Hallelujah! We live in a time of miracles when millions who are sick are suddenly cured.

 

We are truly blessed to live in such a time of miracles. Not since Jesus did his stuff in the rocky hills and valleys of Galilee have so many sick people miraculously become well. Are we witnessing the hand of God? Are stone statues about to shed tears? Is the Second Coming nigh? Anyone running a B&B in the town of Lourdes must be frantically revising their sales forecasts down and trying to work out what the hell they are going to say to their bank manager. After all, who in their right mind would want to shell out for an all-in package to Lourdes to get well when all you have to do is come to the UK and apply for sick pay. You fill in the form, attend and medical and lo and behold, you are suddenly as fit as a flea. Surely we are missing out on a huge opportunity to boost growth here. Our sudden ability to provide a miracle cure to people who have been too sick to work for ten years or more is absolutely groundbreaking. Why are we not hitting the rest of the world with a blanket advertising campaign?

Cue serious anchor man voice. Probably American.

“Are you sick? I mean really sick? And have you been sick for years? Well help is at hand. Come to the UK and get well soon. Leprosy? Aids? Ebola Virus? No matter. We Brits can fix it all. Just one medical and you can get back to work. Come to Britain where we fix more people than Jesus!”

What a shot in the economic arm. We can pack out every hotel from Paisley to Penzance. Book a flight. Catch a show. Try some fish and chips. Attend a medical and poof! …. you’re well again!

What is hard to understand is why all these people who have been too sick to work for years and years and years are not thronging the streets and jumping for joy and punching the air and skipping about like spring lambs. I mean, come on. If you had been deemed too sick to work for fifteen years and condemned to a life of daytime TV, wouldn’t you be pretty damned cock-a-hoop if you heard that all is now well and highly trained medical staff have deemed you to be fit as a flea?

So what is the problem with these silly people? Every day they come mooching into First Base with long faces and tales of woe. The tale is usually the same. They have been signed off sick for ten years and more. They have depression. Or anxiety. Or a drink problem. Or a bad back. Or all of the above. And their GP has always agreed that work is out of the question and signed on the dotted line to confirm it. And then out come a clear blue sky cometh a letter from the DWP in London ordering them to a medical to be carried out by highly trained folks from France. And the results of the medical never vary. Sick people are miraculously cured. Wonderful. No more depression or anxiety or drink problem. All gone. All better. However, instead of being elated at their new found good health, the miraculously cured are instead morose and bitter and angry. How dare they! They gave me no points! They are saying that I am well!

Then what happens? Again, the story tends to be the same. The sick person puts in an appeal against the decision they are in fact not sick after all. Their benefits get cut whilst they count down the days to their appeal hearing. The reduced level of benefits tends to cover power but not food and so a support agency sends them along to us for a food parcel. Not many win their appeals to become sick again. Most in the know reckon a figure of about 20% is there or there abouts. And then? Another appeal. And another. One of our guys is onto his fifth. Every time his doctor is adamant that he is sick whilst the miracle cure men from France say he is in the pink.

The bottom line? To be honest the vast majority of the folk we see are more than capable of working and have been so for years. They have had a drug problem and been put on methadone. Those tasked with supporting them know full well that if they go onto Jobseekers Allowance they will miss appointments and be suspended which will mean no housing benefits and subsequent eviction. Much better to tell them to spin a line about being depressed and anxious which means they only need to get their act together to sign on the dotted line once a month. They do not have to go through the bothersome routine of applying for jobs and filling in progress forms. And best of all, they get another £30 a week or so which is incentive enough for them to make that all important monthly appointment to sign on the dotted line. Other than that, they can crack on and top up their daily dose of methadone with whatever cocktail of cider, supa-lager and valium they can afford.

We have had endless arguments with support workers about this nonsense for years. A lad goes to jail for three months, gets clean, fills out on three square meals a day and emerges clear headed and motivated to change his life around. What is the absolute best thing to make this happen? A job! A chance to make a living, meet new pals whose lives don’t revolve around the next score and a chance to regain some self respect. Instead their support workers get them signed off sick and tell them that it is for the best. And when this goes on for years and years, not surprisingly people become quite convinced that they are indeed sick and incapable of ever completing a day’s work. The prospect of not being sick is terrifying. They become hyper protective of their benefits and prescriptions. Mentally they become hard wired to feel sick, for being seen to be well is a nightmare. And if you concentrate hard enough on feeling sick, I guess you will indeed feel sick.

Now everyone is in a lather with the Government about this. We are hearing all the stuff about wicked, heartless Etonian bastards whose big dream in life is to spit roast the babies of the poor and turn them into pate. Surely the real blame lies with governments of all colours going back thirty years and more. In order to pretend they were doing a tip top job, they needed to boast about how far unemployment had fallen. So they took unemployed people, told them they were sick, bribed them with an extra £30 a week and duly signed them off. Hunky bloody dory.

Had this new miracle cure process been carried out back in 2000 when things were not so bad, things could have been very different. The French miracle workers could have told people that they were not sick after all. The newly cured would have gone onto Jobseekers, had to go through the routine of looking for work, and in most cases they would have got an actual job. Because back in 2000 there were lots of actual jobs for them to get. But instead, for the sake of lying at election time, the Government of the day preferred to keep people sick and it didn’t matter anyway because the City of London was coughing up more than enough tax to pay all the bills.

So what happened? A million East Europeans in the very rudest of health came over and filled all the jobs. Well best of luck to them, but those vacancies should never have been there for them to fill. Now there are no vacancies and the sick of 2000 have been convincing themselves of their own sickness for thirteen long years. Can they compete in the work place with some highly motivated and well educated 19 year old from Poznan? Can they hell.

What next? Well many we see will indeed cock it up once they are expected to meet the rigorous routine of the Job Centre Plus and more and more will be suspended from all benefits. And they will get evicted. And for a while we will all stump up £30 a day to keep them in homeless hostels until the Government decides it can’t afford that either. Then it will be cardboard boxes under bridges and jail when they get desperate.

You know what, when Jesus healed the poor things seemed to work out better.   

 

Say it ain't so, Joe

‘They tell us that our leader has played his trump card,

He doesn’t know how to go on.

We’re clinging to his charm and determined smile

But the good old days have done…’

 

Murray Head, ‘Say it ain’t so.’

 

These lyrics pretty well sum up how things have felt at First base over the last couple of weeks. We open the front door and tales of misery walk in and time after time I get that ‘Say it ain’t so’ feeling. Anyone who has read my blogs will be more than aware that I am hardly the greatest of patriots. However I still do retain a core belief that there is a line we British have never really crossed. Of course we have our share of corruption and dark deeds. The way the City of London will launder money for the very worst of humankind is a national disgrace. The way we offer up multi million pound mansions in Belgravia to any tin pot gangster or torturer lucky enough to have stashed a few million away in the gilded towers of Canary Wharf shows how very far we have fallen. The expenses scandal, Murdoch, BAE Systems, Iraq, Leveson, the BBC. Corruption and cover up and feathered nests.

