Tag Archives: Radio 4

Nat-C true believer Miriam Cates’s Rwanda comment explains why we won’t vote Tory any more

Miriam Cates: the mouth is flapping but the mind is vacant.

Miriam Cates is a true-blue National Conservative – or Nat-C, for short.

Like most Nat-Cs, she seems to subscribe to the belief that propaganda is always better than fact.

How else are we to explain her words about Rwanda during a Radio 4 interview?

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Challenged on her claim that “Rwanda is a safe country”, she instantly changed her tune to the much lesser claim that “Rwanda is a country that we have a deal with”:

So Rwanda isn’t safe and she admits it. Didn’t she – very recently – vote in support of a Tory Bill that insists Rwanda is safe?

Isn’t that knowingly presenting a falsehood to Parliament?

Oh dear. If this is the quality of a Conservative’s word, then I won’t be supporting her party at the next election. Who would?


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Jamie Driscoll: Independent candidate to be North East Mayor speaks on Radio 4

Jamie Driscoll is turning out to be a bit of a breakthrough spokesperson for alternatives to the ‘Establishment’ policies of the Tory/fascists and Keir Starmer’s party, that used to be Labour.

Last week he was invited to speak on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions – and made a lot of sense.

Here’s part of what he had to say:

The rest will be here.

Does it inspire you to look up other independents in your own constituency, to whom you might be encouraged to give your vote – rather than to the so-called Big Two or the Liberal Democrats, whose only policy seems to be to go into coalition with one of the others if they get a few seats in Parliament?


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Brand’s ‘battery acid’ comment: At least Farage has admitted he is an ‘unpleasant’ character

What a drip: But why is Nigel so glum? The only person harmed by this milkshake attack was his tailor.

Nigel Farage’s complaint about Jo Brand is to be welcomed – he has admitted that he considers himself to be an “unpleasant” character.

The Brexit Party leader spoke up after the comedian jokingly suggested an acid attack would be more appropriate for “unpleasant characters” who had been hit with milkshakes during recent political campaigns.

She immediately followed the line by saying, “That’s just me, sorry, I’m not gonna do it, it’s purely a fantasy, but I think milkshakes are pathetic, I honestly do. Sorry.”

So clearly she didn’t mean it and wasn’t trying to incite anybody into throwing acid over some of our favourity politicians like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson), Mark Meechan (Count Dankula), Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad), or indeed Mr Farage.

But Nigel was clearly incensed and leapt into full-hypocrisy mode with this tweet:

It was hypocritical because this is a man who spoke of taking up deadly weapons if he didn’t get the Brexit he wanted:

The clip from BBC Essex is well worth a listen, to put this matter into its proper context.

Heresy host Victoria Coren Mitchell defended Ms Brand:

She made a topical point about another comment in the show:

And she pointed out that certain right-wing websites had stripped Ms Brand’s comment of its context:

So the best that can be said about this storm-in-a-milkshake is that Heresy is back on the radio after a three-year absence and is as thought-provoking as ever. Click on the link above to listen to the first episode and then follow it every Tuesday at 6.30pm on Radio 4.

Source: Farage furious over Jo Brand’s ‘throw battery acid not milkshake’ joke | Culture | The Guardian

Cabinet minister Michael Gove made a RAPE joke* on national radio. Where’s Nusrat Ghani?

A week in politics really is a long, long time. At the start of this week, Nusrat Ghani was demanding an emergency debate in Parliament over Clive Lewis’s use of the phrase “Get on your knees, bitch”. Here at the end, Michael Gove has made a comment that is arguably far worse and neither she nor any other Conservative has anything to say.

Mr Gove is a Cabinet minister – the Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

It is not appropriate for him to make such a comment, and an apology after the event –

– is not enough.

The fact that he spoke those words means he thought it was acceptable to do so – belittling the experience of every woman who has ever fallen foul of Mr Weinstein’s unwanted attentions.

