The Home Office: only a fool would believe its publicity material.
So much for the lockdown. So much for social distancing. So much for any suggestion that the UK’s Tory government is interested in fighting the coronavirus pandemic.
And so much for the lie that the “hostile environment” policy has ended.
The Home Office chartered a private plane to deport dozens of EU nationals during lockdown, despite government stay-at-home instructions stating that people should not fly unless it was essential.
The private jet, understood to be from Titan Airways, took off from Stansted last Thursday, 30 April. The flight to Poland was chartered at a time when air travel had fallen by 95%.
A woman on the flight said there were about 35 passengers, accompanied by around 40 to 50 Home Office escorts and plane crew.
The woman, who was placed into quarantine on her arrival in Poland, questioned whether it could be defined as “essential travel” and said it was impossible to adhere to physical distancing rules during the flight.
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Sir Philip Rutnam: he was contractually obliged to carry out the orders of the Tory government; he didn’t make those orders.
The Guardian has published a comment piece criticising Sir Philip Rutnam for his decision to quit as permanent secretary – de facto boss of civil servants – at the Home Office over bullying by Priti Patel.
Columnist Amelia Gentleman reports that some consider it offensive that, by contrast, he could preside over – for example – the “hostile environment” that led to the Windrush Scandal with no concerns.
The criticism is understandable, but wide of the mark because of one fundamental point:
Civil servants put into effect the decisions of Parliament. They do not have a say in those decisions.
So Sir Philip had to enact the policies of David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson that created the “hostile environment”, Windrush and all the other scandals because, as a civil servant, he had no choice.
Ms Gentleman suggests that he should have spoken up to get the Tories to change the harsh – racist, in my opinion – policies that they were ordering him to carry out. But who says he didn’t?
That would have been a private discussion that he or his officers would have had with the relevant Tory MPs. We would not have been told about it because civil servants put into effect the decisions of Parliament.
The decisions of Parliament, of course, are mostly dictated by the government of the day, and we have a Tory government.
And who has been able to persuade a Tory to change their mind?
But leading civil servants do have a duty to protect their subordinates and themselves from mistreatment.
So, if the allegations are correct, Sir Philip was right to highlight that civil servants in his department, including himself, had been mistreated by Home Secretary Priti Patel; to point out that this behaviour apparently had the support of the prime minister; and to take legal action over it.
It might be an uncomfortable fact, but a fact is what it is.
If you’re angry about a government policy, don’t blame the civil service for it.
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You may be getting tired of this image, but it adequately describes the Liberal Democrat offer to the electorate.
The Liberal Democrats are apparently enjoying a surge in support in marginal London constituencies – why? In office, they were a disaster for the UK.
Do people really have such short memories that they have forgotten the legacy of the Coalition government? Liberal Democrats helped ruin the UK – especially for young voters such as those who are being targeted by the party now.
As Rhiannon Lucy Coslett points out in The Guardian, the very first thing the Liberal Democrats did in government was renege on their election promises.
Where they had promised to abolish tuition fees, they tripled those fees instead. Current Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson gleefully supported this policy.
The Liberal Democrats also supported the Tory imposition of austerity on people whose income fell below a certain level. Young people most of all.
For further details of Ms Swinson’s “record of shame”, see:
— MerryMichaelW 🎗 😷 #T & T #BlackLivesMatter #BDS (@MerryMichaelW) November 18, 2019
Result: “Now, there are homeless people everywhere, food bank use has skyrocketed, the housing crisis has worsened, the right is now the far right, zero-hours contracts are common, and just over half the country [actually just over half those who voted] has voted to take away its citizens’ ability to live and work in 27 European countries.
“Racism has become normalised. An MP has been murdered, many others threatened and harassed. Disabled people, migrants and black British citizens face a hostile environment.”
These are consequences of Liberal Democrats in government, made possible by people voting for the Liberal Democrats.
Now, the Lib Dems are promising to revoke Article 50 and put a stop to Brexit. They know they will never take enough Parliamentary seats to make this possible.
