Tories

Welfare “reform” kills

Health, Life under Capitalism, Poverty, Tories, UK politics
Published on 5 Comments on Welfare “reform” kills

Just some of the people who committed suicide after their (disability) benefits were stopped:

Richard Sanderson, 44, an unemployed helicopter pilot of Southfields in London, who stabbed himself twice in the heart in May. He had been informed that his family faced a £30 a week cut in housing benefit and he feared this would leave his family homeless

Paul Willcoxson, 33, of Corby, Northants, was according to the suicide note he left behind, worried about benefit cuts when he hung himself in April.

[…]

Elaine Christian, 57, of Hull, was worried, according to reports of an inquest in July, about a meeting to assess her disability benefits. She was found drowned in a drain with ten self-inflicted cuts to her wrist and she had taken painkillers.

Now imagine you’re on long term disability benefits, unable to work or even find an employer willing to take you on, knowing that the “reforms” will mean you will lose what little money and assistance is getting you by at the moment. Sign the petition against this “reform” that will end up killing more people.

Victory to the public sector workers

Crisis? What Crisis?, Life under Capitalism, Tories, UK politics, Unions
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Today public sector workers in the UK are on strike. According to a BBC poll,
the majority of the British public supports them:

An opinion poll commissioned by BBC News suggests 61% of people believe public sector workers are justified in going on strike over pension changes.

[…]

Younger people, it also suggests, are considerably more supportive of the strikes than pensioners; almost four in five 18 to 24-year-olds back the action, a little under half of over-65s do.

Half a million public sector jobs have already been lost and the ConDem government yesterday confirmed that more cuts were coming, which may mean another 300,000 people losing their jobs as the UK is to cut its way to becoming a growth orientated export driven economy. Those workers who haven’t lost their jobs have to swallow pay freezes (extended by two years of below inflation salary growth yesterday), less pension and having to work longer to get their pension (brought forward yesterday). These are all cuts supposedly driven by the government’s desire to bring down Britain’s debt, yet what was also revealed yesterday was that it’ll have to borrow up to 100 billion in the next few years, or more than 30 billion over what needed to be borrowed in Labour’s plans until 2014 if their policies had been maintained…

Instead these and other ineffectual crisis measures (certain tax cuts, less protection for workers against being fired, undosweiter) are ideologically driven, a wish list of their pals in the City. These measures are not intended to solve the crisis, but to get a bigger share of the country’s wealth to the one percent, while everybody else suffers. It’s simply fat cats stuffing their pockets. The public workers strike is the next major act of resistance against this agenda, after protests earlier this year by other affected groups, including an earleir union led day of protest in March for which half a million people turned up.

Middleclass families to adopt a scrounger?

Poverty, Tories, UK politics
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Here’s the latest ConDemned brainwave to force scroungers to work: get middleclass volunteers to sort out trouble families:

It began in December when the prime minister said: “All evidence suggests that it’s no use offering a range of different services to these families – the help they’re offered just falls through the cracks of their chaotic lifestyles. What works is focused, personalised support.” This fits neatly into Cameron’s big society narrative – cut government funding, let amateurs fill the gap, and clap yourself as social deprivation segues into riot. The government has already slashed Connexions, the catch-all advice centre for 13- to 19-year-olds, and abolished the Educational Maintenance Allowance and the Future Jobs Fund, which existed to find jobs for the young. The careers advice service for school-leavers, meanwhile, is now only a memory – and a website. But no matter – an army of Emma Harrisons is waiting.

Emma Harrison is the founder of Action for Employment (A4E), and she is establishing Working Families Everywhere on Cameron’s behalf. You may know her from Channel 4’s The Secret Millionaire, where she gave £50,000 away in front of a TV camera in 2007, after the poor had proved their worthiness for her bounty. The scheme is being piloted in Hull, Blackpool and Kensington & Chelsea, and will roll out in the next four years. Volunteers with no prior experience of social work, creepily renamed “family champions” (FCs), will enter “never-worked” families with drug, crime and child protection issues, and turn them into “working” families. Once polished, these families will inspire others, like a game of Social Democratic dominoes, but backwards. “Family champions are going to stalk the streets, they are going to find the jobs,” says Harrison, who is clearly, like Margaret Thatcher, a Nietzschean. They will get a small wage and priority access to all other services the family is using, and they will be handpicked by Harrison. They may also get badges, but this is not confirmed.

