Tuesday, 20 November 2012

The Last Nail in PiP's Coffin?












'Elf and Safety

Britain, I’m frightened.

Something dreadful is happening to you and you don’t know.





David Cameron wants to compete with India and China.








He believes you must work longer for less money.





Since then, he has :

  • ·         Restricted your right to go to an employment tribunal
  • ·         Reduced the support we give CABs to help you
  • ·         Suggested that we get rid of the Human Rights Act
  • ·         Denied profoundly disabled children the right to an independent income
  • ·         Restricted your right to appeal any wrong decisions
  • ·         Ignored and broken international law
  • ·         Closed committees designed to keep check on his policies
  • ·         Politicised the police force
  • ·         Proposed secret courts
  • ·         Continually ignored expert advice
  • ·         Arrested peaceful protesters and influenced sentencing (supposedly independent)









I’m becoming truly frightened that my generation has forgotten

Monday, 12 November 2012

People's Review of the WCA





(An accessible version is available for download from: http://wearespartacus.org.uk/wca-report/)

Saturday, 10 November 2012

Disability Roulette














Now imagine your “job” is cancer.










So I’ll leave you with a quote from Joseph Goebbels :


And one from David Cameron :

"We will always protect the most vulnerable"

Thursday, 8 November 2012

"...and then you Win"










  •       Medical evidence from own GP or consultant rarely taken into account












  •          Correspondence sent to the claimant is threatening and frightening.










But we have to tell them.
(Dealt with under delays and appeals above)




Tuesday, 6 November 2012

ESA Reaches a Tipping Point

Today, pretty much as I type, the Government will release the first significant figures for the transfer of claimants from incapacity benefit to the new Employment Support Allowance (or ESA, via the feared and despised Atos WCA)

Finally, we will get to see how many people previously claiming Incapacity Benefit are being awarded the new benefit, how many are being awarded it for one year only, how many are told they are immediately fit for work and how many can look forward to the mythical  “support” that doesn’t actually exist for those told they need it to find work.

But it will show lots of other things too.

We have a curious – and I would guess fairly unique - situation here with welfare policy. Sick and disabled people have found a voice on social media that often went unheard in the past. At this very moment in time, we, the public, have access to information that we have never had access to before.

With the introduction of the Data protection and Freedom of Information acts and their perfect marriage to the information superhighway, sick and disabled people can campaign online with immediate access to political information via Hansard, the Parliament.uk website and other sources.

They can share that information with a network of millions in seconds via Facebook, Twitter and email.

They can analyse endless, technical reports and data in hours, overnight if need be - by breaking it down for many people to do in chunks. Any government still hoping they can sneak information out, cook the books, distort results or mislead the public can only be totally unaware of the invention of computers and what actual human people use them for.

I know of at least 8 groups or analysts with hunches on what today’s figures will show, waiting to pounce as soon as the report is released and prove or disprove their theories. Almost all would be pretty much terminal for ESA as it exists. Did I mention these are very clever people indeed? The odds of all 8 hunches being wrong are negligible.

The truth is the game is up. Oh, the name might limp on – you know how politicians love to save face – but there are only two ways for ESA to go : It either has to improve drastically, beyond all recognition, in partnership with sick and disabled people or current protests will spill over into a terrible crisis for Britain.

Ask yourselves what it takes for people like me – an ordinary Mum and wife who happens to have a serious long term illness – to suddenly start writing here, trying desperately to warn you all that something terrible is happening. When 13 year old boys write to the Right Honourable Minister accusing them of killing their Dad; when vulnerable people feel they must do something as extreme as going on hunger strike, a policy is simply no longer sustainable. Oh, it might limp on for a while, but every time someone dies just days after being found “fit for work” by Atos, every new set of damning statistics, every announcement that “work providers” are actually not providing work gets more and more coverage and more and more embarrassing for politicians.

Today’s figures should show that Atos are not close to conducting the number of assessments the DWP predicted. Files are backed up for months, Atos have been trying to recruit more assessors – and failing – for months. Assessments either a) take longer than the DWP insist on or b) cannot be accurate. If today’s figures don’t show that Atos are way behind schedule, then the books have been cooked. This is not debatable or theoretical. Despite Iain Duncan-Smith’s endless claims that everyone will face an assessment under ESA, we have reams of proof that this is not, in fact, the case. The only way to clear the backlog would be to simply approve a large number of files based on the application form and the evidence provided by the claimant alone – just as they always had to.

For what it’s worth, I predict a significant increase in Support Group numbers, but the reasons for my hunch are classified.  

Harrington will also release his Year 3 review in just a week or two and, again, it either has to call for very significant changes to the WCA or be discredited totally. Another fudge, any attempt to claim it will all just sort itself out, everything’s fine honest, blah, blah, blah will be the final straw. Harrington will be totally discredited and any campaigners who still have even the tiniest respect for trying to change this welfare car crash politically will dissolve.

