Tag Archives: local authority

‘Women will die’ because of austerity cuts to public services

A victim of domestic violence: The bruising is bad enough but, if funding to support groups is cut, how long will it be before somebody dies?

You can clearly see the evil of Tory austerity cuts to local authorities in action here: We have a Labour-led council being forced to end funding for a vital service because it has no money, and as a result, people are likely to die.

The Tories are responsible but Labour will get the blame.

What’s the answer? It would be easy to say the council should restructure its priorities to allow more funding for SYWA – but very hard to achieve. The Tories have cut funding to the bone, meaning local authorities only have money for statutory services – those they must provide by law. Even then, most councils are struggling.

There seems to be no mechanism to force central government into providing proper funding.

So what is to be done?

Do we have to wait for yet another person to die because of Tory cuts?

South Yorkshire Women’s Aid (SYWA) in Doncaster offers support, advice and therapy for survivors of rape, sexual assault and domestic violence, and their children. But SYWA has struggled to keep its doors open, due to, it says, the Labour-led local authority’s unwillingness to fund it properly.

The centre, originally Doncaster Women’s Aid, closed for the first time in March 2016 due to lack of funding. But after a sustained campaign, the council awarded it a £30,000 grant and the doors reopened as SYWA in January 2017. However, this money is only enough to keep it open until December. And after that, the council says there is no more funding available.

So, SYWA is having to crowdfund for its future, which you can donate to here.

Source: Tory austerity means ‘women will die’ because of cuts to public services | The Canary


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Child trafficking victims are disappearing from UK care – and the attitude seems to be ‘so what?’

In one year, nearly 30 per cent of all UK child trafficking victims disappeared from foster and care homes [Image: Veryan Dale/Alamy Stock Photo].

In one year, nearly 30 per cent of all UK child trafficking victims disappeared from foster and care homes [Image: Veryan Dale/Alamy Stock Photo].

Is nobody else worried that our local authorities seem completely unperturbed about this shocking failure in their duty of care?

Would they have mentioned the fact that a confirmed 760 young people have gone missing from their care at some time, if they had not been forced to do so by a Freedom of Information request?

Would they have told anybody that 207 of these children have never been found and are presumed to be back in the hands of their exploiters?

And these figures aren’t even accurate!

Less than a quarter (45) of the 217 local authorities from whom information was requested have bothered to reply.

This is a bitter indictment of a care system that, quite clearly, doesn’t.

Child trafficking victims and unaccompanied children are going missing from local authority care at an “alarming” rate according to a new report, which reveals that in one year, nearly 30% of all UK child trafficking victims and 13% of unaccompanied children disappeared from care services.

New research by child trafficking NGO Ecpat UK and the charity Missing People has found that 167 of the 590 children suspected or identified as child trafficking victims in the year from September 2014 to 2015 vanished from foster and care homes across the country.

An additional 593 of the 4,744 unaccompanied children placed under the protection of local authorities also went missing at least once in the same time period. Of the 760 trafficked or unaccompanied children who disappeared from care, 207 have never been found.

The new data, drawn largely from freedom of information requests to 217 local authorities across the UK, shows that Thurrock, Hillingdon, Croydon, Kent County Council and Surrey had the highest numbers of trafficked and unaccompanied children who were unaccounted for. One local authority reported that 22 child trafficking victims had gone missing in the recorded time period.

Despite the high numbers, Ecpat says that the real scale of the UK’s missing child trafficking victims is still not accurately reflected in the data.

Source: Child trafficking victims disappearing from UK care at ‘alarming’ rate | Global development | The Guardian

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Independent Living Fund is closed but disabled people vow to battle on

140427paulapetersILF

Despite all the protests over the last five years, the Independent Living Fund (ILF) closed yesterday (June 30).

The Conservative Government has claimed that disabled people will still be able to access funds to help them live independently, but these will be available from local councils now, rather than from central government.

They do not mention the fact that they have been cutting funding to local councils ever since they regained office as part of the Coalition Government in 2010, meaning that some may not have any money to give.

