With politics as nasty as it is now, it’s the private sphere I look to for hope. In particular, I think of some of the people I’ve met over the past year. People like John, who I wrote about at the end of October.
One of the great privileges of being a journalist is that you can legitimately ask anyone anything. They can tell you to sod off. The government departments and big companies will refer you to a PR department. But some people – often those with least power, with most to lose – will open up and take you into their lives.
That’s how it’s been with John. Over the past few months, our relationship has gone from banter on social media to profile in the Guardian to friendship. My article on John focused on how he’d just been stripped of part of his disability benefits and been deemed fit to work – despite a series of major injuries, despite constant pain and sleeplessness, despite very limited mobility. His case struck me as a real-life enactment of I, Daniel Blake.
But what stood out about John from our very first chats was how dignified he was. Here was a man whose weekly income had been slashed, who in his late 50s was being batted between benefits call centres and the jobcentre, who was suffering what sounded like the symptoms of depression. He is being crushed by a system designed to take benefits from people with disabilities.
Understandably, he didn’t want me to publish his real name or some critical details. Yet he could tell a joke and take one; recommend novels by Trollope and ask me about my life. I’ve met people on six-figure salaries and three holidays a year who haven’t got an ounce of the charm shown by this man pushed up against a wall.
Over the past couple of months, things have got even tougher for John. His GP wrote a letter saying he was in no state to look for work, so the jobcentre took away his jobseeker’s allowance. No regular income comes in now apart from the disability living allowance. Merely to pay the rent and buy some groceries, John sank heavily into the red. On the other hand, an anti-poverty charity contacted me to offer help, and one of their advisers has found that the Department for Work and Pensions actually owes John money for unpaid benefits.
Through it all, John has maintained his good humour. His appeal against the fit-for-work ruling is due in a few weeks.
The first time we met he told me: “I don’t want anybody to see me so weak. I just feel beaten.” But whenever I call he’s always ready with some atrocious pun. When he can, he blogs – and writes very well. Every Monday, as I’m pulling out my hair over my column, he texts encouragement.
