HEY DUDE,WHERE'S MY PENSION? :Episode 1

 And so it begins,,

I received a letter from the DWP - dated 5 August - on August 12.All their official postal correspondence is sent second class post.

Having seemingly completed all necessary formalities weeks earlier regarding my State Pension claim, this was I assumed a final confirmation of the information I had given them.

Besides my hand written details that I'd previously provided them with such Credit Union acc.no.etc,It turns out that they require a copy of my marriage cert. and a copy of the Decree Absolute,without which they cannot complete my Pension claim.

Within an hour of reading their letter,I phoned and immediately emailed both the Wakefield Register Office and The Civil Justice Centre to ascertain what needed doing.

The Register office responded by email the next day with what I needed to do - £11 for a 5 working days turnaround  search + £2.50 postage. IL paid for it via Card on the online form.

On Monday  August 16 I phoned the CJC to see what progress my email was making.They checked their 7 day backlog of emails received to confirm receipt. I phoned them again on the 17th.where they took  quite a lot longer to retrieve my email.Their backlog had not shortened.During both calls I was given to understand that once they got round to dealing with my email they would after their search contact me via phone for payment.

On Friday 20th.after a third call to CJC,yet another different " Colleague" informed me authoritatively that I ought to have been told straightaway that the £10/£45?£65 search fee is payable upfront.That person apologised and I managed to persuade them to include their apology for their earlier misinformation in an email.Which they did at close of business on the 20th.

£10 if I knew the Decree absolute's original Case Ref No. ,£45 if I didn't but I was certain that either Wakefield or Pontefract County Court issued it or £65 if I am unsure and would have to apply via Central Index in London.Oh yes and the apologetic email of the 20th had a pdf attached with Form 440 which is how you apply to Central Index.

Today,being Monday 23, IL kindly downloaded the 4 pages of Form440 and have agreed to pay the £65 CQ which I hope to be mailing out first class in a couple of days time.The Central Index turnaround time is 10 working days.

By the way, that DWP letter dated the 5th which I got on the 12th.They enclosed a 2nd class reply envelope;asking for all the necessary docs to be enclosed and sent to them forthwith -their explicit demand by no later than August 19.Otherwise there'd be delays processing my Pension claim.

and so it goes...

fahrenheit451:110

Ken Loach's current film , " I, Daniel Blake " has had a significant an impact as any film in the last 30 years. As someone who was wrongly sanctioned in 2015 by politically motivated scoundrels,thieves and liars ;a placement Charity, Interserve and DWP - I know what it feels like to get shat on from the great heights of a Stasified state apparatus. I won my Sanctions Appeal on October 1st 2015. I still maintain and refresh my dedicated facebook page ,#DansLaMerde which served as the fulcrum for a pretty effective social media campaign which I conducted from April 2015 when I was first denounced and recommended for punitive sanctions. Comments to a more recent report on the ineffectiveness and massive implementation expenses of the Benefits Sanctions Regime, argued that the very existence of foodbanks helps to encourage DWP staff to issue Sanctions against claimants. Two years ago  at thoughts.com ,kulturist no.446 on 8 December 2014, I addressed not too dissimilar concerns aired in Parliament.

The trouble with " moral outrage " is that you need to identify who in fact is generating it and what the supposed object of the " outrage " is.  People suffering  Hunger ; that's a good one to start with. In conditions more shocking than can be seen in Congolese refugee camps ; wow,that's another one. Let's complete the picture ; The Church of England and two of the three largest parties in parliament all agree on the aforementioned. Blimey, it's serious after all. The Daily ten plagues Mail asserts its usual place in the media ruck and maul of such issues with :-

" The all-party Commons group on hunger warned that some parents spend far too much money on cigarettes, alcohol, takeaways and other ‘non-essential items of expenditure’ because they lack basic budgeting skills.

Many more cannot cook even the simplest meals for their children – leaving them to go hungry.

The MPs call upon teachers to do more to report parents from chaotic households so they can receive help from ‘troubled families’ units.

However, they conclude: ‘We should not leave the duty resting with schools. Parents have duties, and these duties are not abated by the chaos resulting from their lifestyle.’

The report, Feeding Britain, is released today. Chaired by Labour MP Frank Field, the all-party group calls for:

• A new publicly funded body, also to be called Feeding Britain, to work towards a ‘hunger-free’ UK with the help of eight Cabinet ministers;
• Bigger food banks to distribute more free food, and advise how to claim benefits and make ends meet;
• A rise in the minimum wage, and the provision of free school meals to children even during school holidays;
• New measures to make it harder to withhold benefits, including ‘yellow cards’ instead of outright bans; and
• A request from the Government for food bank funding from Brussels.

As a Christian,revolutionary activist and campaigner I argue that it would be politically counter-productive and socially regressive to implement any single one of the five bullet points mentioned above.For in truth there is no food crisis ,there are no shortages.No-one is starving in Britain.Lost in their own little Narnia-worlds of soon-to-be-nice to one another again; heretics and traitors to the Reformation and heretics and traitors to the cause of Organised Labour are trying belatedly to save ,not the masses from further suffering,but rather the Ruling Elites from their own hubrisitc follies that have brought us all to the edge of something rather wonderful and exciting;not seen in this country or in Europe properly since the 1640's.
They act and posture naively , as if all of this has nothing at all to do with the inexorable logic of  the immutable historic Laws governing the accumulation and centralisation of Capital and the attendant and necessary socio-economic developments that accompany such remorseless economic Laws. The point of the global system of Usurer-Capitalism is the continuing,unabated and increasing exploitation and pauperisation of the mass of the proletariat and sub-proletariat as a natural consequence of the inherent and intrinsically dysfunctional division of wealth and appropriation thereof by the 1% Ruling Elites. Their sole purpose of all of this, is for their own self-gratification and self-aggrandisement ;the fulfilment of their immutable historic destiny of the 1% ; to utterly consume as much of  the planet's wealth irrespective of any implied social/humanitarian cost to the 99 % and the state of the planet itself. The point of exploitation is,as Orwell pointed out, exploitation.