The Welsh Government has created a £20 million fund for disabled people west of the border, but what about the disabled of Newcastle – where welfare funds have been “plundered”, according to the BBC, to pay for other services?

The Tories have turned disability into a postcode lottery – as they have with the health service in England.

Disabled people have vowed to battle on – as this video from Kate Belgrave shows:

We can hope that nobody encounters serious suffering as a result of this change – but that hope may well be forlorn.

Vox Political readers are encouraged to notify This Blog of any news stories in your local area, covering the effects of the change – whether positive or adverse.

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Another Cameron bungle – on spending cuts

Money: David Cameron's tool of oppression.

Money: David Cameron’s tool of oppression.

David Cameron can’t get anything right, can he?

The Guardian has announced that he has been trying to mislead the public on the proportion of his planned austerity-led spending cuts that he has already enacted, in order to make it seem that the worst is over.

The newspaper put it a little more diplomatically than that, saying he “got his sums wrong” (and this is the party that most people trust to look after the economy? People are strange) – but we know that Cameron is perfectly aware of where his cuts programme stands and what it is doing, don’t we?

The report has it that Cameron reckons he’ll have imposed four-fifths of the cuts on us by the general election – but the Institute for Fiscal Studies, having examined the figures, said he has not imposed even half of what he has planned.

Cameron said he’ll have made £100 billion worth of “savings” – the IFS says this is hugely inaccurate, and it is more likely that just £23 billion has been cut.

More interestingly, Cameron said the next Parliament (if the Tories are elected) will see a further £25 billion of “savings”. In fact, according to the IFS, he means a further £28 billion of cuts.

Let’s pause for a moment to get our terminology right. Cameron wants us to think he is making “savings” because that implies that services are unaffected – but we know that this is not true. The more accurate description is “cuts”, because he is reducing the services provided using taxpayers’ money wherever he can. Look at your local council and the cuts it is making; those are being dictated by David Cameron. Look at the restrictions that have been imposed on taxpayer-funded social security benefits – both in terms of eligibility and the amount being provided; they are also being dictated by Cameron. He is cutting – not saving.

Now consider the drastic effects of the cuts that have been imposed so far – the way social housing tenants have been terrorised with the Bedroom Tax; the persecution of the physically and mentally ill with the humiliating work capability assessment; the humbling of the English health service that has fallen from its highest satisfaction ratings ever to closed Accident & Emergency departments, inaccessible GPs and faceless Clinical Commissioning Groups who refuse to fund basic medicines for patients.

Tens of thousands of people are dead now, who would have been alive if David Cameron had never become prime minister.

And he wants to increase the agony by more than double.

Oh, but look – here’s why it’s all right: He has cut income tax by £10.5 billion! So we’re all better-off, then. Right?

Wrong. The national debt has nearly doubled since Cameron came to office and the deficit is rising, due to the Tories’ incompetent mishandling of the economy.

Most people are £1,600 worse-off per year. It is only the very rich who are better-off. Their incomes have doubled since Cameron came to office. Does anybody remember him saying he would spread the burden of austerity equally? Another lie.

If you take the average income as £26,000, then £1,600 is around 6.1 per cent of it. That’s what we have lost, every year, on average. The richest one per cent of the population has enjoyed an income increase of 50 per cent.

To my way of thinking, that means these people owe the UK 56.1 per cent of their incomes over the past five years, to bring them into line with the rest of us.

Is Cameron going to make them pay? The proposition seems doubtful. Is he going to make up the shortfall from his own fortune, then?

As British citizens, we are owed that money. It won’t bring back the dead, but it might help stop any more money-driven fatalities.

And we need it now.

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Cameron’s engineered homelessness crisis must end

141028no-oneturnedaway

David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’: What a tasteless joke.

This was his big idea, when he forced himself on us in 2010: His Coalition government was going to thin out the public sector, sure, but don’t worry! The private sector would leap in, to fill the gap, and charities would be a major part of this.

