Labour Promises Inquiry into Deaths Caused by Tory Benefit Cuts

Mike put up a very encouraging piece last Thursday reporting that, according to the Disability News Service, the Labour Party will, if elected

“set up an independent inquiry into the deaths of disabled benefit claimants linked to the actions of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and its private sector contractors.”

This is excellent news. So far, an estimated 130,000 people have died due to victimisation by the Department for Work and Pensions due to the reforms brought in by the Conservatives and their coalition partners, the Lib Dems. Mike, however, points out that this is probably the minimum number, and the real figures almost certainly are shockingly higher.

This is exactly what Mike and the other disability rights activists and campaigners have been fighting for. Mike says he’s been doing so almost since he set his blog up in 2011. And he had despaired of any such inquiry ever occurring. The Tories would definitely try to stop it, just as they did everything they could to prevent Mike getting hold of the information on the number of people, who had died after being declared ‘fit for work’. Mike requested this information under the Freedom Of Information Act, as his readers will recall, and the government did everything they could not to give this information to him. Even going so far as to challenge his appeals to the Information Commissioner. Eventually they released some information, though they interpreted his request in a manner so that they could avoid giving him the precise information he wanted.

Mike states that he felt Labour would also do its best to avoid confronting the problem, and points to the ‘dark days’ when Rachel Reeves was Work and Pensions Secretary. But Jeremy Corbyn’s accession to the leadership of the Labour party has given him hope. Hope that could be fulfilled if Labour gain power. He states that under Labour, we might just see the people responsible for those deaths brought to justice.

He concludes

So if you don’t have any other reason to support Labour, do it for this.

The families and friends of the dead need this.

Vote Labour for justice.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/11/28/labour-will-hold-an-inquiry-into-all-the-benefit-related-deaths-overseen-by-tories-vote-labour/

And Trev, one of the great commenters on this blog, has pointed me in the direction of a piece by the Disability News Service reporting that a five year long investigation by them into the deaths of five people found ‘fit for work’ – Mark Woods, David Barr, Michael O’Sullivan,  Paul Donnachie and a woman known as ‘Ms DE – has provided them with ‘strong and clear evidence’ for the prosecution of the two ministers responsible for the Tory policies – Iain Duncan Smith and Chris Grayling – and the senior civil servants who share that responsibility – for misconduct in public office.

It’s a lengthy report, going into the circumstances of the deaths of these five people, four of whom killed themselves due to mental health problems and the first, Ms DE, starved to death. I’ve done no more than skim it and am not a legal expert by any means. But it does seem to be a substantial piece of research.

https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/dwp-the-case-for-the-prosecution/

If this was possible, and actually went ahead, so that IDS and Grayling found themselves in the dock it would be utterly fantastic. I’ve made several comments expressing my utter disgust at their culpability, exacerbated by their flagrant lying and denials, that they should face prosecution for murder. They won’t, but this is clearly the next best thing, and perhaps the best we can hope for.

I’m not sure such a prosecution will ever get off the ground, for the same reason that attempts to prosecute Blair and George ‘Dubya’ Bush for war crimes for the illegal invasion of Iraq were frustrated. But I hope I’ll be surprised. Even if they aren’t convicted, the trial should be very interesting and extremely revealing.

In the meantime, if you want to stop the Tories killing more disabled people, who could be your friends, relatives or even you yourself, then I urge you:

Vote Labour.

Because Tory policies have killed over a hundred thousand victims. And will kill a hundred thousand more.

But your vote for Labour will help stop them.

Boris Johnson and His Cabinet of Privileged Thugs Seize Office

So it’s finally happened. As just about everyone expected, but nobody outside his circle of the Tory far right actually wanted, yesterday Boris Johnson finally slithered into office. It was already on the cards on Monday, when the papers published this piccie of an expectant, jubilant Boris.

It sounds ridiculous, but I know people, who were genuinely unsettled by this image. They described him as looking mad, possessed even. I think it was probably due to a loathing of the man’s vile personal character and views coupled to his goofy expression. It also struck me that with his eye’s wide and his mouth wide open, there’s a certain superficial resemblance to the expression on this notorious American mass murderer, Charles Manson.

Which means that when they saw the picture of Johnson, subconsciously they saw this:

Which is enough to give anyone the creeping horrors.