Worse still, this attitude to rape seems to be a family trait as Mr Gove’s wife, Sarah Vine, has also made a comment that is staggering in its insensitivity:

Has she apologised?

Fortunately for our national character, plenty of people have come forward to criticise Mr Gove’s appalling remark, even if the government won’t. Let’s start with the only question worth asking:

https://twitter.com/AGayLabourLefty/status/924180579456835584

At the very least, as mentioned above, Nusrat Ghani should have something to say:

But the silence has been deafening.

Appraisals of Mr Gove’s own character are fair comment after his own words:

There has been criticism of Radio 4 for allowing it and failing to apologise afterwards:

And there is speculation on the thinking behind it:

Yes he did.

And he has put Theresa May in an untenable position. She has a very small pool of talent (if you can call it that) from which to draw her Cabinet ministers, and Mr Gove – like Boris Johnson – is most likely only a member because he can command the support of a significant number of Conservative backbenchers.

If she sacks him, then he’ll take that support away with him and Mrs May’s position as prime minister will be weakened – it would only take a moment of spite for Mr Gove to undermine her on a crucial issue, possibly triggering the end of her government.

But if she doesn’t, then she is tacitly supporting his words and betraying rape victims – not just those who have made allegations against Mr Weinstein, but everywhere. That could be just as damaging for her.

As for Mr Gove himself, the future of his career is looking rocky, because we now have the perfect answer to every policy announcement, every speech and every opinion he puts forward:

“Nobody cares what you say any more, Mr Gove. You think rape is funny.”

*This is an oxymoron, of course. Let us all be clear that here is nothing remotely funny about rape (unless you are a Conservative Cabinet minister, it seems).


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Boris Johnson sinks beneath his own wishy-washiness in radio interview disaster

Boris Johnson in one of his more sane moments.

Do you enjoy a breakfast waffle? If you were listening to Radio 4’s Today programme, you got one whether you wanted it or not – from that master of baffled-gab, Boris Johnson.

In 20 minutes, he managed to reverse his ‘go whistle’ position on paying to exit the EU, back-stabbed his boss Theresa May (with a side-swipe, which makes it seem more impressive than it was), and demonstrated that he both supports and opposes Donald Trump – at the same time.

Let’s start with Brexit because he got into a real pickle over it. You will recall that he said, in Parliament, that the EU’s proposed bill for the UK to leave the political bloc were “extortionate” and that it could “go whistle”.

Today anchor Mishal Husein asked, what did he mean when he said the EU could “go whistle” over the Brexit bill?

“I was being asked about some very large sums of money… that the EU suggested we were on the hook for, and that’s not a number I recognised…” he began stumblingly (and inaccurately).

“Of course we will meet our obligations. We are law-abiding, bill-paying people. The UK has contributed hundreds of billions over the years.”

Oh! So he’s happy to pay?

“I’m not saying I accept Mr Barnier’s interpretation of what our obligations are, but we will meet our obligations as we understand them.”

He wouldn’t say how much he was prepared to pay before the sum became “extortionate”, adding: “I’m not going to get into a financial haggle…”

“Can they ‘go whistle’ if it’s more than ÂŁ30 billion?” asked Ms Husein, obviously enjoying his discomfort.

And he collapsed. His response was waffle about getting “the best possible value for the UK taxpayer”.

https://twitter.com/RobDotHutton/status/900982065600102400

Then he seemed to realise what he had done, because he claimed that he would give an absolutely precise answer. Here it is: “We should pay not a penny more, not a penny less, of what we think our legal obligations amount to.” Waffle.

And on the possibility of a two-to-three-year transition period, he started with more waffle about the government’s position. Pressed on what he thinks, he said: “There are several transition periods that are envisioned.” More waffle.

He went on to waffle that the UK would be “getting out with confidence and determination and doing it in a timely, orderly and effective manner”.

