1 November 2025
Without doubt, the most shocking of recent excitements is a new insight I gained into the Britain’s state benefits system. A neuro-divergent friend, a single-parent with two small children, struggles to survive on Universal Credit and Child Benefit. The older child was recently diagnosed as needing a SEND plan and the school counsellor said they should apply for Disability Living Allowance.
When the DWP heard about this application they immediately cancelled the next Universal Credit payment because they hadn’t been told about a change in circumstances. People claim benefits because they can’t live without them so letting a Jobsworth remove a benefit because of a technical breach of their bureaucracy leaving the claimant Sweet Fair Angela to pay their rent and heating bills and buy food for the next month seems … petty (the kindest word I can think of)
What can anyone say about a bunch of civil servants (paid by you and me) who enforce such an ineffably stupid and cruel response?
I wonder how ‘changes in circumstances’ are defined? For example, should a parent report that a child will no longer drink Ribena but will now drink Dr Pepper? If this should be reported, we can all overwhelm the bastards with trivialities.
Perhaps I’ll google it and see how changes in circumstances are defined.
I read recently that Google’s AI programming has some sort of swearing restrictions and will anticipate questions rather than offer the results of a wider search. If you ask “What is AI?”, you’ll get an AI-generated selection of links; if you ask “What the fuck is AI?”, you get a quite different selection. (Of course I tried it.)
Apparently, you can also circumvent those irritating chatbots by repeating “I want to talk to a human”, or say something is an emergency, but I haven’t yet tried this.
In other news, Plaid Cymru won an election for a traditionally Labour seat in Wales; Labour and Conservatives were humiliated and Reform was disappointed.
Further east, Andrew Windsor, the piss-artist formerly known as Prince, was stripped of all his titles while others just worried about digital ID cards. Why do people get so exercised about having them? We already have photo ID driving licences and passports, I have an iris scan on a computer somewhere in America, my mother’s ‘maiden name’ was shown in ‘Who’s Who’ until I deleted it some 20 years ago, and Sainsburys know where I live.
I also wonder how many people give honest answers to ‘security questions’ about things like my favourite football team and the name of my first pet (both ‘hydrangea’ if you’re interested).
However, with the incomparable brilliance of governments generally, it seems a trial run will introduce a smartphone-based veteran card available to 1.8 million people. “Veteran”? Does that mean those of us who are a generation behind technology, haven’t even got smartphones and are more likely to be suffering from dementia? I have already had to accost passing strangers at 11 pm on dark nights to offer to repay them in cash if they’ll use their smartphone to pay for my parking because the car park company’s payment machine doesn’t accept cash or cards or jokes from Christmas crackers.
More worrying still are the results by research by Cardiff University into how viewers’ preferred news media influence their beliefs about what is happening in the world. For example, they discovered that 84% of GB News viewers believed net migration into the UK is still increasing, compared with 71% of ITV viewers, 62 % of BBC viewers and 51% of Channel 4 viewers. It’s interesting that, in all these cases, more than half these viewers still believe net migration has increased although, in fact, while net migration did rise between 2020 and 2023, it has since been falling. But who lets facts stand in the way of a good story?
Incidentally, can anyone think of any other political party leader apart from Nigel Farage who is allowed to front their own series on a television news channel? I’ve tried watching some of his (and other) GB News shows but my hearing no longer lets me separate individual voices when two people are shouting over each other and I get more pleasure from reading a good book anyway.
In the Middle East, the word ‘ceasefire’ is gaining a new meaning. Because Hamas hadn’t returned the remains of all their hostages and an Israeli soldier was killed in a skirmish between Israeli troops and Palestinian militants, Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a raid on Gaza that killed at least 104 people, 35 of them children, and wounded many more. The situation was further complicated by Hamas’s return of the remains of a hostage who Israeli forces had claimed to have recovered two years ago.
And there was I thinking “ceasefire” meant that firing would cease.
More evidence of stupidity came from the covid inquiry when Boris Johnson denied claims that his government had failed to prepare for school closures, saying he thought it would be “amazing” if the Department for Education hadn’t done this. Chuck Brodsky once sang about George W Bush: “Orders come down right from the top / to punish the guy who pushes the mop”.
So here’s another example of stupidity at the bottom of the food chain in our nearest town: last week, a woman pushing a buggy, was being followed by a somewhat older child who, unbeknownst to her, dropped a sweet wrapper. Suddenly, a “Littering Enforcement Officer” loomed out of the shadows and fined the mother £120, payable NOW or they’d call the police. These people have the power to fine people from £75 to £150, so what costs £75 if a sweet wrapper costs £120 – an unexpected sneeze?
Thus did the Jobsworth make a parent responsible for a crime they didn’t even know had been committed. Surely this will allow: “Good evening, sir, I’m a police officer. You may have thought your 9-year-old was in their bedroom but they’ve just been caught setting fire to the Council offices so you’re under arrest for arson.”
Lesser Mutterings 