 

Despite all this I hang on to a hope that all of this is down to immoral, greedy individuals on the take. Every society has them and we seem to have always had more from our fair share all the way from Sir Walter Raleigh to Sir Philip Green. Some call them buccaneers. Some call them chancers. Some call them out and out crooks. So long as you make a big enough pile, you get knighted and deemed a national treasure. Let’s face it, a small Island like ours doesn’t just happen to get the biggest empire the world has ever seen without playing fast and loose.

 

And yet through all the rape, pillage and plunder we managed to avoid ever going down the Robespierre, Hitler, Stalin route. Each century saw new checks and balances and slowly but surely we managed to learn how to behave better. We could easily have a done a deal back in 1940. Hitler always had a soft spot for us. He was more than happy for us to keep and expand our Empire so long as we let him have Europe to himself. If we had followed the money, the choice would have been a no brainer. Thankfully we didn’t. Thankfully we had a stubborn old bugger at the helm who saw Hitler for the arsehole he was and told him to stick his offer where the sun doesn’t shine.

 

Would we do the same now? I really would like to think so, but it is hard to be confident. The sense of basic honour and decency that once make us take a deep, collective breath and take on the Nazis seems to have evaporated. The way we are behaving now exhibits barely a trace of honesty, honour or decency.

 

The ‘Say it ain’t so, Joe’ line goes way back before Murray Head claimed the words for his song. In 1919 ‘Shoeless Joe Jackson’ was a big baseball star. He was the classic poor boy made good. A Stevie Gerrard figure. His dad was a dirt poor sharecropper from North Carolina who upped sticks and moved the family to a mill town. Joe started work at six and put in 12 hour shifts collecting fluff off the factory floor to do his bit to put food on the table. At ten he caught measles and all but died. Before pulling through, he was paralysed for two months. He never had a day at school and never learned to read and write. But could he ever hit the ball out of the park. By 1919 he was big time and kids the length and breadth of America had his picture on their wall. Then scandal erupted. Several members of the Chicago White Sox were implicated in match fixing. Joe was one of them. He was arrested, charged, taken to court and found guilty. As he emerged from his trial a young fan ran forward, utterly distraught that his hero had been revealed as a common cheat. ‘Say it ain’t so, Joe!’. Joe had nothing to say. He just walked away into the rest of his life.

The way so many are being treated at the moment makes me feel like the kid outside the court. You know it is true but you don’t want it to be true. Surely this kind of thing cannot become the norm in Britain? Or can it?

 

A case study. Let’s call the guy in question Dave in honour of our leader. Dave is unemployed. He has been unemployed for a while. For years he worked the club doors, but things slipped on the back of a bad divorce. Working the doors is a pretty good way to collect up a few enemies. Grudges are held for a ridiculous amount of time. And in August one such grudge bearer picked up the phone to the Job Centre and told them that Dave had been working on the ‘Black’. He was duly summoned to attend and told that he was suspended from all benefits until further notice. He explained that the allegation was ridiculous. One the day in question he was just out of hospital with a broken arm in plaster. He got letters from his GP and A&E to back his story up. Not good enough he was told. The onus was on him to prove that he was categorically NOT working and proof of an arm in plaster didn’t cut it. He asked if they would tell him who had reported him. No they wouldn’t. He asked if they would tell him where he was supposed to have been working. No they wouldn’t. It was down to him. Absolute proof or nothing.

He had no proof. His days are split between wandering around town and watching daytime TV. The money stopped on 24 August. His power ran out a week later. No Agency in the town could do a thing about it. He lived off the Voluntary Sector including us. He walked the streets collecting fag ends out of ashtrays in outdoor smoking areas in a polythene bag. He called in to the Job Centre time and again and when he exhibited any anger at his situation they threw him out. Suspended Job Seekers triggered a similar suspension of Housing Benefit. Which meant that no rent was paid. Which meant arrears. Which meant his Social Housing Provider went to court and asked for an eviction notice. They changed the locks whilst he was out and about collecting up dockers. When he returned to his locked home he smashed a window to get back in. There will be a price to pay at some stage.

 

Finally the Job Centre have decided he has been punished enough. They say he will be re-instated next week. Does that mean they have decided there was actually no case to answer? No comment. Will his Housing benefit be back dated? No chance. Which means he now has a debt of £700 and a broken window. He will no doubt be evicted before Christmas and stuck into a Homeless Hostel. And do doubt he will be taken to court for criminal damage for the broken window. And he’ll get fined and if he cannot make the payments he’ll probably be sent to jail

 

All because someone with a grudge made a single anonymous phone call and told a single anonymous lie. It helped someone at the Job Centre to meet their weekly target of getting three clients off benefits.

Is it true? Christ, I hope not. But every day we hear similar stories and it is hard to believe that everyone is lying. This morning I will pass this on to Russell Brown our local MP. I will ask him if he might be willing to contact the Job Centre and ask for a clear list of reasons why people get suspended. Legal reasons. And once we have that list we will be able to advise people if they have a leg to stand on. Or not. And I really, really hope that this new rule of ‘Guilty until proven innocent’ is not in fact carved in stone. I really, really hope that it is the work of a few cavalier individuals looking to hit their targets and protect their jobs rather than actual written down policy. Because if it is indeed actual written down policy, then it is hard to accept. Britain isn’t supposed to be like this.

 

‘Say it ain’t so, Joe.’     

 

 

The Fascists are on the pavement and the the dogs are on the roof

 

Rooftop space is a big deal in Athens. And balconies. And there’s nothing special about that of course. The same thing goes in most countries where the summer months mean long hours of burning heat. A rooftop is a place to retreat to in the early evening with a long cold drink. A place to watch the sky turn all colours from burning blue to blood red to soft black. And course it is the place to catch the faintest of breezes after a day of pavement cracking heat.

Our place in Athens was perched high on a steep hill and the view from the roof was enough to take the breath away. The city spread out in all directions, a densely packed sprawl of shining white buildings which climbed up through the valleys of the surrounding hills. Stunning, spectacular, scenic; all those view describing words beginning with the letter ‘S’.

But Athens had one rooftop feature that was a first for us.

Dogs.

Lots and lots of dogs. The city is home to hundreds of thousands of them. Some are ultra pampered and the pet sections in the supermarkets are made up of many shelves. Others are of the mangy mutt variety; the skinny strays who compete with the African refugees for anything edible in the over flowing bins. With so many dogs in such a tightly packed space the pavements offer a constant challenge. If you walk the cracked Athenian sidewalks with your head held high your shoes will be in a dire state after fifty yards.

The rooftop dogs spend their days lazily prowling their space. They take an occasional slurp of water from a silver dish. Sometimes they crash out in a shadow. Other times they retire into their rooftop kennel for a more serious kip. Every now and then they will exchange barked conversations with fellow rooftop dogs and from time to time these exchanges hit an enthusiastic pitch and the barking spreads across the neighbourhood.

