at the Guardian and BBC Newsnight is voluntary and undertaken on the basis that the individual knows from the start it is unpaid, but they will gain valuable experience that will help them in their career. The workfare scheme touted by the government is nothing of the sort. People are being forced into these situations because they have been told if they do not comply, then they will lose their benefits. Benefits that they have received because they need a subsidy to live as they cannot find work. Pulling the carpet out from under people and telling them that they chose to sit on the floor is hugely disingenuous and lying about it, or pretending to equate workfare with genuine work experience opportunities is an insult to any right-thinking person.

I am intrigued as to how you still feel, what with companies dropping out of the workfare scheme like flies, that this is still a reasonable situation to put unemployed people in – especially when the economy is in such an awful state. But please do let me know if you find someone else who agrees with you.

Yours faithfully,

@ThatSoph

Guest post: Religion and the sex lives of women

This guest post has been written anonymously.

Last Friday I stayed at a male friend’s house. I’ve done this a few times before but this time, after one too many glasses of wine, we made some ill-advised decisions which led to me spending Saturday lunchtime in an NHS sexual health walk-in clinic, due to what I like to think of as a “communication break down”, but what other people may choose to call plain stupidity. They’re probably right.

Sexual health clinics are not places I frequent and I felt judged just because I was there. I convinced myself the friendly, helpful receptionist was secretly attaching a hundred and one labels to me as she read through the form I filled in in the waiting area – I know this is illogical, but it did not feel that way at the time.

When I got into the nurse’s room I sat opposite her and my eyes were quickly drawn to the cross necklace around her neck. People wearing crosses is not usually something I take offence at, it’s an acceptable way to express your faith – but was this really the place to be wearing it? The Bible’s stance on any sort of sexual relations outside of marriage is not one you need to read deep into to discover – you don’t do it. I felt vulnerable and judged enough as it was without my nurse making it very obvious her strong beliefs (as those held by Christians, or people of any faith for that matter, usually are) did not agree with my actions. However, this probably would not have been a big deal – certainly not one big enough to warrant a blog/rant on it, had it not been for what she said during the session.

As is the way with sexual health clinics, you don’t just get the treatment you need and get to leave within 5 minutes – they usually want a run-through of your sexual history. The first thing that offended me was the comment she made after I told her I’d previously had a relationship with another female. I told the nurse that I knew her sexual history and trusted that I’d been told the truth as we’d always been very honest with each other. I was told I should ask again and tell her to be completely honest with me this time. The implication being that she was either promiscuous, lying or both.

As if her prejudiced comments about my sexuality weren’t enough, she insisted on referring to the man I spent the night with as my “boyfriend”. I told her he wasn’t – I didn’t have a boyfriend – to which she replied “well you do now”. I was shocked. Clearly she felt sex should be confined to relationships; a view shared by many. But was it appropriate for her to try and push this view on me in such a patronising manner? I don’t think so. I strongly hold the belief that other people’s sex lives are their business. I resist judging people based on their personal lives generally and if I do find myself doing so, I certainly wouldn’t belittle them for their decisions. It is simply not my place. How lovely it’d be to live in a world where other people – especially those in positions of trust, as this nurse was – extended me the same courtesy.

I left the clinic feeling about 2 feet tall. However, I considered myself relatively fortunate after reading this. A 29 year old woman was refused the morning after pill because the chemist she was served by had religious objections. When I first heard about it I figured the woman was living in America’s Bible Belt, where women being refused contraception or an abortion due to their doctor’s beliefs is not unheard of. But no, this was in a Boots store in Hartlepool.

Why, in 2011 in the Western World, are women still having other people’s so-called moral values thrust into their sex lives? The fact that it is acceptable to judge, and even to prevent a woman from taking responsibility for the actions of herself and who she has slept with – and then to be able to use religion as an excuse for doing this – is an example of how far we have to go in securing full reproductive freedom for women even in the West. I hope that Boots and the General Pharmaceutical Council reviews their policies. Why should someone’s “ethics” come before another person’s well-being? I also hope that next time (if there is a next time) I go to an NHS walk-in clinic I get a nurse who does his or her job without making me feel like I should be ashamed of decisions that are my business.

Food bank demand increases

It should come as little surprise to anyone that jobcentres are sending claimants to food banks. A few months ago, when I was at University, I was producer on a radio news day, and whilst researching stories, I came across a tiny radio station on the coast that discussed increasing demand for food at food banks. I did a little research, and what I found out was shocking.

I had held back from discussing this on my blog, as I was sitting on the story for an economics journalist to use – though this could hardly have come at a worse time. As the Euro teeters on the brink of collapse, domestic stories such as these take a back-seat to more pressing issues. So this has been highly neglected in the press – I have seen a couple of articles talking about it but they haven’t really been picked up on social networks as fervently as the Independent’s article above. I am the least surprised – my only astonishment is that it has taken this long.

Food banks are charitable local organisations that people donate food and money to, and they provide emergency food for people who are in need. People are referred to food banks for specific reasons – benefit delays, low income, benefit cuts, homelessness, unemployment, domestic violence, refused crisis loans… There are other reasons – but those are the main ones. They are given enough food for three days – enough to tide them over until their next pay packet comes through, or enough for them to organise some other means of obtaining food.