“What business would want us to achieve is speed and efficiency,” he added, with the relish of a man who had reached the end of his pre-scripted lines.

“The crucial thing is certainty,” he said, oblivious of the irony in the fact that he wasn’t offering any.

 

If that amount of waffle is making your stomach turn over, let’s consider something else:

The backstabbing side-swipe against Theresa May came during a discussion of the political situation in Libya, where an intervention supported by the Tory-Lib Dem Coalition government of 2010-15 left the country with two rival parliaments and four governments (according to the Telegraph).

Calling for unity, he said: “Politicians… need to suppress their own selfish interests, compromise for the good of the country.”

The Torygraph took this as a message for Theresa May, telling us he was saying her “disastrous” decision to call a snap election “shows the risk of going to the polls too early”.

Twitter commentators pointed out that the comment could be applied equally to Mr Johnson himself, who campaigned for Brexit in the belief that his political career would benefit from it (it didn’t).

https://twitter.com/RobDotHutton/status/900979718111068160

https://twitter.com/washyourmouth1/status/900979779146579968

Mr Johnson criticised US President Donald Trump over his comments following the Charlottesville rally in which an anti-fascist protester was killed, saying he was “totally wrong” to suggest that white supremacists, neo-Nazis and racists were “fine people”.

Despite this, the foreign secretary confirmed that the UK will still be welcoming Mr Trump on a state visit – at a future date that has not yet been set.

So he was both supporting and opposing Mr Trump, at the same time.

And Mr Johnson was mistaken on whether international students are included in official migration figures (they are; he said they weren’t)…

… and had to backtrack: “I am content with the success we are having in attracting international students”.

He said he was glad they were not overstaying their period in the UK and were “doing the right thing”. In that case, why include them in migration figures? They haven’t immigrated into the UK; they’re here for a specific purpose and then they leave.

“That is the way they are currently counted,” he dissembled.

The snap verdict, from Twitter, was damning:

https://twitter.com/KatyJMc/status/900982395196911616


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A pathetic last gasp from the editor of More or Less on incapacity deaths

Biased Broadcasting Corporation: It seems the BBC's More or Less programme really is more interested in broadcasting the views of the Conservative Government than in providing a genuinely impartial public service.

Biased Broadcasting Corporation: It seems the BBC’s More or Less programme really is more interested in broadcasting the views of the Conservative Government than in providing a genuinely impartial public service.

I had another email from Richard Vadon, the editor of BBC Radio 4’s More or Less today – and it was absolutely pathetic.

I note that you have published my reply on your website without permission under those circumstances I will be making no further responses.

I have replied as follows:

“You never asked for any of it to be kept in confidence. Why should you wish it to be? You broadcast your programme happily enough but, now that you’re being asked to justify it in public, suddenly you have nothing to say.

“The public can judge you on that.”

I’ll let you know my own judgement right now: Pathetic.

Feel free to offer your own opinions via the BBC More or Less website.

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Is this saga More or Less over? VP blogger puts down BBC editor

This is the last (so far) episode in the More or Less saga: My response to the comments of the programme’s editor, Richard Vadon, regarding the segment on the programme covering the DWP’s release of statistics relating to deaths of claimants of incapacity benefits – published as promised in a previous article.

Thank you for your very fast response to my further complaint. I think you have reacted a little too quickly, in fact, judging from the comments you make.

Firstly, allow me to remind you that I am the person who made the Freedom of Information request to which the DWP’s statistical release is an attempted response and about which all of the media discussion following that release – whether acknowledged or not – is based. I have been dealing with this matter for a little over two years so forgive me if I suggest that I may have a little more authority on the subject than Full Fact, Ben Goldacre or your team. Your opinion of those people is of no interest at all. They have all gone into this from the wrong angle and I am disappointed that you see fit to defend this.

