Dear readers its Thursday again and it’s another cold, windy day. My thoughts are with everyone that are street homeless or are living in cold homes because they can’t afford to heat them. Fuel poverty is real and its only going to get worse.
You can bet that hypothermia related deaths will increase this year because so many more people are living in poverty, and it isn’t just elderly people either. Indeed this morning I topped up a young couples electric key for them because they’d ran out of electric. Life with pre payment machines is no fun at all. I’m talking from experience though because I’ve always had pre payment machines.
Winter with it’s dark mornings and dark evenings really takes it’s toll on many people so please be kind to each other, times are hard.
Like I said this morning started with being freezing cold but then a cold breeze became stronger and stronger so we had to finish early. I need to find some thermal clothes to wear.
Anyway, all the food parcels bar one were taken straight away. This week we were able to give people a packet of doughnuts with their food parcel. Doughnuts might not be nutritious but they do cheer people up, so does a packet of biscuits etc. Never underestimate the value of this type of food.
I bet you’re fed up of me writing that so many people are dressed in clothing not suited to the cold winter weather. This was the case today, so many people were walking in and out of the Jobcentre and council offices looking freezing cold.
Can I please have a magic wand to change this? I’ll be eternally grateful.
Noted today was the amount of young people going into the Jobcentre to make their first claim. Luckily I was able to give them a leaflet and some advice. Having to cope with the whole universal credit system can be so daunting and stressful for young people at the start of their adult life.
We spoke to a lovely man who has several disabilities, a brain condition,a completely knackered knee that he cant use for standing for any period of time and a back condition.
He explained that he was disgusted that he’s forced to attend the Jobcentre on a weekly basis even though he’s disabled and is handing in fit notes. Today his advisor told him that he needed to apply for a job at the very same factory that he was previously working at.
He had to end his employment because of his disabilities, the work is heavy going, on foot all of the time and moving heavy equipment etc around. At first he thought that they were joking but his advisor wasn’t and was deadly serious.
Obviously he was extremely frustrated at this, they’re setting him up to fail because they just don’t care. If they did care they wouldn’t be doing this to him in the first place, and you can bet that they’ll try to punish him if he doesn’t.
This is the side of the DWP that many people don’t see. They don’t understand that the DWP can, and often does behave like an abuser gaslighting its victim until they give up.
Don’t let them do this to you, appeal any decision that they make, you do have the right to do this.
I had a lovely conversation with a man that used to be street homeless in Manchester, hes now housed in a flat and is doing well. He told me that he used to be a solider in the army but once he left they ditched him and didn’t care about him one bit. I’ve heard this story so many times and it’s awful.
Luckily he eventually found support and he now helps other street homeless people. He told me how dangerous Manchester is for street homeless people and how concerned he is about this.
Gordon spoke to a man that had walked miles to the Jobcentre only for his appointment to last for the maximum of five minutes. I’m not wrong when I say that they do this to control people.
Last but not least we were told of the plight of someone having terminal cancer only for their claim for PIP to be rejected. They’ll be appealing this decision, but will they live long enough to see this through? I hope so, but no one in their position should have to go through this.
Sadly like I said earlier, we had to leave early but we spoke to lots of people, and helped many of these. We will be back next week as usual.
Please can I ask you a favour? Can you read, share, tweet and email my blog? I really need to get the word out there that the DWP system is cruel beyond belief.
Also I have a donate button at the side and the top of my blog. For anyone not able to see this my PayPal add is seercharlotte@gmail.com
I live on virtually nothing and every penny helps me to continue blogging and campaigning. Thank you to everyone that have done already.
I’m also in the process of writing a book based upon my blog. If you’re interested in this please email me via my blog.
The poor side of life 
I will definitely be interested in a book if you write one.
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Sometimes, when some good luck comes my way, I do feel as though someone is watching over me (having had psychic experiences all my life I’m convinced of this). There’s been times when I had no baccy (and I’m addicted), went out to walk into town and found a nearly full packet of fags on the pavement, that’s happened at least 3 times now. Other times I have found perfectly good food in the streets, quite inexplicably. I thank my lucky stars when things like that happen 😊 Recently just as I was going out the door I suddenly got the thought that I need vitamin C and kind of saw a mental image of myself eating an orange, but I didn’t have any spare money for fruit so I just set off out, turned the corner and saw a woman I know ( a local Buddhist nun) stood on the street corner holding a bag of oranges and eating one, she smiled and gave me an orange, I was shocked and blurted out that I’d just thought about that and she just laughed and walked off. Weird.
