Tag Archives: Samaritans

McVey steps down from the Samaritans. What about other Tories on charity boards?

Walking away: Esther McVey [Image: REX/Shutterstock].

From the Samaritans‘ website:

Esther McVey MP has stepped down from our Advisory Board due to her commitments as Secretary of State for the Department of Work and Pensions.

She was invited by the Board to become a member in early 2017 when she was Chair of the British Transport Police Authority, one of the partners we work with to reduce suicides in the rail environment.

We are extremely grateful to Esther for her support for the work of Samaritans and for the time she has given to the Advisory Board.

Samaritans’ Advisory Board provides us with informal support, helping us to increase our potential to influence and fundraise. Neither the Chair nor any of its members is paid.

Note that Ms McDeath’s departure is not being ascribed to the public outcry after her membership of the Samaritans‘ advisory board was revealed. Some may therefore question the honesty of the statement.

Of course, as This Site reported earlier, the Samaritans is not the only charity to have Conservative politicians in prominent positions of influence.

May we expect a mass exodus from the others – or do we have to winkle them out one by one?

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Samaritans’ advisory board crammed with Tories? So is the Campaign Against Antisemitism. Who else?

It is certainly shameful that the Samaritans’ advisory board is crammed full of Tories.

Scratch the surface of any charity, though, and how many of them would be similarly… shall we say Conservative?

Take the Campaign Against Antisemitism, for example – the organisation that is more accurately described as the Campaign of Hate, most particularly against the Labour Party.

It doesn’t appear to have an advisory board but among its patrons we see the following:

Eric Pickles – Tory.
Matthew Offord – Tory.
Mike Freer – Tory.
Bob Blackman – Tory.
Baron Ahmad – Tory.

Conservatives outnumber everyone else with a declared political allegiance on the list of patrons (it includes a crossbench peer and two Labour politicians).

How many Labour members has the CAA attacked recently? According to a friend of This Site, the total is approaching 40.

And how many Tories have been attacked? Two.

That’s not because of any huge amount of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party; it’s because this is an organisation run by right-wingers with an agenda.

That’s exactly what is happening with the Samaritans.

Who knows how many other charitable organisations have been similarly infiltrated? I don’t, but I can promise you that the people running these charities are playing a dangerous game?

Want to know why?

Because charities have to be non-political, otherwise they lose their status. Those are the rules; ask the Charity Commission.

Postscript: After I posted this piece, the following tweet appeared – providing more proof of my point:

A mental health charity that refused to criticise the government for ignoring links between claimants of out-of-work disability benefits and suicide attempts is facing criticism after it emerged that more than half of its advisory board are influential Conservatives.

Disability News Service (DNS) revealed in December that the Department of Health (DH) had failed to highlight claimants of employment and support allowance (ESA) as a high-risk group in its national suicide prevention strategy.

DH had failed to act even though its own survey showed that more than 43 per cent of ESA claimants had said in 2014 that they had attempted suicide at some point in their lives.

But when told about that failure in December, the mental health charity Samaritans – which focuses on suicide prevention and support for those in mental distress, and is itself part-funded by the Department of Health* – refused to criticise the government.

Now mental health system survivors have raised concerns that at least seven of the 11 members of the charity’s advisory board are prominent Conservatives or Conservative supporters, or have close links to the party, including two Tory peers, a current and a former Tory MP, and a leading Tory donor who is married to another Tory peer.

They are particularly alarmed that the newest member of the board is Esther McVey, the new work and pensions secretary, whose appointment to head the Department for Work and Pensions last month caused widespread anger among disabled activists.

Source: Under-fire Samaritans faces anger over advisory board crammed with Tories

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Esther McVey advises The Samaritans. Why is nobody making the obvious comparison?

[Image: Evolve Politics].

Esther McVey is the real-life equivalent of Arnold Rimmer from Red Dwarf.

