Many Commiserations On Your Unqualified Success | TheCritique Archives
Mr Odoni is absolutely right. While I was overjoyed to learn that my two-year campaign to get these figures has been a success, the actual figures were heartbreaking.
I don’t think for a moment that the DWP caved in solely because of my efforts, either. Thanks are due to the nearly 250,000 people who signed a petition supporting my bid – and to Maggie Zolobajluk, who set it up; to the MPs who created and signed the Early Day Motion in Parliament, for the matter to be debated (more than 90 of them), and in particular Marie Rimmer and Debbie Abrahams, who have been implacable in their pursuit of Iain Duncan Smith and his ministers; to Vox Political’s readers for supporting and publicising This Blog and its articles on this subject; and to all those I have momentarily forgotten (I’m quite tired).
The campaign continues. Nobody has been saved because the DWP released a few numbers. The whole point is to change policy, ensuring that the system adapts to reduce the number of deaths. That’s something we have yet to achieve.
For the time being, though, I thank Mr Odoni for his congratulations and welcome his commiserations also.
I would just like to express my admiration and heartfelt condolences to Mike Sivier over on the Vox Political blog. After a very long, arduous and hair-tearing battle against the delaying tactics of the Department of Work & Pensions, to get the real numbers of deaths of people claiming incapacity benefits, today he won, as the figures were revealed to the world. It genuinely is a great achievement, managing to force one of the most stubborn, secretive and underhand departments in all of the British Government to give way. But has there ever been a more heartbreaking boon at the end of such a long and gruelling journey?
What Iain Duncan-Smith has done is preside over a completely pointless and utterly avoidable humanitarian disaster in one of the richest countries in the world, and then imagined he could keep such a disaster neatly brushed under the carpet. So while I congratulate Mike on lifting that carpet enough to reveal what we had all feared lay beneath it, I commiserate him on what it has taught us. If ever there were a victory to despair at, it is this one. However necessary it is to reveal ugly truths, that does not mean we have to enjoy them. Instead, they should be seen with the disgust that motivates us to correct them.
Source: Many Commiserations On Your Unqualified Success | TheCritique Archives
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It’s difficult to add to this post, other than say thanks to all those that have contributed.
Totally agree
Great words form Mr Odoni. I hope this news, plus today’s news about all the Camoron’s Corrupt Cronies given Peerages will make a few more people finally start to wake up to what a disgraceful party and government Camoron leads.
I hope too that these DWP revelations are passed on to the UN for their Crimes Against Humanity investigations of Camoron’s Cronies. May their black hearts rot in hell.
So true. Maybe this will go some way to get people who think that people on benefits are skivers and scroungers to start to rethink their views. Thanks Mike for your work in this.
Dear Mike,
Without your concern for common decency for all, and all the effort you put into showing up the false information given by IDS and his department I doubt if we would have got the figures.
This government has not made any comment from the top which indicates just how little regard it has for the ordinary citizen of this country and I fear, that unless we can find a way of getting rid of it, before the expiry of another 4.5 years, it will have destroyed what we all considered to be a democracy into a dictatorship.
Thank again Mike for all your efforts,
Rupert
Hum but are these the true figures or more rtu ids hookery pookery has truthfull they aint but even this figure is a high price to pay in souls lost so that they plug that gap that the banksters left pity they who dkne this wernt dealt with rather than culling the stock the tory way jeff3
The fact that these figures have been released at all shows that even a government as contemptuous of and detached from the people as this one can have its hand forced by those same people. Lots of people have contributed to making sure this information is widely known – my own blog post earlier today was largely devoted to sharing examples of this: https://aspiblog.wordpress.com/2015/08/28/the-inhumane-despicable-sociopath-and-attempting-to-bury-bad-news/
I would also like to thank Mike for his efforts in keeping this obscenity on the political agenda and his significant role in the release of these dismal figures.
An incredible effort.
Well done,Mike.
Congratulations – a remarkable achievement. May I make 2 observations. I speak from experience when I say that if they were prepared to give you these figures, then they must be hiding a situation in the same field that is even worse. These people are outright liars. Also I would take issue with the suggestion that Britain is “one of the richest countries in the world”. We are not, we are potless. Yes there are more millionaires per square foot here than in most other places but the country itself has no money. Perpetuating this lie is one of the greatest obstacles to change. Make a list of the necessities which the UK does not seem to be able to afford and the real situation can be seen. Police services cut to the very bone; road repairs totally ignored; drains not cleaned or cleared for years; support for those suffering with mental health issues in deep decline; prisons not fit for purpose; the legal system destroyed. These are items (along with others) which are easily identified in the area where I live. Great work, again Mike, but please don’t perpetuate this total myth about the UK being ‘a rich country’. Surely the people must be persuaded to realise that our elected reps (of whatever stripe) have screwed us and continue to do so at every opportunity. If more people realised what is happening, the better the chance of a meaningful change in 2020.
The UK is a rich country.
A country is made up of its citizens, not just its government.
That is entirely the type of comment which I would have expected from you Mike. Are it’s citizens providing everything that the Country requires? Details would be interesting. Would you also provide a reference for details of the concerted efforts which Her Majesty’s Opposition played in gaining these figures? I hope they were more significant than the efforts made by you and your helpers. Isn’t that what a healthily paid Opposition is for?
I would say no, the richer citizens are being extremely stingy with their massive wealth.
You see, it seems many of them would like – and Conservative Party philosophy supports this – a state in which taxes are reduced to the bare minimum and the so-called Welfare State disappears, to be replaced by privately-funded health and income insurance. For this to be in any way appropriate, though, there would have to be much, much closer equality of earnings, across the board; it would be inappropriate to expect someone earning 1/400th as much as you to pay out the same amount in insurance. Then there is the question of insurance companies fiddling their rules in order to minimise payouts. Unum, the company that has been advising successive UK governments since the early 1990s, is a convicted criminal organisation in its home country, the USA, precisely because it fiddled its rules in this manner.
In a country where a significant minority earns a significant amount more than the vast majority, it is appropriate for the richest to pay a higher proportion into a state-organised system where the money is used to ensure support for everybody, of sufficiently high quality to sustain them.
Even in this, the Conservatives are failing.
Oh, and if you don’t know what HM Loyal Opposition did towards pushing the government into publishing these figures, then you haven’t been following the news.
Thanks, Mike, you’re a top bloke.
I can only express agreement with the comments so far.
Now that the evidence is in the open we all need to co-operate in getting this odious regime indicted for their crimes against humanity, so that we can have a government with some morals.