Monthly Archives: October 2019

Election 2019: Bad start for Johnson as he’s booed out of Addenbrooke’s hospital

Thick(-skinned): Boris Johnson smiled his way through his visit to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge – even, one suspects, as staff and patients were booing him out.

Why does Boris Johnson still think it’s good electioneering to make appearances in hospitals?

Everyone knows he hates the National Health Service and using it as a backdrop for other unpopular campaigning doesn’t help him.

Today (October 31) was the day he promised, “do or die”, that the UK would leave the European Union. It hasn’t. But he turned up at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge to tell nurses that, if elected, then the new Brexit deadline would be in January next year at the latest.

It shows a particularly rough form of insensitivity to keep denying reality in this way.

People don’t want his Brexit. They want a reasonable deal that won’t shrink the economy by 3.5 per cent (equivalent to a loss of thousands of pounds per year for UK households). They want to save money by withdrawing from the EU – as he claimed would happen to the tune of £350m per week in 2016, and not to spend £500m a week on medicines for the NHS in a frankly bewildering deal with the US that would harm us all.

And today, they wanted him out of Addenbrooke’s Hospital. He left to boos and other sounds of derision (as you can see here).

Elsewhere, he was accused of withholding information on Russian interference in the UK democratic process – material that, it was argued, should be available to the public in the run-up to an election.

Oh, and it could also be argued that he spoke inappropriately to children at a primary school in Bury St Edmonds when he told them that enemies of the state used to have their heads chopped off and put on spikes on London Bridge. Did the parents know he was going to put this grisly thought in the minds of impressionable youngsters on Hallowe’en?

All in all, it could hardly have been a worse start for the unelected prime minister.

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Crowd-pleaser Corbyn launches Labour election campaign with rip-roaring speech

Jeremy Corbyn: “Our NHS is not for sale.”

Jeremy Corbyn has vowed to lead a Labour government that will “transform” the UK as he launched the party’s general election campaign.

In a widely-praised speech, he promised to “rebuild” public services and hit out at “tax dodgers, dodgy landlords, bad bosses and big polluters”.

But don’t take my word for it. You can read the speech here.

Or you can watch it here.

Highlights included the moment when the audience burst into chants of “Not for sale!” as he committed to return the National Health Service to what it should be – a fully-public organisation with no private providers involved – reversing the privatisation ushered in by the hated Health and Social Care Act 2012.

Here’s the part that’s worth remembering, though:

It’s the big difference. With a Conservative government, the super-rich win, and stamp on your face as they’ve been doing for the last nine years. Think of all the people who have died because of their policies.

With a Labour government – as defined by Mr Corbyn, you win.

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General Election 2019: Beware of ‘tactical voting’ websites that are really party propagandists

A timely warning from Another Angry Voice.

As we go into general election campaigning, this is vital information from Another Angry Voice:

The site mentioned above is only one of several; until you know otherwise, I think you should consider all of them to be suspicious.

The best advice This Writer can give is to use your own intelligence.

Source: Beware of dodgy tactical voting sites

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DWP persecutes claimants rather than scammers over ‘industrial scale’ benefit fraud

Despair: It seems the DWP’s plan to tackle Universal Credit fraud is to prosecute the victims, rather than the criminals.

Only one scammer has been prosecuted by the Department for Work and Pensions in connection with a fraud that has cost the nation an estimated £150 million per month.

The 145 dedicated staff hired by the DWP to investigate seem more interested in prosecuting genuine benefit claimants – with one already convicted and 28 facing prosecution.

Doesn’t that seem the wrong way around?

The scam works because people who need to claim benefits have been made increasingly desperate by the economic conditions created by the Conservative government.

Here’s how I described it, back in July:

“The scammer approaches the victim – a person in need of quick cash – and offers to get them a government grant or a payday loan for a small fee. They demand the victim’s identity details.

“The scammer then simply goes online and makes a Universal Credit claim in the victim’s name, demanding an advance loan in the process.

“The DWP’s online system automatically approves the claim because it doesn’t know any better and transfers the money into the victim’s bank account – from which the scammer then takes a huge amount of the money that has been handed over.

“The victim is left with a small fraction of the loan, but owing the entire amount back to the DWP. Not only that, but any other benefits they may have been claiming will have been cancelled.

“So the victim is left much worse-off – and the government department doesn’t care. It will pursue them for the full amount.”

This is what we are seeing now – the DWP is apparently pursuing the victims, rather than the perpetrators.

“It seems the scam works because of Universal Credit’s ‘digital by design’ nature; the computerised system automatically approves the application, no matter how bizarre the claims in it.