Rimmer (played by Chris Barrie), the incompetent chicken soup vending machine technician, managed to kill the entire crew of the mining ship Red Dwarf (barring his nemesis, Dave Lister (Craig Charles)) by exposing them to lethal radiation. He denied that it was his fault.

Ms McVey, was a part of a team of Tories who devised policies to deprive sick and disabled benefit claimants of the payments to which they were due, leading to thousands of deaths – many of which have been recorded on This Site. Like the rest of the Tories, she denies that it is her fault.

Now we find that Ms McVey is a member of The Samaritans – as was Mr Rimmer.

In the Red Dwarf episode The Last Day, he has the following conversation with Lister:

Rimmer: I used to be in the Samaritans.

Lister: I know. For one morning.

Rimmer: I couldn’t take any more.

Lister: I don’t blame you. You spoke to five people and they all committed suicide. I wouldn’t mind, but one was a wrong number! He only phoned up for the cricket scores.

Rimmer: Well, it’s not my fault everyone chose that day to jump out of buildings. It made the papers, you know. “Lemming Sunday,” they called it.

The announcement that Ms McVey had been named Work and Pensions Secretary, on January 8, received a similar reception from the people of the UK. It wasn’t quite “Lemming Monday” – I’m not aware of anyone actually taking their own life (and I know lemmings don’t actually behave as they did in that old Disney movie) – but I understand that many had to be persuaded out of it.

The operative question now is whether she has any other traits similar to the Red Dwarf character.

I suppose we’ll find out if she turns up at Caxton House in a blue Gingham dress, saying from now on she’ll take all her advice from her favourite sockpuppet, Mr Flibble.

She says people having to go to foodbanks is ‘positive’. She justified huge cuts to disability benefits by saying that ‘bodies heal’, and she used misleading statistics to ‘stoke up antagonism’ towards disabled benefit claimants. Does this sound like the kind of person who should be advising a major charity which supports people in severe emotional distress?

And yet that is the case. It has been revealed that Esther McVey, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, and cheerleader for some of the most brutal welfare cuts of recent years, is an advisor to the charity Samaritans

Source: Tory DWP Secretary Esther McVey advises The Samaritans whilst bringing misery to millions of benefit claimants | Evolve Politics

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Samaritans demands action as number of women committing suicide reaches 10-year high

Samaritans want further research into the reasons for the increase in female suicides – and rightly so – but it should be noted that suicides always increase under a Conservative government.

The fact that female suicides are increasing is a new, worrying trend.

This Writer could suggest that it has something to do with the fact that the Conservative austerity agenda focused relentlessly on women, who were said to have been hit twice as hard as men.

But perhaps that is premature?

If anybody else – particularly Tories or their supporters – has a better answer, let’s see it.

Figures released … by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that more women took their own lives in 2015 than at any time in the previous decade, and that deaths by suicide in Northern Ireland are at an all-time high.*

The figure for the UK as a whole was slightly up on 2014, rising from 6,122 to 6,188. There was a slight decrease in the number of men dying by suicide, but men are still three times more likely to take their own lives than women. More men under 30 took their own lives than in the previous year. Middle-aged men are still at greatest risk.

Samaritans CEO Ruth Sutherland said: “We are alarmed by the increase in the number of women taking their own lives and will look carefully at why this might be. What is interesting is that, as with men, it’s middle-aged women who are most at risk and the more we can support this most at risk age-group the better.

“The record number of suicides in Northern Ireland and increase in suicides in Wales needs to be treated with caution. Fluctuations from one year to another in different nations can be due to problems with accuracy in registering and recording a death by suicide, which can mask actual trends. Samaritans believes that it’s critical to have more timely, high quality data to ensure that resources at both a local and national level are better targeted to those most at risk.

“Suicide is everybody’s business, which is why we are currently campaigning to ensure that every area has an effective Local Suicide Prevention Plan. Suicide is not inevitable, it’s preventable and politicians, employers, health bodies and educators all have a role in identifying and supporting those most at risk.”

Source: Samaritans demands action on suicide as the number of women taking their own lives reaches 10-year high | Samaritans

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