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Hayley’s back
Did anyone see The Fairy Jobmother on TV last night? Yes, our Hayley’s back. This time, however, there was less bossiness and far less psychobabble. And she’d come to Bootle which is where I happen to work. I must say, I had more mixed feelings about this type of thing than last time.
I still don’t like people like the boss of A4e getting rich off the back of government contracts to provide services but I think I’ve warmed a little to Hayley. She seems to mean well. And you’d have to have a heart of stone not to be touched by how far the two women had come by the end of the programme, but, the highlight was the following.
Hayley and Dave were talking. Dave is a 53 year old, and how should I put this, old school with a bit of an attitude, a wiseacre with a lingering streak of bitterness. Hayley was preparing him for a job interview and the following exchange took place.
Hayley: What do you think is your biggest weakness?
Dave: My sugar diabetes.
Ruddy priceless and could slot neatly into any stand up comic’s routine.
However, the programme was totally eclipsed by the later documentary called “poor kids”. A searing account of life through the eyes and voices of children being brought up in poverty and poor housing. Despite caring parents doing their obvious best it was a signal lesson of how unemployment and deprivation blights people’s lives and excludes them. And the kids know this. They are not stupid. They compare their lives with that of their friends who do have parents in work and they are acutely aware of the differences.
And, in the end, it is all well and good for the Hayleys of this world to preach that there is work out there and that people are not trying hard enough, but it is far more complex that that. If, indeed, Britain is broken, then the Tories broke it back in the 1980’s and the devastation brought to entire communities back then still remains. People have been ground down and defeated again and again, victimized, stigmatized and blamed, and it is going to take more than a handful of Hayley’s to put them back together again.
I remember an episode from the first series when Hayley, known after all as the Fairy Jobmother, with a film crew and no doubt many career advisers/work coaches stood outside her customer’s home and said something like “her problem is that she thinks someone’s going to knock on her door and offer her her dream job”.
I watched the Fairy Godmother programme and it wasn’t really anymore or less than I expected it to be, to be honest.
However, what I did pick up on, which wasn’t otherwise noted, was that out of Hayley’s 4 clients, the programme implied that she’d secured 3 of them some kind of work.
When they did the follow-up trail over the credits, only the one single parent lady was actually in the job she’d got them.
The other girl, it seemed, had decided against the paid job and instead gone with work experience in the garden centre where she wanted to work but hadn’t been offered a post, the young bloke was working in a bar, which was a very different situation to his previous circumstances and the post that she helped him get, and the Jim Royle sound-a-like had got himself a job anyway as a security guard, which he said he was planning on doing anyway.
So a 25% success rate really, which is similar to the success stats for W2W providers as I understand it anyway - this leads to the inexorable conclusion that welfare to work providers seem to get paid for placing clients, even though they haven’t actually done much to secure that work, other than harass and harry their clients.
she’ll always be Pauline of Re-start to me though…
Innit, that’s exactly what my other half said (although we didn’t see so many of Pauline’s pens disappointly…..)
If, indeed, Britain is broken, then the Tories broke it back in the 1980’s and the devastation brought to entire communities back then still remains. People have been ground down and defeated again and again, victimized, stigmatized and blamed, and it is going to take more than a handful of Hayley’s to put them back together again.
The current lot are going to be judged even more harshly in history than Thatcher, they are attempting to bring the neo-liberal agenda to its bitter disgusting denouement. At least Thatcher had the great public sector sell off to cushion the blow at the time, this lot only have vapid soundbites and a keep calm and carry on attitude; they will be found out, hopefully they will be held accountable.
...hopefully they will be held accountable.
I’m not sure whether to restrict my howling guffaw to 115 decibels or 125…. :-) .
Hope is important
In fairness to the darling Hayley, I think she did actually succeed with three of the “victims” in the first show to the extent that they became more confident about themselves. That said, I’m not ecstatic about the tendency, on occasion, to treat the “victims” as if they had a combined IQ of 10…. For me, the jury’s out - more episodes to be watched before deciding if toys need to be parted from the pram.