Talk about turning a wilfully blind eye: there are armed troops on the streets of Italy, a major EU country, today and not one single UK newspaper has it as a front page story, at least not in their online editions.
To be fair, The Independent does have a front page story about Italy- but it’s about wifeswapping.
As neatly and accurately summed up by the very cute when he’s angry Russell Howard, on Mock the Week last week:
It’s the only clip of it I could find and the video quality’s not brilliant, but the comedy is spot on for accuracy.
A used beemer, that is.
Why so? Thanks to Egalia at Tenessee Guerilla Women for drawing my attention to this sick little ad campaign for BMW:
As it’s described in Salon:
Broadsheet: [A] beautiful young woman — presumably naked and lying in bed — wearing a come-hither look and a crown of blond curls. In small print scrawled across her bare shoulder, it reads: “You know you’re not the first.” As your eyes drift to the bottom of the advertisement — and the top of her chest — you learn that it’s an advertisement for BMW’s premium selection of used cars. Used cars, used women — get it?! And, finally, there’s BMW’s slogan in the bottom right-hand corner, which takes on a whole new meaning: “Sheer Driving Pleasure.”
I’d also add – how old is that girl? 13? 14? She could be 18; but even so the aim is to make her look pubescent, yet still available.
The air of innocence suggests virginal chastity, yet the pose of passive abandon says ‘here, take me’. The makeup is deliberately designed to accentuate the dewy skin, pouting mouth and cherubic curls of extreme youth; yet the direct gaze gives an implicit promise of sexuality. It’s all very carefully done and just to make sure you get the message, it’s made explicit in the slogan. “You know you’re not the first”. Oh well, that’s all right then. Lech away at the child.
No doubt BMW’s marketing droids are aiming for a discrete demographic – and from the message sent by this ad, I’d say that’s the repressed-paedophile-with-aspirational-tendencies-in-a-boring-job-that-doesn’t-pay
[First spotted by Copyranter.]
* Jeremy Clarkson, The Sunday Times
I’m reposting this March ’08 post because banker David Freud is prominent right now as the evil genius behind New Labour’s brutal welfare reforms.
As the BBC, particularly, seems to be regurgitating government press releases almost verbatim, accepting Freud’s outright lies (he claims 2/3 of Incapacity benefit claimants fraudulent, when the DWP’s own figures say 99% are legit) as gospel truth, swallowing unquestioningly the government’s premise that being jobless is in itself a crime, I thought it prudent to have another look at why it might be that Freud is getting a such an easy time of it from the media. Know the enemy etc.
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Who is David Freud, and why’s he getting such an easy ride from the media?
Freud is the connected City banker and former journalist who made his name in PFI deals and massive privatisation schemes and so was, of course, the perfect choice to conduct the review of welfare policy that resulted in yesterdays budget announcement that sick people will be forced into to work, fit or not, by the imposition of even harsher medical tests.
In the UK sick people with no income may claim Incapacity Benefit, ICB, a benefit paid for by national insurance contributions *from working people* and payable to working people off sick. Those who do not have sufficient contributions get another non-contributory benefit, Income Support.
The current medical testing regime is already one of the harshest in Europe.
For the first 28 weeks of absence from work due to illness or injury, an employed person is entitled to just £72.55 a week. This is called ‘Statutory Sick Pay’ and it is paid by the employer. Self-employed people can claim the Lower Rate Short Term Incapacity Benefit, currently £61.35 a week, plus £37.90 for an adult dependant.
For weeks 29 to 52, for both employees and the self-employed, the Higher Rate Short Term Incapacity Benefit is £72.55 a week for the claimant and £37.90 for an adult dependant.
After 52 weeks, a single adult is eligible for as little as £81.35 a week in State Incapacity Benefits (£4,230.20 a year). If that same adult had a spouse, they may receive just £130 a week (£6,760 a year). Additional benefit depending on age also applies – £17.10 for under 35s, £8.55 for those aged 35 to 44.
Furthermore, Incapacity Benefit is taxable after the first 6 months of claiming.
The unsubtantiated claims of the Daily Mail and James Parnell notwithstanding, it isn’t easy to get Incapacity Benefit to begin with; now it’s to be made even more difficult to obtain – even though it’s an entitlement you’ve already paid for from contributions from pay.
But then you can’t sell off a social security system and bureaucracy that actually pays out money, can you? Where’s the profit in that?
The second element of his report is the proposal that responsibility for such “support” and “training” programmes should be handed over to 11 large contractors, each of whom would have total responsibility for one region. They would be given the contracts to look after claimants for up to three years and would be paid according to results, with a “successful” long-term outcome being that the claimant stops claiming for up to three years. In other words, they would share in the benefits “saved”.
