Jeffs posts
Disability Income Guarantee abolished under Universal Credit rules – a sly and cruel cut
by Kitty S Jones
social justice man
Many of us have said previously that the government's 'flagship' policy, Universal Credit (UC), is about implementing further cuts to welfare support by stealth. However, the loss of income to disabled people through hidden cuts has been under-reported.
Despite the systematic cuts to support that was originally calculated to provide sufficient support meet the costs of citizens' basic living needs, UC is on course to deliver only marginal taxpayer savings despite driving through the huge cuts in benefit payments to many claimants, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), last month.
Disabled people who qualified for the support component of income-related Employment and Support Allowance and (ESA) are also eligible for a disability premium. This is also called the Disability Income Guarantee. However, as a result of the abolition of both the severe disability premium (SDP) and enhanced disability premium (EDP) under UC rules, according to the disability charity, Scope, the cut to the disability income guarantee will see disabled people lose as much as £395 a month.
The UC system has made an estimated £11bn in savings, mainly through Treasury cuts to the original set level of universal credit rates – most notably through reductions to work allowances, which will save around £3bn, and the removal of £2bn in disability premium payments – but UC planning and delivery has also incurred £8.5bn in expenses.
Legal challenge
A terminally ill man is challenging the government regarding their catastrophic universal credit (UC) policy. Known only as 'TP,' a 52-year-old ex-City worker – who has non-Hodgkin lymphoma and a condition called Castleman disease which affects the lymph nodes – is launching a landmark challenge at the high court after becoming worse off under the new benefit system. The outcome of the legal challenge could have widespread implications for an estimated 230,000 disabled people who will be hit by the removal of disability premiums under UC rules.
TP discovered his illness is terminal in 2016 and he moved to London to receive treatment, but as it was an area where UC had already been rolled out in the capital, his lifeline support was cut by £178 a month.
The government claim that disabled people will be protected by “top-up payments” as they transfer to UC but such payments are not planned to be implemented until July 2019. The Department for Work and Pensions have claimed that UC means that support is focused on those “who need it most”, but a government removing SDP and EDP, which is support designed to help severely disabled people who live without a carer – is pulling a basic safety net from citizens with the greatest needs.
This cut will also affect disabled lone parents who may rely on their benefits to pay for support to shop, cook and wash, for example. The cut may mean that they will be forced to rely on their own children as carers.
This exceptionally cruel cut will affect a social group that have already been hit the hardest by austerity. It's difficult to imagine that these further targeted withdrawals of support are not deliberate. Furthermore, councils hit by government funding cuts are increasingly charging disabled people for social care - and those who need to claim SDP don't have a family carer, and so often have a greater need for council social care support. Scope found earlier this year that disabled people have to pay on average an extra £570 a month for the costs of disability for anything from specialist equipment and treatments excluded from charge exemptions on prescription, to taxis and a special diet, with one in five paying more than £1,000 extra per month.
As Frances Ryan says "Since its rollout, UC has become synonymous with hardship, often heaped on the most disadvantaged families: from an increase in food bank use and rent arrears, to now one million children set to miss out on free school meals because of UC’s new earnings threshold. But the threat to disabled and chronically ill people has up until now gone largely under the radar. Yet severely disabled people will collectively lose £2bn in disability premium payments (a fraction of what the government is spending on UC’s delayed rollout). Or to put it another way, a mother with multiple sclerosis won’t be able to afford to put the heating on or pay for a carer to help her wash.
Last October, the Resolution Foundation said that a spree of Treasury-driven welfare cuts since 2015 has left universal credit unable to meet its original aims of 'strengthening work incentives' and supporting the incomes of low-income families.
The Foundation warned that the current fragile political consensus in support of universal credit risks breaking down unless ministers refinance the reform and fix multiple design and implementation problems.
At the time, Conservative MP Wendy Morton, David Gauke and other Conservatives responded by claiming that Universal Credit ‘helps’ people into work and criticised opposition MPs for ‘scaremongering.’ However, the new benefit has pushed people into debt and rent arrears, with some forced to rely on food banks to survive. It’s difficult to see precisely how a social security benefit that creates those extremely challenging circumstances could possibly help people into work.
The leader of the House of Commons, Andrea Leadsom, was accused by senior Conservatives MPs of "paving the way for tyranny", after the government whipped its MPs to abstain on a Labour motion on universal credit. Labour’s motion passed unanimously despite the concerns of several Conservative rebels, but some Tory MPs were infuriated at being urged by their own party to ignore it.
Leadsom faced criticism from some Conservative MPs because she said the government was not bound by the reasonable resolution, which called for the rollout of the controversial welfare changes to be paused.
Sir Edward Leigh, the Conservative MP for Gainsborough, said: “The road to tyranny is paved by executives ignoring parliaments.”
We really do need to worry when Conservative MPs are calling out Conservative ministers regarding their own ingrained authoritarian tendencies. The public don't want a government that reduces debate about the catastrophic impacts of their policy to basic strategy, crib sheet responses and political role play.
