All I ever wanted to do was to have earned a living in peace

There is a saying, “if all else fails, go back to the beginning”. I have run out of ideas so I am going to go back to when everything went wrong and start again. Well, very nearly. I was working abroad before all this started. Indeed that is where I truly want to go; I want to leave the UK and never return. I stand no chance of getting work as I did before.

I am going to go back to trying to get help from the DWP. I sent the following e-mail to the DWP to be routed to the Hoxton office.

I am forced to ask one last time for assistance to get back to work. I know that this futile and that you will refuse to help me. Indeed, I expect that this plea will not get a response of any kind, or even deleted without ever being read. I have to give you the chance anyway.

I have not worked since my return to the UK in July, 2004. Despite numerous pleas during the last six years, I have been refused any realistic help in my desperate desire to return to work. I have tried standard requests for assistance, begging the DWP for help, begging my MP for help, begging government ministers for help. In my desperation to get proper attention I have even tried to use threats in the hope that I will either be put on trial to publicise my plight, or maybe get some other sort of help. All that achieved was the FTAC ordered me locked up in a mental hospital with a doctor fabricating diagnosis to attempt to justify my detention. It took me five months to win my freedom.

Almost every day I read about the schemes that will help claimants off of sickness benefits and back into work. This fills me the terror; I cannot survive any longer on the benefits I currently get and if they are cut by the third that I expect as a minimum then I will dead within weeks. I am so fearful of the time when I am called in that I cannot sleep, I cannot concentrate on anything, and have a constant headache. The last six years have broken me; I am a physical and mental wreck. The prospect of even lower income (definitely in real terms as inflation exceeds up-rating, or probably in actual terms when my claim is stopped) fills me with terror as does the probability that I will end up spending the rest of my days in prison or mental hospital. Death appears to be the only viable option left to me. I have made half-hearted attempts in the past, but it doesn’t look like I will have to make sure it succeeds next time.

It doesn’t have to be this way; it never has. My circumstances are not of my creation; it was done to me. I am not lazy; I was always considered to be a workaholic. I was not devoid of skills; I still try to keep up-to-date (despite being told by a member of staff at the DWP that I didn’t need to) and can demonstrate them. I don’t want to live off benefits; it goes against everything I believe in and I am disgusted with myself and ashamed to have to do it.

I am begging you to help me get back into work. I don’t know the full details of what is required, but I do know that existing schemes will never work for me. I do not need help with motivation, writing a CV, or how to do job searches. In my case, advice such as “lower my sights”; “take the speculative approach”; or “broaden my horizons” is platitudes that are completely inappropriate. The damage that has accumulated over the last six years is so great that basic remedial work on bringing me back to health and a standard of living raised to comparable level to other before I could make any applications for work.

Returning to my first paragraph, I fully expect you to ignore this plea for help. The good thing about e-mail is that there is an audit trail. I have sent this message with receipts requested. At least I shall be able to show that I did ask for help.

I know that it is a futile exercise; they have always refused to help me in the past and I have no expectations that they will help me now. I just don’t understand why. The government and opposition parties all claim to want to get people back to work. They come out with allsorts of ideas for penalties on people to motivate them to work such as driving them into even greater poverty or putting them in a chain-gang picking up dog mess in the local park. However, when someone desperately wants to work they refuse and do whatever they can to stop them.

I will be extremely surprised if this will be responded to directly. What I expect to happen is that I will be called in for one of their corrupt medicals which are used to justify stopping claims. I will be left destitute and homeless again. This will be pure DWP / government vindictiveness.

UPDATES:

19/04/10 17:28	I have sent the message and their servers have returned a delivery receipt. I was half-expecting to get a message that my IP address was blocked from sending mail to them.
20/04/10 10:14	I have just received a read receipt from their servers (they run MS Exchange 6.5). Now they can’t say that they didn’t get it and read it. I was expecting it to be either blocked from their servers in the first place or deleted without ever being read.
21/04/10 11:00	As expected absolutely no response from the DWP regarding my pleas to have some help getting back to work. Employment statistics were released earlier today. The government are spinning that the claimant count is down more than expected. However as always, the devil is in the detail. The wider measures all show that unemployment rocketed up. The total non-working count is about 11 million people. This is roughly 20% of the UK workforce. At the same time the Home office is issuing work permits at an every greater rate to combat the so-called skills shortage. Are all of those 11 million out of work so lazy, devoid of skills, sick, or mad that they could not fill those roles?
22/04/10 12:30	Still no response from the DWP; I do not expect any. Here is a very sad story from the Daily Mail of a young lady called Vicky Harrison, with good qualifications who took her own life rather continue living as a victim of this government. Just how many more will have to die before someone will help the 11 million of us that have been abused and abandoned?