I notice that in your further comments, you are selective about the points I raise and perpetuate certain vague references that were made in the programme. For example: “The figure that the DWP released is only a subset of those who have died…” Why did the DWP only release the figure in that way when the FoI request wanted the full picture? No investigation from your programme and no comment from you. Yet Mr Stephenson says the DWP was asked for information about the irrelevant “within two weeks of being found fit for work” point. Why not do the job properly?

Your comments about people who have been found fit for work are confusing. By virtue of having been refused benefit by the DWP – as I stated before – they are defined by the government as being just as likely (or unlikely) to die as the rest of the non-incapacity-benefit-claiming population. You are making a distinction that is not accepted by the law. Are you saying that the test is wrong to send these people out without benefits, possibly to their deaths? If so, then why not say that on the programme? If not, then what, exactly, are you saying?

I await your response to my other points.

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The More or Less ‘incapacity deaths’ saga: This BBC editor’s comments may infuriate

This is from Richard Vadon, editor of More or Less, in response to my email earlier today, following up on my complaints about the segment on Radio 4’s More or Less covering the DWP’s release of statistics relating to deaths of claimants of incapacity benefits – published as promised in a previous article.

I am the editor of More or Less and my series producer Wes Stephenson has passed me your complaint.

 In your reply to his letter you say that a Full Fact article is discredited, that Ben Goldacre has got the wrong end of the stick and you describe More or Less as making a proper mess of the story. I am full of admiration for the journalism done by Full Fact, Ben Goldacre and for that matter Tim Harford and the More or Less team (although clearly I’m biased in the last case). These are all independent minded and award-winning journalists but your position is that we are all wrong. I’m not sure I can say anything that could change your mind but I will make a few points.

 I’m sorry if the reply has confused things about the 2380 deaths but the programme’s script couldn’t be more definite, “We’re clear: these 2380 people were declared fit for work, and then they died”.

 The reference to deaths after breakfast is making a simple correlation is not causation point. This is a regular theme in the programme and maybe could have explained in a fuller way. I’m sorry if you find the breakfast point in poor taste.

 You say:

 “the figure you provided is only a fraction of the total number of deaths and you have misled the public. It would have been far better for you to have said that the DWP has provided this figure but we don’t know how many have died after its self-imposed time limits. You didn’t.”

 The script does make it clear that the figures released are a subset of those who are died and the true figure is almost certainly higher:

 TIM: But we don’t actually have the data we need to say whether something alarming is happening to people we seeking some kind of disability assistance, but who’ve been declared fit for work.

 WES: No. We don’t. One of the reasons we don’t is that the figure that the DWP released is only a subset of those who have died after being declared ‘fit for work’ it only includes people who’ve been assessed as fit for work and who are still on Employment Support Allowance – so people who are appealing the decision for example. Those people who had been moved to other benefits such as Job Seekers Allowance and had then died wouldn’t be captured in this figure so the figure is almost certainly higher.  So we can’t come up with a proper death rate.

 The claim that “the ‘fit for work group” contains a number of people who have an above average chance of dying” is not really contentious. When someone is found fit for work it does not mean they have been found to be in perfect health or even to be of average health.

 I was for five years the editor of Money Box and Money Box Live. I saw as the years progressed how we got more and more calls from people struggling with the Disability Benefit system. We covered the story many times and my presenter Paul Lewis always held the authorities to account.

 I am currently the editor of a Point of View on Radio 4 and agreed to broadcast this piece on disability benefit just before this year’s election:

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05ns9mt

 I mention my previous history as an editor because I want you to understand that I believe the Government’s changes are an important issue. But I remain convinced by the final thought of the More or Less item that although it should be possible to come up with a much better figure, it’s hard to see how this sort of broad demographic information will ever tell us much about the question at issue – which is whether the test is fair.

I wrote a very quick response which I shall publish shortly. In brief, I thought this was an arrogant response from somebody who considered it beneath him to have to defend his decisions to a member of the public.