One day I was sitting out reading and the sky started to turn angry. White clouds became grey clouds became black clouds. All of a sudden the mountains on the horizon were no longer there and slowly but surely the outer neighbourhoods were swallowed by the dark clouds.

Fierce forks of lightening slammed down on the suburbs in much the same vindictive way that Hitler’s Stukkas had once upon a time softened up the city for the jack booted entry of the strutting ranks of the Wehrmacht.

Anyone not watching the scene would have soon been alerted as the rooftop dogs started to howl at the approaching storm. And as the storm drew nearer, the dogs relayed the message with doleful howls. If you were getting ready to head out and your heard those howls you would be fool to leave your coat on the hook by the door.

Many in Athens are convinced that there is another storm on the way and they are trying to howl out a warning. It is a storm that the city has known several times in the past. Way back when in the days of togas and philosophy and stabbing spears, the government took a lurch to the right and cracked down on new liberal ideas. Socrates was deemed to be the problem and he decided to opt for suicide rather than execution. In the forties Greece was part of a big European club of countries who had Fascism pushed down their throats by the Nazi jackboot. The cancer returned in 1967 when the generals seized power and clamped down for seven years.

Now whenever you fall into a conversation with an Athenian is seems that there is an inevitability about the course that it will take. This isn’t a place where a chat tends to end in football. Instead they say that they have that Germany in the early thirties feeling. And to be honest history makes it easy to see why. Unemployment is over 25% in general and north of 70% for young people. Every week sees another 1000 join the list. Dole has been cut and it only lasts for a year. Then nothing. Nada. Zip. And there are not many who think there is a cat in hell’s chance of finding a job in a year. The shops are closing down one by one and people with rusting shopping trolleys wander the streets and root through bins. Anyone with any money is salting it out of the country in case it should be rendered worthless by a forced return to the Drachma. The super rich are getting out of Dodge as fast as they can and doing their bit to drive up the price of property in Mayfair and Belgravia.

Most consider the Government to be complete joke and it isn’t hard to see why. It is a sickly coalition riddled with corruption that in every way apes the bickering Parliaments of Weimar Germany that Hitler was able to shut down with such arrogant ease.

The state is withering on the vine. We visited a magnificent emergency food project where a bunch of volunteers were by hook or by crook managing to feed a hundred and fifty people a day. One of the volunteers had once upon a time been seconded to the project by the Health Board. Then they just stopped paying her. No letters. No redundancy. No appointment with a sombre line manager. Just no pay at the end of the month with no explanation. She still turns out twice a week as a volunteer. Her brother had been a big success in the boom years. He ran a hip club and drove a Merc. It’s all gone now and he lives of his mum’s pension: a pension that gets cut by 20% every three months of so.

The country is held together by strings and one by one they are fraying and snapping. The rich are leaving, the middle classes are being eroded and the poor are just plain screwed.

So, yeah. It has that last days of the Weimar Republic feel to it. The opinion polls show that with every passing week public support for the Golden Dawn party eases up and up. Golden Dawn. How quintessentially fascist are those two words! They put you in mind of those heroic posters that Hitler was so fond of. You know the kind of thing. Heroic looking blond men and women with determined faces and bulging, bronzed muscles all eager and ready to gather in the harvest and breed kids for the Fatherland.

Golden Dawn are up to 14% in the polls now and their message is hardly subtle. Things are crap and it’s all down to the immigrants. They don’t bother trying to put on any kind of gloss of respectability. They just say it like it is. Most wannabe Fascists in modern Europe at least make an effort to pretend that they are vaguely moderate in their hate. Marine Le Pen in France played the power dressed lawyer act and it was convincing enough to get her over 20% in the Presidential election. Even our own beloved BNP do all they can to claim they are more reasonable than the press tries to pretend.

Golden Dawn have no time for such subtlety. They want mine fields along the border with Turkey to blow up illegals before they get the chance to reach Greek soil. They advocate sticking every one of the millions of refugees on planes and flying them back to whence they came. And if starvation, torture and death await them in their homeland, then so be it.

If you want the services of a Golden Dawn stormtrooper for what ever reason, you can hire him in for 1.80 Euros an hour. He’ll no doubt get more than that. The party makes up the balance from their war chest. Who fills the war chest? Who knows, but it isn’t all that hard to guess. Many of those who filled their boots during their good times are no doubt a tad twitchy about things at the moment. If you have a million pound house up a leafy cul de sac and you haven’t paid a penny of tax for years, you are probably feeling a little vulnerable at the moment. It is a time when many in high tax dodging places probably feel the need for friends in low places. A nice cheque to the good old boys at Golden Dawn gets you a few goons at the front gate at 1.80 Euros an hour. It must be tempting to many who have happily sucked the country dry over the last few years.

History tells us that Fascism thrives when the State has all but given up the ghost. Almost everyone we met told us that there is no Government any more. There is a big fat vacuum that offers a perfect breeding ground for the headbangers of the right. What is left of the State seems to have little appetite to take them on. In the last elections Golden Dawn polled at its strongest in the areas immediately around major police stations. Nothing new there then. Instead of taking on the Fascists, what is left of the State seems to be using its energy to hammer down on anyone being too loud in their criticism of the austerity measures. Two years ago, before she became head of the IMF, Christine Legarde sent the Greek Government a list of 2000 citizens who had cash stashed away in a Zurich bank. She suggested they might look into the list and send out a few tax demands. Successive ministers managed to mislay and forget the list until a freelance journalist who has recently set up his own magazine decided to publish. My goodness me that got the engine of the State running at full revs. He was arrested and charged in days and spent a weekend in custody. In the end the charges were so laughable that they were thrown out, but the whole dismal episode showed where the government’s loyalties lay. Who was on the list? The usual suspects – politicians, big businessmen and gangsters. Oh, and their wives.

Twitter worked at its absolute best for us whilst we were in Athens. I tweeted an activist and freelancer who is at the forefront of the anti austerity campaign. I asked if we might meet up to find out what is happening and to get an intro to a food project. A reply fizzed in straight away. Sure. No problem. There would have been no way of making such a meet happen a few years ago. No wonder Fascists and dictators hate Twitter with such a visceral passion.

So we met and she proved to be a very impressive individual, if a little shaken. Golden Dawn ring her regularly to threaten all sorts of nasty stuff: as often as not it is her mum who picks up the phone. The day we met, she told of how as she was writing an e mail that afternoon, the lines on the computer disappeared as fast as she could type them. No matter how she tried, she could not seem to register as a follower of my Twitter site. She wondered if I would be flagged up on any shared MI5 lists? God knows. Probably. To cap it all her mobile phone was behaving in a distinctly peculiar fashion.

So there it was. A story that would seem so familiar to any well meaning liberal who tried to stem the Nazi Behemoth back in the late 20’s and early 30’s. They failed of course, and those who had spoken out against the brownshirts got beaten to a pulp in Buchenwald and Dachau. That is when you know a real storm is a coming. It is when the State, the gangsters, big business and the pavement Fascists start to work together. Try to shine a light on it, and you get locked up at best and beaten black and blue at worst.

