jeffs posts
You have bought a luxury bathroom for Jeremy Hunt, so he won’t have to mix with the plebs who work for him [Image: Evolve Politics].
This is the reason Tories want your healthcare to be provided on the cheap – so they can lavish your tax money on themselves.
The cost of this extravagance could cover the annual wages of 2 nurses, 169 sessions of chemo or 15 delivered babies, This Site is reliably informed.
Meanwhile Jeremy Hunt has cut NHS funding by £22 billion, and nurses’ wages by 14 per cent.
Ask your Tory-voting, NHS-using neighbour why they keep letting people like Mr Hunt do this to them.
Conservative Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt is at the centre of a fresh expenses row today after it emerged that he demanded a £44,000 taxpayer funded private bathroom was installed exclusively for his own personal use in his London penthouse office.
Despite demanding massive £22 billion worth of ‘efficiency savings’ from the already overstretched NHS budget, the deeply unpopular Conservative Health Secretary decided to spare absolutely no expense with his very own private taxpayer funded bathroom.
Kitted out with floor to ceiling luxury slate tiles, state of the art motion activated lighting and even a ‘designer toilet’, Hunt’s bathroom, generously paid for by unwitting taxpayers, could have paid the salaries of two full time nurses.
The Conservative minister insisted on having the bathroom installed so he can freshen up after his occasional cycle-rides to work.
The new £25m Department of Health (DoH) offices, located in Central London, already have showers for staff close to the bike racks.
However, according to reports, Jeremy Hunt insisted on having his very own private bathroom installed in his penthouse office so he can freshen up without being disturbed by lower-level colleagues.
Posted by jeffrey davies on 14 August 2017
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jeffs posts
RT Report: 90 People a Day Dying After Being Found Fit for Work
by beastrabban
Mike over at Vox Political blogged about this issue last week. In this piece from RT, the presenter interviews journalist Steve Topple over the official figures that 90 people a day are dying after being found fit for work under the Work Capability Test. In one instance, a man, Lawrence Bond, collapsed and died of a heart attack right outside the jobcentre. He had been found fit for work, despite having an underlying heart problem. Topple also goes further, and cites other, highly disturbing figures that show the immense harm the tests are doing to disabled people. Oxford University found that 590 people had taken their own lives due to them. The tests are also linked to 270,000 cases of mental illness, and the prescription of 800,000 drugs for people suffering from the stress of these tests.
Topple and the present also discuss how the tests were introduced by New Labour back in 2008 as a way of redefining disability. Topple states that we do need to cut the welfare bill, but the tests are a blunt instrument that harms the disabled.
Topple also makes the point that the tests themselves are uneconomical. They're more expensive to administer than whatever savings are produced from them. Mike and the other disability bloggers and activists have pointed out that this isn't about saving money. It's about penalizing and harassing the poor and disabled, simply for being poor and disabled. It is part of the principle of less eligibility, the ideology behind the workhouse, which Maggie Thatcher so enthusiastically embraced as one of her vile 'Victorian values'.
They also make short work of another scandal - the DWP's refusal to hand over the precise figures on the pretext that this would damage 'commercial confidentiality'. The document being requested is Maximus' - the company that has been administering the tests since 2015 - own internal report into the results of their tests across regions. Topple states that in refusing to publish the report, the DWP is acting directly against the orders of the Information Commissioner, who has demanded that the figures be published.
The claim of commercial confidentiality is a nonsense anyway. If a company is performing the work of a government department, then it should be open to public scrutiny in the same way a government department is. If you want to argue philology here, the Latin phrase for 'state' was 'res publica', the 'public thing', which became our word, 'republic'. By implication, if a company is therefore working as part of the res publica, it should be open to inspection by the public, as free citizens.
Of course, this is all deeply abhorrent to the DWP and its heads, Iain Duncan Smith and now Damian Green. These two and their underlings and fellow ministers have been determined to cull as many of the disabled as possible in what Mike has called 'chequebook euthanasia', while hiding the figures from the general public. Mike has said many times on his book about the immense struggle he has had getting the true figures from the DWP, who refused, stonewalled, and challenged his requests for them. Just as they did to other disability bloggers and activists.
To see the names and biographies of some of the people, who have been killed by this vile policy, go to Mike's blog, as well Stilloaks, Johnny Void and Another Angry Voice, and see DPAC's website for their criticisms and campaigns against the DWP.
As for the Department itself, I fully concur with Mike: it should be broken up, and the worst offenders in it, those determined to make the lives of claimants as miserable as possible, should be sacked with no chance of a golden handshake. Frankly, if there was an real justice, Smith, Green and the Wicked Witch of the Wirral, Esther McVie, should be behind bars on a charge of corporate manslaughter
Posted by jeffrey davies on 14 August 2017
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jeffs posts
This is what happens when you employ unqualified people to carry out important healthcare duties.
It seems unlikely the assessor in this case had any idea what Mrs Watson’s condition entails – nor would they have cared.
They would have had their tick-box computerised assessment to fill in, and a target number of people to shift off-benefit and into the gutter.
The fact that this was a woman who had been praised by former prime minister David Cameron is unlikely even to have been mentioned.