This would be a recipe for coercion of claimants, as well as creating untold opportunities for fraud as the corporations seek to provide training and support for claimants with their sister companies. This bonanza for the employment services companies comes despite Freud’s admission that there was “no conclusive evidence that the private sector outperforms the public sector on current programmes”.
Let’s face it. Darling and Brown have nothing else left to sell to cover the great gaping hole in the public accounts.
The bloated rich got away virtually unscathed in the budget, as did corporations; a sop of a rise in universal child benefit was thrown to the vast, struggling, indifferentiated middles (the poor won’t get it, it’ll be deducted from their benefit, so that’s all right) and the chancellor also chickened out on green taxes for fear of the wrath of the airline and transport industry. but the least able to fight back, well, screw them.
There is no black hole in the public accounts, apparently, there is no looming recession – no, it’s all the fault of those lazy workshy sick people – just look at them leeching off the state to the tune of 50-odd quid a week. Each! There’s your hole in the public accounts! Why, they should be out there picking leeks in Lincolnshire in the rain for a fiver an hour less four fifty in deductions – what’s a little diabetes or kidney disease or arthritis when Nelson commanded a ship with his arm blown off? Bunch of frauds, the lot of them, according to Freud.
Fewer than a third of the 2.7 million people claiming incapacity benefit are legitimate claimants, a government welfare adviser has said.
David Freud, an investment banker, said up to 185,000 claimants work illegally while on the benefit.
He told the Daily Telegraph it was “ludicrous” medical checks were carried out by a claimant’s own GP.
What? Their own doctors said they’re too sick too work? Then they must be lying. Or there must be something wrong with the tests. Stands to reason. But no, David Freud doesn’t even know the system he’s criticising. ICB medicals are carried out by BAMS, the privatised medical service.
State Incapacity Benefit can be claimed for an initial 28 weeks on the basis of assessments provided by the individual’s doctor.
After 28 weeks, individuals must complete a lengthy questionnaire and be assessed on their ability to carry out any occupation – not just the role carried out before they became ill. Fifteen different functional areas are examined covering physical, mental and sensory abilities. Each functional area is assessed and State Incapacity Benefit only continues when the total impairment is sufficiently significant across the full range of areas.
Whatever, the government can’t be spending all this money on unproductive sick people, not when there’s a war to fund. (Funny how Iraq didn’t get mentioned in the budget..).
You’d think the media would notice and investigate the background to these draconian changes; remember when Thatcher stopped the free school milk? Then it was all “Thatcher, Thatcher, milk-snatcher”. But unelected crony David Freud does something much, much worse and yet the British media consistently say very little that’s not laudatory about the very rich man who wants to drive the already poor in deeper poverty.
Why?
It could be because British journalists have swallowed the myth of New Labour meritocracy (largely because it justifies their own privileged positions as deserved) seeing those who are poor, or sick or otherwise disadvantaged as being there through their own fault (the converse of which is that the rich, like Freud, are rich because they are such superior beings). I’m pretty sure there’s a generous helping of that, yes, but I think mostly he’s getting an easy ride because of his name and his connections.
No-one wants to offend a Freud, it’d be career death to any budding journo.
Freud is related by birth and marriage to a family that’s embedded in the cultural and public life of the country, not least in the media and journalism.
Other notable members of the Freud family in the media include such luminaries of spin as Edward Bernays, the father of public relations. Cousin Matthew of Freud Communications PR agency for Live8 and the G8, is married to Elisabeth Murdoch, daughter of Rupert and media mogul in her own right.
The backing that Live 8 has won from media mogul Rupert Murdoch is just one indication that a massive business machine has been set in motion. Murdoch’s British tabloid the Sun gave the event enthusiastic support, although it is not a paper noted for its interest in Africa or liberal causes. It is, however, a key supporter of Blair.
The Murdoch and Live 8 connections are close. Elisabeth Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s daughter, is married to Matthew Freud, one of the organisers. Freud runs a leading public relations company that is, according to the Financial Times, one of the most influential in the UK. It has the largest media and entertainment client list in the country, with clients including famous actors and major companies such as AOL—of which more later. He and his wife also have connections to the Blair government. They sit on various government committees, and his company, Freud Communications, has organised events for both the government and the Labour Party.
And of course the man himself is a former FT journalist. How very nicely cicular.
Should any future scholar want an exemplar of how Labour turned into a party of patronage and moral corruption they could do worse than study the history of the younger sprigs of the Freud family during the Blair years. The rise and rise of the Freuds and the abolition of Clause IV are all of a same piece, as is the victimisation of disabled people by someone who’d probably spend more on feng-shuiing their conservatory than 6 months incapacity benefit pays someone with cancer. Yes, very socialist.
When – and they will be if there’s any justice in the world – Labour politicians are called to account for the ruin of the country, they’ll probably claim that they were deliberately subverted from within and it was all a capitalist plot.