But they also know that it will take votes away from Labour – online tactical voting tools are advising people to vote Lib Dem in marginals where Labour has the only candidate that could beat the Conservative, according to the 2017 results.
This means that, in many constituencies, a vote for the Liberal Democrats is a vote for a Conservative government.
And we can see that the Lib Dems would support the Tories more than Labour. Jo Swinson loathes Jeremy Corbyn, even though – as Ms Coslett notes – Labour is offering what the Liberal Democrats said they wanted: a second referendum. She adds:
“Her party is not focused on reversing generational injustice; on the contrary, it has enabled it. The Lib Dems – with Swinson as a coalition government minister – were happy to work with the Conservatives to slash benefits, cut social care and play havoc with the health service. Their political conscience only seemed to return when Brexit threatened their world view and their interests. Ideologically, they largely overlap with the vanishing “moderate” wing of the Tories – whose MPs are now defecting to the Lib Dem party.”
The message is clear: If you vote Liberal Democrat, you will get Tory. For young people, that is tantamount to self-harm.
Also: what’s this about new evidence which confirms that the Liberal Democrats sold voter data to the Remain campaign in 2016 for almost £100,000 being withheld from public scrutiny by the Information Commissioner’s Office?
And what’s this about the Liberal Democrats spamming voters with junk mail?
Can everyone who is receiving unsolicited mail from Liberal democrats let it be known this is unsolicited mail using a third party which contravenes data protection and surely is breaking not only electoral laws but also laws relating to Data Protection @Liberaldemocrats
— Will Never Vote Labour Again **All Lives Matter** (@Isobel_waby) November 18, 2019
As I write this, the infamous Liberal Democrat policy – of putting bar charts on election literature claiming that their candidate is the only one who can beat the incumbents – is being ridiculed on the BBC’s Politics Live.
It seems they have been printing bar charts showing them as the biggest party in particular constituencies – by omitting the parties that had a higher vote share than them. The example quoted is notable for failing to show the Labour and Brexit Party vote.
So: take the evidence as a whole, rather than just Lib Dem literature, and the accurate picture of the Liberal Democrats is of a party that will promise anything to get into power and then break all those promises without compunction; a party that will lie to the electorate in order to secure votes; a party that will enable the Conservatives to get back into power, even though the majority of its supporters hate the Tories; and a party that will sell all our young people down the river once again – if it gets the opportunity.
You’d have to be crazy to vote Liberal Democrat.
Spread the word.
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Prepare for a new outbreak of outrage against a United Nations rapporteur.
The Tory government likes to pour scorn on UN reports, and I reckon this will be no different.
Note that Tendayi Achiume managed all her research in 11 days. The Tories pilloried Phillip Alston, the poverty rapporteur, for carrying out his own research in less than two weeks, and there’s no reason this would be different.
Of course, it turned out that the facts on which Mr Alston based his findings were accurate and the Tories rubbished his report for political reasons.
Now Ms Achiume is quoting research by the Equality and Human Rights Commission estimating that by 2022 black households will have seen a 5five per cent loss in income because of austerity – double the loss for white households.
Tory spokespeople should have a field day with this.
But the evidence is damning:
The government’s austerity programme has entrenched racial inequality in the UK, a UN expert on racism has concluded in a report that also describes the Windrush scandal as a “glaring example” of discrimination in the UK’s immigration policy.
National debates in the aftermath of the EU referendum “amplified racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance in the UK” said Tendayi Achiume, the UN’s special rapporteur on racism.
“Public and private actors have played dangerous roles in fuelling intolerance. Among them, politicians and media outlets deserve special attention given the significant influence they command in society,” she said, without naming the politicians or media outlets she had in mind.
Despite the existence of a legal framework devoted to combating racial discrimination, Achiume said race and ethnicity “continue to determine the life chances and wellbeing of people in Britain in ways that are unacceptable and, in many cases, unlawful.”
Achiume, a professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles, said a hostile environment “ostensibly created for, and formally restricted to, irregular immigrants is in effect a hostile environment for all racial and ethnic communities and individuals in the United Kingdom.”
