jeffs posts -WHO?
with this kind of blairite he's allowed the Torys to distruct our welfare system allowing them to take this monies to give big biz a tax cut they killing their own peoples More than 1.5million Brits are living in destitution, a shock report warns.
The Government was … urged to take to take immediate action to tackle the crisis by reforming the social security system.
Of the 1,550,000 suffering in “shameful” squalor, 365,000 are children, the dossier said.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) found that the destitute often went without food, heating or lighting in their home and sometimes slept rough.
Posted by jeffrey davies on 09 June 2018
jeffs posts
reblogged from sb EU-fixated MPs: losing the loyalty of the working class
Having just sat through another interview listening to a member of Parliament calling for a second EU referendum, I’m compelled to write this, if only to vent my frustration at right leaning MPs who don’t seem to get the concept of democracy.
First of all, these same politicians just didn’t see the Brexit vote coming. If they lived in my village they wouldn’t have been shocked. In fact they would have been fully anticipating people would choose to leave the EU.
Not because they hate Europe or Europeans, not because they dislike foreigners, not because they are ‘thick’ or uneducated – but it was because they were sick of being talked down to by a political class that knows little about and seemingly cares even less for the plight of working class communities.
Secondly, the more working class people in these areas are ‘told’ how and what they should be thinking, then the more those MPs will ostracise these voters and in doing so jeopardise colleague’s seats. I know of people who voted remain in the referendum who are now willing to vote the opposite way due to interventions and pontificating by people like Campbell, Blair, Clegg and their ilk.
These right wingers seem to perpetually repeat the mistakes of the first decade of this century which saw millions of lost Labour votes. As Tony Benn put it; ‘When I look at New Labour, I wonder if it wasn’t like trying to light a bonfire on a frozen lake – looked marvellous, bright lights, shining white but you melted away your own support.’ As one ex miner told me, ‘I didn’t walk away from Labour, they walked away from me.’ If the extreme right of the party aren’t careful we will see history repeating itself.
“Pernicious cuts and total demolition of civic society” – in the EU
Leading up to the referendum and after years of the Labour Party offering no alternative to austerity, we were expected to accept our lot, accept that there was no alternative to the pernicious cuts and the total demolition of civic society within our towns and villages. During the referendum we were told to vote for Cameron, Clegg and Osborne’s status quo. Labour HQ at the time presented no alternative EU vision, only the Tory one.
The loyalty of working class people runs deep but you betray it at your peril.
They had also learned nothing from campaigning alongside the Tories in the Scottish Independence referendum. This centrist idea of pluralism saw Labour wiped out in Scotland. The loyalty of working class people runs deep but you betray it at your peril. When the Tories are carrying out acts of community vandalism on a scale that has dwarfed the Thatcher years, only someone who isn’t impacted directly by the suffering that those actions caused would be seen standing on a platform with the guilty.
In doing so, don’t be surprised if you are then judged by the people in those working class areas to be one and the same – no different, of the same ilk as those doing the damage. This, coupled with the disastrous attempt to out-UKIP the real UKIP with the Labour rightist’s shameful immigrant mugs, pandered to the worst lies being perpetuated about immigration being the cause of stresses on our grossly underfunded public services.
Aligning themselves with the Tories
In short we had Labour HQ and Alan Johnson aligning themselves with the Tories, the rightists pushing dog-whistle anti-immigrant memorabilia and an overall message of ‘we want business as usual.’
When you looked around the towns and villages in the left behind, industrial wastelands and working class communities, business as usual didn’t look very appealing.
Project fear
That brings me to the current ‘project fear’ and the mantra that ‘you will be worse off if we leave the EU!’
To understand why this message is not resonating you need to have a walk around the Labour heartlands that voted to leave the EU. In these areas people truly believe things just can’t get any worse.
When you’ve seen any chance of secure work disappear; when you are living from hand to mouth every month on a zero hour contract; when you are dealing with the mental anguish of benefits sanctions or unsecured tenancies that mean you and your family could become homeless at the whim of some distant landlord or the DWP; when you see the fabric of civic society such as libraries, community centres, youth clubs, adult day care centres and OAP facilities closing down all around you – how can things get worse?