We like to think it could never happen again. Maybe it can’t. Maybe it won’t. But when you hear those rooftop dogs start to howl, it is worth looking out of the window to see if a storm is on the way.

And they are howling right now.    

 

The centre cannot hold.

 

We take a Saturday afternoon stroll from our apartment up on the hill all the way down to the centre of the city. After a decent number of years on the planet you get hard wired as to how such a journey should play out. The edge of town is leafy and quiet. And as you are drawn to the centre, the pavements fill and the traffic thickens. Shops get bigger. Crowds form. You need to wait for the green man to cross the road. It’s the old hustle and bustle thing.

Well it is most of the time.

Other times the hustle and the bustle is little more than a faded memory. Nostalgic black and white photos on the walls of pubs where twenty years of nicotine lines the ceiling. As you walk down the hill to downtown Athens nothing gets busier. Sure, few years ago the shops would have indeed been bigger. Now they are simply buildings with bigger sheets of plywood making a home for graffiti. The traffic thins and you have to pinch yourself and make a conscious effort to realise that it is four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon.

After a while even the shops that are not closed forever are closed for the day. A few kebab joints. A few lost souls standing out smoking and gazing into space outside their few square feet of customer free retail space given over to cigarettes and fridges of coke and magazines and bizarre plastic toys from China.

Waiters sit at the tables outside cafes and smoke and wait to wait on. For how long? Will there be any kind of an evening rush? It seems hard to believe there will.

Down and ever further in. Lots of rubbish now. Rubbish stacked in alleyways. Rubbish bursting free of metal wheelie bins. Rubbish blowing in and out of the gutters on a lonely wind.

People on pavements with eyes cast down to the cracks. Some with all their worldly goods in cheap plastic bags. Others with bin liners filled with collected empty drinks cans. Most have the lost air of people far, far away from anything resembling home. A piazza of graffiti and cracked concrete. Plants growing out of the gutters. Boarded shops staring at each other. And a group sitting on concrete ledge that would be at home on the wrong side of town all the way from Toronto to Glasgow to Sydney. Empty cans and bottles and eye sockets. Shared fags. Charity shop clothes hanging off coat hanger thin bones. And the zoned out empty stares of those under the thrall of badly cut opiates.

Ah. We’re in that part of town. The part the landlord had told us to avoid at night at all costs because when you have 4 million illegal immigrants looking for their next meal you get crime and prostitution and way too many dark corners.

By now the only shops open are Asian owned. They nestle in clusters of two or three on corners well on the way to being derelict. Suitcases for fifteen euros a pop. And faces that look like they haven’t cracked a smile since 1975. Carol is a problem to them. For Carol is black and right now being black in downtown Athens means that every Asian shopkeeper assumes that you are there to rob them blind. If she is on her own do they tell her to take a hike? Maybe. Probably. But I complicate things. And when we converse with each other in English it complicates things. And when she buys a scarf it complicates things.

Onwards and downwards. And where the hell is the city centre? Is this in fact the city centre? And above the peeling walls the sky is easing from grey into the blackness of night. And sometimes when people warn you not to be out and about after nightfall you take their words with a pinch of salt. But other times there is a hard to define sense of threat that hangs in the air that makes such warnings seem a smart play.

Now one every other corner there are parked police cars but barely a person to police. Just a few passing cars and buses and fleeting shadow people. Six o clock on a Saturday night in October and the wind is softly moaning up and down the litter strewn alleyways.

Time to rest the legs. A thin yellow light leaks out from the window of a small café down a side street. And people. Not many, but some. A sign of life. Twos and threes around old tables that won’t sit straight on the uneven pavement.

Two expressos ordered and delivered. And the other guests are looking us over with detached interest. Black woman. White man. English voices. What are you doing here on a greying Saturday evening? The men have that air about them. A certain style of clothing. A certain way with their hair. An amused hardness of the eye. Glasses of local brandy. Ash trays overflowing with filterless fag ends. Not worried to look you over.

Familiar somehow. And once we pay and leave a last look back explains the familiarity.

Balkan Café.

News reels from the 90’s. Sarajevo and Bihac and Vukovar. The same effortlessly hard eyes and casual way of carrying themselves.

And suddenly we are in a street that is bursting with life. The cafes are open and there is light everywhere. A bus terminal is like a film set. Coaches here, there and everywhere and the pavements are crowded. And the cafes are crowded. And the line of travel agents are crowded. And every garish advert speaks of the same service. For here is the place where you get the bus to Tirana. Here is the place to find a little piece of Albania in the dead heart of Athens.

And by now the guys are more obvious. Lean and mean and designer clad with eyes like big cats. Putting people on the bus to Tirana who aren’t wanted any more. Collecting people from the bus from Tirana who have a purpose to serve. The air is filled with the smell of cigarettes you can only buy in Eastern Europe. What is it with the gangsters of the East? They love to play it large in their western designer clothes and cars, but they can never give up the superstrong filterless fags of their youth. They have to make room for us as we walk by. The white man and the black woman. Who are they? What are they doing here? One of those moments when that spot between your shoulder blades seems to itch. We’re through and past and away but all of a sudden the road ahead is industrial and emptier than empty.

A U turn. A second journey through the ranks of Albania’s finest. And Carol is shown money by a boss man clad in a spanking new Arran jumper. She is black so she must be for sale. I am middle aged and white and have a greying pony tail so I must be a pimp. It is black and white in every respect. Carol doesn’t know ho much? She only gives the note in his hand the briefest of glances. Her gut feeling is that it is five euros. The value of a life on the streets of the city centre: as measured through the hard, hard eyes of a gangster from Tirana.

In his Arran jumper.

We say nothing. We walk on. They have a laugh and refocus on the next bus.

A drink and a cab back up the hill. Downtown Athens at seven o clock in the evening. It is well on the way to becoming another Detroit. A Brooklyn. A Mogadishu? Surely not. But the shops are closed forever and the only people left are the gangsters and the desperate.

‘Things fall apart.

The centre cannot hold……’

In this land of broken dreams.

 

As the plane eased down to the tarmac of Athens airport I guess most of the non Greek passengers would have been thinking the same thoughts. So what is it going to look like? The Athens of the news has been all about petrol bombs bouncing and skidding along the road making riot police hop and jump. Clouds of tear gas. Eyes streaming tears. Scarves wrapped around faces. Burning Nazi flags. Blazing graffiti. But of course the news always focuses on edited highlights. On the news Athens seems on the verge of being the next Beirut. How would it be in real time? Well for us it looks like picture which is the view from the terrace of our hillside apartment. And hell, this is what Athens really should like, for when all is said and done this as the cradle of democracy. So the gleaming, sparking city of white marble sweeping up and down sun baked valleys under a blue, blue sky is absolutely on message.