Now Johnson isn’t a vile, unrepentant serial killer and cult leader like the late Manson. But he is an obscenely wealthy aristo, who has just appointed a cabinet of similarly obscenely wealthy aristos, none of whom seem to have the old virtues of genuine concern for the poor of the Tory paternalists. Because being ‘wet’ went out with Maggie Thatcher. They also stand for nothing more than their own enrichment and the simultaneous impoverishment of the less fortunate. They are vehemently pro-Brexit, anti-welfare and for privatisation and deregulation, despite the immense harm these zombie economics have done to this country and its proud, fine people. And it hardly needs to be said that they’re also pro-fracking and against the environment.

Two days ago on Tuesday, male feminist and anti-Fascist YouTuber Kevin Logan put up a video, Super Rich F**ks, which exactly described the Tory front bench. It was a piece of musical satire, mirrored from Dirty Little Owl’s channel, which showed images of various leading Tory politicians, with captions showing their personal wealth and a short piece about their horrendous voting record, while a song plays in the background viciously sending them up.

It begins with the statement that the Tories have a combined net worth of £2.4 billion, before going to the following –

Michael Gove

Net worth, £1 million +

Consistently voted against paying higher benefits over longer periods for those unable to work due to illness or disability.

Chris Grayling

Net worth, £1.5 million

Almost always voted for reducing housing benefit for social tenants deemed to have excess bedrooms. (Bedroom tax).

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson

Net worth £1.5 million

Almost always voted for a reduction in spending on welfare benefits.

Is a massive child.

Theresa May

Net worth: £2 million

While her husband’s £1.1 trillion investment firm avoided UK tax, she cut 2,000 police, raised tax on the self-employed and took benefits from 60,000 disabled people.

Penny Mordaunt

Net work: £2.5 million

Always voted to reduce help with council tax for those in financial need.

Philip Hammond

Net worth: £8.2 million.

Consistently voted against raising welfare benefits at least in line with prices.

Sajid Javid

Net worth: £8.5 million

Almost always voted against spending public money to create jobs for young people who’ve spent a long time unemployed.

Lord Stratchclyde

Net worth: £10 million

Voted against free school meals and milk.

Wryly commenting on the girth of the above aristo, the video comments that ‘clearly hasn’t suffered a want of meals himself.’

Jeremy Hunt

Net worth: £14 million

Here the video quotes his views advocating the destruction of the NHS:

‘Our ambition should be to break down the barriers between private and public provision, in effect denationalising the provision of healthcare in Britain.’

Adam Afriyie

Net worth: £50 million

Voted for reduction in benefits for disabled and ill claimants required to participate in activities intended to increase their chances of obtaining work.

Zac Goldsmith

Net worth: £75 million

Voted in favour of proposed spending cuts and changes to the welfare system in favour of spending on new nuclear weapons.

Lord Deighton

Net worth: £95 million

Voted against protections for pensions being ‘raided’ when the master trust fails.

Jacob Rees-Mogg

Net worth: £100 million

Voted for cuts in Housing Benefits for recipients in homelessness hostels, refuges, sheltered housing and accommodation for people with ongoing support needs.

Richard Benyon – richest MP in the UK

Net worth: £110 million

Voted to set the rate of increase for certain benefits, payments and tax credits at 1%, rather than in line with the increase in prices at 2.2%.

The Marquess of Salisbury

Net worth: £330 million

Receives £250,000 each year of taxpayers’ money for his inherited 10,000 acres, mostly in Jersey.

Lord Ashcroft

Net worth: £1.2 billion.

A tax exile in Belize who has poured millions into the Conservative Party over the years and strongly supported Brexit, which would remove Britain from the jurisdiction of forthcoming tax avoidance rules in the EU.

This bit has a clip from Panorama showing Brexit hiding in the gents’ toilets to avoid having to answer questions on tax avoidance.

I dare say that some of these grotesques are no longer in power, like Theresa May, thanks to Johnson’s massive purge of the cabinet. But those, who have replaced them are pretty much the same. They are what Private Eye once described as ‘the futile rich’. Their only concern is to grab more money for themselves, and steal it from the mouths of the poor.