When you see a once thriving high street replaced by boarded up buildings, fast food take-aways, charity shops, pawn-brokers, cash converters and betting shops. When the only hope of breaking the chains of poverty via education will burden you with £50,000 worth of debt; when you have no hope of ever buying your first home; when you see your local NHS services disappearing or chronically under staffed – when this is your reality, business as usual stinks and let’s face it, how can it get any worse?
You’re asking the wrong question
For the majority of people in Britain, the question is not whether we should leave the EU – that decision has been made at the ballot box – but who do we want in power after we leave.
The answer to that question is not a party that offers continued austerity, exploitation of workers or a dystopian world bereft of hope.
They don’t want workers recruited abroad by employers specifically to grind down local worker’s pay and conditions. Nor do these communities want a government that offers the same austerity and neoliberal policies but a slightly different brand of social barbarism.
What they do want is authentic representation in Parliament. They want a voice – and for that voice to be heard. Not to be patronised, lectured or talked down to.
The right question
Whilst Corbyn and his shadow cabinet get this, many other Labour MPs have yet to peer beyond the bubble of a safe job at Westminster, a good salary and pension plan – and many of these right-wingers were parachuted into safe Labour seats – and ask what we’re looking for.
The world that most people inhabit is not concerned with semantics and pontifications from ex-Labour grandees. Let’s be blunt about it: we in the Labour heartlands know all about where centrist appeasement gets you.
It gets you left behind, in an post-industrial wasteland, bereft of hope that your kids will do better or at least have a chance of doing better. It gets your public services annihilated.
So, I say, accept the rule of democracy and party policy. Get behind Corbyn and his team and work for a people’s Brexit.
We have the opportunity to rebuild and transform Britain in the spirit of 1945: a fair, forward-looking Britain. The 2017 Labour manifesto synthesised the bravest of visions in all key government departments into a single tantalising view of the future. Let us face the future and seize it for the many not the few!
Posted by jeffrey davies on 06 June 2018
jeffs posts
The tragedy (for benefit claimants) that calls itself Esther McVey is still screwing up her job – and the lives of the people who rely on her and the DWP to get it right.
The latest blunder affects individuals with chronic conditions that require regular monitoring or medication such as diabetes and epilepsy.
Ms McVey had initially appealed to the Upper Tribunal and the Court of Appeal after the First-Tier Tribunal ruled that two claimants with chronic conditions were entitled to the Personal Independence Payment.
She has now withdrawn both appeals.
See the quoted material below for an analysis by Tom Royston of Garden Chambers North, who represented the claimants.
Mr Royston’s words show that successive Work and Pensions secretaries tried to enact and enforce a major change in the law without Parliamentary approval. That’s a major infraction of the rules.
Not only that, but from the dates on the appeals that have been withdrawn, Ms McVey has been forcing disabled people to wait for a final decision since 2015 in one case, and since 2016 in the other.
Disabled people. People who are likely to be less able to cope with a long wait for justice.
It seems to This Writer that Ms McVey, and successive Work and Pensions secretaries before her, has been gambling that her victims – yes, victims; and I think even that is too mild a word – would run out of stamina and let her have her way.
It is a classic bullying tactic.
As is so much Conservative government policy.
When did we become conditioned to accept a government that brutalises the people, rather than one that does our will?
The appeals concerned the meaning of Daily Living Activity 3, ‘Managing therapy or monitoring a health condition’, before amendments were made to it in March 2017. The government had been arguing that ‘therapy’ excluded treatment which consisted of the monitoring of health and administration of medication. For example, one of the claimants in these cases was a person with type 1 diabetes and unusual sleep patterns, who needed someone to watch over him at night, sometimes administering insulin or glucose while he slept, to avoid diabetic coma and death. The FTT had decided he qualified for PIP. The government had argued in the appeal that he should be awarded only 1 of the minimum 8 points necessary to qualify for PIP.