Four years later we get this, from Pride’s Purge: Man dies after homeless[ness] charity makes him homeless

“Anthony Miller’s dead body was found two days ago washed up on a beach in Newquay.

“Just a few weeks ago he had lost his job as a roofer as a direct result of being evicted by homeless charity Chapter 1.

“He had even offered to pay higher rent but the so-called Christian organisation ignored his offers and turfed him out onto the street:

Christian homeless charity says it has every right to make young Newquay man homeless.”

So much for charities stepping into the breach. What about the public sector, then?

As luck would have it, within hours of the Tom Pride article’s appearance, the above image flashed onto Facebook, along with the following message:

“SIGN OUR PETITION AND DEMAND CHANGE: www.crisis.org.uk/nooneturnedaway-fbook

“Simon isn’t the only one to be turned away when he asked for help. Our team of undercover researchers tested council homelessness services across England. In 50 out of 87 visits, they were turned away with little or no help.

“This is nothing short of a scandal. Homelessness is devastating and shouldn’t happen to anyone. The average age of death for a homeless person is just 47.

“Sign our petition to demand politicians review the help single homeless people get under the law in England. Because no one should be turned away when they ask for help.

“www.crisis.org.uk/nooneturnedaway-fbook #NoOneTurnedAway”

The first thing to do with this is realise and accept that publicly-funded local authorities are also turfing people onto the streets. Second is to accept that this is another charity, so they can’t all be bad. Third is to accept what this charity is saying – that it cannot cope with the numbers of people being made homeless by local authorities and other charities, and that this means something is badly wrong with the way the law says the State should deal with the problem.

Laws are enacted by the government. David Cameron leads the current government. We know that his changes have created the current situation.

It has to end, before any other bodies wash up on our beaches. So we come to the fourth thing, which is to ask yourself:

What are you going to do?

‘Abolition of the Bedroom Tax’ Bill is launched in Parliament

Ian Lavery launched his ambitious Bill to abolish the Bedroom Tax yesterday. [Image: Daily Mirror]

Ian Lavery launched his ambitious Bill to abolish the Bedroom Tax yesterday. [Image: Daily Mirror]

Make no mistake about it – the purpose of the legislation tabled yesterday (Wednesday) by Labour’s Ian Lavery is to discover how many Liberal Democrat MPs are redeemable and how many have been irreversibly corrupted by their current alliance with the Conservatives.

The Bill to abolish the hated Bedroom Tax is unlikely to gain Royal Assent unless Liberal Democrats who supported the imposition of the Bedroom Tax reverse their point of view. There is even the possibility that some Conservatives may now realise that they, as Mr Lavery put it, “underestimated the real consequences of walking through the Government Lobby to support the introduction”. He also said: “It is an olive branch… I would hope that my Bill would receive support from members in all parties.”

MPs voted almost unanimously for the Bill to be brought in, with 226 votes in favour and only one against – but readers of this blog will be familiar with the fact that this happened with Michael Meacher’s motion for a commission of inquiry into the impact of social security changes on poverty. The House approved; the government did nothing.

So don’t get your hopes up too high.

Mr Lavery was the only person to speak on the subject, and his words are well worth noting here.

“The full and sole intention of this Bill is to sweep away the dreaded bedroom tax,” he said.

“It seeks to restore justice for up to 660,000 people — some of our country’s most vulnerable citizens, two-thirds of whom are disabled. They have been inhumanely let down by the Government’s reforms to housing benefit in the social sector. The tax has caused heartache and devastation to thousands of residents up and down this country. It is a tax whose forced implementation has put extreme pressure on councils, housing associations and social landlords. It is a tax that has put extreme pressure on the ordinary working people who are forced to deal with those unable to move and those unable to pay.

“On the introduction of the tax, Ministers argued that the changes would encourage people to downsize to smaller properties and, in doing so, help to cut the £23 billion annual bill for housing benefit; would free up living space for overcrowded families; and would encourage people to get jobs. Significantly, it has achieved none of those objectives.

