Lansley - judge, jury and executioner?

I'm spitting bricks at this article from the Telegraph

First because of the title - 'Lansley defiant amid claims of Lord rebellion over NHS reforms'.
Almost every group you can think of has come out against the reforms - yet Lansley won't back down. He's like a stubborn child, digging his heels in to get what he wants.

But this is bit that really gets my goat:

a Department of Health source pointed out that PCTs are already being wound down while doctors are forming commissioning groups.

In other words, the reforms are being implemented before they have been voted into law. Such arrogance! Is he that sure that the reforms will pass? I suspect it's because he wants them implemented so they have to be passed because it's too late not to. Again, arrogance.

It's like a jury delivering a verdict before the evidence has been heard. If something isn't legal yet then surely it should be il-legal?

These reforms need to be stopped - at least and until they are passed into law. Anything less should be regarded as a criminal act.

A vision of the future - why we must save our NHS

A few weeks ago I went on holiday for a week to Portland, Oregon. It took me weeks to book the tickets as the thought of going somewhere so far away and so unknown terrified me. Not the going itself, but how it would affect me. I was terrified it would make me feel worse.
But I promised myself I would get to America one day and given that MS is a degenerative disease, this could be my last chance. So I did it. I found a ridiculously cheap flight, some decent travel insurance and whacked it on my credit card. The one I got when I was still a productive member of society and hadn't used in two years. I debated the pros and cons of spending out that much money but in the end I decided it was worth it to have one less regret. One thing ticked off my bucket list.

I had a great time there. I met some wonderful people; having known them online for more than two years, I finally got to see them in the flesh. I saw some fantastic scenery - the mountains of Oregon and Washington reminded me strangely of Wales but the waterfall at Multnomah Falls was like nothing I've seen before. I finally got to visit one of those giant department stores only seen on telly. Macy's to be exact. It was great, I could have spent a fortune in there. I learned that there really is a Starbucks on every corner. I even saw a Libyan protest, where people spoke so passionately for freedom for their home country that it made me cry.

But I also saw this



I stood staring at this for a good ten minutes, most of that with my mouth open. It seriously shocked me.
I knew America had a terrible system of healthcare but to see some thing like this was horrifying.

And it made me more determined to fight for our NHS. Because if we lose it, then this is our future.

Some common sense

Today's news brings with it this little tidbit - Jobless figures rose by 27,000 in the three months to the end of January, bringing the total number of unemployed to 2.53 million people. That's a shocking amount.

The Jobcentre in my home town is open just one day a week. That's despite it having a huge unemployment problem.

Jobcentres aren't just there for people to sign on. They advertise local, and national, vacancies which anyone, employed or not, can view. They serve as places for people to get help and advice. Or at least they are supposed to.
But they're being treated as factories, for pushing people from one end to another as quickly as possible. And now their staff numbers are being cut.

The unemployed are treated as goods on a conveyor belt. Or worse, they are treated like criminals. No-one asks to lose their job, for their firm to go bust, or for them to become ill. So why the criminal treatment?
I honestly don't think this government realises what being unemployed is like. The worthless feeling when you are unable to provide for yourself and your family, that gets worse with every rejection. The humiliation of having to queue in the Jobcentre to sign on for your benefits and prove that you've applied for a certain number of jobs.

And if you have the audacity to become sick then you face the humiliation of claiming ESA. I say humiliation because you're treated as if you're faking your illness from the start. The Work Capability Assessment, carried out by unqualified, non specialist assessors, is designed to prove you can work, not to confirm that you can't.
And because of it's failings, hundreds of thousands of people are about to be pushed onto Jobseekers, to join the rest of the 'goods' on the conveyor belt.
Atos gets paid £300 million for this. That's in addition to the £500 million it's already been paid for it's current services.

And let's not forget the much lauded (by the ConDems) Work Programme. Private companies can bid for government contracts to help the unemployed back to work. At a cost of anywhere up to £2 billion a year, according to the Financial Times

With the number of Jobcentre staff now being cut, the system will get worse. I'm no economist or politician but it seems to me to be crazy to payout millions to private firms whilst cutting the number of Jobcentre staff.
So here's an idea - stop paying the private firms. Stop sacking the JC staff. Recruit more of them and train them properly. Have them take on a case load of certain amount of claimants that they work with - from the initial signing, to the 2 weekly appointment, to jobseeking. Have them get to know their clients. So they can help them better and stop the culture of treating everyone as a commodity to be got through.
Stop paying Atos. Instead of subjecting every claimant to a WCA, work with their consultants.