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Second complaint to BBC re: More or Less segment on incapacity claimant deaths

This is my reply to Wesley Stephenson (senior producer, BBC Current Affairs) following up on his response to This Writer’s complaint about the segment on Radio 4’s More or Less covering the DWP’s release of statistics relating to deaths of claimants of incapacity benefits – published as promised in a previous article.

Dear Mr Stephenson,

Thank you for your email of September 14 in which you have attempted to defend your programme against my complaints about it. Please accept my apologies for the slight delay in responding – I had to take a step back and calm down a little after reading your comments, and also had to attend to other matters.

On consideration, the most striking element in your response is the claim that your piece “was about the way the press and particularly The Guardian had reported it”. In case you hadn’t noticed, the Guardian piece refers quite clearly to the fact that the DWP released its information in response to Freedom of Information requests. Any reporter worth the name, investigating the veracity of such a report, would naturally look into the nature of those requests, in order to determine the value of the response from the DWP – and only then would they turn to the media reports in order to decide whether they were accurate or not.

What you have done is engage in an extremely offensive game of ‘Chinese whispers’. “The Guardian said this about the DWP figures but we’ve looked at them and they say that.” Of course, none of what you’re saying matters one jot if the DWP’s figures haven’t properly answered the original Freedom of Information request – and they haven’t. The Information Commissioner’s Office is currently investigating why the DWP deliberately failed to follow the terms of the Decision Notice that was issued at the end of April.

What you are telling me is that, rather than investigate the substantive issue, you have chosen to reinforce a distortion that supports the Conservative Government’s line. That is very clear from your reference to the discredited Full Fact article. But even that article mitigates against you, now that the DWP’s own comments have been added in.

They begin: “Once found FFW [Fit For Work] an ESA [Employment and Support Allowance] claim ends” so anybody who died within two weeks of their claim ending, after being declared “Fit For Work” would also die within two weeks of that finding – or as near to that period as makes no difference. In any case, your comment that “We don’t know whether the 2,380 claimants died after being declared “fit for work” is nonsense because the Freedom of Information request – which you didn’t bother to check – specifically wanted “the number of IB and ESA claimants who have died since November 2011 [up to the date of the request, May 28, 2014]. Please break that figure down into the following categories:… b) Those that were found fit for work”. The fact that they died after being declared “fit for work” is the only reason they are mentioned at all.

Your claim that “The ESA claims of 2,380 people with a ‘fit for work’ decision didn’t necessarily end because they were declared ‘fit for work’ but they will have also have ended because they died” is nonsense. The DWP itself stated quite clearly that the claim of anybody with a ‘fit for work’ decision ends immediately that decision is recorded.

You mention that “people will have still been counted as receiving ESA if they had received a FFW decision and had then appealed”, which is a further indication that you really should have read my Freedom of Information request, the Information Commissioner’s decision notice and the DWP’s response. My request goes on to call for figures relating to “those who have had an appeal completed after a Fit for Work decision”. The DWP provides a figure of 1,340 individuals in this category. What we don’t know – because the DWP was, again, deliberately vague about it (and we can say this is deliberate because there was nothing to stop the DWP from clarifying, as it is now being forced to do) – is whether those who appealed are included in the 2,380 or whether they should be added to that number, so those of us who have been checking the figures properly are saying that 2,380 is the minimum number of ESA claimants to have died after being found fit for work, while the maximum is 3,720.

Add in the number of IB/SDA claimants and that figure rises to a maximum of 4,010 incapacity benefits claimants (ask Nick Dilworth about that – I’m on very good terms with him) – but there is a question mark hanging over whether even that may be done, because adding the total number of deaths of people on IB/SDA together with those on ESA produces a greater number of deaths, in the relevant years, than the DWP’s own combined death figure. It seems that, according to the DWP, you can die twice. Would you like to investigate that, perhaps?

