Transcript
The attitudes in Britain are ‘me, me, me’. And what we need, what we need desperately is ‘us, us, us’.
We have to unite as a community, as a society again, if anyone is being genuine now about change. There cannot be silo thinking anymore, there can’t be a, ‘Oh, well we’re the housing department, that’s the DWP’ and, ‘oh, that’s the housing department but we’re the DWP’ or ‘oh, well that’s health so that’s got nothing to do with anything’.
‘Cause it’s all inter-linked, it always has been inter-linked. And it’s strange to think that in the 21st century we’re still talking about these things as if we haven’t figured this all out 20 or 30 years ago, because we did.
These are not new ideas, these are just ideas that haven’t been implemented. So you’re kind of going, why have we got a charity for homeless health, homeless LGBTQ – why are these all divisions, why are they not all parts of a single, one-stop shop where you go if you’re homeless and then whatever other aspects of your life are figured out afterwards.
I’ve had all my benefits stopped again. I’m about to get my results for suspected cancer on Friday. And I know what’s going to come up, my doctor’s going to say, ‘Paul, you’ve got to change your diet, you’ve got to eat healthily’, and I’m like, how? My benefits aren’t being paid, I don’t have a kitchen in the accommodation that I’m sitting in, so how? How do you expect this to happen?
So unless you, as my doctor, has the authority to get the DWP to pay the benefits that are rightfully mine but that I’m having to – here comes the lawyers again – having to take back to court for the fourteenth time to get them to pay the money. We just go through this cycle. Someone, somewhere has to be able to go, no, no more, we’re not doing this anymore.