That way you stop wasting millions, or even billions, you take more off benefits, and you stop vulnerable people from being treated like cattle. When people start being treated as humans again they are more likely to accept help, to trust their advisers and their confidence is boosted. All of this helps them to look for work.
And the disabled and sick stop living in fear. They stop thinking that taking their own lives is the only way out. They gain back that scrap of dignity that it left to them.

All of this is common sense surely?

Hypocrisy Pt II

Iain Duncan Smith calls refusing to take a job you are offered a sin.
I take issue with with religious language being used for politics, it has no place there. But let's follow his thinking for a moment shall we?
It's sinful to be a benefit cheat.

Isn't it then equally sinful to be a tax cheat? Keeping millions in an offshore account to avoid paying tax would be sinful yes?

And isn't it equally 'sinful' to have more homes than you need to live in? To have properties lying empty while other are homeless?

A BBC show starting today says 750,000 home lie empty, while 1.75 million people sit on council waiting lists. How does IDS view this?

I find it extraordinary that with these figures out there, nothing has been said about this. There is much talk about housing benefit cheats, people living in social homes that are too big for them, life long tenures being wrong. But absolutely nothing about so many HOMES sitting empty while people suffer for the lack of one.

Where is Mr Duncan Smith and his 'sinful' talk now?

A response to DLA reforms

Dear Mrs Miller,

I would like to voice my concerns over the proposed reforms to the Disability Living Allowance

1. Renaming DLA as PIP is a waste of time and money.

2. If the aim is to remove 20% of people from the benefit how is the eligibility criteria to be set?

3. The reforms take no account of those with fluctuating illnesses. Many conditions such as MS vary from day to day. One day could be a good one. One week could be good. The next could be awful.

4. DLA is NOT claimable simply by filling out the form. Medical evidence is ALWAYS required. Introducing mandatory testing is unfair, unnecessary, unjust and a huge waste of money. Paying millions to a firm to complete the assessment - as is done with ESA - is utterly criminal when claimants already have to provide evidence. You cannot claim it for a broken leg. You cannot claim it for flu. The condition must be serious. You should try to claim it yourself and see how far you get.

5. The fact that many claimants have been claiming it for years does not speak of a broken system. It says that many people have long term illnesses that won't go away simply because you want to stop paying. If you want to discern if these people are still genuinely entitled then write to their specialists. Because they WILL have one.

6. DLA does not stop people from working. In many cases it helps people to be able to work. If the benefit is taken away then many people will be forced to leave work and become reliant on benefits. This completely negates any money saved from cutting it.

7. Saying you want to direct support to those who need it most might sound laudable but it does not cut the mustard. If you take away support from those who don't fit the criteria then it is entirely likely their conditions will become worse and end up costing more in the long run than it does to support them now. Whilst also causing pain and humiliation to those who suffer.

8. Telling people they are unsustainable is an insult. Telling them they need to represent value for money is also an insult. No-one asks to be disabled. People don't make it happen so they can claim benefits. Living with a disability every day is a battle, a struggle to be independent and not a burden to others. Being told that you are unsustainable takes away that shred of independence and tells everyone that you ARE a burden.

9. DLA fraud has been estimated at less than 1%. Punishing the many to weed out the few is not a system that would be encouraged anywhere else. Even hardened criminals are judged to be innocent before being found guilty. These reforms are treating the disabled as guilty before being judged innocent.

I sincerely hope these ill informed and ill thought out reforms will be stopped. Those who suffer from disabilities already deal with enough. Don't make their lives even harder.

Yours sincerely

Helen *

*Don't worry, I did put my last name on the letter ;)

Socialism - a dirty word?

This morning I started reading Naomi Klein’s book ‘the Shock Doctrine’. By page 7 I was so shocked, angry and appalled I gave it up, realising I was not in the right frame of mind to be reading it. Just that short amount however gave me a very useful, and very apt, phrase – ‘disaster capitalism’.

Disaster capitalism is what’s happening in the UK right now. With the people reeling from the recession at last May’s general election, the Tory Party was handed a golden opportunity – they could enforce their policies and blame it squarely on the failure of the Labour government. And the people would swallow it because it sounded right.
Freemarket capitalism is what led to the recession. The banks got greedy, and with little regulation, they did as they pleased and squeezed as much as they could from wherever they could get it. Then they burst. To prevent millions from losing everything they have, the banks were bailed out, leaving us with a large deficit. This deficit is now being blamed on the last government overspending giving the new coalition an excuse to start cutting. Sell off the forests, privatise the NHS, close public services, get rid of educational subsidies. Anything that smacks of socialism is to go.

