NB It is with great sadness that we are taking down the previous post on the hunger striker George Rolph. We feel we cannot endorse him for many reasons which we cannot get into here, although many of you will have heard about the issues involved. However, at the end of that post was a long list of atos, government and bbc bod’s addresses which we feel are still useful if you wish to protest or simply to cost atos money. There was also a guide to answering questions at the WCA which is a useful resource. We are therefore simply going to retain these elements and you will then be able to find them as our blog post ‘More resources’. M and L x
Warning: After innocently opening my Guardian on Saturday to see a two page spread of smirking embodiment of evil David Cameron I was put right off my breakfast. So I think it only fair to warn you that this piece contains images both of aforementioned persecutor of the poor and his opposite number, the dark prince of the Oxbridge careerists who have hijacked and stolen the Labour party, Ed Miliband. BUT readers, as always, after this short (I promise!) comment piece, stay tuned and I’ll link you to a really excellent benefits guide.
It is making me very tired to write this. Tired and sad. However, we’re here to comment as well as advise and so I’ll try to fully express my feelings of despair, disgust and anger at David Cameron’s most recent antics.
DC claimed at the recent Conservative Party conference in Scotland that the changes to benefits which are devastating millions of lives and ending thousands were both ‘Fair and compassionate’. I can’t help thinking here of the recent reports of the Eton entrance exam essay question:
David Cameron doesn’t really think the ‘reforms’ are fair and compassionate. He doesn’t give a shit. This is simply, as Laurie Penny puts it in this brilliant piece: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/05/eton-scholarship-question-how-british-elite-are-trained-think, simply how the elite are trained to think. They are experts in double speak. They can justify anything. That doesn’t mean it is just. DC’s line at the conference was that reforms were ‘compassionate’ because they would ‘help people get back on their feet’. Also that the current system had led to people out of work doing better than those in work (1. simply untrue; 2. even if it was true, the solution is a living wage, not cuts to benefits, because that’s one of the many, many scandals he’s trying to obfuscate; the fact that people working full time still can’t afford the basic necessities).
This is spurious and amoral on so many levels. The man is a monster. Yet again, he fudges the issue that the majority of benefits are paid to people IN WORK (hello again, lack of a living wage and a bit of working dignity!). Yet again, he fudges the fact that there are around 400 000 available jobs to go round MILLIONS of people; yet again, because he conveniently doesn’t mention this, he can lie again and claim our national troubles are all because of poor people and immigrants, rather than telling the truth that the reason there are no jobs is down to HIS people, the banks and corporations for whom profit is the only imperative. Still worse, he knows full well these reforms do the opposite of ‘getting people back on their feet’. They kill people. They terrorise the sick and disabled with a ‘revolving door’ of sham medicals driven by targets rather than the truth followed by appeals followed almost immediately by medicals again (or in some cases, whilst the previous decision is still under appeal). They force people to work for nothing (thereby taking even more jobs off the market). They have no problem with welfare for rich people, with companies given fat handouts for denying disability (atos) and offering worthless workfare ‘placements’ (numerous; see http://www.boycottworkfare.org/ for up to date details). They take all financial support away for up to THREE YEARS if claimants don’t dance to their every tune, including handing over PASSWORDS TO PERSONAL EMAILS (see http://skwalker1964.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/major-dwp-ujm-security-flaw-but-forces-claimants-to-use-anyway/). My partner’s brother, who lives in Bradford, has been sanctioned 8 times; the latest ‘jobseeker direction’ he faces is travelling to either York or Harrogate, both over 40 miles away, to participate in a full time workfare scheme. When asked about how he was supposed to afford this, he was told to use his JSA. When he then correctly pointed out that that would only cover part of his travelling costs (this assuming he used ALL his JSA to pay for travel, and so wouldn’t be able to eat or anything) he was told his mum could help him out. His mum is disabled and on benefits herself, and that is beside the point anyway; the sheer arrogance of them, assuming that his mother 1. CAN and 2. SHOULD be able to help him financially so he can jump as high as the DWP wants. He is being asked not just to work for nothing; worse, he’s being asked to PAY to work. To STARVE to work. And his mum’s benefits are calculated (and meagrely at that) to meet HER needs, so she can afford to live. There IS nothing to spare, and every time he is sanctioned the household budgets teeter precariously on the brink of collapse as family who are poor themselves rally round to keep him from going hungry. Meanwhile, his mum is afraid to even leave the house because there’s a woman down the road whose hobby is phoning the benefits hotline to say people aren’t really disabled. Divide and rule at its best; and that’s why DC is ‘proud’ of these reforms. Not because they are ‘fair and compassionate’ – really, how dare he – but because he is a psychopath in a cabinet full of psychopaths with not a shred of guilt or empathy between them, and his true aim of crushing the poor so hard they’ll never be able to get up again looks like it’s succeeding.
I am so sad, and so tired, of reading and writing about all this. Of hearing the stories of friends and family suffering, and those of the people who write to us at KTA desperate and with nowhere else to reach out to for help. Of seeing the food bank donation box in the supermarket, and buying food for it out of my own pocket, and crying afterwards, knowing that it’s utterly wrong that hungry people should have to rely on charity, knowing that having enough to eat is a basic human right; but also knowing that there are people out there who are nonetheless going hungry, their children are going hungry, and the government are quite happy to let them starve. There is no bread? Let them eat cake! But can we expect any help from the Red corner (or in fact, as it has been since Tony Blair’s day, the Other Blue Corner)? What do you think?
Miliband, in his worthless recent speech, simply repeated the same old Tory drivel about ‘ending the something for nothing culture’ (hmm, who first came up with that little gem? Wasn’t it the hard right winger Peter Lilley?), the same old false dichotomy of ‘scroungers v strivers’ and generally left us in no doubt that he cares not a jot about the social safety net for the poorest and most vulnerable, not a jot for the truth (ie the fact that MOST PEOPLE RECEIVING BENEFITS are in work, there ARE no jobs, and the rate of fraud is just 0.5% for disability benefits and that overall, just 2.1 % was overpaid due to fraud and error in the last year [see the DWP’s OWN statistics: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/203097/nsfr-final-090513.pdf%5D; and note that word error, that means through the DWP’s incompetence rather than any dishonesty on the part of the claimant); but that he only cares for his own Oxbridge careerist ambitions. The party has now moved so far away from the people it originally represented that we may as well be on the moon. Nye Bevan would be turning in his grave; so would my dad. In a way this makes me even more sad and tired, because I grew up in a household that was Labour through and through, and the party I believed in so fiercely doesn’t exist any more.
That’s why we have to unite and fight in whatever way we can at the grassroots level. Because at the party political level, as Orwell wrote:
Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
PIP Guide by B&W I don’t have anything else to say today about these two sorry excuses for men – and writing what I have has left me with tears in my eyes – but here’s a guide to DLA and PIP; it’s apparently the best one there is, and we’ll be referring to it heavily when we write our post on DLA/PIP.
As always, love and solidarity.
Michelle and Laurie.
Tags: ATOS, Blue Labour, David Cameron, DLA, DWP, Ed Miliband, food banks, lies, Orwell's Animal Farm, PIP, Tories
kickingtoryassonwelfare 