And the press are complicit in this. Owned by millionaires themselves, they’ve now started a campaign of truly nauseating sycophancy, praising Boris to the rafters. Toby Young even raved about how Boris was a type of ‘Nietzschean superman’.

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/07/tory-propaganda-assault-begins.html

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/07/toby-young-says-gissa-job-bozza.html

And the Beeb enthusiastically joined in last night on the One Show, where one of the guests was his father.

It’s all just Tory lies, one after another. Boris won’t do anything for this country. He doesn’t stand for more investment in the NHS or public services. He won’t put 20,000 more rozzers on the street. But he will privatise the NHS and cut welfare spending like the Tories always have. And Brexit will decimate our manufacturing industry, just as they’re anti-environmentalism will destroy our natural environment.

Get these thugs and hypocrites out now!

Boris, do what you said ought to be done when Blair transferred power to Brown and call an election so we can kick your sorry rear end out of No. 10.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Adolf Hitler, Fascism and the Corporative State

A week or so ago I put up a passage from Hitler’s Table Talk, in which the Nazi leader made it absolutely clear that he didn’t want Nazi functionaries and members of the civil service holding positions or shares in private companies because of the possible corruption that would entail. He illustrated his point with the case of the Danube Shipping Company, a private firm that got massively rich in pre-Nazi Germany through government subsidies, because it had members of the ruling coalition parties on its board.

Which is pretty much the same as the recent fiasco in which Chris Grayling has given 13,800 pounds of public money to Seaborne Freight, a ferry company that has no ships and no experience of running a shipping company, to run a ferry service to Ostend as part of the preparations for a No Deal Brexit. Other companies also wanted to be considered for the contract, like Brittany Ferries, but despite Grayling’s huffing that there were extensive negotiations, the contract wasn’t put out to competitive tender. It seems instead to have been awarded because Mark Bamford, whose maritime law firm shares the same headquarters as Seaborne Freight, is the brother of Antony Bamford, who is a Tory donor.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/01/01/the-corruption-behind-the-tory-freight-deal-with-a-shipping-company-that-has-no-ships/

When a monster like Adolf Hitler, who killed millions of innocents, starts talking sense in comparison to this government, you know we’re in a very desperate way.

Despite his desire to outlaw personal connections between members of the Nazi party and civil service and private corporations, Hitler still believed that business should be included in government. On page 179 of Mein Kampf he wrote

There must be no majority making decisions, but merely a body of responsible persons, and the word “Council” will revert to its ancient meaning. Every man shall have councilors at his side, but the decision shall be made by one Man.

The national State does not suffer that men whose education and occupation has not given them special knowledge shall be invited to advise or judge on subjects of a specialized nature, such as economics. The State will therefore subdivide its representative body into political committees including a committee representing professions and trades. In order to obtain advantageous co-operation between the two, there will be over them a permanent select Senate. But neither Senate nor Chamber will have power to make decisions; they are appointed to work and not to make decisions. Individual members may advise, but never decide. That is the exclusive prerogative of the responsible president for the time being.

In Hitler, My Struggle (London: Paternoster Row 1933).

Hitler here was influenced by Mussolini and the Italian Fascist corporate state. A corporate was an industrial body uniting the employer’s organization and trade union. Mussolini reorganized the Italian parliament so that it had an official Chamber of Fasces and Corporations. There were originally seven corporations representing various industries and sectors of the economy, though this was later expanded to 27. In practice the corporate state never really worked. It duplicated the work of the original civil service and increased the bureaucracy, as another 100,000 civil servants had to be recruited to staff it. It was also not allowed to make decisions on its own, and instead acted as a rubber stamp for the decisions Mussolini had already made.

Once in power, however, the Nazis quietly discarded the corporate state in practice. The economy was reorganized so that the economy was governed through a series of industrial associations for the various sectors of industry, to which every company and enterprise had to belong, and which were subject to the state planning apparatus. When the shopkeepers in one of the southern German towns tried to manage themselves as a corporation on the Italian model, the result was inflation. The Gestapo stepped in, the experiment was closed down and its members interned in Dachau. However, the Nazis were determined to give their support to private industry and these industrial organisations were led by senior managers of private firms, even when most of the companies in a particular sector were owned by the state.

