Tag Archives: term

Tory benefit changes mean around 1m people may be forced into work they can’t do

[Image: Black Triangle Campaign].

The Tories are bringing this nightmare back again.

Jeremy Hunt’s Budget announcement that he is ending the Work Capability Assessment has turned out not to be the relief so many benefit claimants with long-term illnesses thought it would be.

He is ending the Limited Capability for Work-Related Activity element of Universal Credit, meaning that people who received it may now have to seek work under the new Personal Independence Payment system.

They’ll need to claim the new UC health element, and to do that they must also be eligible for Personal Independence Payment – and under this system they may also be required to seek work or accept job offers.

Additionally, assessments will now be carried out by work coaches from the Department for Work and Pensions, rather than the (so-called) health professionals who currently carry out the much-maligned WCAs.

There are fears that these civil servants will not have the proper training to identify claimants’ conditions and needs, and may be set target numbers of people they have to try to force into work, which they will impose on disabled people.

The Institute of Fiscal Studies think tank has estimated that a million people could be forced into work and 600,000 could lose an estimated £350 per month in support as a result of the change.

Hunt has been up-front about the intention behind the change: it’s to push people into work who would not otherwise have sought it.

The problem is that it may push people into work who simply cannot do it.

Experience has shown us what happens when the government forces people with long-term illnesses and disabilities to seek work:

They are rejected by employers – or find that they simply cannot do the work. Unsuitable for employment, and unable to claim benefits, they either starve to death or die of their health conditions.

We have seen it before – many times, in the years since the Tories came back into office in 2010.

It is scandalous that Jeremy Hunt is talking up a change that may make unendurable the lives of people who are already among the UK’s most vulnerable.

Source: Disability benefit changes: ‘My disability means I cannot work but I worry I’ll be forced to by the new rules’

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Sunak urged to put the sick to work to solve labour crisis

At breaking point: the UK’s National Health Service. Now a former Tory pensions minister thinks it should work harder to make people with short-term conditions (and Long Covid, apparently) fit to rejoin the labour force.

It’s not as bad as it looks… but that depends on what the Tories do – and we know they are ignorant, entitled, and stupid.

It seems Rishi Sunak has been looking at ways of encouraging people aged over 50 to stay in work rather than taking early retirement, to fill the enormous gaps in the UK’s workforce – but this won’t work.

Instead, according to Sir Steve Webb, who served as pensions minister in the coalition government between 2010 and 2015, Sunak should be trying to get sick people back to work.

We’ve been here before, haven’t we?

Fortunately, it seems this isn’t a new drive to kick people with serious life-altering conditions off benefits like ESA, PIP and Universal Credit.

Instead, the idea is to improve NHS treatment times to shorten waiting lists and make people fit for work quicker, rather than leaving them hanging around doing nothing.

There’s just one problem: nurses and ambulance paramedics are striking because current NHS pay and working conditions are so shocking that they can only survive with the help of food banks – meaning it is practically impossible to entice anybody to work there.

That’s a Tory plan, of course – run the NHS down to make privatisation of health care look like a good idea.

Their problem is that it means they can’t solve their workforce problems that way. And the over-50s wheeze is just tinkering at the edges.

We all know that Brexit is responsible for the labour shortage – right? – and that was a Tory policy. The deprecation of the NHS is also a Tory policy.

So the destruction of the UK economy must also be a Tory policy – and one that has been in practise since before the EU referendum in 2016.

Think about that one for a while.

Another idea was to improve care for people with Long Covid, so they recover from this long-term debilitating condition.

Good luck with that, Sunak!

There are no proven cures for the condition and the Tories haven’t exactly been exerting themselves to find one.

In fact, there seems to have been a concerted effort by the Tories to ignore Covid-19 as much as possible.

The most recent statistics show 380 deaths in the week to December 9, while 1.4 million people in the UK have the disease. The total number of deaths is now 210,837 – and that’s according to figures that few people now trust.

Hospital admissions in the UK apart from Scotland, up to December 15, stood at 6,244, up from 4,645 the previous week, and continuing an upward trend.

Still, out of sight is out of mind, right? Statistics covering the growth rate of the various will cease to be published in early January because the UK Health Security Agency says we’ve learned to live with it.

Oh, really?

I’d say 380 deaths per week suggests we’ve been taught to learn to die with it.

Source: Get the sick back to work to end Britain’s labour crisis, Rishi Sunak told

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#BorisJohnson wants to dictate when – and WHETHER – #elections take place – as #VoxPolitical warned you

Dictator Johnson: you put him into 10 Downing Street. Now, like all fascists, he is taking steps to ensure that you can’t get him out again.

Remember last December when This Site warned the UK electorate that Boris Johnson’s manifesto said, “We will impose an indefinite Conservative government”?

It means he planned to stay in power just as long as he wanted to, with no election unless he felt like it.

And the UK electorate ignored the warning and voted for him in what may be the last democratic election to take place in this country.

Do you think that’s overstating the case?

If so, you haven’t been paying attention.

Johnson intends to repeal the Human Rights Act and end your access to the European Convention on Human Rights – including the right to vote in elections.