But no. New Labour know and have always known exactly what they’re doing: eventually corporations are to have complete control over people’s livelihoods and the conditions of their existence and David Freud and his colleagues in the media/political/City nexus are right in the vanguard of the process.
The experts and academics present were the theorists and ideologues of welfare to work. What linked many of them together, including Aylward, was their association with the giant US income protection company UnumProvident, represented at the conference by John LoCascio. The goal was the transformation of the welfare system. The cultural meaning of illness would be redefined; growing numbers of claimants would be declared capable of work and ‘motivated’ into jobs. A new work ethic would transform IB recipients into entrepreneurs helping themselves out of poverty and into self-reliance. Five years later these goals would take a tangible form in New Labour’s 2006 Welfare Reform Bill.
Unum Provident is already delivering incapacity benefit medicals for the government while selling policies by emphasising the lack of state benefits. No conflict of interest there, then.
I wonder if- and if so, how many – Unum Provident shares Brown, Darling, Freud et al have in their private portfolios?
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[Edited slightly for grammar, spelling and general incomprehensibility]
Comes from the Guardian, to Polly Toynbee’s column on New Labour’s welfare reforms:
stillthinking
Jul 22 08, 10:18am (about 2 hours ago)
My brother (now 45) has chronic schizophrenia (inherited not drug induced). He is best cared for in the stress free environment of the family home. His interpersonal skills and levels of paranoia means he is best away from groups of people and their demands such as at work. He looks odd, is utterly naive and vulnerable and his personal grooming isn’t great. He would not last 5 minutes. Any changes to his routine trigger severe migraine and violent sickness. There is also the damping effect and other side effects of his miscellaneous necessary medication. He is tired, dopey and grumpy. When the doctors try messing with his medication to achieve a lighter touch he spirals downwards again.
I think there is more though because he also seems to be a little limited in intelligence (he was in several remedial classes as a child) and EEG for his headaches which he even had back then. My mother reports being told that it showed ‘a shadow on his brain’ though nothing more was ever said about this. He writes like a child. It pains me to say all this of my own brother.
I have watched him twice descend into complete psychosis and at other times hover on the edges. Seeing him forcibly hospitalised was a horrific experience. This is distressing in the extreme for him and for our family. I cried simply writing this at the prospect of him being put through this process of re-assessment which will unleash the terrors on him and potentially push him into another massive psychotic breakdown. So to those commentators advocating these measures go on get all muscular and tough about these so-called fraudulent long-term Incapacity Benefit claimants for this is the impact you will have on our family. Hope they will all be happy.
When interviewed on Channel 4 news, David Freud, a banker, who came up with the estimates for those he thought should not be on IB, could not give a convincing account of how he had arrived at the figures when repeatedly pressed. They were simply back of the envelope estimates. He seemed to be saying that he had taken the increase in the number of people on IB and the decrease in the number of people claiming unemployment benefit and read this directly across without any further evidence.
Hope the media commentators who affect to know what’s best for others can live with their consciences knowing the enormous harm that is about to be perpetrated on people like my brother.
This will totally finish my mother off. She is nearly 70 and also caring for her husband who is in the first stages of dementia. She will have to negotiate the system for/with him as well as deal with his inevitable mental health deterioration as a result of this extra pressure and she is just not up to it. He is a poor communicator, will not be able to take in what people are saying to him and is incredibly suggestible. The best thing for him is to be kept gently stable and shielded from unnecessary stress.
THE most important thing for managing my brother is to get him to take his medication and to see the professionals involved in his case. Start bombarding him with another set of professionals pressurising him -any professional asking him questions is a pressure- and you can see the problem here.
The terrible distress that is about to be visited on our family seems to be accepted as some kind of necessary collateral damage. I would suggest that there should be some facility to seek an exemption negotiated by their carers and professionals from the routine quizzing of people like my brother.
I have been staggered at the amount of vitriol towards benefit claimants out there on the comment boards. It is quite frightening.
Indeed it is frightening. But the commenters are merely following the lead of that nice young Mr Purnell, who wants to turn the poor disabled and mentally ill into slave labour for the state.
Anyone who has a disabling physical condition, even with a job, is teetering over a chasm of poverty, as they are only working at the whim of their employer and tend to be dependent on complicated, fragile and expensive support systems. Those who can’t work are only one housing benefit screwup or gas bill from complete and utter disaster. For an nunqualified operative of a private company to overrule your own doctor’s advice and withdraw your income with no effective avenue of appeal – that virtually guarantees disaster.
As for forcing non-working people to do ‘community service’ – community service is a judicial punishment imposed for having committed a crime.
Privately employed, unaccountable know-nothings will be given the power to impose the same punishment – with no judicial process – for the crime of being sick, addicted, inadequate in some way, or just plain out of a job, whatever the reason. The mentally ill are already treated as criminals; regularly jailed physically or chemically rather than treated like human beings and stigmatised by the tabloids as dangerous unpredictables to be avoided and shunned and now the same is to be done to the poor and/or unemployed.