One day in and it has to be said that on the surface everything seems remarkably normal. I have yet to see a riot policeman and the air is filled with the aroma of kebabs, not tear gas. Sure there are many, many boarded up shops but not as many as Dumfries High St.

As is so often the case it is the little things that give the game away. Over the last couple of years it has been more and more common to see people stoop down to collect a cigarette end from the Dumfries pavement: if there are a couple of last draws to be had out of it. The body language is still all about embarrassment. The picker up will cast a quick look about to check if anyone is watching. Then they will be up and down and moving away in quick, edgy steps. Picking up a fag end is still a thing to be embarrassed about. They have gone past that stage here. If you sit out at a table in a pavement café you will not have to sit for very long until you see someone stop and reach down for a fag end. There is no subterfuge. No nervous haste. They simply pick it up, brush it down and light it up. On maybe salt it away in a breast pocket for later on. There is no reason to feel embarrassed any more. Everyone knows that everyone else is flat broke. It has become the norm.

The supermarket offers a similar set of undramatic clues. Pink Floyd took Henry Thoreau’s words and came up with the line ‘hanging on in quiet desperation is the Engish way’ and yours truly has followed suit and half inched his words as the title of my latest book which will be available on Kindle in the next day or two. Plug, plug! Well a Greek supermarket is indeed very much a place of quiet desperation. You can just feel it. You see it in the way that it takes punters forever to put four items in a basket. They are weighing what to put in and what to take out and how the hell to make it add up to about 75p. And when they reach the checkout they pay in coppers. And there is something unspoken about the whole thing. No pleasantries from the checkout assistant. No small talk from the shopper. Heads are kept down. Meagre supplies are stowed away in a shopping bag which leaves the store seemingly as empty as when it came in. Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves. But for many here, there are no pounds any more. The day to day economy is all down to pennies. Counted pennies. Pennies which are not remotely enough. Quiet desperation.

Time in a pavement café people watching. An endless steam of young black guys walking from here to there and back again. Sometimes talking. Mostly not. For what is there to say? They have shelled out their $5000 dollars to be people trafficked to the dream of Europe only to find themselves marooned and hated. Then there are the mothers with their wide eyed young kids. Every worldly possession is contained by a couple of cheap PVC bags from China. Maybe they are walking. Maybe they are sitting. Maybe there is a husband looking for the price of a meal. Maybe not. They are off the map. Statistics to be resented. The stats boggle the mind. The are 10 million Greeks here. And 4 million illegal trafficked immigrants. It is equivalent to about 20 million illegals in the UK. These are people with not a penny to their name, not a prayer of work and nowhere to sleep but a park. Not surprisingly many are driven to crime to come up with the next meal. And the more crime they commit, the more they are hated by the locals who resent the fact that geography has deemed that Greece is the first stop for many of the world’s most desperate. And sure as eggs are eggs, the whole thing is a recipe for the head bangers of the far right to have a field day. The blatantly Nazi Golden Dawn party got 15% in the last election. They even have party shops where wannabe Nazis can pick up their balaclavas and baseball bats to prepare for a good old night’s fun clearing the parks of sleeping illegals. But that is the news. As yet there are no Golden Dawn stormtroopers goose-stepping their way up and down the narrow streets of gleaming white buildings. All you see is the endless procession of slowly walking young black men. Walking and walking and walking and never arriving anywhere. Stuck. No way forward and no way back and everyone just knows that things are only going to get worse.

Most people speak pretty good English here and they all want to tell you what a nightmare everything is. ‘Where are you from?’ asked the bloke in a sun glasses shop. I told him and he shook his head and gave me a rueful smile. He told me never to forget how lucky I am because I live in a country where there is no Euro. I got the feeling that he hadn’t sold a thing for days. The shop had an end of the line feel to it. Meagre stocks were stretched thin. He had a couple of pals sitting with him. They were meandering though the empty hours. I doubt if he had been able to pay any rent for a while. And every morning he must have been tempted to say stuff it, I ain’t going in today. What’s the point? I will just sit there all day and sell nothing because nobody has any money any more. Well not for sunglasses. All they have is a few coppers for four items in the supermarket. But if not the shop, then what and where? Another day watching TV at home all day? And maybe, just maybe someone might call in to buy something. A long shot, but what else is there? And all that is left is a small collection of goods to try and turn into cash before the bailiffs come to change the locks and board up the windows. Quiet desperation.

Youth unemployment has passed the 60% mark here. If you factored in the 4 million illegals, it would be up in the 90’s. Which quite frankly beggars belief. At the moment it means endless thousands of young people walking up and down streets where more and more widows are boarded up. And when they scoop up a fag end and light it up, they do so without a trace of unease. And later they will be fed by a grandmother who has made the pennies of her pension stretch to an ultra plain meal of starch and little else.

The new book is Quiet Desperation.

The last book was Mere Anarchy.

The question is when does one title become another?

Will the dismal bleakness of the Jimmy Savile revelations get us any closer to the real truth of sex abuse and its legacy? Doubtful. Very doubtful.

 

Over the coming weeks and months and probably years we are all going to wail and gnash our teeth as the Savile scandal plays out. How could we not? It’s going to be another Hillsborough, except that this particular cover up spanned half a century as opposed to a mere 23 years. At Hillsborough 50,000 of us saw the whole thing play out in front of our eyes and then we saw the authorities tell a completely different story. And for 23 years we basically kept on and on saying ‘That’s not right! That’s total shite!’ But we were merely little people and the powers that be laughed their socks off at the lot of us. It isn’t hard to see how many parallels are about to appear as we are taken deeper and deeper into Savile’s depraved world. I would happily bet on the fact that the ongoing enquiry will throw up a pile of evidence that will show that any number of people have in fact stepped forward to report what was going down over rhe last half century. But they, like the 50,000 of us at Hillsborough, will turn out to be the kind of little people nobody ever wants to hear. Not when the truth we have to tell is of the inconvenient variety. Not when the truth offers a clear and present danger to the big people and their treasured pension funds

On the subject of which….

Norman Bettison was one of the cover up kings at Hillsborough.

Norman Bettison was promoted to be a Chief Constable – OF MERSEYSIDE!

Norman Bettison was made SIR Norman Bettison.

And now that the truth has been prised out and it has become clear that he is a conniving, scheming, conspiring, amoral, stop at nothing twat, he is trying to retire early so he can wriggle himself clear of the consequences.

He must have Googled ‘Fred the Shred’…

Retire.

Duck out

And get paid £88,000 a year for the rest of his disgusting life.

£88,000 a year from the people of Merseyside.

It is all so utterly, completely, rotten, stinking bad to the core that it makes you want to tear your teeth out. Oh, and by the way. £88,000 doesn’t represent the whole of his pension. The good folk of South and West Yorkshire are also chipping in to get him up to the £200,000 a year mark.