As insanely stupid social initiatives go, this is about average for the coalition. It seems tailor made for trousering yet more money from already existing social programmes to dodgy private firms like erm, Emma Harrison’s A4e while making sure the actual worth of the work these firms do is not easily quantifiable. Money for old rope, in other words.

I would hope therefore that some enterprising journalist asks Harrison the questions Watching A4e would like her to answer:

  1. Has A4e bid for the contracts the DWP is putting out, to use European Social Fund money to pay private companies to run the same scheme that you’re promoting? Are you trying to pre-empt these contracts by getting your scheme up and running first?
  2. You have argued in the past for “super-contracts” in which a private company would run all the services in a local authority area. Is this scheme a step on the way to that?
  3. Given your company’s record of missing targets by some distance in previous welfare-to-work contracts, why do you believe you will be any more successful with this?

Here’s your fucking welfare reform

Tories, UK elections
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So you’re somebody with a disability who thanks to a bit of support from the government is still able to work and keep yourself going; you’re not doing brilliantly well perhaps but you cope. And then they take that support away:

So imagine my devastation when my government, took away my car and told me, you are no longer entitled to help or benefits because frankly you’re just not disabled enough. With no car I fear now my life as I know it is on borrowed time. I’ve appealed but the minimum wait for an appeal is another 11 weeks. With no car I’m struggling to get to work, I have to walk to the bus stop and try and manage two bus journeys and another walk from the bus stop to work. By the time I get there my feet already scream in pain. By the time I’ve done an 8 hour shift I’m dead on my feet and I have the same two bus journey home to do before I can even think about sitting down and resting my red raw and sore painful feet. If they ever get that bad I usually don’t walk on them for 24 hours to try and let them recover but without a car and rent and bills to pay I have less than 12 hours before I have to do it all over again. There’s no chance of food shopping (how on earth could I carry it home!) and I don’t think hospital appointments are available on a weekend.

If I lose my job I lose my house and then where do I go? On a council housing list? Oh I’m afraid not, you see I was bought up to earn my own living, take the minimal help i need and don’t have babies until i can afford them, and yet when I call to ask for help I am told that as i don’t have any dependent children they cannot house me and as i elected to leave work (regardless of why!) they won’t help to find me a home because I had one.

So here I am, in pain and in fear of losing my home because I can’t physically carry on getting to work but more importantly because today my government gave up on me. I’ve spent all my life trying to live the right life, to be a productive part of society and not different but it seems I got it wrong because my society cannot help me unless I have done all the things my hard working mother told me not too.

What do you think will happen? If she’s in luck this poor woman might just win her appeal, “only” having had to suffer unnecessary pain for the eleven weeks or longer it will take her to put her appeal through. More likely she’s fucked, her appeal will be denied and instead she’ll try to cope a bit longer, probably fail, lose her job, her health and her house and finally the council will have to take care of her, at much greater cost to both her and that mythical beast the taxpayer, but at least she won’t be a “burden” on central government anymore…

Welfare reform is always contraproductive, ruining lives for dubious savings. And this particular instance of it doesn’t even save money, but just shifts the expenses to local government, much less able to bear it.

Weird drugs, bizarre sexual practises or something more sinister?

Cameron, Tories, UK politics
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David Cameron’s constituency chairman dead at Glasto:

David Cameron said he was “devastated” after the chairman of his local constituency was found dead in a portable toilet in a backstage area at the Glastonbury festival.

Police said they did not yet know the cause of death of Christopher Shale, a 56-year old businessman, although friends said there was a history of heart problems in his family.

Heart problems; ‘syeah right. Hands up who didn’t think this is the Tories continuing the deviant behaviour that got record numbers of the buggers killed and/or disgraced when they were last in power…