No, it’s not just about making sure asylum-seekers can’t use human rights as an excuse to stay in the UK when they shouldn’t.

The plan to let Johnson dictate when – or rather, if – we have elections is the second part of this. And it seems some people, in Parliament at least, can see what’s coming:

MPs looking into the issue say there should be no return to the days when the date of the next election was a matter for the government alone.

The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee says that would give an unfair advantage to the party in power.

Under the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, the next UK general election will be on Thursday, 2 May 2024 – but Mr Johnson is seeking the power to go to the country before that date if he wants to.

In fact, he isn’t. The FTP Act repealed all the other legislation on when elections take place, so getting rid of it wouldn’t be giving Johnson a choice on whether to have it sooner.

It would be giving him a choice on whether to have an election at all.

Source: Don’t give prime ministers the power to choose election date, say MPs – BBC News

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Extended jail term plan will lead to disaster

Behind bars: Boris Johnson’s plan for extended jail terms – stretching overstrained prisons beyond their limits – is criminal. But Johnson seems immune to punishment.

Conservatives can’t run prisons.

We all know this – right?

They tried privatising prisons and the cuts imposed by the privateers (in order to make a profit) meant wardens could not keep control.

Consider the failure to control drug use or even to stop drugs being passed into prisons.

Overcrowding led to unrest and even the occasional riot.

Now Boris Johnson has announced an intention to extend jail terms, meaning even more people will be packed into our limited prison space.

Or is he going to build more (like he promised to build more hospitals)?

Even if he achieved this – and I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting – would he not simply turn them over to private companies that would cock it all up again?

Yes, of course he would.

The UK’s prime minister is deliberately plotting a disaster for the justice system.

Or is there evidence that I am mistaken?

Source: Watchdog warns of prison overcrowding as Boris Johnson vows to extend jail terms | The Independent

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

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Give the public a say before selling off the NHS, demands Burnham

Scheming, lice-ridden vermin: All the airbrushing in the world could not erase the brutal, calculating dishonesty of the Conservative 2010 election poster.

This guy has been impressive from the get-go: Today (Tuesday) Andy Burnham will call on the Coalition to put its plans for further NHS privatisation on hold until there is clear evidence that the public wants the health service to be sold off.

The speech in Manchester is being timed to take place before the Conservative-led government signs a series of new NHS contracts that will – underhandedly – tie the hands of a future government.

Sly little devils, aren’t they?

The British public has never given its consent for far-reaching and forced privatisation of services – and that’s what Mr Burnham will be saying.

He will point out that the forced privatisation of the NHS is entering new territory and becoming harder to reverse: Contracts are being signed that will run throughout the next Parliament and beyond, tying the hands of the next government in a crucial area of public policy.

Not only is this unacceptable to Labour, but it has never been accepted by the public, and Mr Burnham will say that comedy Prime Minister David Cameron needs to be reminded that the NHS does not belong to him but to the British people – and he never received our permission to put it up for sale.

He will remind everybody that Cameron was dishonest about his privatisation plans before the last election. Cameron said there would be “no top-down reorganisation”.

If he wants to continue to force privatisation through, he should seek the consent of the public at the 2015 Election, Mr Burnham will say.

And he will contrast the increasingly fragmented and privatised travesty that Cameron wants to force on you – where service has become a postcode lottery dependent on the cost-effectiveness of providing certain forms of healthcare in your locality – with a public, integrated NHS as Labour intends to re-form it.

It was confirmed last week that NHS spending on private-sector and other providers has exceeded £10 billion for the first time.

“For all its faults, it is a service that is based on people not profits,” Mr Burnham will say. “That principle sets our health service apart and was famously celebrated two years ago at the Opening Ceremony of our Olympic Games.

“When his reorganisation hit trouble and was paused, David Cameron explicitly promised that it would not lead to more forced privatisation of services. But… on his watch, NHS privatisation is being forced through at pace and scale.

“Commissioners have been ordered to put all services out to the market.

“NHS spending on private and other providers has gone through the £10 billion barrier for the first time.

“When did the British public ever give their consent for this?

“It is indefensible for the character of the country’s most valued institution to be changed in this way without the public being given a say.”

Among the long-lasting agreements due to be signed by the Coalition in a bid to tie the next government into its privatisation of services are two contracts for cancer care in Staffordshire lasting no less than 10 years and worth a massive £1.2 billion; a five-year contract worth £800 million for the care of older people in Cambridge; and a contract in Oxford and Milton Keynes set to begin a month before the General Election for medical staffing.

The last of these is using a ‘reverse auction’ process where the lowest bidder wins, confirming fears of a ‘race to the bottom’ culture and contradicting claims from the Government of no competition on price in the NHS.

Once again Labour shows us that there is no depth to which the Cameron administration will not stoop. This time they are using the summer Parliamentary recess to sign contracts intended to prevent any future government from restoring our health service and reversing the appalling damage they have done so that they and their friends can profit from the suffering and sickness of the poor.

They could not do more damage if they were a filthy, sickening, scheming plague of lice-ridden vermin; in fact, that is exactly what they resemble.

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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Tag Archives: term

Sunak urged to put the sick to work to solve labour crisis

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