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Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell is calling for voters to force their MPs – particularly Tory MPs – to admit the brutality of Universal Credit, benefit sanctions and disability benefit assessments that he says are now unchallengably linked to people’s deaths. But will it do any good?
He wants us all to speak personally to MPs because they refuse to face the facts when discussing it in a Parliamentary debate.
It’s an optimistic view, in This Writer’s opinion, because it assumes that Conservative MPs don’t understand that people are dying as a result of their policies. They do – or at least many of them do.
Not only do they understand that people are dying, they approve of that fact.
They agree with the 1930s Nazi definition of the sick and disabled as “useless eaters” and they think any policy that reduces the numbers of such people is a benefit to the nation (meaning it cuts the tax bill for the very very rich).
The problem with that is, we could very easily point out that those very very rich tax dodgers may also be described as “useless eaters” as they contribute increasingly less to the nation as a whole while using a proportionately higher amount of the services those taxes fund; many of them rely on the profits of businesses that were started by their ancestors and which they do not understand; and they are therefore worse parasites than the disabled people their votes persecute.
Mr McDonnell says it is possible to gain “appreciation” of the situation by introducing MPs to people who have been sanctioned. I don’t think that’s true. They may nod and say placatory things, but they will do nothing because they want those people to die.
Mr McDonnell says it is possible to gain “awareness” by mentioning individual cases in which people have committed suicide because of the hostile environment they have to endure. I don’t think that’s true either. The official government response is that there are many reasons for people to commit suicide; they spit out this line even in the face of hard evidence that the deaths were prompted by their policies.
There may be productive ways forward. A court case or public inquiry to examine the relationship between deaths of people on benefits and the behaviour of the system itself may conclude that a reasonable person would find a connection between them. If so, the government will be open to more than 100,000 legal challenges for corporate manslaughter – at the very least.
Realistically, the most likely way of lifting the Tory threat hanging over benefit claimants is the election of a Labour government.
That is one reason This Writer wants an early general election, which seems possible with Theresa May’s failures over Brexit.
The trouble is that, despite the fact that a vast majority of the public support Labour Party policies, people are being misled by an overwhelmingly Tory-supporting mass media into believing that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is a threat.
Consider the scandal last week, in which it was revealed that members of the armed forces have been using a poster of Mr Corbyn as target practice.
The system is stacked against Labour, and therefore against anybody who is in a position of vulnerability; anybody who isn’t a vastly rich Tory.
So if you have a relative or friend who has to claim sickness and/or disability benefits, go and see them, and give them a lot of affection. They may soon be dead – and if you voted Conservative, it’ll be because of your vote.
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Are you getting tired of hearing the Conservative government claiming the latest tragedy to befall sick or disabled people is the result of an administrative error?
If so, think of the reason: You’ve heard it too often.
Every time we hear of a new instance in which the Department for Work and Pensions victimises somebody in a position of extreme vulnerability – possibly to their death – the Tories say it was an error, often with a comment that measures are being put in place to ensure the same mistake can’t happen again.
Then we read another story in which it happens again.
Here‘s Patricia Nimmo, of Hull – a woman so crippled with the pain of severe arthritis and fibromyalgia that she struggle to walk, move her hands, or even talk.
The DWP has spent the last two years telling her she is not disabled enough to claim Personal Independence Payment (PIP) – or failing to get the amount of PIP correct. Notice that, in Ms Nimmo’s story, spokespeople couldn’t even be bothered to apologise.
The department didn’t apologise to Paige Garratt last year, either. She had Stage 4 cancer but apparently wasn’t sick enough to receive PIP either. That was many months ago, and we are told she made a full recovery, despite the DWP’s refusal to acknowledge the seriousness of her condition or pay her the benefit she was due.
Here‘s Pat Higgins, who has multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, anxiety and liver problems. Moving her onto PIP, the DWP decided she didn’t deserve half the money she had been receiving and took away her mobility car. The loss of her independence seriously harmed her mental health.