“At the same time, the Department for Work and Pensions has trumpeted the measure as ‘returning fairness to housing benefit’. The words ‘fairness’ and ‘bedroom tax’ should not be uttered in the same sentence.”

He said: “This tax is a problem in each and every constituency up and down the country; this is not simply a problem in Labour-dominated authorities. I was contacted only last week by a distraught resident from the Tory shires who is hoping that my Bill will be successful, because he, a disabled man, is living in a three-bedroom property and has just received an eviction notice for bedroom tax arrears. He is not alone. The bedroom tax sufferers in Liberal Democrat and Tory constituencies number around 250,000. Perhaps we should ask them whether they think this abominable tax has restored fairness to housing benefit.”

Mr Lavery said his Bill seeks “to restore fairness and to end the misery that the bedroom tax has caused”. He said there are hundreds, if not thousands, of “appalling” examples of suffering, mentioning (but not naming) mother-of-two Stephanie Bottrill, a woman suffering a crippling illness who committed suicide after realising that she could not pay the bedroom tax. Her family received correspondence later saying that she should have been exempt from the charge.

He also mentioned a case he said was “hard to comprehend; it really is difficult to try to get to grips with”. He said: “The family of the 1999 child of courage, who spent years battling multiple cancers, is suffering at the hands of this horrible reform. These people are not living a life of luxury in palatial properties; they are living in a place in which they feel safe and which they call home. It is time to listen. I am sure that most fair-minded individuals would agree that a bedroom is not spare when carers sleep in it, when couples use it because one of them has health problems and they cannot share a bed, or when it houses vital medical equipment, yet this indiscriminate tax deems it so.

“The reality is that yet another measure introduced by this Government is in total and utter chaos. It lies in tatters, with the victims left to pick up the pieces. As thousands suffer, there is a real risk that the bedroom tax will end up costing more than it saves. The National Housing Federation has said that the savings claimed by the Government are ‘highly questionable’, partly because those who are forced to move to the private rented sector will end up costing more in housing benefit.

“Surely, as politicians and members of the general public, we are entitled to question the motives behind the introduction of the bedroom tax. The tax does not deal with the problem of under-occupation. In fact, the Government’s costings on the yield raised from the bedroom tax explicitly assume that people will not move into smaller properties. There are simply not enough smaller properties for people to move into.

“Some 180,000 households were deemed to be under-occupying two-bedroom homes, yet only 85,000 one-bedroom homes became available during the whole of 2012. The savings projections of the Department for Work and Pensions assume that not one of the 660,000 households affected would respond to the policy by moving to a smaller home. Put simply, this is yet another example of the Government balancing the books on the backs of the disabled and the vulnerable. The tax must be scrapped now.

“Housing associations say that tens of millions of pounds are likely to be lost through the build-up of arrears. Reports this morning estimate that 144,000 people have fallen behind with their rents since the introduction of the bedroom tax and that 14 per cent have received eviction notices [20,160].

“Was that really meant to happen? Was this eviction of the poor really the plan of the Government?

“In October, research by the University of York, which was based on data by the housing associations that have tenants affected by the bedroom tax, suggested that the policy could save up to 39 per cent less than the DWP had predicted. In the past week, it has emerged that more than half of the £500 million that the Government claim will be saved by the hated tax will be spent on re-housing disabled people. These are vulnerable people who already live in properties that have been adapted for their needs and who have built up local support networks with their friends, family and neighbours. The future for them lies in communities that are unknown and foreign to them. They have been cast out like the proverbial dog in the night.”

Interrupted when he mentioned the loophole that exempted Stephanie Bottrill from paying the bedroom tax – another member said that the loophole had been closed – Mr Lavery continued: “As Ministers scramble to mop up the mistakes, another challenge to the hated tax has arisen. A judge has overturned the tax in the case of a Rochdale man who argued that one of his bedrooms was used as a dining room. The appeal was upheld on the basis that the dictionary definition of a bedroom is a room that contains a bed that is used for sleeping in. An avalanche of appeals is on its way.

