letters
Pressure point
As someone who’s been in and out of work since my youth in the 1980s, I can honestly say being unemployed today feels like I’m on probation and licence from prison. Not that I’ve been in contact with the criminal justice system. But I know people who have, who tell me about the pressure it is under.
I’ve had spells of employment and unemployment including long-term sickness due to my anxiety disorder that I’ve had going back decades. Being on UC is extreme pressure and I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone. The rules are obviously coming from the top, and the government has been hostile towards all claimants, sick or not.
You do have good work coaches but unfortunately you have poor ones as well. I don’t know what’s worse, being in a low-paid job with lousy terms and conditions or being on universal credit and having the pressure it brings.
One assessment told me because I was clean looking and well spoken, I couldn’t possibly be anxious or depressed. And politicians in all parties continue to spout the same old nonsense, that we’re all avoiding looking for work and spending all day in bed.
One government minister recently seemed to think anxiety and depression isn’t as serious a condition, and that people like me should pull my socks up – even though I’ve had decades of mental illness associated with it.
Ryan Herrmann, Wiltshire
Mind your language
I’m not picking on him in particular, as so many do it today, but I couldn’t help wondering why Rick Edwards [Issue 1607, 18-24 March] thinks it’s fine to say “Me and Emer kissed” and “Me and my best friend camped” when he was educated at Cambridge... Is this down to collective amnesia about basic English grammar, or a possible desire to appear edgy and somehow classless? Either way, me finds it very dispiriting.
Henry Birkbeck, Chester
Money magic
It costs a lot to right an enormous wrong, so it would cost a lot to give justice to the victims of the Post Office scandal, to the victims of the contaminated blood scandal, and to the WASPI women.
But as a sovereign state with its own free-floating currency, the United Kingdom has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control.