The DWP tried to claim that she could have kept her mobility car for three months and was entitled to a £2,000 payment – but she said she was never offered the cash as the DWP – the same DWP – had said she didn’t qualify for it.
Ms Higgins said the DWP had made her feel like “a scrounger and an outright liar despite having the documentation”. She also said, “If it isn’t affecting their life then they aren’t bothered.”
How about Malcolm Tower, who has lost his home because the DWP insist he owes £18,000 in overpaid benefits, despite the fact that he was cleared of the accusation in a court case? The DWP is still insisting he was overpaid, and claiming (unconvincingly) its debt management team is useful in supporting people having problems.
Check enough cases and you’ll see that the DWP is working to a plan. As Sue Jones describes it on her own site, this government department is subjecting innocent people to “strategically placed and thoroughly demoralising ordeals, which are being passed off as arising because of bad administrative practices and simple errors”.
This cannot be true, she states, because “such ordeals are happening far too frequently to have arisen through random error” and “there is an identifiable pattern of government sponsored behaviours… which is aimed at simply denying people support”.
Isn’t that what we are seeing?
Ms Jones wrote: “Many people who have challenged a Department for Work and Pensions’ (DWP) decision not to award them Personal Independent Payment (PIP) in court successfully are finding that soon after they have won their appeal, they face a reassessment, and their award is taken from them again.” That’s what happened to Patricia Nimmo.
“Even when people appeal, the system is rigged against them applying for legal support, and cuts to charities mean any support at all is shrinking away.” Mr Tower could take the DWP to court over the disproved claim that he owed £18,000 – but he simply doesn’t have the money to carry out a court case.
“Since PIP was launched in 2013 to reduce the costs of disability support, the increasingly reduced access to financial assistance to help with the additional costs of being disabled has forced more than 75,000 people to give up their specially-adapted Motability vehicles.” And that’s what happened to Pat Higgins.
Here’s the sting:
All of the cases mentioned above (apart from that of Paige Garratt, which is mentioned to demonstrate a point) were reported in the press within the last week.
The DWP has been committing the same injustices to the vulnerable for years.
That‘s why you keep hearing about it.
They say they are improving, but they haven’t changed anything.
And under “Groundhog” May, they never will.
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We always knew Theresa May’s “hostile environment” extended to more people than immigrants and EU nationals.
She doesn’t like people from broken homes either. Perhaps it’s her puritanical, daughter-of-a-vicar blood.
Mrs May would prefer it if people – mostly women, of course – who suffer domestic abuse would suffer in silence, rather than burdening the Department for Work and Pensions with annoying claims for benefits.
Annoyingly – for her – the morals of the age require her government to present the appearance of one that cares when people come to harm.
So the DWP has devised a wealth of rules designed to make it seem it is doing its best for victims, while in fact keeping them in poverty and pain.
There’s an entire page on getting help if you’re a victim of domestic abuse on the DWP website.
On the page it lists certain conditions, yes conditions, victims must meet.
They include;
“You will need written evidence from a person acting in an official capacity showing that:
your circumstances are consistent with those of a person who has had domestic violence or abuse inflicted, or threatened, upon them, during the 6 months prior to you notifying
you have made contact with the person acting in an official capacity to tell them about any incidents that have occurred in the past 6 months
“You must provide your evidence to Jobcentre Plus as soon as possible but no later than one calendar month after you first told us about the domestic violence and abuse.”
So a victim of domestic abuse not only has to open up to work coach about their abuse, then they get asked for proof?
The requirements do not end there. Once they’ve decided to accept that you have been a victim, you MAY be allowed a 13 week break from looking for work, but only if you satisfy the next set of criteria.
The most notable of them being,
“you have not had a 13 week break from work-related requirements as a result of previous domestic violence within the last 12 months”.
In some cases of domestic violence, the victim may return to their abuser. This is well known and it’s hard to think the DWP wouldn’t have known this.
This means a benefit claimant who’s endured repeated abuse, just has to battle on because they’ve been unfortunate enough to be abused twice in a year.