Mrs Watson was used as a public relations tool when it suited the Tories; now they want her to starve.
It is well-documented that Mr Cameron himself claimed Disability Living Allowance for his late son Ivan. After the child’s death, the Tories replaced DLA with PIP, which has a much harsher assessment system, intended to make it almost impossible for disabled people to survive.
It’s typical of the Tories: After they get what they want from a service, they close it to ensure that nobody else can.
A woman praised by David Cameron as an ‘ambassador’ for people living with Alzheimer’s has had her benefits stopped.
Joy Watson, from Eccles, has been left struggling to pay bills after an assessment by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) decided she was able to look after herself. This means she has £400 less each month.
The 59-year-old, who was diagnosed four years ago, was forced to give up her job as a carer. But showing remarkable fortitude she became a champion for people with dementia giving lectures raising awareness, teaching nursing students and showing local businesses how to help those with the condition. Her efforts earned her a doctorate and praise from the former Prime Minister Mr Cameron.
Joy was assessed by a health worker from the DWP at her home in April following the recent government changes to move claimants on Disability Support Allowance to Personal Independence Payments (PIP).
After this assessment, Joy’s support payments were stopped.
She appealed, but was rejected and returned an even lower score than the original decision. Joy’s Personal Independence Payments were stopped, and the Carer’s Allowance her retired husband Tony received for supporting Joy was also rescinded despite him caring for her round-the-clock.
Source: In a sickening insult a woman with dementia praised by David Cameron has had her benefits cut by Tories – Manchester Evening News
Posted by jeffrey davies on 14 August 2017
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jeffs posts
The Tories promised they would take back control after Brexit. They meant they would take it AWAY – from US [Image: PA].
If you were wondering why the Tories have quietly dropped their dodgy ‘Bill of Rights’, it’s because they don’t need it any more – they can achieve the same aims, with far less fuss, in their so-called ‘Repeal Bill’.
The Bill will be the most dishonest piece of legislation to go through Parliament in decades – starting with its title. It will repeal nothing. The stated aim is to enshrine European laws that the UK observes (without having passed them as our own) into UK law, to ensure a smoother transition when Brexit happens.
But this is not true. The Tories intend to pick and choose which EU laws get to go on the UK statute book – and the plan is to ensure that the people lose out to corporations on every line.
So the ‘Bill of Rights’ – which was intended primarily to remove rights that had been conferred on UK citizens by the EU – will no longer be necessary; the Tories will simply cut those rights out of the Repeal Bill and hide it from the public.
Similarly, the Tories won’t have to face public scrutiny over their plans to ensure that corporations can sue the UK government if any future administration tries to put the good of the citizens before private profit.
The so-called Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) system was a principle reason the US-EU Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement foundered last year. Soon after, it was rumoured that the whole project may have been demanded by the UK government, with the intention of putting corporations in control.
Now, with our departure from the EU imminent, the Tories don’t need anybody else’s permission to impose the worst of all possible worlds on the people of the United Kingdom.
They are planning a new hierarchy, with working people at the bottom, enjoying no rights other than what their overprivileged toff masters hand down to them.
Next will be the apparatus of the state, as embodied in the elected government.
But the government will be a slave to the will of the corporations.
And who will be at the top of this system?
Why, shareholders in corporations, of course. And wouldn’t it be a strange coincidence if these boardrooms turned out to be stuffed with people who are currently Conservative government ministers?
Perhaps you should ask your Tory-voting neighbour why they support this kind of corruption.
Fundamental rights and powers that ordinary citizens currently enjoy will be scrapped.
This week we have discovered, for instance, that British citizens will no longer be able to sue the government for breaking the law.We will lose our rights, if the government gets its way, to sue for compensation in court when the government acts illegally and infringes our rights at work, or our right to a clean and healthy environment.
Currently, a European ruling means an individual can seek damages if the government has failed to properly implement the law. But the government says that no similar domestic law exists, so there will be no legal mechanism to get such redress in future.
There will be plenty more where this comes from. The Great Repeal Bill, after all, awards our government powers that no modern government has enjoyed in peacetime. And far from simply changing the words “European Union” into “United Kingdom”, ministers will gain the ability to make radical changes to fundamental human rights and environmental protections that simply don’t make sense when taken out of an EU context.
As if this weren’t bad enough, Trade Secretary Liam Fox is touring the planet looking for unsavoury regimes we can sign deregulatory trade deals with. And at the heart of those trade deals, in all likelihood, will be special “corporate courts” that allow foreign businesses the power to sue governments for regulations they judge to be “unfair”.
That’s right – as British citizens lose their ability to hold the government to account in court, foreign multinationals will gain rights to sue the government in secret arbitration panels for passing a regulation or standard that those corporations believe will damage their profits.
We know this because these “courts”, formally known as Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), already exist in hundreds of investment deals in which countries all over the world have been secretly sued for such radical actions as putting cigarettes in plain packaging, placing a moratorium on fracking, removing toxic chemicals from petrol. No appeal is allowed. And we know that the British government has been one of the most vociferous in the world in putting the case for such courts.
Posted by jeffrey davies on 14 August 2017
