Promises, promises.

Imagine you're at an informal meeting at the end of which someone says their child is running a marathon and needs sponsors.  With much good-natured chatter everyone passes an iimpromptu "hat" around and  chucks in a fiver or a tenner. ' Till it comes to you.
 "Oh no! I've no change on me!" you cry.
"Not to worry, it isn't till Sunday" the parent says.
 Your face doesn't change.  Sunday you'll still be broke.
"It's ok" someone else says "I just threw a tenner in for you. You can give it to me at work, later."
Your cheeks blaze and you swallow nervously.  How the hell are you going to finesse an extra £10 out of your next payment which, in any case, isn't for another twelve days?

Or perhaps you're having coffee with someone.  They get an urgent call  about a breaking crisis and have to leave, forgetting they haven't even paid for their untouched coffee.  NOW what do you do? In your purse, in splendid isolation, is the exact money for your coffee.  Plus the 5p. extra you always seem to have.  Do you get up and run after the distressed person and demand £2?  Do you snitch on them to the assistant and say they ran off without paying?  Do you try to get the assistant to take the coffee back?

 Or do you resign yourself to ten minutes of exquisitely drawn-out mortification, gulp your own coffee without tasting it, and stoicly resign yourself to the inevitable?

Those are just a couple of the everyday humiliations of being on Benefits.  You try to live a 'normal' life but it's bloody hard.

Yet  not enough punishment, it seems.  One of the dandy Election promises in the latest campaign was probably dreamed up by some Benefactor in the days of the workhouse: Let's make people live continually without a cent in their pockets.   That'll be THEIR contribution to  offset the tax breaks promised to the wealthier sort in the same campaign.

Yep! Some brave soul has peeped into the Space at the End of the Ladder  and seen someone eating a burger, someone else quaffing a beer and lots of lots of fat people.  Obvious, isn't it? We're all too well off down here.  Gruel and pease porridge. That's the stuff for the poor.

 What do those on Benefits need money for anyway?  It's well-known that they only spend it on rubbish and clog up the hospital services. Much better all round  to take all money from the shifty buggers; can't trust 'em to look after themselves, what?

 Proof positive, m'dear, look!

 A man out there in a cheap anorak drinking beer.  He'll be one of your Benefits laddies. See what I mean?  Might as well give money to one's two year old as to that lot, what?

The proposed "reforms" indicate that each person on Benefits be given cards in lieu of money.  They can use these these cards at certain, prescribed outlets - but only for food, of course.  Not for a birthday card for the girl in Melanie's class; or the £2.50 the school wants for Danny's outing tomorrow. And what about those vitamins you were going to get from the Vet for Next-Doors cat which is always half-starved? Or a bottle of wine for the old bloke who always does your minor repairs for free. "Just sling me a bottle of Merlot once in a while" he says.
 "Bloody Hell" you think, glumly.

Keeping adult persons from handling money is the kind of infantilising  tactic that a wife-beater subjects his wife to.  Ask any social worker or battered woman: one of the first gambits in the rise to total domination by one partner over another, is to deprive them of money.

If the misguided persons who dreamed up this caper don't trust We the Poor to give them any insight, let them visit any battered women's shelter in the land.  Ask the women there how it feels to walk around with an empty purse: to be unable to give a visiting kid their bus fare home when they've lost theirs; to  send a child off to a birthday party bearing a "gift" from the Poundshop that you know is going to fall to bits as soon as the plastic packaging is removed; to find an old woman bleeding on the pavement after taking a fall and not be able to pop into the adjacent chemist for a box of band-aids.  Try refusing an invitation for you and the kids to go on a picnic with the rest of the group because you didn't factor those fares into your weekly budget; or huddling in a doorway with a troubled friend rather than taking them to the nearest cafe for a hot cup of tea. Or not even being able to chuck  a 50p piece to someone else in  need.

It is de-humanising and, in personal relationships, is a very quick and easy way to establish dominance.  In a relationship between a government and its people, it clearly defines the unbridgeable gap between  a marginalised group of people and their democratically elected leaders: and it places a huge  division within society by excluding one sector completely from all others. It makes one's circumstance as sharply defined as once a yellow star did.

No-one in their right mind would deny that there are Benefit fraudsters; manipulators; and complete no-hopers down here in the Space Below the Ladder.   Just as no-one in their right mind would deny that there are fraudsters, manipulators and no-hopers in every strata of society. The bank clerk who siphons off a few cents here and there; the CEO who speculates with Company money; the office worker who takes all the office pens and stationary home; the small business owner who pays their staff wages below the National Average; the people who nick knickers from Marks and Spencers, ...there is not one form of social disobedience and crime which does not take place across all strata. Not one that is restricted solely to one social class. Nor is there any crime that is the sole province of a group of persons who don't even fit in the class system.

If there were an optimum number of offences which had to occur amongst the managerial class before all those in managerial positions were punished; or a certain number of office pilferers who spoilt it for everyone else by bringing punitive measures down on  every office worker in the land or....but of course, I'm being facetious; no parallel would make these recent proposals any more acceptable.

Why would Government try to slip one over the rest of the country when they know the uproar, the ridicule, the abuse, the rioting, the media frenzy this would produce? It would be political murder.  But, even though everyone on Benefits constitutes a sizeable chunk of the voting bloc, there isn't much danger of opposition, let alone media attention, from us lot.

Why?  Well, apart from the fact that we are all perceived as being too tanked up and drug-ridden to make it to the polling booths, most of us are seen as just too damn thick to vote.   But, even  if our voting capacity were to be taken seriously, there is one vast, overarching and vitally important reason why we lie beneath the ladder like one great, big deflated football for everyone else to kick: - we have no Voice.

Our case is always presented at second-hand; others speak for us; stratagems intended to control us are always  theory-based; and we are subject to political and media misrepresentation: - because we can't talk back.  We have no representation.  No mediators. No sponsors.

But I'm working my way up to it.  So watch out, world.  I'm just clearing my throat.