“I am proud to see that, only last week, the Scottish Labour party shamed the Scottish National party into abolishing the bedroom tax. I must put it on the record that I am also proud that one of the first acts of a future Labour Government will be to end this full frontal attack on the vulnerable. However, we cannot afford to wait until the general election of 2015. I urge the supporters of this tax to think again.

“The question is this: Are they happy to see the misery and social disruption of the vulnerable and disabled? I began this speech by expressing the view that those who voted in favour of introducing this dreaded bedroom tax may have underestimated the human suffering that it would cause. That is no longer in any doubt, so I urge them all to do the honourable thing and support my Bill.”

That really is the question for members of the public to consider, along with MPs. If your MP votes against Mr Lavery’s Bill, then you will know that they are, indeed, happy to inflict misery and disruption on the vulnerable and disabled.

Do you want to live in a country where people like that are allowed to rule?

Make no mistake: This legislation is unlikely to succeed without support from people who previously helped bring the Bedroom Tax into law. As such, it might not work.

But this is also legislation that should help you decide how you will vote in May next year.

We can hope that our MPs – and you yourself, dear reader – choose wisely.

The Bill will have its second reading on February 28.

 Labour’s Chris Bryant took the opportunity afforded by Mr Lavery’s motion to bring a point of order – that Iain Duncan Smith, Esther McVey and Lord Freud had been using false statistics. He said: “Earlier this year, when asked how many people had been affected by the loophole in the bedroom tax legislation, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions… said that the number was between 3,000 and 5,000. In a written answer, the Minister of State… (Esther McVey)… said that she did not know how many had been affected. Lord Freud, a Minister in another place, said that it was an insignificant number. Today, however, he told the Work and Pensions Committee of this House that the number was 5,000.

“We have been doing their work for them, and from Freedom of Information requests to local authorities in England, Wales and Scotland, we already know, from just the third that replied, of 16,000 cases.”

Debbie Abrahams, a member of the Work and Pensions committee to whom Lord Freud provided the false figure, said committee members will be pursuing the matter.

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No protection from Bedroom Tax for the vulnerable as it would cause ‘political embarrassment’

vulnerable

Vulnerable children and adults with disabilities or high support needs may be forced to pay the Bedroom Tax, despite protestations to the contrary by Lord Freud, after it was revealed that creating more protections would cause ‘political embarrassment’.

Current rules mean some supported housing is protected from the Bedroom Tax, benefit cap and the effects of Universal Credit (if a working version ever arrives) – but this accommodation is not exempted if the landlord is not the care provider or when the landlord is a local authority.

This means that, for example, supported housing provider Habinteg has 1,200 wheelchair-accessible properties for the disabled – but only 516 of them are exempt from the benefit changes.

Lord Freud, who is minister for social security reform, said last April that the DWP was working to ensure all supported accommodation would be protected from what he called the “unintended consequences” of the government’s changes.

Freud famously worked for Labour before the last general election, but turned against his former employers and switched his allegiance to the Conservative Party in 2009 – for which was rewarded with a peerage.

Now it seems the government has turned against him. According to Inside Housing, “in a letter sent to housing organisations… the DWP [Department for Work and Pensions] said that while it still wants to protect supported accommodation from Universal Credit and the benefit cap, it no longer wants to protect non-exempt accommodation from the bedroom tax.

“A source said the government was opposed to the move because creating more protections from the bedroom tax would cause political embarrassment.

“Civil servants cannot change the exempt accommodation definition without also adding extra protections for the bedroom tax. This means all plans to protect non-exempt supported accommodation from welfare reform are on ice.”

Anti-Bedroom Tax campaigners recently discovered that people who had been living in social rented accommodation since before 1996, and claiming housing benefit for the entire period, were exempt from the Bedroom Tax.

But the latest development proves David Cameron’s protestations that the disabled were entirely protected from the Bedroom Tax were false and, instead of changing the rules to rectify the error, the DWP has made a worse liar of him.

