James O'Brien's shocking call with a benefits officer | LBC

i uh i work a particular phone line for universal credit which is the advanced phone line so an advance in your wages of something i'm sure your listeners will understand um and it's essentially an advance on your benefits from the future most people can get about 350 quid the top you can get is 812 that's if you've got kids right um and the reasons i can give it out there is a very specific list of reasons i can give out the budgeting advance which is the advance that is available to everyone um i can't give it out for gas and electricity right that's not something i'm allowed to give it out to i have to explain that they need to call the gas electricity supplier and arrange some kind of debt relief situation and it will come out of their universal credit forever yeah um and the things they can ring up for fridges ovens cookies that sort of thing 812 could be for a boiler would it or something like that well if it's not your landlord's responsibility if it's your annual responsibility i can't even if it's say a uh not a very good landlord even if you're freezing freezing your to the bones you're learning the handle is not picking up the phone there's nothing even if you've got medical conditions um yeah so i i this is an awful business i i hope you won't take this the wrong way but do you look after your own mental health properly because um well i grew up on benefits right so in in a way i feel like i do have a slight slightly better understanding maybe i'm sure you do people yeah i'm sure you do but nevertheless you're at the coal face of some of the worst experiences that your fellow citizens are enduring in this country it's uh it does sometimes feel like people are almost it's it's a horrible system because people are having to in order to get this money they're having to explain everything that's gone wrong in their lives like i'm having to listen and it's not i don't want to make this like a poor me it's just you have to listen to people essentially pitch their misery like a sort of dragon's den of of horror yeah sadness and poverty and and we're penalized if we give too much out of course you are and you're a nice lad i can tell you compassion that there'll be some people who aren't on the end of that phone line won't they it's an interesting sort of sociological thing because they they hired the how you off the door for it right so i was unemployed after lockdown right and i got the job a couple of months later everyone came off the door and what you've just said yeah i mean about 30 of the people within two weeks worth talking about scrounges but all off the doll yeah it's it's one of those sort of when you put prisoners in charge of guarding other prisoners sort of thing i think psychological experiment but it's not is it it's it's brexit britain so in my crawl that i am going to have to haggle with people over 200 pounds or i'm going to have to because yeah i'm not i'm not a monster so if someone says i need it for gas and bills and i say i can't give it to you and they say but it's freezing in my house and i say why is it cold and they talk to me about it for a while and then they say oh but i haven't got any clothes you know the the newest clothes i have five years old i can do it for clothes all right so i go oh yeah sure sure you try and help within within the rules you try and help but um so i i mean god this is a tricky one isn't it because i i mean it feels inhuman almost to be asking a question now about the hundreds of millions of pounds that the man ultimately in charge of all economic policy has in his own private bank honestly that is almost more of an effect on mental health these stories of billions wasted stories of more money than i have denied to everyone that i have spoken to in months years of doing this job yeah is is wasted in a day a day and i'm i'm having to haggle with people i'm having to on fraud and ppe alone on this if just just the hypocrisy of it so that's that's the that yeah i mean that could happen under any party and has in the past you know that the wastes of public money are well documented i think that tory's campaign on we won't do it but then of course they do but what about rishi sunak personally and he can't give all his money he wouldn't suddenly become a more qualified politician or a more effective chancellor if he gave all his money to charity would he or gave it all to you and told you to divvy it up among the people calling you every day how does it affect his political um i think it it intrinsically he he can't speak with the same authority it's just like johnson with the parties he can't tell us if there's another disaster or another god forbid another kind of coronavirus thing happens in the next couple of months if he told us to hide in the anderson shelters or something who would do it yeah who would he's in the same way when rishi sunak talks about fiscal responsibility it's just really i'm close i'm i'm close to you and graham you've nearly got me there i know it's not quite probably because of my own circumstances and the fact that i'm comfortable i can't quite sure i mean i can walk a mile in your shoes but then i'll give them back when i and put my own shoes back on yeah and i mean maybe some of this is just sort of the logical the fallacies involved in western logic which is if it can be explained it must be able to be understood which may not be true in some circumstances you maybe have to experience might have to play a and that's all yeah i mean then that that's a that yeah you might just have pinned it down actually is it you cannot have it so the more removed you are from the experience the less capable you will be perhaps not always there are exceptions but general the general experience will be the less capable you will be of legislating from a position of understanding and if you're not legislating from a position of understanding what the hell are you legislating for yeah and an intrinsic it's a democracy and i don't i don't think this is out of the annals of marx to just sort of say if you if you've got hundreds of millions if you've got more wealth than like most cities in this country yeah well surely your interests aren't aligned and there's a family over the road who are burning furniture and wearing coats inside you

Channel: LBC

Views: 786,831

Keywords: lbc, lbc live, watch lbc, interview, interviews, politics news, british politics, uk politics live, live debate, debate, current affairs 2020, Coronavirus, Coronavirus uk, Coronavirus update, Coronavirus news, Brexit, Coronavirus symptoms, coronavirus explained, covid 19, corona, boris johnson, boris johnson interview, boris johnson coronavirus, coronavirus speech, farage, James O’Brien, Iain Dale, Nick Ferrari, Johnson

Id: jdpE40IeHUI

Length: 6min 36sec (396 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 04 2022