Clerical Bloody-Mindedness Driven from above by political pressure, front line clerks in government departments are bent on interpreting 'the rules' to the advantage of their employers, irrespective of the hardship it may inflict upon the hapless individual.

My wife suffers from a mental illness. The controlling drugs she has to take make her too slow to hold an outside job with an employer. Nevertheless, she helped me with my business and I paid her a wage for doing so. During March 1991, I realised that my business was not making enough money to support my family. So on 1st April 1991 I registered officially unemployed.

Some months later, a person (I'll call her Harriet) came from the DSS to assess whether the amount of state welfare we were receiving was 'correct'. In the course of so doing, she scrutinised our bank statements. She noticed that my wife was receiving a regular payment which she had been receiving before I became officially unemployed. It was a monthly standing order from my account to hers. It had been, in effect, her salary for helping me in my business. She used it for buying the food and other domestic consumables. Since it was to my wife, and not to an outside employee, I had not bothered to cancel the standing order. It was simply money going from my account to hers. Had she been an outside employee, obviously I would have stopped the standing order when that person's employment finished. Since it was my own wife, I did not see stopping it as urgent.

Harriet asked me what it was. I told her. She said my wife was still receiving her salary for two months after I had registered as unemployed. I agreed, but told her why I had not bothered to stop it immediately. Harriet said that the 'documentary evidence' showed that my wife was still receiving a salary after my unemployment had commenced, and that therefore she would have to deduct it from the amount of the welfare to which we were entitled. I objected, saying that the money had come out of my account into hers. No money left the family. No money entered it.

My account was what the bank designated a 'business account'. My wife's account was a private account. I did not have a private account. Harriet therefore decreed that what entered my wife's private account was income, but what left my business account was a business loss. She said that state welfare did not support business losses, so the income my wife had received had to be deducted from the 'benefit' to which we were entitled. Of course, she still counted the balance in my 'business' account as part of the family's 'savings'. She did not regard it as a separate entity from that point of view. As a result of this, we lost £398.66 (1991) in benefit. This may not seem much to most people. But when you consider that, on state welfare, it was then 9% of our entire annual income, it was to us astronomical.

Whatever fancy accounting label the money goes under, the net change in the family's means resulting from my paying money from my account to my wife's - for whatever reason - was zero. I repeat: nothing came in: nothing went out. This is typical of the circular-reasoning-of-convenience which petty bureaucrats apply in nit-picking their way through bits of legal syntax while ignoring the obvious reality of the situation. To my mind it is pure bloody mindedness. It is also a form of bloody mindedness which causes other people - including young children - great deprivation and hardship.