There will be a whole host of names we haven’t heard about yet who will be fingered over the coming months as we get to the bottom of just what a horrible bastard Jimmy Savile really was. It will be Sir this and OBE that. Good old boys who were deemed to offer a safe pair of hands. Salt of the earth types schooled in the age old art of sweeping under the carpet and smoothing over. Of course they didn’t want one of the BBC’s ‘National Treasures’ to be unveiled as a serial sex offender. You don’t get the OBE and the gong and the six figure tax payer pension when that kind of nastiness gets shovelled into the public view on your watch. No way Hose. So you make sure the voices of the inconvenient little people get shut down.

Shut right down.

The tabloids of course will love every second and revel in the utter horribleness of it all. The fact that these were the very same tabloids who threw down the red carpet to good old Jimmy is neither here nor there. The world moves on, and a favourite Celeb becomes much better box office as a piece of 'Paedo Scum Celeb!' (i.e. Headline - not me) as far as those magnificent men at the redtops are concerned.

Usually when one sex offender emerges from any institution of the 70’s and 80’s, it means that many more will inevitably follow. It was the case with the Boy Scouts and Childrens’ Homes and the Catholic Church. Probably Light Entertainment is about to be next in line. And no doubt there will be more much loved National Treasures who will emerge as something entirely different. We will revisit the issue of taking away knighthoods and OBE’s and those who manage the charitable legacies of these tainted legends will wish they had never volunteered for the job. But the Bettisons of this world will no doubt slip quietly through the net. There will of course be calls for their gold plated pensions to be taken away. And there will of course be politicians with their faces creased with concern telling us that the law is the law and we don’t do that sort of thing here in Britain. So we will continue to pay Fred the Shred his £700k a year. And Bettison his £200k a year. A the right honourable whoever who happened to shove the Savile complaints to the back of his filing cabinets back in 1976 his however much a year.

And grouse will still get shot on windswept moors and Pimms will still be slugged down at Henley and strawberries and cream will still fly off the shelves at a tenner a pop at Wimbledom.

Because in the end this is Great Britain and once you are admitted to the club you get to stay in the club. And the little people who try to tell the inconvenient truth will be forever hushed up.

The Jimmy Savile saga will play loud and long and the focus of media attention will be on predatory sex offenders who look a bit weird. And once again we will miss the real story because the real story is so ugly and nasty that hardly anyone ever wants to look at it.

At the First Base Agency we have little choice but to look at the real story. Why? Because we are a drug agency, that’s why. Before we opened our doors back in 2003 someone told me that 70% of those among us who have become dependent on heroin will have suffered some sort of abuse as kids. Surely not. 70% has to be an exaggeration, doesn't it? But it isn’t an exaggeration. It is another of those nasty, inconvenient truths. It is the sad and sorry career path of many a lost soul who discover the ever warm embrace of heroin. At eight they get abused by someone in the house who threatens to kill should they whisper a word about it. Or kill their mum. Or kill their little sister. Or kill their dog. And if they do tell their mum, their mum whacks them one and tells them to stop lying. So they bottle it up and bite their lip and suffer night after night of degradation until they are old enough for the abuser to lose interest in them. And the boiling shame, anger and despair they feel inside shows itself to the world in the form of anti-social behaviour at school and out on the street. They get thrown out of lessons and fall behind in their work. And they fall in with others who have been thrown out of lessons. And they play truant together. And they steal booze and swig it down in parks together. And they try street valium together. And they burn wheelie bins together. And they rob shops together. And they serve time in Young Offenders Prisons together. And they are bounced from hostel to hostel together. And they in the end find the only thing that takes away the nightmares about what happened when they were eight years old and their mum would have none of it.

It’s a well trodden path believe me. The long and winding road from the hell of abuse to the heaven of Smack.

And not many get abused by weird looking national treasures who strut their stuff on Top of the Tops. And not many are lifted from the playground in the park by weird looking types offering sweeties and a ride in the nice car for fish and chips. Instead the vast majority are abused by someone who lives in the house where they live. A father or a stepfather or some bloke their mum tells them to call uncle or an older stepbrother or a grandfather. It’s bleak and it’s ugly and it’s the way it almost always plays out.

Inconvenient truth. Ugly truth.

The real ugly truth is that among us there always have been and always will be some who crave the chance of taking their sexual pleasure with kids. At times this is deemed to be OK. In the days of the Roman Empire, having grown women as wives were deemed a dreary necessity to produce kids. Real pleasure was to be had from pre teen slave boys and girls. Mostly boys. Three or four hundred years ago in Britain it was considered perfectly right and proper for a man to marry an eleven year old. In India right here and right now, over 200,000 kids are abducted from the streets every year. No prizes for guessing how the organised criminal gangs who manage the abductions make their cash from the little girls.

The laws of our land have changed over the years and thank God for that. It has become harder and harder for the Jimmy Saviles among us to get their kicks following traditional methods. They have had to change their ways. Their Modus Operandi. Forty years ago, there were a number of career paths open to those who wanted access to vulnerable young people who nobody would listen to. Become a scout master. Work in a Childrens’ Home. Take your vows and become a Catholic priest. Light entertainment at the Beeb? Maybe.

One by one, we have managed to close these windows of opportunity. Thank Christ. Back in those dark days, an abuser’s own family offered a poor option. An abuser could take a wife, have kids and abuse those kids. But it wasn’t all that easy. Families were closer knit back then. Uncles and Aunties and Grandparents all lived in the streets nearby. There were more people for a young person to tell. People who loved them. People who were inclined to believe them. People willing to make sure things were nipped in the bud. And even if the abuser got away with it with their own kids, eventually their own kids would grow up. And that was that. Because marriages lasted for life back then. That’s why the Childrens’ Homes and the Catholic Church and the Scout groups made offered a more attractive option.

So where are we now? Well things have changed. Changed utterly, as Yeats once said. Now barely one in three marriages lasts the course. Online dating sites offer potential abusers literally millions of single mothers of one or two or three. And they have perfected the art of being Mr really, really nice who is ever so good with the kids. And they get asked to move in. And they move in. And the kids are asked to call the new guy uncle this or uncle that. And when they have taken the opportunity to use and abuse the kids on offer, they simply move out, log on and start over. Are there as many people to tell? No. Families are no longer nearly as close, either emotionally or geographically. And as a society, our leaders have encouraged us to despise the single mother with three out of control kids and forty fags a day and tattoos everywhere and a 42 inch widescreen TV and an ever open door for any bloke down the pub who will ply her with Blue Wicked all Friday night. Do we listen? Will we listen? Of course we don’t. We make Schemie jokes and Chav jokes and we silently cheer when George Osborne promises to come down on the spongers and the dissolute like a tonne of bricks.

The inconvenient truth.

Our miserable excuse of a society has become a veritable playground for the abusers who are forever among us. No longer do they have to go to the trouble of getting a job in a dismal Childrens Home or studying theology or learning the words of Ging-Gang-Gooligong. Not necessary. Now they simply have to log on. Play nice and find a single mum with no support network. And when they are done with that one, they can log back on and find another.

And will anyone listen? Of course we won’t. We’ll read about Jimmy Savile instead   

 

Are we becoming East Germany?

