<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/28/citizens-advice-cost-of-living-emergency>
"The queue forms early outside Norwich’s Citizens Advice. Right next door
another other long line waits for the library to open. Queueing for books?
Maybe, but mainly for a warm place to spend the day, a member of Citizens
Advice staff tells me. They aren’t street homeless but neatly dressed people
from cold homes.
This branch of Citizens Advice is only open for two hours on weekday mornings,
as it can’t cope with any more clients for its volunteers to triage.
Appointments are fully booked for the next two weeks and sometimes desperation
explodes. On this day, the advice coordinator, Trudie Gibbons, has to ask a man
to leave. He had been yelling, “You’re not giving me any advice!” but she talks
him down with what she calls “zero tolerance but great understanding” from her
20 years’ experience. One man arrived with a sharpened stake the other day.
“We are just about the only face-to-face service left,” she says. “Everything
else is online, or a phone line that never answers, no humans to talk to.” And
so some vent their frustration here. Most people arriving are awkward, never
having needed help before; they never expected this devastation of unpayable
bills, soaring debt, bare cupboards. Gibbons gives out six food bank vouchers
in the first hour to deeply embarrassed clients. “They don’t quite know how to
phrase asking for food,” she says.
Staff who have worked here for years, alongside admirable volunteers, say that
they have never seen anything like this. They are well accustomed to advising
people in trouble, but it’s hard to capture their sense of shock at what’s
happening now. People I meet on the frontline in all kinds of services are lost
for new ways to describe the scale of this tsunami crashing in not just on the
already poor, but on middling households impoverished overnight. “Cost of
living crisis” sounds too tame, too polite to capture the brutal fear of losing
homes and everything. Martin Lewis, the wise money-saving expert, saw this
arriving early on, admitting earlier this year that he was “virtually out of
tools” to help people now. Are Tory MPs hearing all this in their surgeries?
Perhaps few still expect any help from them."
Via Kevin O'Brien, who wrote "The accelerating decline of the UK under Tory
misrule."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
