Money money money, it's the root of all evil

Right now i'm feeling despairing because i seem to be trapped in a situation of poverty that i can't find any way out of...

I am living on Jobseeker's Allowance (a total of £59 per week, paid every 2 weeks) and about £33 a week housing benefit. That £33 is supposed to cover my rent, but in fact it only covers approximately 2/3 of it - my rent is £208.33 (a third of the rent for the house, £650) per month, which comes out to approximately £50 per week - which is very cheap for the area i'm living in, and is the same amount of money i was paying for the (roughly equivalent quality) accommodation i was living in in 1999. The reason the council assessed the amount of HB i was to get as £33 is because they assessed the "market rent value" of the house (without actually sending a rent officer to visit the house) as £450. There is absolutely no way that anyone would be able to find a privately rented house of comparable size to this one in this area for £450 - in 4 months of looking, the cheapest house we found was £625 (which had a lot of disadvantages compared to this one at £650). I had to blag a fake job reference from a friend of a friend's company to get past the estate agent's credit checks, because of the absolute unwillingness of any estate agent in the area to take clients on housing benefit.

Total income of £92 per week minus approx £50 per week rent leaves me with round about £40 per week for all of my living costs. I can and have lived on that amount relatively easily before, but i seem to be having trouble now. I think at least in part it's because over the spring and summer of this year i went to quite a few demonstrations, activist gatherings and events such as Climate Camp, all of which cost money for travel, plus fairly regular (maybe every 2 weeks) visits to a friend who lives a £6.50 train journey away (I have managed to jump the train a few times, but after the cumulative psychological effects of threats of arrest and violence from ticket inspectors i don't really feel willing to do that any more, except on the particular trains which i know don't have inspectors, which is only the last train at night, which as the single train fare is almost as much as the return doesn't help me much). Last month i was stupid enough to buy a couple of books from Amazon, which i think, together with the cumulative impact of the travel costs, was probably what tipped me over from having just enough to pay my rent to not having enough, meaning i had to owe my housemate until next benefit day...

I thought that, as my benefits happen to get paid at roughly the same time fortnightly, and there were 3 "giro" days in October, that this month i would be OK - but somehow i'm not, and i'm either going to have to borrow money from somewhere (and i don't know where, because i have pretty much exhausted all the friends i could possibly borrow money off - i already owe about £800 to various friends, £400 of which is to one person who i've owed since 2004, and probably something in the region of a couple of grand to my parents, although i haven't really kept track of that, and don't know whether they'll ever really ask for it back) or do the same again - but if i do the same again, i'll never be able to get back on track with the monthly money cycle, because there's just no possibility at all of me saving the £80 or so necessary in a month.

I don't exactly want to be unemployed - i guess i've just pretty much despaired of finding a job. In smaller towns i've lived in, i was able to get... not quite continuous, but regular-enough-to-pay-the-bills temp work, and while it was mind-numbingly alienating, exhausting and generally horrible work (sweeping the floors of factories or stacking rusty metal on pallets, for example), i could at least afford my living costs. Since moving to Birmingham just over a year ago (a move partly motivated by thinking work might be easier to find in a big city), i've attempted to register with temp agencies, but had no work offers whatsoever.

I've applied for "permanent" jobs which i felt myself to be amply qualified for, but had no replies whatsoever, even when the employer advertised the "Two Ticks" scheme (under which any applicant with a disability who meets the qualifications for the job is supposed to be guaranteed an interview). Other jobs, which i am reasonably confident i would be able to actually do, have "person specifications" worded in such a way (usually referring to neurotypical social skills, which would not actually be regarded as essential for the job in any open-minded approach to logic) that it would be impossible for me to truthfully answer the questions on the application forms in such a way as to meet the specification.

I won't even go into details on the scheme "for getting disabled people into employment" which the council led me to believe was an alternative route into a job to application/interview, by doing a short unpaid work placement, but actually turned out to be an unpaid work placement doing the boring bits of someone else's work, just for the sake of it (suffice to say i didn't take up the offer)...

And, of course, there are all my anarchist, feminist and ecological critiques of the nature of "work" under capitalism, which i could probably write a dissertation on if i had the concentration and access to all the books i would need to reference...

There's nothing additional i can get under the benefit system either. Unlike a friend who has just been put on it, i seem to have managed to avoid the Employment Zones programme (possibly by virtue of having a Disability Employment Advisor), but the nature of my disability is such that i have pretty much no chance of getting Disability Living Allowance (DLA), because that gets awarded depending on how much assistance you "need" (or, more accurately, are assessed as "needing" by someone with often no real understanding of your actual needs), and, well, with my impairment there isn't really anything that anyone could be paid to "assist" me with. There would be no point in me going on Incapacity Benefit because for me, as someone who hasn't worked enough to build up National Insurance contributions, it would be on exactly the same rate as JSA. After attempting to appeal against not getting my full rent awarded in Housing Benefit, i was given a "discretionary" payment to make it up for 3 months, but only for 3 months because that would apparently give me time to "bargain with my landlord or find a cheaper place" - the first of which bears no relationship to anything resembling reality whatsoever, and as for the second, the likelihood of finding anywhere cheaper is slim to none, and moving would be an upheaval that, right now, i just wouldn't be able to face again...

What i've been saying i really want to do with my life for about the past 2 years is to go to Leeds University to do the MA in Disability Studies, followed if possible with a PhD (probably focusing on disability, labour and employment - a radical deconstruction possibly involving what "work" would look like in my utopian post-capitalist society). I have the academic qualifications to get there (a first class degree, undeserved in my own opinion though that might have been, in Politics with International Studies from the University of Warwick), but no way that i know of to get the funding. (I have been procrastinating for nearly a year over actually contacting the Centre for Disability Studies and asking what funding possibilities might be available...)

Getting back to immediate stuff, I have already got into conflicts with my housemates (which can only get worse over the winter) over having the heating on when "we" (read: me) can't afford the gas bills, when my sensory sensitivities (which i've sort of told my housemates about, but not fully, because i'm not "out" to them about my impairment) mean that i find it utterly unbearable, to the point of feeling suicidal, if the temperature goes below my comfort level (and i would be perfectly willing to pay the whole heating bill by myself, if i could safford it)...

I really, really want to go to the Anarchist Bookfair in London this weekend (both because of the actual books and because several people who i've lost touch with but would really like to get back in touch with are very likely to be there), but can't afford even the train fare.

I got an email from a fellow crip activist a few days ago replying to my question as to whether she was going to the upcoming DAN gathering, saying that, because her DLA had been reduced (resulting in her losing housing benefit), she can't afford to leave her house for anything that doesn't pay travel expenses until February. (I'm trying to sort out a lift for her from the fellow activist i'm getting driven down by.) Why the fuck do we have to live like this?

The cruel irony is that the disability movement doesn't have the resources to organise to campaign against such enforced poverty, because most of us are living in poverty... and then there's the vexed question of how to integrate an anarchist desire for a world with neither states nor money, with having to be supported by the welfare state...

This post doesn't really have a conclusion, unfortunately. I might be able to sort my life out if it did...