“So thousands of pounds have been given in response to claims on behalf of (allegedly) a 19-year-old with six blind children, people with children called Lisa, Bart and Homer – or indeed Ha, Ha and Ha – and people claiming “Harry Kane” is their landlord.

“Apparently 100,000 or more such advances are being paid every month. At up to £1,500 a go, that’s a lot of money.”

It seems the DWP’s 145 investigators are currently looking into 85,000 cases, with the caseload increasing all the time.

Has anything been done to stop the computerised Universal Credit claim system from automatically allowing these scams? If not, why not? Do the Tories see it as another way to persecute the vulnerable?

It seems to This Writer that there is only one way to stop the scammers from exploiting the vulnerable – and to stop the Tories from persecuting them.

Elect a Labour government that will end Universal Credit and implement a fair system in which people won’t be pushed into the arms of criminals.

It’s that simple.

Source: DWP: Just one scammer prosecuted so far for snaring people in Universal Credit fraud – Mirror Online

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Was this disabled couple made homeless by a council because they have a pet dog?

Losing hope: Ian and Frances Cooper in the car they now call home.

This tells you everything about the direction of travel in Tory Britain.

Ian and Frances Cooper, from Aylsham, have been living in a Renault Kadjar for two months.

They have been unable to find a permanent residence after being evicted from a privately-rented flat because one of their three pets is not an assistance dog.

Seriously. Their local council appears to be penalising them for having a pet that they love.

They were evicted from a privately-rented bungalow after an attempt to claim housing benefit (or that component of Universal Credit) from North Norfolk District Council was turned down.

Since then, the council has tried to house them in a number of other places – none of which proved appropriate.

In one instance – a Premier Inn – they were told they could not stay because, while two of their Jack Russell terriers are assistance dogs, the third is not, and the hotel chain’s policy is only to allow assistance dogs in its rooms.

The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman is to investigate a complaint by Mr and Mrs Cooper that NNDC did not award them the correct priority band, made unsuitable offers of interim accommodation, gave the wrong advice over whether or not the couple should have claimed universal credit or housing benefits and did not consider evidence of harassment from a landlord.

And in the meantime a man with spondylolisthesis of the spine – a condition which causes the vertebrae to slip out of place – who recently spent time in hospital with sepsis and now has a stoma bag, and a woman with fibromyalgia, are living with their dogs in a car.

Of course it is affecting their physical health – and inevitably it is affecting their mental well-being as well.

Personally, I would not blame the local council. I would blame the Conservative government.

It is the Tories who perverted the benefit system into a tool to persecute the vulnerable – especially people with long-term illnesses and/or disabilities like the Coopers.

There is no doubt in my mind that Iain Duncan Smith, the architect of these changes, would be absolutely delighted to hear that a disabled couple had been forced to live in a car with deteriorating mental and physical health because of him.

He knows the Department for Work and Pensions will always claim plausible deniability – no matter how damning the evidence against it.

But I wonder how long the Coopers – and who knows how many other families like them? – can survive in the punitive Tory system.

It’s time for change. These are people who have worked all their lives and instead of being able to rely on the system to keep them safe in a time of hardship, they have been – literally – thrown onto the streets.

There is only one way to achieve change for the better – change the government.

The Coopers’ story is a great reason to vote Labour in the general election.

Source: Disabled couple Ian and Frances Cooper left homeless and living in car with their three dogs | Latest Norfolk and Suffolk News | Eastern Daily Press

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Boris Johnson’s big NHS meltdown

After their campaign on law and order dissolved into chaos, the Tories tried to take the moral high ground on health. It didn’t work.

Most particularly, it didn’t work for Boris Johnson, who was challenged on the subject by prime minister-in-waiting Jeremy Corbyn at Prime Minister’s Questions.

Mr Corbyn was keen for Mr Johnson to explain why his government had held secret trade talks with US firms that would nearly triple the price of medicines bought by the NHS, creating serious pressure on the service at a time when it is already under enormous strain.

I discuss the issue here, or you can watch this video to have it in a nutshell:

Note also that “drug pricing” is now to be known as “valuing innovation”. And, as a TV comedian once said, from now on radiation will be known as “magic moonbeams”.

Here’s Mr Corbyn, opening his questioning in PMQs – and Mr Johnson’s answer:

Of course, Mr Corbyn was well aware of the situation regarding the cystic fibrosis drug Orkambi; it was his intervention that succeeded in getting it provided on the NHS, we’re told.

Mr Johnson’s claims about building 40 new hospitals fare less well in the fact-check. As Mr Corbyn put it: “As for the fabled 40 hospitals, that figure dropped to 20 and then finally dropped to six.” They’ll be down to none in the event of a Conservative election victory.