Something similar to the Nazi and Fascist economic systems has arisen in recent years through corporate sponsorship of political parties, particularly in America. So important have donations from private industry become, that the parties ignore the wishes of their constituents once in power to pass legislation benefiting their corporate donors. The result of this is that public confidence in Congress is low, at between 19 and 25 per cent, and a study by Harvard University concluded that America was no longer a functioning democracy so much as a corporate oligarchy.

The same situation prevails in Britain, where something like 75 per cent of MPs are millionaires, either company directors or members of senior management. New Labour was particularly notorious for its corporate connections, which had already caused scandals under John Major’s administration. Tony Blair and his cronies appointed the staff and heads of various government bodies from donors to the Labour party, giving them posts on the same bodies that were supposed to be regulating the industries their companies served. The result of this was that the Labour government ignored the wishes of the British public to pass legislation which, like Congress in America, benefited their donors. See George Monbiot’s book, Captive State.

It’s time this quasi-Fascist system of corporate government was brought to an end, and British and American governments ruled for the people that elected them, not the companies that bought their politicians.

Fabian Authors on the Tories’ Inability to Understand the NHS

I found the following passage in an old Fabian pamphlet from 1989, Does Society Exist? The Case for Socialism, by Brian Barry. It discusses the psychological reasons why the Tories hate the NHS, and why they are so keen to wreck and burden it by introducing market forces and private enterprise. They simply don’t understand how any public institution, which isn’t run as a private enterprise, works. And they despise the NHS because it is, and does. Barry writes

I can best illustrate what is at stake here by showing the two ides at work in analysing a particular institution – the National Health Service, which I take it to be (in its general principles if not its detailed operation) an exemplary socialist institution in that it replaces profit with service as the rationale of its activities.

No doubt that is enough to make the NHS highly distasteful to Mrs Thatcher and her more ideologically-driven colleagues. But it would be too simple to suppose that the only explanation for the Government’s proposed revamping of the NHS is the desire to destroy a stronghold of values alien to those of the market. A complementary explanation is that the denizens of the think-tanks whose advice the Government listens to really cannot imagine that an organisation can possibly work effectively unless incentives are rigged so that decision makers find it in their interest to do whatever they ought to do. They are so besotted by the rational-choice paradigm in this form that they just deduce from first principles what a health service driven by self-interest would be like and put that forward without feeling any necessity for looking in detail at the strengths and weaknesses of the existing system.

This seems to be precisely the case. The Tories and their think-tanks really don’t understand anything that works outside market forces and the profit motive. We’ve seen that in the various pronouncements they’ve made over the years about how public services run as state industries are inefficient, because they’re not run as private firms. And when Thatcher and Major began to reform the NHS along the lines of private industry by introducing the disastrous internal market, they did so arguing that making the NHS more like a private firm would improve performance and make it more efficient.

In fact none of this is remotely true. The internal market was a disaster, and repealed by New Labour. Blair, however, was a true-Blue Thatcherite, and continued Thatcher’s programme of privatising the NHS piecemeal. But the privatisation of public services has only made them more expensive and inefficient. It’s been estimated that we’re paying 10 to 20 per cent more for our electricity now than we would be if the electricity grid had remained in the hands of the state. The railway network is similarly falling apart. We’re paying far more in subsidies now to the private firms that run the railways than we did when it was British Rail. And the service is worse. The ‘I; reported in its business pages that Grayling was under pressure to renationalise the East Coast line, one of the latest of the train companies to fail. The NHS is failing precisely because the market reforms and privatisation of services introduced by Thatcher, Major, Blair, Cameron and Tweezer eat up the funding for it. Private hospitals and healthcare providers spend less of their money on actual healthcare than the NHS, and more on administration. Quite apart from the fact that the Tories are privatising the Health Service anyway to give it to their friends and donors in private industry.

Thatcherism is a complete failure. The only solution is to get the failed market out of the utility industries and renationalise the NHS, the electricity companies and the railways.

Private Eye on the Magistrates’ Partnership with the Private Prisons Companies

One of the biggest scandals in America is the relationship between the private prisons companies and legal authorities and local governments. The private prison companies lobby the state legislatures to pass harsher laws, and the judiciary to increase custodial sentencing, all to boost their profits. One of the cases highlighted by Michael Moore in his film, Capitalism: A Love Story, is the case of a troubled teenage girl, who was sent to a private jail by a judge, who was in receipt of monies donated by one of the private prison companies.

