This is my second article on my experiences as a self employed person on a low income on the government’s abysmal Universal Credit (UC) ‘social security’ programme. When writing my first article, it was even a surprise to me just how many examples of incompetence I had experienced in only around 7 months as a claimant. Perhaps, then, I shouldn’t be surprised that in the following 6 months I’ve experienced so much more incompetence that it justifies writing a second article. The main issues I have faced are due to the process of transferring from the ‘Live Service’ which I was on in Sheffield, to the new and improved ‘Full Service’ here in Oldham. Additionally, as I’ve been self employed for over a year, I have been introduced to a new kind of sanction called the ‘Minimum Income Floor’ (MIF). Transferring from the ‘Live Service’ to the ‘Full Service’ A few days before moving house in September, I had a mandatory work coach meeting at the Job Centre. I used it to explain that ...
We make our own bed of plastic. By Tyros.andi [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons In the billions of years since the earth was formed, there have been a number of geological epochs, the Holocene, Pleistocene and others, which are characterised by identifiable layers in the Earth's crust. Human civilisation has existed for around twelve thousand years, a tiny fraction of the overall life of the earth. We have only been an industrial species for the last two or three hundred years. The internal combustion engine was invented in the nineteenth century, modern plastics and nuclear power in the twentieth : all revolutionary moments in history. As a result of the technological developments in the short time since we became an industrial species, our growth has accelerated rapidly, and proportionally our impact on the world has also increased. That is not to say that we didn't have a dramatic impact in the preceding thousa...