Looking back at the DWP’s comments on the Full Fact page brings us to your error in claiming that “people will have still been counted as receiving ESA if they had received a FFW decision and had then appealed”. The DWP states: “anyone who died during a mandatory reconsideration period would not be classed as being in receipt of ESA at the time of death and should therefore not be included in the figures.” THERE IS NOTHING IN MY FOI REQUEST THAT PERMITS THE DWP TO REMOVE THESE CLAIMANTS FROM THE FIGURES. The request calls for the number of claimants who have died between November 2011 and May 2014, including all those who were found fit for work. Don’t you wish you had checked that? Mandatory Reconsideration was introduced in October 2013 to ensure that claimants who had been found fit for work would have been cut off from ESA while the reconsideration was taking place and would have had no other form of income. How would they have survived? The fact that they were removed from the figures is extremely suspicious. You could have reported this. You didn’t.

“If the claimant goes on to appeal the MR [Mandatory Reconsideration] decision then the ESA claim is reopened,” the DWP continues. This is correct. But we all know that Mandatory Reconsideration was designed to cut down the number of appeals (the question being whether it does so by ensuring the deaths of the claimants) and in any case, as I have already mentioned, there is a further category in my FoI request to cover claimants who have made appeals.

The DWP continues: “Therefore anyone who died during an appeal period (whichever stage of the appeal process they are in) would be classed as being in receipt of ESA at the time of death and would be included in the table 2.3 figures.” If you had asked me, I would have been able to tell you that the relevant part of the original FOI request was for “those who have an appeal pending”. For some reason the DWP did not want to separate this group out from the rest, and asked me to change it to “those who have had an appeal completed after a FFW decision”. You could have asked why the DWP did that. You didn’t.

Let’s have some more of the DWP’s Full Fact reply, as it is relevant to yours: “Yes it is possible that someone may not have appealed the FFW decision and due to time required to update the system they were still in receipt of ESA when they died.” This would, of course, have been within the two-week ‘scan’ period the DWP mentioned but in any case is irrelevant to the terms of the FoI request, which merely required that claimants had died after a FFW decision.

Back to the DWP: “It should also be noted that, as detailed in the publication, the data in tables 2.3 to 2.6 (and table 1) should be viewed with some level of caution as the figures are derived from unpublished information and have not been quality assured to National Statistics or Official Statistics publication standard.” Quality-assured or not, the information has been published – by the DWP, after a delay of between 15 months and three years and nine months. It is not unreasonable to expect the DWP to have managed some kind of quality assurance during that time – especially as the DWP has spent at least two years assuring members of the public that the figures would be published. Considering the period of time we’re discussing, they could even have provided ASMRs – the ONS provides a very handy methodology for doing just that which means it could have been done overnight and checked within a week. You could have asked about that. You didn’t.

DWP again: “I can confirm that the figures to which you refer include people who died up to 2 weeks after their ESA claim ended i.e. those where death is believed to be the reason for the claim ending, as specified in the publication. The FFW decision may have occurred at any point in the preceding period.” It is interesting that the DWP admits it only published information on “those where death is believed to be the reason for the claim ending”, which was not any part of the terms of my FoI request – or anybody else’s. The DWP was instructed (by the Information Commissioner) to provide information on all claimants who died from the beginning of December 2011 to the end of May 2014, after a FFW decision. The end of the claim – as I keep having to point out – is utterly immaterial.

You can see, therefore, that the Full Fact article is also utterly immaterial to the issues at hand. In fact, considering the fact that it has been quoted by Conservative MPs including the Prime Minister, it is hard to believe any claim that it was not written to support the claims of the Conservative Government and therefore your own reliance on it is also suspicious.