As a result of withdrawing her appeals, [Ms McVey] has accepted that, as with the case of her error relating to the mobility element of PIP, she will now need to review past claims relating to this descriptor, to identify other claimants who may have been underpaid. The government has not yet given any details of when or how that process will be carried out, or how many claimants it expects to be affected.
Further, [Ms McVey’s] abandonment of her appeal may cast doubt on the legality of the changes … made to the Regulations in March 2017 regarding Activity 3. When making those changes, [the then-Work and Pensions Secretary, Damian Green] did not consult before doing so. Following the … concession in these test cases, it now appears that [Mr Green] was… making a significant change in the law.
Posted by jeffrey davies on 05 June 2018
aktion t4 rolling along
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) claims it has no record of whether it showed vital documents linking its “fitness for work” test with the deaths of benefit claimants to the expert it hired to review the assessment.
Even though DWP possesses the documents, it is claiming it holds no information in its records on whether they were passed to Dr Paul Litchfield.
Litchfield (pictured) published the final two independent reviews of the work capability assessment (WCA) in December 2013 and November 2014, but neither of his reviews mentioned the documents linking the WCA and the deaths of claimants.
The documents include at least seven internal “peer reviews” – reports written by civil servants following the deaths of benefit claimants – that mention the WCA, and two “prevention of future deaths reports” written by coroners.
The existence of the documents was only revealed in the years after Litchfield’s final report was published.
If they were not shown to Litchfield, the suspicion will mount that DWP and its ministers took deliberate steps to cover up evidence of the fatal impact of the assessment on sick and disabled people.
Posted by jeffrey davies on 04 June 2018
liberty hay
Organisations including the Food Standards Agency and the Department for Work and Pensions will be able to see UK citizens’ entire internet browsing history within weeks.
The Investigatory Powers Bill, which was all but passed into law this week, forces internet providers to keep a full list of internet connection records (ICRs) for a year and to make them available to the Government if asked. Those ICRs in effect serve as a full list of every website that people have visited, rather than collecting which specific pages are visited or what's done on them.
ICRs will be made available to a wide range of government bodies. Those include expected law enforcement organisations such as the police, the military and the secret service, but also includes bodies such as the Food Standards Agency, the Gambling Commission, councils and the Welsh Ambulance Services National Health Service Trust.
Watch Theresa May speaking about surveillance
The full list of agencies that can now ask for UK citizens’ browsing history, which is laid out in Schedule 4 of the Bill and was collected by Chris Yiu, is below:
Metropolitan Police Service
City of London Police
Police forces maintained under section 2 of the Police Act 1996
Police Service of Scotland
Police Service of Northern Ireland
British Transport Police
Ministry of Defence Police
Royal Navy Police
Royal Military Police
Royal Air Force Police
Security Service
Secret Intelligence Service
GCHQ
Ministry of Defence
Department of Health
Home Office
Ministry of Justice
National Crime Agency
HM Revenue & Customs
Department for Transport
Department for Work and Pensions
NHS trusts and foundation trusts in England that provide ambulance services
Common Services Agency for the Scottish Health Service
Competition and Markets Authority
Criminal Cases Review Commission
Department for Communities in Northern Ireland
Department for the Economy in Northern Ireland
Department of Justice in Northern Ireland
Financial Conduct Authority
Fire and rescue authorities under the Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004
Food Standards Agency
Food Standards Scotland
Gambling Commission
Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority
Health and Safety Executive
Independent Police Complaints Commissioner
Information Commissioner
NHS Business Services Authority
Northern Ireland Ambulance Service Health and Social Care Trust
Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service Board
Northern Ireland Health and Social Care Regional Business Services Organisation
Office of Communications
Office of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland
Police Investigations and Review Commissioner
Scottish Ambulance Service Board
Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission
Serious Fraud Office
Welsh Ambulance Services National Health Service Trust
Posted by jeffrey davies] on 04 June 2018