But why? Why would New Labour stigmatise and even criminalise poverty?
The government itself is almost as insecure as an Incapacity Benefit claimant itself, and one more bank crash away from total implosion. Aid to the poor is being cut just as it’s most needed and it’s not co-incidental. Brown and Darling certainly see the depth and severity of the coming recession, their public optimism notwithstanding; hence their desperation to cut, cut and cut some more. Knowing how bad things may get the government has certainly been planning for some time for civil disorder and mass movements of people (this from the organisers of the Jarrow march). That’s why there are all those spiffy new laws restricting protest and why the police have been given handy new toys to contain and control potentially rebellious crowds. Now comes the propaganda painting the unemployed as lesser humans. It’s easier to accept police use of their new toys on chav scum and lazy scroungers.
To have Labour, Labour mark you, the supposed champions of the poor and oppressed, cynically whipping up such hatred is sickening, though hardly unexpected, given the events of the last 11 years. The only comfort to be had is the hope that Parnell, Brown, Harman and all the rest of the jumped up town hall clerks in government will soon themselves be on the dole, picking litter for peanuts, with their tabloid friends joining them as the print industry collapses.
Oh yes, and just as a matter of interest and to show just how these things work, one of the people set to benefit from all this is the wife of the Australian prime minister. Yes, really.
Question: Which Australian company under fire for its shabby treatment of workers in Australia fled overseas and is now in hot water for under-cutting its competitors bids by escaping employment conditions designed to protect staff?
Answer: WorkDirections UK, part of Ingeus, the multinational group founded and run by Therese Rein, wife of Federal Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd.
Question: Which Australian company was found to have underpaid its workers by up to $4000 and was forced to repay them after shifting them from awards to common law contracts?
Answer: WorkDirections Australia, the Australian arm of the multinational group founded and run by Therese Rein, wife of Federal Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd.
Question: Which Australian company sacked 300-400 workers after failing to meet the standards required by the Australian Government for employment agencies?
Answer: WorkDirections Australia, etc, etc. Now, before Rudd’s chief of staff, David Epstein, the Sultan of Spin, the Master of Muck, and former chief ANiMaLS operative arcs up and unleashes the full force of the ALP’s mindless army of bloggers and Howard-haters, let it be noted that the latest confrontation between Rein’s company and its staff was revealed in the pages of The Guardian, the principal Labour daily in the UK.
The details were not revealed by anyone from the Coalition’s non-existent dirt unit, despite what Rudd’s deputy, the strident Julia Gillard, might honk, or shadow Treasurer Wayne Swan might insinuate, or mud-slinger extraordinaire Anthony Albanese might bray, nor in some crypto-fascist neo-con sheet bankrolled by aged nazi war criminals. The Guardian is a left-wing newspaper which still believes in class war, like some in the Left of the ALP, and no doubt published its story to highlight what it believes is an attack on workers and their conditions.
Rein’s company won six of 15 contracts worth more than 85 million ($A196,560,000) from the British Government under a scheme which aims to get disabled people off welfare. According to The Guardian: `’Unions and charities are furious that Mr Hain (the work and pensions secretary) has handed over the lion’s share of the first tranche of privatised services to the Ingeus group under a deal which will not include union recognition and will not safeguard jobs on the same conditions as in Whitehall.”
The competitors, mainly charities, factored in the costs of TUPE staff benefits – which cover employees when their employers are taken over – into their bids. Rein’s company had legal advice it did not need to provide those benefits and was able to undercut its competition. Charitably, and with an enviable display of the sportsmanship associated with thugs from the Graham Richardson school of “whatever it takes” right-wing Labor politics, Rein’s UK manager William Smith said the charities were `’whingers”. `’Frankly its their own fault. They should have bloody read the questions and answers documents.” Indeed. If they hadn’t been busily looking after the handicapped, widows and orphans, they may well have employed a firm of smart lawyers to look for such an edge.
Interestingly, The Guardian quoted angry and disappointed officials from two interested parties, the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations and the Public and Commercial Services Union, in its article about Rudd’s wife’s company. Stephen Bubb, the volunteer groups’ representative, said he intended to ask the UK Government whether it had decided there was no future for voluntary organisations in delivering services. PCSU general secretary Mark Serwotka said: `’Not only has the voluntary sector been used as a Trojan horse by the private sector but the Government has handed a large chunk of work to a firm which is failing and mired in controversy in Australia. The Government is giving a green light to a company who we fear will try and circumvent TUPE regulations.”
Ingeus has been given nearly half of the British governments contracts for privatised benefits. There’s more on Pathways To Work and the theft of tax money that should have gone to the poor by a government who’s handing up to 120 billion quid of it to the Aussie PM’s wife, here.