The simple fact is that life on benefits is appallingly hard – the Conservatives have deliberately made it so.
The system means survival is slightly easier for couples (at least, that has been This Writer’s experience) – and it is entirely possible that domestic abuse victims, in the impossible situation of being unable to find paying work and unable to survive under the cruel conditions of Universal Credit, end up believing they have no choice other than to return to their abuser.
Once there, DWP rules say they must stay for at least a year – no matter what abuse they suffer.
Some might even die.
But that’s why it’s called a “hostile environment”, you see.
The DWP won’t care because the death of a claimant is listed as a “positive benefit outcome”.
Information on where abuse victims can get genuine help is available in the Universal Credit Sufferer article.
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Sajid Javid: Didn’t he say he would end the “hostile environment” policy that is harming so many innocent people?
It’s a testament to these truthless times that the Conservative government that got into so much trouble over its “hostile environment” policy is still getting away with horrific treatment of people who happen to have a different skin colour from that of Theresa May.
The Independent has reported on the case of Faloshade Olayiwole, who has been told she must travel from her asylum accommodation in Stoke-on-Trent to a reporting centre in Manchester to comply with Home Office immigration rules.
There’s no real reason for her to have to do this. The Home Office could send her to any government office – there’s bound to be one in Stoke with a video link to other offices, for example – but it seems the Tories prefer inflicting mindless, meaningless cruelty on people, just for the sake of it.
So reporter May Bulman followed Ms Olayiwole from Stoke to Manchester – a 50-mile journey which they had to start at 8am in order to arrive three hours later, or Ms Olayiwole would face detention.
It’s clear that this is setting her up to fail. The railway service is an expensive, incompetent nightmare and a slight delay could cost Ms Olayiwole her freedom. Ironically, the journey has been necessitated by a programme of closures of immigration reporting offices which the Tories have euphemistically claimed is meant to “more effectively manage” the reporting population, which includes thousands of asylum seekers.
It’s certainly effective in reducing the amount of cash these people have to manage their survival, and that of their children. But of course, this is the Tory “hostile environment” and Conservatives simply do not understand what it is like to have to survive on very low funds.
The article says charities have made it clear that disabled people and parents with young children must make long and expensive journeys to “sign on” in compliance with immigration rules – a traumatic experience in itself – and the Home Office refuses to cap the distance they can be told to travel.
Not only that, but a report commissioned by the government itselffound that asylum-seeking families are living in unsuitable accommodation that fails to meet basic needs, with almost half of asylum properties deemed unfit for purpose.
Further details are in the full article.
For This Writer, the saddest part is that some people reading this will think it is entirely reasonable to send Ms Olayiwole back to her home country of Nigeria, which she fled due to sexual and emotional abuse that would have forced her eldest daughter to suffer female genital mutilation (FGM). The lack of understanding, let alone sympathy, that these people suffer from that section of the population currently nicknamed “gammon” is nothing less than sociopathic.
And the Conservatives are still getting away with it.
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Sarah Newton: The Conservative minister for disabled people once said there was no “hostile environment” for benefit claimants. The seven reviews of wrong decisions carried out by the DWP within the last 12 months suggest otherwise.
As I write this, I, Daniel Blake is on the TV – its television premiere. The scene involves the title character’s work capability assessment (he’s claiming Employment Support Allowance), with a “healthcare professional” who does her level best to avoid discussing the heart attack that put him in front of her, and also to avoid explaining how she is qualified to handle his case.
The implication is clear: The assessor isn’t qualified to deal with him and doesn’t want to talk about his genuine health problem because she wants to deny him any benefits.
Aaaaand sure enough, he’s just been found fit for work. Falsely, of course.
I mention this because the Department for Work and Pensions has been forced to launch a seventh expensive review of its own records to find details of disabled people unfairly deprived of benefits.
This particular review isn’t about people being denied benefits because of wrong assessment decisions – it’s actually more appropriate to the situation faced by single mother Katie (Hayley Squires), who is denied a chance to sign on because she arrives late at the Job Centre.