 

It is odd to think that neither of my sons has any conception of East Germany. When the whole rotten house of cards fell apart back in 1989, one was three and one wasn’t born yet. It was of course a bizarre, brief invention of a country born out of the catastrophe of 1945. The borders were haggled out at Yalta when Uncle Joe Stalin stamped his feet and threw his tantrums whilst Churchill took him on in a drinking contest and more or less got a draw.

A quarter of the Germans who were left alive were earmarked for the new communist version of Germany whilst twice their number were to become model capitalists. Once the Americans and Russians fell out and started aiming their nuclear missiles at each other, both Germany’s became case studies. The Americans poured in cash to prove that the wonders of capitalism could help a bombed-flat basket case to become a thriving, productive democracy in less than twenty years. On the other side of the fence, the hard faced men of the Kremlin followed a similar path and were hell bent on showing the world how a bombed-flat basket case could be transformed into a Socialist Paradise.

I was only three when Kennedy and Kruschev took us to the brink of the End of Days in 1963, but I grew up with the legacy. Throughout my childhood, East Germany was always there as a kind of half seen Mordor of a place. East Germany meant the border: the fence: the very edge of Western Civilisation. Beyond lay a place of tyranny, and crumbling concrete tower blocks and smoke belching factories. We were sometimes reminded that our soldiers were stationed by this particular fence and should the men in the Kremlin ever decide to let their thousands upon thousands of tanks roll west, then the average life span of a British infantryman would be measured in minutes. I remember days in my 70’s class room where the walls hadn’t been painted for years and the desks still carried carved names from the 40’s. We would be heads down in our books of logarithms when the dismal howl of the air raid sirens would come up the hill and into the classroom from the town centre in the valley floor. Teachers would give us a sort of wincing smile and assure us that it was merely a practice. A test. And each of us would quietly consider the Government adverts that were on the tele from time to time instructing us what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. Get under a table. Get God.

The word was that Crewe was target three on the Kremlin nuke list. The logic was that American reinforcements would get off the boat in Liverpool and jump on a train down to Dover. And all trains went through Crewe. Nuke Crewe and the Marines were going nowhere fast. Nuke Crewe and Blackburn would feel the blast. So get under a table. Get God.

East Germany strutted its stuff in the 70’s, mainly at the Olympic games. I was 12 when the Munich Olympics played out on our newly rented colour tele. ‘Great service you get renting your colour set from Granada!’ Jingles last forever whilst memories fade. My memory of those Olympics, apart from the carnage at the airport, was of Renate Stecher. She was the East German sprinter who blasted her way to gold in the 100 and 200 metres. And she was some woman with shoulders like a docker and legs to match. She probably needed to shave at least twice a day. The fact that Stecher and the rest of the East German women were so weirdly transformed by steroids was an open secret. It only deepened the whole Mordor thing. What kind of evil regime could create such mutant humans merely to win a few medals?

Later in the years after the Wall crashed the truth emerged. As early as 1960 it was abundantly clear that the new Socialist Paradise was an economic basket case. The people unlucky enough to live there knew that only to well and they were voting with their feet and walking into the West. There was a quick fix to that one – build a bloody great wall, and in 1961 that is exactly what they did. But how can an economic basket case use its meagre resources to cut a dash on the world stage? The communist bosses came up with a canny answer. They stopped splashing the cash on weapons and instead spent heavily on pumping steroids into their athletes to ensure that they punched above their weight on the world stage of the Olympics.

1972 was always going to be a big deal for both Germanys as they strived to be top dog. In the end it was a close run thing. The fifty million West Germans won 10 golds whilst the twenty million East Germans won 13. The steroids came through. By 76 the race wasn’t even close. Stecher and the steroid girls and boys grabbed 40 golds whilst the Wessies once again only managed 10. We by the way got a mere 3. But we never felt envious of the Socialist Paradise that could chemically engineer these deformed looking uber-athletes. Instead we were scared by the totalitarianism of it all. Here were people who would stop at nothing. No wonder the average life of a British Para up by the fence was expected to be about three minutes in the event of World War 3. Mordor.

By the time I was in my early twenties curiosity replaced fear, and along with a couple of pals I took my old VW Beetle east for a first hand look. It was some learning curve. We crossed the line at a small border post somewhere in Thuringia. Memories are a bit blurred. I recall a cheap night ferry and a long drive down the autobahns in the wee small hours. Cassettes of the Clash and The Specials and The Doors. It was winter and stars sparkled down onto snow covered fields. We stopped at dawn in the last village in the West where a just open newsagents sold fresh bread, cheese and sausage. The village was like the cover of a chocolate box, all timbered houses and smoother than smooth roads. For those of us used to the litter and pot holes of recession Britain, it seemed a world apart. Those were the days when everyone who returned home from a visit to West Germany would bore everyone to death with stories of super neat, litter-free streets. Every car seemed to be a Merc or and Audi and every car was brand new and shiny clean. That early morning Thuringian village oozed an easy wealth that was alien us children of Thatcher in our beat up Beetle.

Then it was down the hill to the border crossing in the valley floor. And the fence. It emerged from the morning mist. Watch towers and electric wire. The West German guy in the hut was middle aged and uncle like. He had a big warm smile and hoped we would enjoy our time in the East. He was being ironic. Then it was a slow drive across No Mans land to the land where nobody seemed to smile: ever.

They made us stand outside and shiver for twe hours whilst they took the car apart. How long you stay? Four days. Which meant we had to exchange four days of money. I don’t remember how many East German marks we got for our pounds. I recall we got ten times more a day later when we did a black market deal with a guy in a battered leather cap in a Leipzig back street. By the time I returned a couple of years later I had learned the Border drill. The dance. The trick was to leave a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label on top of the bag in your car boot. When the border guard opened the boot, he would take a look and the bottle and then he would look at you. You would give him a small nod and he would stash the bottle and send you on your way. Five minutes to cross instead of two hours. But no smile.

At last we drove up the hill and into the first village of the East. Where the West German village was chocolate box, its East German neighbour was a Channel 4 documentary. More pot holes than tarmac. Rusty old Trabants belching early morning black smoke from noisy exhausts. Dismal high rise blocks built from festering, crumbling concrete. A sad queue outside a closed shop. Welcome to the East. Welcome to the Socialist Paradise. Welocme to the land of Renate Stecher.

It made Toxteth look like a village in the Cotswalds. The place was falling to bits. The place was a basket case. I remember thinking that in 1945 both villages which were basically about half a mile apart would have been identical twins. There were no prizes for guessing which system had worked best. The Worker’s Paradise was the grimmest, greyest place I had ever seen.

Four days was plenty. The money we changed on the Black turned out to be more or less unspendable. Beer worked out at under a penny a litre. In the end we found an old hotel in the centre of Leipzig that must have been five stars and then some in the days before Hitler took his people to hell. It was still trying in a faded glory sort of way. We ordered bottle after bottle of Russian champagne until we could barely walk and in the end we gave up trying to spend all the cash and passed wedge of notes to the old waiter as a tip. He didn’t smile. Had we given him a five dollar bill he might have managed a smile. Nobody wanted Ossie Marks. Everyone craved dollars. No wonder they had to build a wall.