According to this last fortnight’s Private Eye, the same has been happening in England. They report that the Magistrate’s Association has been attempting to open a profit-making arm in conjunction with the outsourcing companies that run prisons. After having been criticised for the scheme, the Association is trying to fold it into the Probation Institute, but leaving this corrupt relationship intact.

Here’s the article:

Magistrates

Bendy Beaks

Who is the Magistrates’ Association trying to kid?

Last year it was criticised for getting into bed with the very same private punishment companies which now carry out the sentences imposed by … magistrates. It had set up a commercial wing, the MA Education and Research Network, as part of an “income generation strategy”. Alas, three of its funding partners were the French multinational Sodexo, US import MCT Novo, and Working Links – all of which, thanks to former justice secretary Chris Grayling, now profit from carrying out court punishments.

The move troubled some at the top of the MA as well as its rank and file; and after the Eye highlighted concerns over conflicts of interest, sources told the Eye that there were plans to close the network. But when asked if it would therefore return members’ money used as seed funding, MA communications director Jason Hughes said, on 4 December last year: “There are no plans to close down the network. Your question regarding seed funding is therefore redundant.”

But the Eye has now been leaked minutes from an MA board meeting held two days earlier, on 2nd December, showing a weaselly plan to distance the MA from the scheme. In the minutes, chief executive Chris Brace said the board had decided to dissolve the network and that it would be “incorporated” into the Probation Institute. Among the reasons cited were negative publicity, allegations about compromising justice and judicial independence, and the amount of time spent on “reputational management”.

Troubled members of the MA should know what this means. As Hughes now explains: “The network was incorporated into the Probation Institute; it therefore exists (not closed) with a different ownership and governance structure – however, the objectives are maintained. The legal vehicle by which it was subsidiary of the Magistrates Association has been dissolved, as per the minutes. The [seed] funding … has been allocated to setting up the new initiative and into research about the treatment of women in the criminal justice system.” (Readers may recall that “women in the justice system” were hastily added to its initial research plans after the Eye questioned why its first year was to be focused on “technology” – an obvious commercial interest.)

The Probation Institute website declares that this “new joint Probation and Judicial Matters Professional Network … will include magistrates, probation and … rehabilitation practitioners” – ie, Sodexo et al. The venture is “an evolution of the work that has already taken place within the association’s Education and Research Network”, and aims at “identifying priority areas of research which the two organisations should promote, and to facilitate and encourage contributions from funder”. New name, new legal governance – same old tricks?

If the MA hope this would head off criticism, it hasn’t. Frances Crook, of the Howard league, said: “Taking substantial sums of money from companies delivering sentences calls into question the independence and integrity of the Magistrates Association. Now would be the time to repay the money and be honest with its members about this unfortunate relationship.” (Private Eye, 15th – 28th April, 39).

The relationship between the Magistrates Association and the private prisons industry would have confirmed to anarchists like Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Malatesta not only the basic injustice of the state, but also its links to exploitative capitalism. With a fund-raising network like that, you can understand why the Surrealists, in the first issue of their magazine, demanded that the prisons should be opened and the convicts released. I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s a recipe for terrible miscarriages of justice and bring the British legal system into severe disrepute.

The Six Tories for Leaving Europe, Who’ll Make You Want to Stay In

Mike has posted up a picture on Vox Political of the grim Rogue’s Gallery of leading Tories supporting Britain leaving the EC. He refers to them as six good reasons not to vote for the Brexit. They include John Whittingdale, Theresa Villiers, Ian Duncan Smith, Chris Grayling, Michael Gove and Priti Patel. See http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/02/20/at-least-six-good-reasons-not-to-support-brexit/.

This is absolutely right, and current EU legislation at least helps keep some of their monstrous policies in check. For example, Priti ‘As a Picture’ Patel, was one of the authors of Britannia Unchained, a vile little screed which scorned British workers for being lazy, and told us all that we should work harder, for less, because that’s what people in the Third World were doing. Except that in this case, the reverse was true. The people of the Developing World were working harder, because we were. If we work fewer hours, for a bit more money, they might get a bit more too out of their employers. At the moment, British workers, as part of the EU, are guaranteed certain minimal rights under the Social Charter. Naturally, the Tories hate this with a passion. If we leave the EU, Patel and her fellow slave drivers will get their way and strip British workers of the rights and benefits we’ve built up over centuries.