Disability News Serviceexplains: “The latest review is necessary because of an upper tribunal ruling in the case of a claimant moving from disability living allowance (DLA) to personal independence payment (PIP) who had his DLA stopped because he had failed to attend an Atos face-to-face assessment.
“The upper tribunal found that the claimant, OM – who had long-standing psychosis, and became agitated and aggressive around people he did not know – had “good reason” for not attending the PIP assessment that the government contractor Atos had told his wife he would have to attend in one of its London centres.
“The upper tribunal found that OM should have his DLA reinstated until a final decision was made on his PIP claim, while he should also receive backdated payments from the date DWP stopped his DLA.”
The new review means the DWP has to apply the same approach to other cases in which DLA claimants had their benefits stopped because assessors said they did not have “good reason” for failing to attend or take part in interviews or to provide necessary information or evidence for their PIP claim, but were later found to have had a “good reason” after all, by the DWP or a tribunal.
Of course, the operative question here is, why were all these people denied benefits, based on a false premise?
And, if no fewer than six other reviews have taken place to find other people who have been wronged by the DWP, I have to ask: Were these really mistakes? Or were they deliberate policy decisions designed to harm the people DWP is meant to be helping?
I think anyone who’s seen the film will know the answer to both those questions.
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Sajid Javid: Pleading the cause of racism against asylum seekers.
It’s a common argument against the refugees coming across the Channel to the UK at the moment – why don’t they just stop in France?
The answer is obvious: They don’t feel safe there.
And the legal position is clear: The 1951 refugee convention acknowledges that refugees may enter countries through irregular routes and should not be penalised for this. The outcome of an asylum application cannot be pre-judged, irrespective of how that person reached the country. Asylum claims have to be determined according to the law and the circumstances of every individual case.
All of the above seems to have been lost on Sajid Javid, who seems to think it would be big and tough of him to refuse asylum to anybody who manages to cross the Channel safely.
Sajid Javid here, just casually suggesting his government would breach the Geneva Convention by deliberately refusing asylum to genuine refugees who have risked their lives to cross the Channel and seek sanctuary in the UK pic.twitter.com/KmRRviwQTo
The Prole Star is correct. It would be illegal to refuse asylum to anybody who arrives in the UK and demands it, based on the method of their arrival or the fact that they did not stop in another country instead. It is not up to him to make such a decision.
As Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott pointed out: “It is not for Sajid Javid to claim that asylum seekers may not be genuine. He cannot know. We have a system for determining that.”
Can you imagine what would happen if Mr Javid went through with his racist idea?
No?
Well, don’t worry – all you have to do is watch events in Israel, where the racist Likud government has announced that it intends to expel around 38,000 African refugees.
(I say racist because the hatred of people of other ethnicities is clear; Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said the expulsions are necessary to protect Israel’s “Jewish character”.)
Many of the people concerned say they came to Israel to seek asylum after fleeing persecution and conflict, but the authorities in that country regard them as “economic migrants”.
The BBC report of this outrage states that the group affected by this policy “includes people fleeing war-torn countries such as Syria, who are likely to be granted refugee status”.
But the Guardian‘s report on Sajid Javid’s racism includes a comment by immigration and asylum barrister Colin Yeo as follows: “Sending genuine refugees to face persecution in order to dissuade others from seeking to come here is plainly illegal.” If Israel is signed up to the same convention as the UK – and it is – then it is illegal in that country as well.
And the words of Yvette Cooper, quoted in the Guardian report, may also be applied to Israel: “Asylum claims have to be determined according to the law and the circumstances of every individual case, not as an arbitrary political decision supposedly to deter others.”
Sadly, it seems there is no penalty for non-compliance – other than bad publicity in the newspapers, and that depends on the political leanings of their owners.
Perhaps Mr Javid thinks a little bad publicity is worth risking. It seems likely he’ll be watching what happens in Israel with great interest.
Of course, if a general election is called in the meantime, there’s a chance his racist ideas will come to nothing.
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