And once that very same wall came down, the dismal truth of East Germany came out. It was a nation of nasty little beaurocrats who would gladly shop their fellow citizen’s to keep their meagre little privileges. These were the grey people who would happily consign someone to a few months in a labour camp to get themselves bumped up the queue for a new Trabant car. It emerged that out of a population of twenty million, at least two million were working as informers for the Stasi, the secret police of cheap suits and plastic briefcases. The Nazis created beaurocrats of demonic efficiency who ran a railroad that freighted 5 million souls to the gas chambers of Poland. East German beaurocrats were meaner. More petty. Nasty, nasty little people who did the bidding of a nasty, nasty little State for a new car; a holiday on the Baltic coast: a television. No wonder they had to build a wall.

And so to the title of this particular ramble. Are we becoming East Germany? What a ridiculous notion. Or is it? Have you noticed how many pot holes are appearing in the roads? Have you noticed how shabby all the buildings are beginning to look? And then there were the Olympics of course. These days Germans build all the cars and machines for the whole world and they won 12 golds. We build just about nothing, but we piled ten billion quid we managed to borrow from China into trying to maintain the myth of Britain. And hip, hip hurrah, we won 29 golds! So all must be well in the garden! It feels uncomfortably like the way Stecher an Co were hailed as heroes by Eric Honeker and his merry men back in 1976.

And then we get to the issue of nasty, petty beaurocrats. The public sector has become consumed by an all pervading climate of fear. Hang onto that job and you keep your house and car and bi-annual holiday and wine with your evening meal and a pension to die for. (What an oxymoron that statement is!) Lose your job and it’s negative equity, the bus, the Tesco Market Value Range and the scrapheap. And in every Government office in the land, everyone looks at everyone else and wonders who’s going to be cut next. So when Job Centre Plus workers are tasked with getting three clients a week off the dole, they attack the task with the same dreary zeal as their East German counterparts exhibited all those years ago. And every day we get the stories as newly beaten people come in for food parcels and share the stories of how they have been suspended; hung out to dry: rendered penniless and dependent on charities for their daily bread.

Here is the case of a couple from this week that made me wonder if we really are becoming East Germany. She is 26 and she needed a place to live. Well, we all need that. For her there was a sense of urgency for she is four and a half months pregnant. Social housing meant too long a wait so she sought out a private let. The only one she could find had two bedrooms and a shared bathroom, kitchen and lounge. I should have mentioned that she has no job. So the only way she can pay rent is if Housing Benefit pays her rent. And these days Housing Benefit will only pay for one room. Fair enough. She found a pal who also needed somewhere to live to move in and her pal took the other room. And the Housing Benefit paid for both rooms. Tickety Boo. But then her pal moved out which meant she needed to find another pal. OK. A problem, but not an impossible problem. The grapevine told her that another pal was needing somewhere to live, so she got in touch. They had known each other a while and always got along. He is 32 and looking for a job. He was more than happy to take the second room. So all was fine and dandy.

But then all of a sudden all wasn’t fine and dandy. Both had their benefits stopped. And the housing benefit was stopped. Why? The beaurocrat made the case for the State. You have no right to claim Housing Benefit for two rooms because you are a couple. You can only have Housing Benefit to pay for one room. As a couple you can share one room. And we will only pay for one roon. But we are not a couple! Yes you are. No we are not! Of course you are. You share a flat. That means you are a couple. No we're not. Yes you are.

 

She asked if they would make a similar decision if she was sharing with a female. She was told not to be ridiculous. She asked if it was really so impossible that two lesbians night share a flat and each have their own room? She was warned not to be provocative. Being provocative would only make things worse. The beaurocrat was not for turning. Well obviously not. This after all was two for the price of one. Two off benefits with one tap of the keyboard. Why would they change their decision? They have a target to reach and there is no way that they are about to jeopardise paying their mortgage and having two holidays a year and driving a nice car and quaffing wine with their evening meal.

 

And how very reminiscent of the old East Germany is the judgement at the heart of the system. Guilty until proved innocent. You’re a woman, he’s a man, therefore you have to be a couple because you share a flat. How do you prove otherwise? How do you come up with the cash to install a Spooks style CCTV system to monitor where everyone sleeps when you’ve had your dole suspended and you can’t even buy groceries any more?

They went to get advice and there were basically three options. Option 1. Share a room and a bed and get someone else to move into the other room. Ouch. Share a bed even though you are not a couple and one of you is four and a half moths pregnant? It’s a big ask. Option 2. Both keep your rooms whilst pretending to share a room and get someone else in to pretend to share the second room whilst in reality they sleep on the couch. Well it’s possible in theory, but such a compliant individual would be hard to find. Option 3. Do nothing, get evicted and wind up in a homeless hostel.

And here is where the whole thing really does have that Leipzig 1976 feel about it. Yesterday we saw Cameron wrapped in the flag telling us how great Britain is because we won 29 golds in the heady days of summer. Just like Eric Honecker must have said much the same in the wake of Stecher and her teammates’ Herculean efforts in Montreal. But behind the bluster are the nasty little games that get played when countries run out of cash. And the nasty little games are played out by nasty little beaurocrats who will do the bidding of their cheapskate bosses for a meagre set of perks. Honecker’s lot got Trabant cars and flats five square feet larger than the average and the chance to buy bananas in a Western Currency shop. Our lot get to pay their mortgage and plan a retirement with a caravan and the chance to watch Celebrity Come Dancing on a 42 inch tele from Comet bought on a credit card.

Hannah Arendh was an Israeli writer who sat through every day of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in the early 1960’s. Eichmann was Hitler’s favourite beaurocrat who did the flow charts and time and motion studies that allowed five million souls to be collected up from all corners of Europe and be shipped to the gas chambers of Aushwitz and Treblinka and Chelmno and Sobibor and Madjanek. He was one of the worst men in history, but that was not what Anna saw in the dock in Tel Aviv. She saw an insipid little man with a pidgin chest and a bald head complete with comb over and a cheap suit. He played the ‘I was only following my orders’ card. And no doubt if Adolf Eichmann was alive and kicking today he would feel right at home following his orders in the Job Centre Plus and making the small print work in his favour to meet his three a week target. And no doubt he would return home to eat a meal made from the Tesco Finest range and to watch Celebrity Come Dancing on his 42 inch tele from Comet.

In 1963 Anna Arendh wrote a book about the trial she had witnessed of the non-descript, grey little man who had dotted the I’s and crossed the T’s of the Holocaust. She came up with a title for her book that will forever echo through history.

‘The banality of evil’

It was Germany in 1942

And it was East Germany in 1976.

And sadly it seems to be creeping into Britain in 2012.

Lots of gold at the Olympics and widescreen TV’s for the beaurocrats. And stuff the rest.