He went on to say: “I do urge my right honourable friend to listen to parliament, and I urge the secretary of state to come to parliament and make a statement, and it should be a statement full of meat. His own party would be outraged if a future Minority Labour government ignored parliament in this way”.
Valerie Vaz, the shadow leader of the house, pressed Leadsom on the government’s response. She said: “This is where we make the law. This is not a school debating chamber. This is a disorganised government, disrespectful to the house.”
“I know the government didn’t want to hear about people in rent arrears struggling to feed their families when they’re in work, but that’s the reality when government policy is failing.”
Conservative MP Heidi Allen broke down in the House of Commons during the emotional Labour-led debate on Universal Credit, where the government conceded it would finally release the ‘confidential’ reports into the impact of the welfare reform’s rollout.
Yet despite the Information Commissioner ruling the documents should be fully published, the government still refuses to release them to the public. As ministers appealed the decision, the documents remain under wraps, at least until the case is heard at tribunal in April.
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) agreed to provide the reports to the work and pensions committee just before Christmas on the basis that they would remain confidential. The committee, while not publishing the reports in full, quote selectively from them.
The MPs’ report assesses 10 reviews compiled by the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) between 2012 and September 2017. The IPA was established by the Treasury and Cabinet Office to oversee major government projects.
The committee say Conservative ministers' central claim that UC helps people into work is "highly uncertain” because the estimate relies only on single, childless, unemployed claimants, the committee said. Those who face complex barriers, such as lone parents needing child care provision, those with chronic illness and disability and those responsibilities for providing for families are not included in the estimate.
There is no full business case presented by the government for UC even now, eight years after it launched.
Committee chairman Frank Field said: "They have produced no evidence to back up the key, central economic assumption of the biggest reform to our welfare system in 50 years.
"William Beveridge will be rolling in his grave.”
The commitee say "Many millions of pounds of public money were wasted” on UC in its early stages and declared: "By 2013, the UC programme was on the brink of complete failure."
The committee’s report is scathing about the jargon-ridden IPA reports, describing the style as “a combination of the cryptic and the cliched”, dense with phrases such as “operational cost burners” and “developer stand-ups”. It concludes that they are “no loss to the canon of published prose”. However, serious challenges remain, and the commitee have said recent IPA reviews have noted that the criteria by which the operational progress of universal credit should be judged should include customer experience, such as payments delays, for which the DWP has been consistently criticised.
The committee report says: "The DWP has consistently been unable or unwilling to share statistics with us regarding the functioning of UC.154 Similar concerns were evident in the IPA reviews.155 In his sole comments on the September 2017 HC, Neil Couling quoted the Living Bible: “If you wait for perfect conditions, you will never get anything done”.156 Mr Couling told the Chair of the PAC that UC “still represents a value for money programme” and that, in any revision of the business case, its net present value “will remain substantially positive”.157 In scrutinising the UC programme from the outside there is, however, a danger we are being asked to take too much on faith."
We really do need to worry when Conservative MPs are calling out Conservative ministers regarding their own ingrained authoritarian tendencies. The public don't want a government that reduces debate about the catastrophic impacts of their policy to basic strategy, crib sheet responses and political role play. The report released by the government to the work and pensions committee does not examine Government policy or the consequences of policy for claimants. They do not, for example, include a single statistic of whether people were receiving their payments on time.
The road to tyranny is mostly paved by executives ignoring citizens’ accounts.
Posted by jeffrey davies [82.9.81.48] on 01 March 2018
power to the people nah its power to companies
Oil giant INEOS has won the right to move forward with challenging the Scottish government for breaching its ‘human rights’ [pdf p10] by banning fracking. INEOS claims that the 2017 ban conflicts with a statute in the European Convention on Human Rights.
The company wants the ban overturned, and is also applying for undisclosed damages.
The people say no
The 2017 ban came after a consultation attracting over 60,000 responses of which around 99% were opposed to fracking. Announcing the ban, Scottish minister for business, innovation and energy, Paul Wheelhouse, said:
Having taken account of the interests of the environment, our economy, public health and the overwhelming majority of public opinion, the decision I am announcing today means fracking cannot and will not take place in Scotland.
INEOS, however, opposes the ban and on 23 February received a legal judgement allowing it to take its case to judicial review.
ADVERTISING
Second victory for INEOS
This was the second victory for INEOS in as many days. The previous day, the company got permission to bring a case against the National Trust, which had refused permission for a seismic survey in Clumber Park in Nottinghamshire. INEOS claim that the survey was “routine and necessary”. The National Trust sees it rather differently:
We have no wish for our land to play any part in extracting gas or oil. We are already seeing the impacts of climate change at many of our places, and we have launched a programme to dramatically cut our own fossil fuel usage at our properties.
Tactics
Last November, INEOS was also granted a wide-ranging injunction preventing “persons unknown” from interfering with their “lawful activity”. Anyone breaching the injunction may be “imprisoned, fined or have their assets seized”.
In each of these cases, INEOS essentially mounts the same defence: its right to pursue its business interests. And it presents its climate-changing activities as not simply neutral, but good for the community. In its case against the National Trust, INEOS says that:
Legal action has been the last resort and we have used powers which prevent landowners from blocking projects which benefit the wider community and the nation as a whole.
