Supporting and commemorating sanctions fodder

Text by Dude Swheatie of Kwug. Photos by Kwug members and Peter Murry of Brent Green Party.

On Wednesday 7 April 2015 KUWG members were joined outside Kilburn Jobcentre by members of Brent Green Party in supporting the recently JSA sanctioned Elisabet and commemorating the sanctions-and-eviction-related suicide of former Kilburn Jobcentre customer Nygell Firminger. We were also joined by local police after jobcentre managers complained that we were disturbing both staff and customers by being too loud in our protest.

KUWG and Brent Green Party members affirm that sanctions lower the claimant count ...

and sanctions fodder face huge deficits!

'Police, camera, action' Kwug style!

"But aren't you concerned, Mr Policeman, that the jobcentre are robbing us?"

Commemorating a 'welfare reform' related suicide

Nygell Firminger: Worker & Jobseeker killed himself at 32a Cambridge Ave, 3 April 2012

By typical coincidence, the police arrival came just as we were packing up to move down the road to symbolically install a memorial placque outside the 32a Cambridge Ave flat where Nygell Firminger had committed suicide on 3 April 2012 had died the day before a 'group session' at Kilburn Jobcentre.

Symbolic installation of memorial placque for Nygell

Nygell was born in September 1966 and had been sanctioned by the jobcentre, fallen into the clutches of loan sharks and subsequent rent arrears after his JSA had been restored, tried to negotiate resolution of his rent arrears with 'arms length management organisation' Genesis Housing Association, and been evicted by bailiffs who would not even allow him to collect his mental health medication. He was later found dead there a little less than five months before his 46th birthday. That was in the same week that the Welfare Reform Act of 2012 was passed into law. (Nygell's family have given us permission to publicise his name.) He had also been denied Employment & Support Allowance with reference to his depression.

On 10 July 2013 at the deferred inquest into Nygell's death, the North London Coroner ruled that Nygell's death had resulted from the stress brought on by eviction. Months later, we heard that Genesis had concluded the sale of Nygell's former flat for £375,000 in line with an 'austerity'-led Government policy of social cleansing that sees housing associations turfing tenants out of London and dumping them away from their support networks in order to finance future house-building.

Back in the jobcentre

In 2015 the Conservatives have said that they will defer until after 7 May 2015 General Election day the revelation of how they intend to cut yet £billions more from the Work & Pensions budget. Yet the voting public need to realise how nasty things already are at the jobcentre delivery point of the DWP's services. Argotina Schmurgle reports on just 20 minutes spent inside the same jobcentre on 7 April 2015 at https://welfaretales.wordpress.com/2015/04/07/all-this-in-20-minutes-at-our-local-jobcentre/
the sort of treatment of benefit claimants that you will not read in the Daily Star, etc.

(Sanctions are vicious, personalised means of implementing cuts to the 'benefits bill'. They do not creat jobs and make a nonsense of Government aspirations of moving over to a 'happiness index'.)

And given the back catalogue of the DWP holding internal whitewash enquiries rather than allowing public inquiries into the deaths of claimants affected by neoliberal 'welfare reforms', Benefits & Work Publishing Ltd are justified in stating: Vote for your life — "dramatic" cuts are coming.