Then there’s Chris Grayling. Grayling’s in charge of British justice, rapidly becoming British injustice. The Tories have set up a system of secret courts, in which you may not even know what the evidence against you or who your accuser is, if someone decides this contradicts the national interest. Grayling has cut legal aid, so that the poorest now find themselves unable to afford a solicitor. And he effectively wants to set up special prisons for political offenders, starting with Islamist terrorists.

The obstacles here are the European human rights legislation and the court of justice. The Tories have long resented these on the grounds that they protect terrorists from deportation. They don’t. They do, however, protect the human rights of EU citizens, and that’s what Grayling and the rest of the Tories want to strip from British citizens. And just remember – in the 1970s the Tories were planning internment camps for Labour MPs, the Socialist Workers, Communist Party, and leaders of youth, age and minority activist groups in the Shetland Isles. And with Grayling and Cameron planning a British gitmo for Islamists, it looks like radical Muslims aren’t going to be the only people rounded up as a threat to national security.

IDS – what can I say here? He himself is a walking indictment of the Tories. The minister for chequebook genocide has done his level best to kill, starve and impoverish the poor and disabled by cutting back on welfare support. And he’s been criticised repeatedly by international organisations. These have included the UN. Of course there’s a resentment there for the welfare provision in many EU countries, and the Social Charter. So long as we’re in the EU, there will be pressure for British workers to enjoy some of the same welfare benefits as in the other EU countries in western Europe. And this drives the Tories up the wall. They would like us to leave Europe, and become more like America, or at least the Republican version thereof, where there’s little or no welfare support.

So if you truly value the freedom, rights and welfare benefits British workers currently cling on to, vote for the ‘In’ campaign. Because if you vote with those six for leaving the EU, they will deprive you of all your rights. It’s their primary reason for wanting to leave Europe. Trade has little to do with it.

Vox Political: Parliament Votes to Keep MPs’ Arrests Secret

Kingdoms without justice are just giant robberies

– St. Augustine, City of God.

Only yesterday I was writing about how British politics was increasingly coming to resemble that of Richard Nixon. Now here’s even more proof. Mike over at Vox Political has this story about parliament’s vote to keep secret the names of MPs, who have been arrested. This was pushed through by Chris Grayling, the unjust justice secretary, and the debate lasted only an hour. It passed almost unanimously. Only one person voted against. http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/02/11/parliament-votes-to-keep-mps-arrests-secret-from-the-public-and-just-one-member-voted-against/

Mike in his comments points out that this is a case of one rule for you, another for us, as the Tories’ proposed human rights act will end such privacy for the rest of us.

This is a piece of legislation that would have shamed Nixon or Berlusconi. Remember Berlo? He was mired in corruption scandals, but managed to keep one step ahead of prosecution by passing retrospective legislation either stating that no crime had taken place, or pardoning himself, or else delaying it until the opportunity to prosecute expired under Italy’s statute of limitations. He was a walking indictment of the endemic corruption in Italian politics. He was so flagrant, especially in his ‘bunga-bunga’ orgies, that he became something of a joke. Private Eye sent him up in its pages as The Robber Baron, parodying his regime as a comic opera. Oh, our Italian cousins!

Well, Tessa Jowell’s husband, David Mills, was one of the old filofascisto’s lawyers, and British politics has now joined his in turning into a sewer.

It’s also another monstrous piece of double standards. One of my friends on a postgraduate archaeology course was a retired social worker. I bumped into him a few years ago on the train, when he was coming back from a conference in Birmingham. It had been called by one of the New Labour ministers. New Labour were considering passing legislation to inform the public of the criminal records of people in their area. Now there are strong arguments for doing this when it involves violent offenders against women and children. Such as child molesters and men with a history of violence against women. The argument here is that if women were informed about their partner’s history of violence, this might prevent the terrifying numbers of women, who are killed every year from domestic violence. This suggested legislation went far beyond this. And it really frightened my friend.