So, roll back to May earlier this year. The Trussell Trust – which runs food banks in the UK – had just published a press release stating that in between May last year and May this year, there was a fifty percent increase in people going to food banks. Incredibly, at that point, they calculated they had been opening one new food bank a week in 2011, as demand increased. I spoke to the manager at Bournemouth food bank at the time, and she explained why there was such a huge increase at Bournemouth particularly:

“50% of the people we now give out to are (because of) benefit delays and benefit cuts. I think this is a direct result of what’s changing in the government and how they’re reassessing the whole system of benefits, and I think that’s why people are struggling… What we were doing in a month, we’re doing in a week.”

She had seen someone who had to wait 9 months for their benefits to come through. There was so much demand for food that there was barely any food on the shelves at the end of the week. The food bank had to spend donated money on buying extra food, and she described the situation as “touch and go”. This was four months ago, and I doubt the situation has changed – if anything it would have, I imagine, gotten worse. Cuts in the public sector have led to redundancies and therefore unemployment, and it is no secret that job centres across the country are struggling with the inundation of new claimants. The logical conclusion, then, is that for families where both parents (or one, in single-parent families) have been made redundant, they may genuinely struggle to afford food – especially if they are in the process of obtaining benefits of some kind.

I find the Independent’s report to be quite worrying. Firstly, it states, “from tomorrow” that people will be referred to food banks by job centres, as if this is new – I had assumed that this was already happening, and I’m not convinced this is the real story here. “It is the first time in living memory that hungry people will have been passed on to charities in this way.” The BBC wrote in 2008 of job centres giving out food vouchers to the unemployed. Unless there is some minor difference that I am missing, this isn’t the first time, and I was under the impression it was routine for those suffering from benefit delays.

Secondly, “a claimant will be limited to three consecutive referrals”. This means they will be limited to nine days. Is nine days enough, when you are living on the poverty line and you don’t know when you will next have money? Concerning, for sure. I would question the legitimacy of that claim, because I personally haven’t heard that at all – in fact, it seemed as though one person in Bournemouth was using the food bank for nine months, or, one must assume, used it more than three times during that time they were waiting for their benefits to come through.

If there is actually a nine day limit for people who need to go to food banks, this is appalling – and this is what we should be getting angry about.

Debt is a badge of honour

Apparently, “young people seem to view debt mostly in just positive terms rather than as a potential burden.” Uh. It’s definitely a burden. I am going to have at least £24,000 worth of debt when I leave University. I am 22, at the beginning of my career and the rest of my life. As far as I’m concerned, that’s no way to start your life. That is more than I am expecting to earn in a year, for several years. University debt is, of course, slightly different to credit cards etc – and I am aware that the student loan is probably the best deal I will get in terms of borrowing – but debt is still debt. For what it’s worth, I don’t have any credit cards in my own name. But the ridiculous thing is that as far as I know, credit checks are more positive if you have credit cards (and are, you know, reasonably careful).

I might be wrong, but I was under the impression that without a semi-decent credit rating, you can’t rent certain places, and you certainly can’t get a mortgage. So at some point in my life – even though I am the sort of person who is careful with money, is phobic about borrowing anything (very forgetful; have always hated libraries), and I save as I go – I will be forced into getting a credit card for the sake of trying to make my credit rating better.

I have a less-than-desirable credit rating because I asked for an extension of my overdraft and someone didn’t do their job properly and rejected it. I’m not even being rude here; they genuinely messed up because they didn’t take into account that I had a student account and they didn’t ask their superior for advice. Being rejected, for some ridiculous reason, made my credit rating go down. Which meant the next time I asked for an extension, I had a lower credit rating – and was rejected. Which made it go down even more. I am not financially desirable, let’s say.

So how am I supposed to get a good credit rating without forcing myself into debt?! As far as I see it – and I’ll admit I don’t know too much about it; just what I know from talking to people – the system penalises people who save, and people who are careful with money. The banks seem to want people to be dependent on borrowing – because that’s how they make their money. Debt is a money-spinner for banks.

To say that debt is seen as a positive thing among young people is ridiculous and quite offensive, actually. Because all young people have no sense of responsibility whatsoever. Right.

The John Snow Pub Kiss-in Protest

A gay couple were kicked out of a pub in Soho for kissing a couple of days ago, and this sparked a ‘gay kiss-in’ protest today. I just caught the Sky News report. Towards the end the reporter says “Although in the heart of Soho, the John Snow ISN’T a gay pub…”

I have an issue with this wording. I totally understand the need for there to be ‘gay’ pubs or ‘gay’ areas, where queer men and women can meet others, away from prejudice in society – but I take issue with the representation of this pub as specifically NOT ‘gay’. It appears to gives credence to the view that I’m sure some people will have – that they shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Because by not being a ‘gay pub’, it’s implicitly therefore a ‘straight’ one.

I don’t see why it is necessary for the report to state that it was or wasn’t a gay pub. If it was in a gay pub, it would be unacceptable. If it’s in a non-gay pub, it’s unacceptable. I honestly don’t see the difference or the need to clarify whether it is specifically ‘gay’ or not. That treatment shouldn’t be allowed anywhere, regardless of sexuality or gender, and regardless of whether it’s in a ‘gay’ pub, a ‘gay’ area, or one that ISN’T specifically ‘gay’.

I realise some people don’t see the problem with this. I do. If it was a gay pub that they got kicked out of, would it have been stated that it was such? Or is it such an incredibly shocking idea that two gay men should want to go into a ‘non-gay’ pub and kiss? It propagates homophobia but in an incredibly subtle way; creates a divide between ‘gay’ pubs and ‘not-gay’ ones. The truth is there should be no divide whatsoever – on a basic level their treatment is ridiculous, and breaks equality laws. Gay pub or not.