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Charlotte would be so interested to read your book. Your truly amazing x
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Thank you so much and thank you for reading my blog
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Excellent
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In my town we have the Welcome Centre that besides being mainly a foodbank also provides warm winter coats, wooly hats, scarves, gloves, which have been donated, and the Methodist Mission next door also do. Are there any such organizations in Ashton/Stockport that can provide poor people with such things? I suppose there’s always the Charity shops if people can afford. But I’ve noticed that a lot of people don’t dress appropriately these days, not necessarily the poor, often young folk, I see them out & about in town wearing no coat or just a hoodie in all weather! I always get wrapped up, I have a good all-wool long trench coat that I got from Oxfam, and a few short jackets, one is a sheepskin flying jacket that I bought on ebay for just £23 with free postage, an absolute bargain, but I suppose many people don’t have even that amount spare. I remember the days when there were church jumble sales, which were great but they don’t seem to have them now.
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P.S.
I forgot to add that last week at the foodbank we received a donation of about 3 or 4 bin-liners full of winter coats and fleeces from staff at the local Jobcentre of all places who had done a collection amongst themselves. The cynics among us might put that down to guilt, but it was an act of generosity accepted in the spirit it was given, and maybe it goes to show that the Jobcentre staff are human after all and not all of them are the ogres we think. Don’t get me wrong, I hate the Jobcentre, but I do try to look for the good in all people, and I guess they have a job to do but it’s not a job that I would want!
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when someone is left with less that £23 to live on for a week, your ‘bargain’ coat will be unaffordable. As will charity shops which charge several quid per item.
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Absolutely this. The people that I see wearing inappropriate clothing aren’t doing it for fashion they can’t afford to buy from charity shops. I’ve bought shoes, coats, hats and gloves for people as well, some have been donated also. It also takes a lot of guts for someone to admit that they need to ask a stranger for a coat etc. Life is very cruel for the poorest and disabled.
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Believe me I do know that, I’ve been living on JSA for a long time, am often down to pence with a week to go, have eaten food my neighbour threw in the bin before now, but sometimes just every now & again I manage to slightly get in front, it maybe that I got £20 off my sister for Christmas/birthday, or I’ve caught up with bills etc. At the moment I’m slightly better off as I pay my Council Tax over 10 months so it’s not due again now ’til the new bill comes. Sometimes I’ve been lucky enough to find money in the street, over the last 5 years have found a total of £35, one 20, one tenner and one fiver, on separate occasions. Other times I won a tenner on a scratch card. The trench coat I had given when I was volunteering at the Oxfam sorting depot, they were going to put it in the rag bag for recycling just because it had a bit of mud on the bottom! Other times I got hold of some cheap baccy someone brought back from abroad @ £3.50 a pack, cost here is about £24 per pack, so that saved me loads. Recently I was given a free Tablet by Interserve worth £90, I flogged it the next day for £50. People do what they can to survive and occasionally get a little bit in front. I got my debt payments wiped out by going Insolvent, which also wiped out last year’s Water bill as that came up as a debt on the credit report. So yeah, basically I know what it’s like.
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I’m so sorry I wasn’t intending to have a dig at you, I know that you’ve been through this. Let’s hope that one day we will have a much kinder society. Xx
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Five minutes? More like thirty seconds! (his quote). He walked from the far end of Duki, too!
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I stand corrected lol
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Excellent
Need major reform of DWP to make it user friendly.
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Keep up the good work.
Mervyn, Member Unite the Union
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It’s not totally a Tory , very regimented and corporate management style
at one time , someone would have been selected ( and / or someone has thought they were being clever to trip someone up ) for sanction ( though the targets weren’t nearly as high , nor was the appeal bill for tribunals ) if they didn’t ‘ snatch off ‘ a job offer in similar work that they’d been employed in
The modus operandi from the JCP advisor would be ‘ I’m trying to protect you ‘ or in reality the advisor would be under pressure herself from on higher ?
However IF someone stated that they’d been through a mechanistic staged attendance procedure / their Occupational Health Provider ( often the beleaguered and controversial Atos ) / Discipline to get someone ‘ through the door ‘ – then there would be SOME discretion and common sense
They’d tell someone to get the doctor to get them signed off , put them on Income Support , there were more ‘ complicated ‘ benefits then as people’s lives tend to be complicated too ! – instead of the vindictive , punitive , & fundamentally flawed Universal Credit , one size fits nobody at all
They may have been told to apply for incapacity and to ‘ chase them ‘ back into work , there was the likes of Third Sector agencies that they were sent to and permitted work
However we have this quasi religious in tone and pseudo science system
Also there has to be SOME good will on both sides rather than begrudged aggrandizement and spiteful platitudes
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