Are you sure you're all right (Jack)?

I used to give £50 notes to the homeless people on London pavements. I couldn't think why not: I was wearing £200 shoes and a £200 haircut, weaving my way from a £100 meal that my employers paid for to a £40 taxi home. It was a nice life. I could spare a few notes, and felt sure they weren't all spent on Carling and smack. What if they were, anyway? I spent mine on red wine and Chanel, hardly a morally superior choice.

Most of my friends were amazed - not just that I gave those people cash, but that there were destitute people in London. We all walked the same pavements each day, yet most seemed not to have noticed the bundles of humanity littering their path. "How can you not see them? They're in the way!" I asked. They looked puzzled; "I guess I just step over them. No, I've never seen them."

I wonder if David, Sam, Nick and Miriam ever see who they're stepping over? (Miriam might but, if so, she's not influencing her husband much.) It's becoming patently clear they don't "see" the poor, or notice that they are human and hurting. I recall how nice it feels to be warm enough, clean enough, safe enough, healthy enough and to feel sure of one's place in life; one's worth. How utterly natural it feels to know where you're going, literally and metaphorically, and how to get there. You don't really appreciate that until it all changes.

Bag lady, London

Some things happened to me that shook my sense of 'rightness'. It was shaken hard: I became ill for a very long time. My employers got fed up of fitting in with my erratic health and made me 'redundant'. I still took it for granted that I'd get well again, and made plans accordingly.

I didn't get well. My plans, therefore, turned out to be inappropriate. All my insurance policies (the ones that paid out, that is) proved to be time-limited, or to have tiny but pivotal clauses which meant they didn't have to keep paying.

Bag lady, London

I sold all my investments at a bad time, and ended up losing the flat anyway. Now I had no job, poor health, nothing in the bank and nowhere to live. Friends lent me money (I still owe them!) but no-one else would. Lines of support were suddenly cut off: the bank that couldn't stop giving me free gifts and benefits no longer wanted my custom. I'd completely lost sight of the price of petrol, bus fares; everyday expenses. They now seemed terrifyingly high.

People like me have little knowledge of the benefits system. I now know I was given dreadful advice and baldly lied to, by folks who are paid to 'help' taxpayers in trouble. Now renting and still very ill, I couldn't cope. I asked everywhere for help and they all said No. I didn't know they always say No first! How could I? I'd happily paid nearly half a million in tax and NI while working (I got a statement on redundancy), trusting that this money went to ensure a healthy, functioning society that supports its weaker members. I didn't know it actively works to avoid helping them.

Lifestyle benefits

I became homeless. The entire fall took three and a half years, protracted as it was by my cushions of investment and insurance. Had I known things wouldn't get better I'd have done things differently. But you don't, do you? Nobody sits on their Italian calfskin sofa, quaffing Moulin-a-Vent, thinking "I fancy becoming debilitated, selling everything that makes my life nice, and living on a hundred quid a week off the welfare." You believe you can make things better, because you always have. And you believe your country will lend you a hand if you really need it.

Neither is a given.

If you've got less than I had to start with, you fall even faster and harder.

Those poor people - the scroungers, the feckless, the invisible - they had lives, too, and we paid taxes to make sure they got help when they needed it. But they didn't get help.They just fell and fell.

It can happen to anyone.

Welfare benefits

And, when you've fallen, you might be reeling in shock and you will certainly be unwell. But you'll still have to get to grips with the fact that this welfare state WILL NOT HELP YOU unless you learn its rules; play its game. And when you succeed, this is what you get.

£70 a week, because they don't believe you or your doctors when you say you are ill. It goes up to about £95 after your successful appeal, which takes six months.

This is what the asses running our country think you will give everything up for; what you'll learn to play their convoluted games for; what you're robbing the country for.

Really?

I would like to remind you that people like you live on less than £100 a week because they must, no other reason. We cost the country quite a bit, that's true. It's taxpayers' money - we've paid taxes, too - just like the taxpayers' money we continue to give the banks that continue to give themselves huge bonuses, and just like the taxpayers' money that gives bounties to business to get workers for free, also paid by the taxpayer.

Who would you rather your tax went to? Tesco and Primark, for getting free staff? A bunch of bankers celebrating their bonus with a new yacht? Or the lady in the third picture, who once had a life much like yours?

What Can I Do?

Channel 4 is asking for signatures in support of their Empty Homes Campaign 2 Million families are homeless - 1 million empty homes... it would be an amazing start.