I should not have to warn government that this is something they should avoid happening at all costs. Any group who tries to engage with the political system and finds that archaic laws are invoked to deny all recommendations from a second chamber, information is hidden and falsified, statistics are twisted and distorted or released unapproved, the press is co-opted with politicised departmental press releases and the public are made to hate them through a programme of propaganda find, they become a civil rights movement.
I am frightened by the desperation I see growing daily amongst sick and disabled people. I am frightened that people are taking their own lives and going on hunger strike. I am frightened by what form a civil rights movement takes when a group are so systematically disenfranchised by the actions of a sitting government. I am frightened by the sense amongst the people I write for, that the time for talking is passing. Maybe that it has passed.

Sometimes, people describe me as a disability campaigner. I’ve often tried to explain that I don’t see it that way. I’m a writer. I’m meant to reflect what I see, not distort it. I’m meant to dig down into the reasons for it, try to understand what motivates it.

There are only two ways for this to go. Either :

The government announces a pause to the IB to ESA transfer and a total re-design of any future out of work sickness benefit and the process of assessing a need for it


The entire process will collapse, grinding to a painful halt under the sheer weight of backlogs, appeals, bad press and public outcry. Thousands more mums and sisters and sons will die un-necessarily, all for the refusal of politicians to accept expert advice and ESA will go down in history as the most shocking human rights abuse of people with disabilities the UK has ever witnessed.

Because that’s what civil rights movements are for. 

Monday, 5 November 2012

Savile, Hitler & Welfare Reform. Some things are just too Terrible to Believe

Generalisations are always tricky, (Do you see what I did there?) but I think I can say fairly safely, that there is one question almost everyone in the western world has asked :

How did Hitler happen?

How did the German people allow Hitler to round up millions of jews and homosexuals and disabled people, cram them into cattle trucks and gas them to death? How did that happen? Why did tens of millions of presumably good, honest, compassionate German people turn a blind eye to one of the greatest atrocities of all time? It was going on before their very eyes!  Bakers and lawyers and neighbours “disappearing” never to return, the rhetoric of hate that the government used to justify psychopathic murder – how did it happen? In Europe?  Just 70 years ago?

When I asked myself the question, I decided some things are too terrible to believe.

I mean, imagine, right now, I told you that I had proof - absolute solid proof - that aliens were going to destroy the earth around teatime next Tuesday. You wouldn’t believe me would you? Your mind would immediately cast me into the “raving conspiracist” category of amusing fools. Your answer would almost certainly be “What this Tuesday? At teatime? Don’t be so ridiculous.

We saw the same thing happen recently with Jimmy Savile. How did he get away with the most disgusting and calculating abuse, in plain sight, for decades? Why did no-one say anything? Why didn’t they do something? Why were the victims almost unanimously dismissed?

Again, some things are too terrible to believe.

It was Jim! Jim’ll fix it Jim!! The Jim who ran countless marathons for charity, who raised millions for good causes. Children my age literally deified him and would have done anything to get on Jim’ll Fix It. Rumours that Savile was a paedophile did the rounds for years. We all just sort of knew and simply couldn’t bring ourselves to go there.

For the last two years, I’ve seen for myself that it’s true.

For two years, I’ve been saying very clearly, here on this blog that sick and disabled people face a very grave threat. Half a million people with disabilities will lose the support they rely on to leave their homes or to get them out of bed and dressed. A million more will find themselves forced to the jobcentre with cancer or Parkinson’s or heart failure. People are dying as a direct result of the policies this government have introduced. 

Right here, in Britain, right in front of your eyes, this government is lying to you. They are not "protecting the vulnerable", they are not “making sure support goes to those who need it most”. What's more, they are making sure you turn a blind eye by making you hate us. You don’t hear me over the screech of “lazy feckless scrounger” propaganda when I say people will become bedbound or housebound; starving without the means to buy food; cold but unable to heat their homes.

When I tell you that we have a government so calculating that far from protecting the vulnerable - as they endlessly claim, - they are in fact attacking the one group of people they thought could never fight back. You are witnessing the biggest attack on the well-being and security of people with genuine and profound disabilities this country has ever seen. It’s happening, right now, here in Britain, right in front of your very eyes. Like every bully, they have picked out the weakest, who's voices are rarely heard.

But you don’t believe me yet – some things are too terrible to believe.

So when a 13 year old boy is writing to a government minister, here in the UK, to tell him very clearly, that his father is dead as a direct result of that minister’s policies, something is very wrong indeed. Kieran McArdle, 13, wrote this heart-breaking letter to Iain Duncan Smith last week telling him what so many thousands of others have tried to tell him but failed. That his ill-conceived, ignorant welfare “reforms” are killing people.

When someone with a disability embarks on a hunger strike so that you will listen to what they are trying to tell you, something is very wrong indeed. 

How far will you let this go? What will it take for you to listen? What are you prepared to "turn a blind eye" to?

My father's generation hoped we would never need to ask these questions again.