People were to be informed of every crime an individual had committed. My friend was horrified, as this does lead to vigilante persecution. He talked of having to deal with incidents where stones had been thrown through children’s windows. But this idea was being seriously considered by New Labour, despite objections from professionals like himself. I think the social workers must have prevailed, however, because the legislation didn’t go through. But it does show the populism and authoritarianism of British politicians in the first decade of the 21st century.

Well, that went, but David Cameron still has his snooper’s charter. He wants to expand the powers of the secret state to spy on its citizens massively, with precious legal restraints. While obviously, the politicians themselves are exempt from such scrutiny by the public they are supposed to serve. This is a recipe for massive injustice and corruption. And only one person voted against.

Private Eye on Death of Man from Heart Attack after being Assessed ‘Fit for Work’

This is a piece from Private Eye’s issue for the 27th November to0 10th December 2015 issue. It’s an article reporting the death of a man suffering from diabetes, Alan McArdle, after he failed to attend ‘work related activity’ sessions with Maximus. The article makes it very plain that the Eye sees it as further proof of the harm aIDS’ policies are having on disabled people, and those genuinely unfit for work.

Fitness To Work Tests
Deadly Reckoning

Yet more evidence has emerged of the often devastating impact of the government’s welfare reforms on those with disabilities after Alan McArdle died of a heart attack less than an hour after learning that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) was threatening to cut his out-of-work disability benefits.

Mr McArdle is the latest claimant to have fallen foul of a push to force people off sickness benefit and into work, no matter how ill they are.

Mr McArdle, whose diabetes left him with no feeling in his arms or legs, had just come out of hospital following a fall and was too unwell to visit the offices of Work Programme contractor Maximus for sessions of compulsory “work-related activity”. Even though the charity Slough Homeless Our Concern, which had worked with Mr McArdle for 16 years, told Maximus he was not well enough to travel to its offices, the company recommended to the DWP that he be sanctioned with the loss of benefits. Slough MP Fiona Mactaggart said it was “shocking” that the only way Mr McArdle could prove he was not well enough to take part in the Work Programme was by dying.

Details of his death emerged as new research from Liverpool and Oxford universities concluded that the government’s controversial “fit to work” tests for disabled claimants, which Mr McArdle faced, were associated with an extra 590 suicides in just three years and 279,000 cases of mental ill health. Eye readers will be aware that the tests, until recently run by Atos, have attracted widespread criticism for delay; for being too prescriptive, leading to devastating errors; and for leaving claimants stressed and penniless.

Ministers continue to claim that any link to suicide or death is “misleading”- even though they received a formal warning in 2010 in a “Rule 43” letter from a coroner after a suicide “triggered” by a wrong dining of “fit for work”. The coroner urged improvement in the collection of medical evidence before finding someone fit for work, in order to prevent further unnecessary deaths.

It is now being asked why work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith and former employment minister Chris Grayling failed to respond substantively to the coroner back in 2010 – as they are legally obliged to. Nor did they pass on the coroner’s concerns to Professor Malcolm Harrington, the independent expert commissioned to review the tests in the wake of widespread concern.

Let’s make this very plain, and itemise some of the salient general points about the policy as a whole.

* Private Eye concurs that there is a real and overwhelming link between aIDS’ policies and the deaths of disabled people. The Eye is, presumably, sure of the legal basis of its claim. It is a magazine, after all, that has had a very long history fighting libel battles, and I doubt Ian Hislop, the editor, fancies another appearance in court.

* It also mentions studies by Oxford and Liverpool Universities. This sounds like the book, First Do No Harm, mentioned in Mike’s article.

* The Eye cites the figures of 590 suicides and 279,000 cases of ‘mental ill-health’. Vox Political has put up some of these suicides. So has Stilloaks, who put on a website the increasing number of this foul policies helpless victims. Tom Pride over at Pride’s Purge has also covered it, along with many, many others. And Mike has also reported the various reports and warning about the policy from mental health practitioners – the doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists, who have to treat severely vulnerable people, who have been made seriously depressed or turned into genuine nervous wrecks from …Smith’s callous, inept and cruel policy.

* A coroner has come to the same conclusion as the Eye, and informed aIDS and his vile colleagues under a legal instrument.