How much humiliation is Cameron prepared to take before he curbs the excesses of this out-of-control organisation?

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Sink, Britain, Sink! – the cost of privatising water management

– This is a song by a local musician, here in Mid Wales, written during the last serious flooding. I make no apologies for opportunistically linking to it as it says a few choice words about the situation and the government.

“And the rains came down, and the floods came up” – The Wise Man and the Foolish Man (Southern Folk Song).

Some of you may have noticed we’ve had a few spots of wet weather recently. This is nothing new to our island nation.

The trouble is, having fallen on us all, the water hasn’t had the decency to clear off and drain away. Instead, it has built up and up and caused a huge amount of flood damage to land and houses that were not built in a safe place, as in the song lyric quoted above, but in flood plains.

This is a result of bad planning – by water and sewerage companies that have failed to implement successful drainage schemes or to divert floodwater from rivers in order to prevent overflow, and by planning authorities that have allowed housing to be built in the wrong place.

What were they thinking?

My guess is that the water companies were thinking about the money, and planning authorities wanted to ease overcrowding.

We live in a country where management of the water supply went into private hands several decades ago. When that happened, it became impossible to have any kind of integrated plan to deal with the supply of water, droughts, floods and storage. Water supply became a commodity to be bought and sold by rich people according to the golden rules of capitalism: Invest the minimum; charge the maximum.

So reservoirs have been sold off to foreign water companies, meaning we have no adequate response to droughts. None have been built, meaning we have no adequate response to floods. Concerns about river flooding have been neglected. There has not been the investment in extraction and storage of floodwater that repeated incidents over the last few years have demanded.

The government is reducing its budget for handling these issues. Not only that, but it is delaying implementation of a new policy on drainage.

This would be regulated by local authorities, who have responsibility for planning approvals. Some might say these authorities should have had a little more forethought before granting applications to build on flood plains, or for adaptations to existing properties that have prevented water from draining into the soil and sent it down drains instead, to overload the sewer system.

Some of these are matters of necessity: Planning officers may have gone to the limit of what is allowed, in order to allow housing developments that relieve the burden of overcrowding; in other matters, they may have been unable to apply any legal restrictions on applications.

In short, there is no joined-up thinking.

There will be no joined-up thinking in the future, either – unless the situation is changed radically.

Meanwhile, the cost racked up by the damage is huge – in ruined farmland, in ruined homes and possessions, and blighted lives. And what about the risk of disease that floodwater brings with it? The NHS in England is ill-equipped to deal with any outbreaks, being seriously weakened by the government-sponsored incursions of private, cheap-and-simple health firms.

Something has to give beneath the weight of all this floodwater. Change is vital – from commercial competition to co-operation and co-ordination.

Privatisation of water has failed. It’s time to bring it back under public control.

Is anyone opposed?

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Was Stephanie Bottrill a victim of corporate manslaughter?

140111Stephanie-Bottrill

It’s what we all feared, as soon as we found out that people who have been in the same social housing since before 1996 are exempt from the Bedroom Tax:

Stephanie Bottrill, the grandmother who committed suicide because she could not afford to pay the Bedroom Tax, was one of those who should never have been asked to pay.

She took her own life by walking in front of a lorry on the M6 in May last year, just one month after the Bedroom Tax – sometimes called the State Under-Occupation Charge – had been introduced by Iain Duncan Smith. Her rent at the time was £320 per month, some of which was subsidised by Housing Benefit – but the imposition of an extra £80 charge, to come from her own money, was too much for her finances to take.

She left a note to relatives in which she made clear that she had taken her own life – and that she blamed the government.

She had lived in the same Solihull house for the previous 18 years (since 1995). Recent revelations by Joe Halewood at SPeye have shown that this meant she was exempt from paying the charge under the Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit (Consequential Provisions) Regulations 2006.

The government has a duty of care in these matters. It may not impose charges on people who are exempt under legislation that is currently in force, nor may it demand that local authorities should do so. If a person dies as a result of such action, then the government is guilty of a very specific criminal offence.