Mr Corbyn continued: “We learned this week that Government officials have met US pharmaceutical companies five times as part of the Prime Minister’s planned trade deal. The US has called for “full market access” to our NHS, which would mean prices of some of our most important medicines increasing by up to sevenfold. While the Government are having secret meetings with US corporations, it is patients here who continue to suffer.”

And he said: “Of course we need to import medicines from various places; I just want it to be done in an open and transparent way. I do not want secret talks between Government officials, on behalf of Ministers, and big pharma corporations in the USA.”

He slammed Tory privatisation of NHS services, which has skyrocketed with more than £10 billion being frittered away to private companies and their shareholders, rather than supporting the health of UK citizens.

He said: “What we do not want is private companies like Virgin Care suing our NHS for contracts that they did not get. Our NHS should be focused on making people better, not making the wealthy few richer.

“National health service A&E departments have just had their worst September on record. This morning, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine said that this winter the NHS needs more than 4,000 extra beds.” But under Boris Johnson’s government, he said, the number of people in England waiting for an operation has now reached a record high of 4.4 million.

He continued as follows:

And he concluded: “Despite the Prime Minister’s denials, the NHS is up for grabs by US corporations in a Trump trade deal. Is it not the truth—the Government may not like this—that this Government are preparing to sell out our NHS? Our health service is in more danger than at any other time in its glorious history because of the Prime Minister’s Government, his attitudes and the trade deals that he wants to strike.”

It is indeed the truth.

Mr Johnson spluttered on for a while but the best he could do in his defence was quote a discredited CBI claim that Labour would spend nearly £200 billion on a privatisation programme; the CBI itself has admitted that the claim was based on questionable assumptions and withdrawn it.

He lied that Labour would tax corporations, people, pensions and businesses – in fact Labour will only increase taxes on the people earning the most, who are therefore most able to accommodate such a charge.

And he said Labour would condemn the UK to two more referendums – on Brexit and Scottish independence. He neglected to say that he would consign us all to even more Brexit uncertainty as he would try – yet again – to push through a departure on the worst possible terms for the majority of the nation.

Finally, he appears to have become tongue-tied in his predictions of the future, mixing the roles of his party and Mr Corbyn’s.

I’ll fix that for him now:

“That is the future for this country: drift and dither under the Conservative party, or taking Britain forward to a brighter future under Labour. That is the choice this country faces.”

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Tory ‘law and order’ campaign falls flat on its… truncheon

Lawless: All those police officers behind Boris Johnson, and not one of them had the good sense to take him into custody.

That was short and not-very-sweet, wasn’t it?

Yesterday we heard that the Conservatives would try to make December’s general election about law and order. Today, that plan fell to ruin.

It seems the Conservatives wanted to trumpet their claim to be adding 20,000 police officers to our streets. There was only one problem:

It has already been debunked.

We know that it was the Tories who cut the service by 21,000 in the first place.

We also know that, with natural wastage occurring all the time (such as retirements or resignations), adding 20,000 won’t even make up the staffing level we have at the moment.

So we know that any claim to be restoring law and order to a higher standard in this way is false advertising, if not an outright lie.

Also, of course, there’s no point in having police if the Tories are going to use them as political tools – as seems to have been the case in the Extinction Rebellion protests, when they victimised vulnerable people with disabilities.

But health secretary Matt Hancock didn’t seem to know that, when he appeared on Good Morning Britain.

The result was a train crash for him, and a killing for the show’s co-presenter, Susannah Reid:

Now, to judge from Nadhim Zahawi’s performance on the BBC’s Politics Live, the Tories want to make it about the NHS.

But wasn’t there a scandal about a dodgy US trade deal to rig the price of drugs, only yesterday?

Ah yes, that’s right: Price-rigging is now to be known as “valuing innovation”.

Hopefully the Tories’ innovative valuing system will price them right out of being re-elected.

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‘Degrading and humiliating’ – why do police treat disabled people so badly?

Targeted: Is the Met police’s ill-treatment of disabled people part of an overarching policy of discrimination against them?

The Metropolitan Police has been accused of “degrading and humiliating” treatment of people with disabilities who took part in the Extinction Rebellion protests in London.

In isolation, this would be bad enough – but it is just the latest in a series of incidents targeting disabled protesters, by forces across the UK.

Now the Met’s independent advisory group says the bullying that took place may have caused “irreparable damage” to relations with disabled people.

Stop and think about that. This isn’t just a public relations problem – it’s a disaster for the police: “irreparable damage.”

According to The Guardian, advisory group chair Anne Novis said everybody in that organisation – all of them – were on the point of resigning because of the stories they were hearing from disabled people.