Let’s look at your claim that “at no point did we mention you or make any suggestions about what you were trying to achieve the the FoI request”. In the piece, Mr Harford goes into what he describes as a “subtext” that the claim is unfair – “that the people who are being tested and then pronounced fit to work are either so ill that they promptly die or perhaps the strain of being forced into work has hastened their deaths”. It’s sloppy reporting to say people were being forced into work because – as you should know – the jobs simply aren’t there for them; they were being forced to seek work that, the evidence indicates, they weren’t fit enough to carry out. But that’s a side-issue. The fact that Mr Harford suggests a subtext implies that this was behind the initial request that forced the DWP to publish the figures – whether you mentioned it or not. As I said in my complaint, there was nothing in my request to suggest such a thing; in essence Mr Harford and the More or Less team made it up.

On whether the number of deaths was “bigger than we would expect”, you say “it was fair to give the figure for the number of people receiving ESA who had died, to give a sense of the size of the number that had been reported” – but this figure is not accurate. The request was for the full number of deaths after being found ‘fit for work’ – didn’t I already mention Mark Wood, who died of starvation, months after his own FFW decision? Where does he fit into these DWP statistics? He doesn’t, does he? How many other people like Mr Wood are there, who have been omitted from the figures because their deaths happened after the end of the DWP’s self-imposed claim end date period? Remember, the DWP was asked to include ALL deaths; this shows that the Department chose to omit – how many? I don’t know. I wanted to. The DWP refused to provide that figure in what I understand is “contumelious disregard” of the Information Commissioner’s decision. So the figure you provided is only a fraction of the total number of deaths and you have misled the public. It would have been far better for you to have said that the DWP has provided this figure but we don’t know how many have died after its self-imposed time limits. You didn’t.

Your claim that “the ‘fit for work group’ contains a number of people who have an above average chance of dying” is contentious, to say the least. By definition, people who receive a FFW decision have been told that they are no more likely to die than the average – because they are now to be included among the general population and not among people whose conditions mean they should receive incapacity benefits. Your line, “Just because people are deemed fit for work doesn’t mean they should only have an average chance of death” is unintentionally hilarious. Didn’t you stop to think that ALL the people you mentioned – men, people with lower qualifications and older people – are all included in the wider working-age population who have never claimed incapacity benefits and are therefore among those with an “average” chance of death? I’m a man, and fairly close to the older age range mentioned, but in the nearly-two-weeks since your programme aired, it seems I’ve managed to avoid death. That’s not a miracle.

You mention the Ben Goldacre article, but he got the wrong end of the stick too. DWP didn’t give “the right answer to the wrong question” – it gave the wrong answer to the question it was given.

Now, to return to the second paragraph of your letter, given the number of inaccuracies I have identified above, can you see that the comment that “thousands of people die after breakfast”, in context, was in extremely poor taste? Yes, the piece said that “we know nothing about how or why they died” but stating that “thousands of people die before breakfast” implies – before anything else is even said – that the controversy over these figures is a storm in a teacup. It isn’t.

I think it might be useful to tell you a little about possible future developments. As the DWP’s response to my FoI request was so poor, I have written to the Information Commissioner, requesting enforcement of the terms of the request. The Commissioner is investigating why the DWP has only provided information up to February 2014, rather than May, and also why the DWP – after giving an undertaking to provide the full figures for people who died after being found fit for work, has failed to do so. My suspicion is that the Department will say it did not provide numbers for people who died after its ‘scan’ period because it does not hold them. In that case, why offer them in the first place? The DWP never made any objection to any of the wording of the FoI request, other than that which I’ve already mentioned about appeals pending/concluded.

Finally, you may wish to consider the following, alarming, evidence I received yesterday from the Information Commissioner’s solicitor, who writes: “The Act is only concerned with recorded information and not whether the information which is recorded is accurate, logical or consistent with other information.”

This means, of course, that all of the information provided by the DWP may be complete and utter nonsense – moonshine, intended to confuse and diorientate the public in order to keep us further from the facts. That would explain the discrepancy between the number of deaths recorded for all incapacity claimants and those for IB/SDA and ESA when added together. If you had investigated this matter properly, you might have been able to ask some searching questions about this, too. But you didn’t.