Make no mistake, this is done with a purpose, it has very little to do with cutting the deficit. The capitalists hate anything to do with socialism, so much so that they do everything they can to make it a dirty word.

But what’s so scary about it? Take away the –ism and you’re left with ‘social’. This is who we are, it’s what we do every single day. That’s where the word comes from. If you went out with a friend to a pub and he didn’t have any money you’d buy him a drink yes? Because he’s your mate and you know that if the situation were reversed he’d do the same for you. You wouldn’t tell him you would only buy him a drink if he signed a piece of paper promising that for every drink you bought him he’d buy you two back would you? Of course not. But this is what capitalism does. It treats people as money making commodities as opposed to real human beings.

If someone is in need you give them a helping hand. You treat them as a person and you make no conditions about it. If you’re a capitalist you start thinking about conditions because people are selfish and they might run off with your money. That’s usually because capitalists are selfish themselves and they expect everyone to behave the same way they do. But if you treat someone as selfish, act as if they are selfish, is it any surprise when they turn out selfish? If you mistreat a dog are you surprised if it bites you? But if you treat it with kindness you are rewarded with loyalty.

I prefer to think of my fellow human beings as people. I don’t think money should be made from their pain, I don’t think money should be made off their backs. I don’t think that a privileged few should be able to run roughshod over those who have less. And free market capitalism ensures that it does.

I'm angry

I'm angry a lot these days. Or more accurately, I vacillate between anger and despair.

The coalition are making a big noise about welfare 'scroungers'. The thieves are costing the taxpayers billions they say. Headlines about 'scrounger' scream at us from atop the Daily Mail almost every day.They want to make claiming harder to weed out those who are undeserving.
Benefit fraud costs £1.5 billion. Tax fraud costs £15 billion.
So why aren't they targeting the tax cheats? They are costing us more. Yet the government is making hundreds of HMRC staff redundant. They should be taking on more and training them properly.

The Atos system used to 'weed out' the cheats is not fit for purpose. This has been demonstrated time and time again. It finds huge amounts of people fit for work, yet 70% of those who appeal have the decision overturned. This is an enormous waste of money. And it hurts those it's supposed to help. Not to mention the staff aren't trained and they earn more for each person they find fit for work.

They are abolishing Disability Living Allowance. Sure, they're replacing it with the personal Independent Payment but this is nothing but an excuse to chop the amount of people eligible for it. DLA fraud is estimated at less than 1% of the total. Everyone else is legally entitled to it. But they have said we're 'unsustainable'. Do they have any idea how insulting it is to be told that?

They are privatising our NHS, all in the name of 'patient choice'. Apparently GP's are the most trusted people in the medical profession. Aside from the fact that I know several GP's who are terrible and made me feel like I was wasting their time, if they want GP's and patients to have more say why don't they put some of them on the boards of the PCT's, instead of spending £3 billion on abolishing them?
And for that matter, if GPs are the most trusted people in the medical system why doesn't the government allow them to decide if people are fit for work? When it comes to benefits, GPs aren't trusted. The government instead chooses to spend over £500 million on employing Atos, whose track record for mistakes is appalling, resulting in even more money being spent on re-assessments and appeals.

But worse, they are opening the market to private healthcare providers. We all know this is nothing more than paving the way for privatisation. I'm still blinking in disbelief at this. Healthcare should never be linked to profit, it's a basic human right. These reforms will end up with us having a system like America's. And no-one in their right mind can say that works well.

They have raised uni tuition fees to the point where many students will be put off going. Who wants to saddle themselves with £30k of debt before they've even bought a book or paid their rent? Nick Clegg would have us believe that a large number of students will end up paying nothing back. If this is the case then that's their argument for fee raising to pay off the deficit gone out the window.
Of course many of those poor kids won't be attending uni anyway since EMA, the money that enabled them to go to college or stay in the sixth form, has been abolished. A cost saving exercise that hits the poorest children without affecting the richer ones.
Kids who are determined to go to college despite no EMA can turn to the library to borrow their books. But wait, they want to close libraries. Again another cut that will affect the poor much more than the rich. One that will hit the young harder.


Tories apparently value traditions - unless there's money to be made it seems. Why else would they be in favour of selling off the nations forests? Forests that have belonged to the nation since the 1500's? They say they will favour charities or community groups but these organisations as a rule do not have the funds to buy them. They'll end up in private hands or worse, go to the timber companies.

It's like an attack on all fronts. How are we supposed to deal with all of this? And how can we not be angry about it?

Cross posted at Where's the Benefit