According to the Crown Prosecution Service, an organisation is guilty of corporate manslaughter if the way in which its activities are managed or organised causes a person’s death; and amounts to a gross breach of a relevant duty of care owed by the organisation to the deceased.

An organisation is guilty of an offence if the way in which its activities are managed or organised by its senior management is a substantial element in the breach.

It seems clear – from the suicide note at the very least – that this is an open-and-shut case.

Will we soon see Iain Duncan Smith – or better still, David Cameron – in court?

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Sleepwalking further into Police State Britain as law offers new powers of repression

policestate

Scriptonite Daily has published a piece that everyone should read. It begins:

“The UK Government is about to pass legislation which will make any behaviour perceived to potentially ‘cause nuisance or annoyance’ a criminal offence. The Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill also grants local authorities, police and even private security firms sweeping powers to bar citizens from assembling lawfully in public spaces. The Bill has successfully passed through the House of Commons without issue, and is now in the latter stages of review by the House of Lords, after which it will receive Royal Assent and become Law. Those who refuse orders under the new rules will face arrest, fines and even prison time.”

It seems to me that this legislation is being made partly to deal with concerns about section five of the Public Order Act. This, as stated in Vox Political‘s article last year, states, “(1) A person is guilty of an offence if he: (a) uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or (b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting, within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby” – but only applies if a person has been the victim.

It could not be used if an organisation had been subjected to abuse – as was claimed, in this case of the Department for Work and Pensions. Now, it seems, a law is coming into force that can.

This is entirely unwarranted. Abuses of the Public Order Act have clearly demonstrated that the law needs to be relaxed, rather than tightened. Your freedom is being taken away from you, including your right to free speech.

It’s no surprise that this is going on even after this blog, and Scriptonite, and others (I’m sure) have pointed out the problem. We are tiny islands on the media map; most people only ever visit the continents that are the TV news and newspapers, which are happy to pander to their prejudices.

The Public Order Act, as Rowan Atkinson stated in his (should be) legendary Reform Section 5 speech, has led to several alarming exercises of power, “like the man arrested in Oxford for calling a police horse ‘gay’.”

The new Bill introduces Injunctions to Prevent Nuisance and Annoyance (IPNAs) to replace ASBOs, which were also widely abused. Scriptonite quotes some of these abuses, including:

“The ASBO has allowed the line between criminal behaviour and annoying behaviour to become hopelessly blurred – and the IPNAs will only serve to increase the problem,” says Scriptonite. “We have seen the abuses permitted under ASBO legislation, the test for which included wording to the effect that ASBOs could only be issued where an actual act of ‘harassment, alarm or distress’ had occurred. IPNAs have a much weaker test, applicable where on the ‘balance of probabilities’ a person has or might engage in behaviour ‘capable of causing annoyance’ to another person. How many times a day could this legislation apply to any of us? Eating with our mouths open, talking too loudly into our phones in a public space, walking too slowly or quickly or belching without saying ‘pardon me’. All of this may very well cause annoyance – but soon it might well also be illegal.”

More to the point: If you had a complaint against a government department – no matter whether it was justified – and you publicised it… wouldn’t that cause annoyance to them? Would it not cause them a nuisance?

And, considering the reaction to one woman’s complaint outlined in the VP article mentioned above, would this legislation not give ministers the power to lock you up for it?

This is not a law that should be passed. It is an attack on your freedom, and mine. It is a badge of repression, to be worn by our police as they continue their metamorphosis into symbols of the totalitarianism into which the UK is falling.

There is a petition against this. Please sign it before the law is passed and this document itself becomes a nuisance or annoyance.

I can find no better way to end this article than by paraphrasing what I said before: Police intimidation of those who speak out against injustice is not only an attack on free speech; it is an attack on the entire philosophy on which our society is based.

Next article: Bedroom Tax Tories: What they said and why they were wrong – covering the debate on the Bedroom Tax (or state under-occupation charge, but never spare room subsidy) in the House of Commons on November 12.

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