I await your response to this with, I have to admit, diminishing hope. You’ve made a proper mess of it so far.

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BBC More or Less response to first complaint about ‘incapacity deaths’ programme

This is the email from Wesley Stephenson (senior producer, BBC Current Affairs) to This Writer’s complaint about the segment on Radio 4’s More or Less covering the DWP’s release of statistics relating to deaths of claimants of incapacity benefits – published as promised in a previous article.

Thank you for getting in touch about our piece on ‘Fit for Work deaths’ I have read your complaint and feel that there are some misunderstandings about the programme.

1.       Your objection to the comment that ‘thousands of people die after breakfast’ I believe is misguided. This points out the error that can be made with the deaths figure that correlation somehow infers causation. We did not suggest that there is no link just that we don’t know if there is a link and caution should be taken at interpreting the figures otherwise. This was made clear in the piece when I said “We know nothing how or why they died. It could have nothing to do with the fit for work decision; they could be accidents or unrelated illnesses. Or they could be directly related. There is no way of knowing just by looking at the 2,380 deaths figure.”

2.       You suggest we do know that people died within two weeks of the decision to declare them fit for work. I believe this is a misreading of the figures that stems from the way the DWP chose to present them. We don’t know whether the 2380 claimants died after being declared ‘fit for work’. The figures do not tell us this information. The ESA claims of 2380 people with a ‘fit for work’ decision didn’t necessarily end because they were declared ‘fit for work’ but they will have also have ended because they died. People will have still been counted as receiving ESA if they had received a FFW decision and had then appealed. We checked this before transmission and you can see a similar clarification close to the bottom of this piece from Fullfact.org.  https://fullfact.org/factcheck/economy/fit_for_work_deaths_ESA-47588

3.       You say in your complaint that “While the point that we don’t know how these people died is correct – this is because the DWP deliberately fails to record causes of death, which is a contentious matter in its own right – this seems to be making a false claim about my Freedom of Information request. There was nothing in it to suggest that I thought the figure that the DWP provided would prove its responsibility for any deaths that took place. Why was Mr Harford suggesting that there was?” At no point did we mention you or make any suggestions about what you were trying to achieve with the FOI request. The piece was about the way the press and particularly the Guardian had reported it.

4.       The question of whether these deaths is ‘bigger than we would expect’ – we made clear here that we didn’t have the ASMRs for this particular set of people and therefore couldn’t make a proper comparison but it was fair to give the figure for the number of people receiving ESA who had died to give a sense of the size of the number that had been reported.

5.       Your assertion that it’s false to say that those declared ‘fit for work’ may be more likely to die than the general population is not borne out in the figures. The death rate for the working age population is an average. The ‘fit for work group’ contains a number of people who have an above average chance of dying. Men are more likely to die than the average, people with lower qualifications are more likely to die than average, older people are more likely to die that average these groups are all over-represented in the people who are deemed fit for work. Just because people are deemed fit for work doesn’t mean they should only have an average chance of death.

6.       As you say in your complaint you say that these deaths are ‘likely to be the tip of a very large proverbial iceberg’. This is possible although we can’t say that this will be the case however the programme did point out that 2380 certainly wasn’t the total number of people who had died after being declared fit for work as it only took in a subset of those people declared fit for work.

As Ben Goldacre pointed out in his piece (https://storify.com/bengoldacre/how-dwp-has-confused-everyone-by-releasing-the-rig) no matter where we look we haven’t got enough information to know and until the DWP release the ASMR for those people declared fit for work we cannot reach any meaningful conclusions.  Also Nick Dilworth (who I spoke to before writing the piece) says that DWP figures are not meaningful  http://ilegal.org.uk/thread/9144/death-statistics-idss-obfuscation-answer.

I will publish my response shortly.

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