Held to ransom
So now a fossil fuel company has the power to take a democratically elected government to court over its decisions, force a landowner to allow access for test drilling, and threaten peaceful protesters with imprisonment for obstructing its activity. We are facing catastrophic climate change. Yet companies such as INEOS want to carry on drilling and fracking.
The decision by the Scottish government to ban fracking was based not only on overwhelming public support, but also on overwhelming scientific evidence. If we want to keep global warming to 2C (itself far too high), we need to leave 80% of fossil fuels in the ground.
It’s already far too late to prevent the worst damage but standing up to INEOS and other fossil fuel companies is vital for the planet and all of us who live on it.
Posted by jeffrey davies] on 25 February 2018
jeffs posts
Ben Bradley issues public apology for defamatory comments about Jeremy Corbyn
by Kitty S Jones
I wrote a fairly comprehensive article this week about the outrageous allegations that were made by the right-wing press and some Conservatives that Jeremy Corbyn was a "Commie spy" and so on. Of course it was the usual vile lying smear tactic that the right-wing press have been doing since they succeeded with the fake Zinoviev letter in damaging the Labour party's prospects at the election in 1924. The gutter press have been trying to stage manage our democracy by telling blatant lies ever since, with the same hysterical McCarthyist headlines.
Conservative MP Ben Bradley sparked outrage last week with a tweeted comment, claiming that Jeremy Corbyn had ‘sold British secrets to communist spies’. The tweet prompted a letter to Bradley from Corbyn’s lawyers, who insisted that Bradley issue an unreserved apology, and that he asks his followers to share it and make a significant donation to charities of Corbyn’s choice – or face court action.
Bradley deleted his malicious tweet. He has also tweeted the following apology:
Bradley
The full statement says:
...On 19 February 2018 I made a seriously defamatory statement on my Twitter account, ‘Ben Bradley MP (@bbradleymp)’, about Jeremy Corbyn, alleging he sold British secrets to communist spies. I have since deleted the defamatory tweet. I have agreed to pay an undisclosed substantial sum of money to a ch…
However, Bradley has not tweeted it so far.
Ever since Jeremy Corbyn became party leader, he has been utterly and outrageously smeared by the right-wing media. Theresa May made her disastrous decision to call an election, the right-leaning papers went to town in an all-out campaign against Labour’s leadership.
Who could forget the Sun's front page showing a picture of Corbyn inside a rubbish bin - so childish it's like kindergarten bullying. The Mail, meanwhile, showed Corbyn alongside shadow Chancellor John McDonnell and former shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott under the headline “Apologists for Terror”. The Express told its readers: “Vote May or we face disaster”. I found it hilarious that both May and the right-wing press gangs so badly overestimated their own and the prime minister's credibility and popularity.
It seems readers don’t make judgements purely on the basis of their preferred newspaper’s editorial line. The Conservative leader and her friends in the media wrongly assumed that vicious attacks against Labour’s leaders would be enough to secure a Tory win. It didn't, because the public is all too aware now of the behavioural patterns and ideological headline habits of the attack dogs. The public recognises that tabloid press overconfidence has led to a complete lack of verisimilitude in screaming and often libelous headlines, seriously undermining public credibility.
It's not just that the right-wing rags are run by lying anti-liberals. Conservatism is pretty tame compared to some of the narratives these rags peddle to the public, veering further to the right of support for an authoritarian government, landing in the realms of totalitarianism and fascism.
Image result for daily mail supported fascism
The smearing campaigns of the right-wing tabloids has a long and repetitive history. In September 2013 the Mail attacked Labour Party leader Ed Miliband for having a father - the Marxist academic, Ralph Miliband - who "hated Britain." This was ironic on a number of levels.
Firstly, a key piece of "evidence" for this allegation was the 17 year-old Ralph Miliband's diary, where he speculated that the English are "perhaps the most nationalist people in the world," which of course is something you could very easily conclude from the Mail's longstanding editorial stance alone. However, Miliband was a staunch anti-Stalinist, so his political views are rather more like Orwell's than Stalin.
The Mail clearly isn't afraid of afraid of being accused of hypocrisy, in the face of their own history of support for Adolf "the Great" Hitler and the National Front; Ralph Miliband, on the other hand, fled to the UK in 1940 to avoid anti-Semitic persecution, enlisted in the Royal Navy, and served in the D-Day landings. This prompted a particular public dressing down by Mehdi Hasan on the BBC's Question Time programme, prompting the Mail to respond with vicious smear campaign against Hasan.
Then there's the Sun.
The Sun's front page on 19 April 1989. The allegations were later proven to be entirely false, with the Sun later admitting their decision to publish the allegations was the "blackest day in this newspaper's history."
Despite the Leveson inquiry, following News of the World scandal and the fallout that led to Sun staff being charged with conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office, the right-wing press have yet to learn the fundamental difference between 'free speech' and disgraceful, malicious and intentional lies.
Posted by jeffrey davies on 25 February 2018