* Furthermore, aIDS has broken the law by not responding to the coroner’s “Rule 43” letter, and he and Chris Grayling also did not pass it on to an independent researcher, Professor Malcolm Harrington.

This is truly a perverse and lawless administration that has absolute contempt for both the disabled and the laws and legal and academic authorities, who try to protect them. Mike has issued a challenge to aIDS stating that he has made outrageous claims about the Gentleman Ranker, and that the Spurious Major should prove him wrong.

IDS can’t and probably won’t. … Smith is the stereotypical bully: once confronted, he runs away and starts squealing. He has hidden from protestors behind armed guards in parliament, run away from them out the back way of a Job Centre, and hidden in laundry baskets in hotels. These are acts of such magnificent cowardice that you could probably turn them into a brilliant comedy film. He’s just as craven when it comes to producing evidence. When it’s demanded, his tactic has been to find some spurious reason to turn it down, or stonewall the request, and appeal at the very last minute. And then finally to misinterpret the terms of the request quite deliberately so that he can send the wrong information.

Now he’s squealing that people have been making ‘outrageous claims’ about him. This is wrong. They’ve been making entirely reasonable statements, based on solid factual evidence, about aIDS’ policies and their effects. The only thing that’s outrageous are precisely those: that nearly 600 men and women have killed themselves due to his wretched policies, and over a quarter of million have been driven into depression, anxiety and madness.

And this coward, bully, braggart and fantasist has the audacity to declare that he’s being maligned. Well, Mike’s right. The facts speak for themselves. Let this monumental sham and incompetent prove otherwise.

Private Eye on Government’s Attempt to Destroy Freedom of Information Act

This fortnight’s Private Eye has a piece attacking the government’s attempt to neuter the Freedom of Information Act. It takes apart their claims they are doing so ‘because newspapers are using it to generate stories’, and gives the email address for people to contact the Commissioners to express their opinions on the issue. The Private Eye article makes much the same points Mike over at Vox Political and the other bloggers have done.

I’m posting up the article as you have to email the commissioners before the end of Friday, 20th November. This means that if you feel so strongly about this issue that you want to state your case to the commissioners, you only have about five days or so left.

FOI
Cry Freedom

The government’s “Independent” commission of the great and not so good on the future of the Freedom of Information Act is looking for views on if and how the rules should be changed. The mood music is not encouraging.

First there was the appointment of former cabinet ministers with little interest in the full truth emerging – Lord (Michael) Howard and Jack Straw – while no campaigner for more openness was invited on the commission. Then last week the leader of the Commons, Chris Grayling, complained that the law was being used by the media to “generate stories”. How appalling!

Among the “stories” that would not have come out were it not for the legislation, and might not again if it were watered down or subject to financial charges, are MPs’ expenses and several exposed in the Eye over the past ten years, including: the recent mapping of English and Welsh property owned by offshore companies; the “shameful” (the Coalition’s word) privatisation of part of the UK’s international development fund CDC; rampant junketing by the country’s public spending watchdog; the scale fo the “tax gap” (extent of the tax dodging in the UK); the schmoozing of Whitehall mandarins that forced the open publication of hospitality registers; and New Labour’s prolific and ruinous spending on management consultants and the disastrous NHS IT project – to name just a few.

Readers who think such matters should continue be exposed, or indeed if they think they should be covered up, can write to foi.commission@justice.gsi.gov.uk by the end of Friday 20 November.

Vox Political: 300,000 Sanctioned without Warning

This is another story from Vox Political. Dr David Webster, a researcher at Glasgow University, has calculated that over the last five years 300,000 people have suffered through having their benefits sanctioned without warning. The letters informing them of the decision were not sent out due to ‘an administrative error’. He made this discovery based in information released to him under the Freedom of Information Act.

Mike’s article is at: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2015/11/02/destitute-and-penniless-no-warning-benefit-sanctions-imposed-in-nearly-300000-cases/

Two things occur to me. Firstly, it may well have been administrative error that the letters weren’t sent out. On the other hand, given that this government does not like to release any information that may allow their decisions to be challenged, this can be doubted.

Secondly, as another embarrassment to the government produced through public access to government documents, it shows why Chris Grayling and his masters are trying to neuter the Freedom of Information Act as fast as they can. Before another scandal happens, no doubt.