This is entirely understandable. The claim is that people with disabilities were deliberately and aggressively targeted by police.

Here’s an example of what police were doing: When a disabled protester outside Scotland Yard needed a carer to adjust her supplemental oxygen and provide other medicine, police arrested both on the grounds that they were an illegal assembly.

They had been there to protest after police had confiscated independent living equipment including wheelchairs, disability ramps, noise-cancelling headphones, specially adapted toilets and other items intended to make protest sites accessible to disabled people.

Another incident saw a blind protester released without his cane. And left to get home without any help at all.

Legal observers for Extinction Rebellion said they had expected violence by police – but had not reckoned on it being almost exclusively directed at disabled people in what appeared to be a “deliberate intimidation tactic”.

The Met has claimed that it does not single out any minority group or community – but this is unpersuasive in the light of the mountain of evidence against it.

And it seems part of a nationwide policy to target the disabled. Remember when anti-fracking protesters in Lancashire were targeted by police?

Those people then faced a secondary attack from the Department for Work and Pensions, who claimed that they did not deserve sickness and/or disability benefits because they were well enough to take part in a protest. Remember that?

We discovered then that the police had an agreement to share information on protesters with the DWP, precisely to help that government department unfairly strip disabled people of their benefits.

Loss of state benefits – for a disabled person – has led to starvation, the worsening of their condition through lack of medication, and – in some cases – suicide.

It may be considered an attempt to pass a death sentence on them, simply for daring to protest against something that is wrong.

Has the Met passed the details of the disabled XR protesters to the DWP, in the hope of forcing them into that fate?

I don’t know. But I feel sure we will find out.

Let us hope that we do so before it is too late.

Source: Met police accused of ‘degrading’ treatment of disabled XR activists | UK news | The Guardian

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Kids are dressing as Boris Johnson for Hallowe’en – to terrify their parents

Terrifying: Costume choices include ‘Zipwire Boris’, ‘Bike Boris’ and ‘Bullingdon Boris’. Wouldn’t YOU be terrified if you saw lots of mini-versions of BoJob coming towards you?

If Boris Johnson gives you the chills, look out! He may just come knocking on your door.

No, this isn’t because Parliament just voted for a general election.

It’s because kids are dressing up as him to scare the daylights out of adults for Hallowe’en.

Imagine it – a mini-BoJob pushing his bucket at you with the words “Bah! Or Brexit!”

Research by the Beano has shown that 66 per cent of parents and children think Mr Johnson is the ghastliest figure of the 21st century.

And more than half of families are drawing on Brexit as the inspiration for their costumes – a choice that will now be ironic, considering the fact that the UK won’t be leaving the EU on October 31 after all.

And the findings didn’t have much to say for BoJob’s electoral chances – even this poll put him 10th, behind classic costume ideas like Pennywise the Clown (from Stephen King’s It) and Spider-Man.

Source: Kids are dressing up as Boris Johnson for Halloween | Metro News

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Tory aide in bar ruckus – and Johnson wants his election to be about law and order!

James Starkie.

You couldn’t make it up, could you?

Here’s The Guardian‘s Rowena Mason:

“The home secretary’s chief of staff was escorted out of a bar in parliament by armed police earlier – just as MPs were voting on an election that Boris Johnson wants to make about law and order.

“Two people who witnessed the incident say James Starkie was ordered out of Strangers bar after swearing loudly in the vicinity of a Tory MP, Col Bob Stewart, being refused service and appearing to punch a door.

“As police escorted him out of the bar, which is frequented by MPs, witnesses said he apologised for his behaviour.

“Starkie is a familiar face around Westminster as a former Vote Leave campaigner who went on to work for Michael Gove, before taking up his position as a senior adviser to Priti Patel. A House of Commons spokesperson said:

“‘We can confirm there was an incident with an individual in Strangers bar. The individual was asked to leave, and was escorted from the estate by parliamentary security.'”

How can Johnson claim to improve the rule of law in the nation at large when he can’t even enforce it among his followers?

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politics for the people

Monthly Archives: October 2019

Election 2019: Bad start for Johnson as he’s booed out of Addenbrooke’s hospital

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Crowd-pleaser Corbyn launches Labour election campaign with rip-roaring speech

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DWP persecutes claimants rather than scammers over ‘industrial scale’ benefit fraud

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Was this disabled couple made homeless by a council because they have a pet dog?

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Boris Johnson’s big NHS meltdown

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Tory ‘law and order’ campaign falls flat on its… truncheon

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Kids are dressing as Boris Johnson for Hallowe’en – to terrify their parents

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Tory aide in bar ruckus – and Johnson wants his election to be about law and order!

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