Tag Archives: vulnerable

How will an ‘Online Harms’ law help if judges won’t recognise the tactics?

Kate Winslet: accepting her BAFTA for I Am Ruth, she pleaded for legislation to tackle the online abuses to which young people are subjected. But what good will any law do, if judges refuse to acknowledge the methods of online abuse?

When Kate Winslet won a BAFTA for I Am Ruth, she pleaded for legislation to battle the online harms to which young people are now constantly subjected.

It was a powerful speech, and the panellists on the BBC’s Politics Live on May 15 (Danny Kruger, Shami Chakrabarti, Alastair Campbell and ConservativeHome’s Henry Hill) discussed what could be done. You can hear their salient points here:

https://youtu.be/ectWDks3Y0Q

But is it possible to legislate against the tactics that are used to mentally and emotionally attack young people? Would the courts even recognise such methods if a case reached them?

I don’t think so, based on my experience in Rachel Riley’s libel case against me.

I put forward evidence about several different forms of abuse that are commonly used in the social media but the judge refused to recognise any of them.

That was her prerogative, and I’m sure she had her reasons.

But it sets a precedent that means it may now be much harder for anybody trying to win a case under forthcoming “online harms” laws to succeed.

Actions have consequences. I fear the consequences for young people in this age of anti-social media may be severe.

I will try to make our MPs aware of my concerns. It would be welcome if you would do the same.

In the meantime, I am still trying to raise money to pay my legal team, whose members were also concerned about the effect of online abuse on young people.

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Make a donation via the CrowdJustice page. Keep donating regularly until you see the total pass the amount I need.

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Online harm continues to be an urgent, current issue and my court case was all about that.

It is possible that my actions in defence of a vulnerable teenager may eventually be vindicated, whether a High Court judge approves of them or not.

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How do ‘community cooking events’ help us cope with rising energy bills?

It’s being reported that the government is putting £842 million more pounds into the Household Support Fund, which is said to help struggling families deal with the cost of living including food and energy costs.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) will be dividing the money among English councils, which must use it to help people pay for energy bills or groceries.

The funding is said to be targeted at areas of the country “with the most vulnerable households” and it is being left up to the councils to decide how to spend it.

What I want to know is…

How is a ‘community cooking event’ or an ‘energy cafe’ – both ideas used by English councils – the best way to divide up this cash? Even voucher schemes and ‘energy saving packs’ spend money redundantly.

Wouldn’t it be better simply to provide the cash to those who need it most, and let them decide how to spend it?

The way this scheme is being (mis)managed, it seems to be an attempt to keep cash away from vulnerable families, rather than helping them.

Source: DWP issues update on new cash for hundreds of thousands to help with rising energy bills

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Covid-19: clinically vulnerable people won’t be required to shield… from April Fools’ Day

Covid-19: hospitalisations are down, so clinically-vulnerable people are being told they won’t have to shield from April 1. Is this so they can, finally, contract it?

Presumably someone at the Department of Health and Social Care is having a little giggle.

With the health service allegedly gearing up to face a new surge of Covid-19 infections, people who are likely to be extremely vulnerable to it are being told they don’t have to ‘shield’ from April 1.

This means clinically vulnerable people won’t have to stay at home and avoid all contact with other people any more.

In fairness, they are still being advised to keep social contacts at low levels, work from home where possible and stay at a distance from other people.

This Writer’s own family members in Bristol have been shielding, and I would advise them to continue doing so, as much as possible – for a very simple reason.

They were told to shield at a time when hospitals were in danger of being overwhelmed by Covid-19 admissions; the concern at the time was for the health service, rather than for people who were clinically vulnerable.

Now, hospital admissions are falling as the number of Covid-19 cases drops.

So shielding is ending, not because vulnerable people are now safe, but because hospitals will be better-able to cope with them.

And we should take note that the official advice is that shielding is being “paused” – not ended. It may be reintroduced. If so, then clinically vulnerable people should not be encouraged to think they are safe.

Yes, people who have been shielding have had priority access to vaccination, but that just means they are more likely to have had their first injection.

They won’t be fully-immunised until after they’ve had their second jab – and it has been suggested that the longer delay between injections has created a vulnerability to variant strains of Covid-19.

And the government is warning that people coming out to enjoy the current hot weather have not been social distancing, meaning they are more likely to contract the virus. The same government is inviting clinically vulnerable people to mix in with those people.

So This Writer is led to question the purpose behind this change.

Is it really to give people who have been stuck at home for more than a year a chance to stretch their legs again?

Or is it to give the virus a chance to wipe out a few more “useless eaters”?

Wednesday is the last day millions of the most clinically vulnerable people in England and Wales are told to shield.

Source: Covid-19: Shielding coming to an end for millions – BBC News

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Did Tory-run DWP change rules on cancelling benefits to avoid humiliation in court?

Errol Graham: he starved to death after the Department for Work and Pensions cut off his benefits.

The Department for Work and Pensions has quietly changed its rules on stopping benefits of vulnerable claimants – after relatives of a man who died of starvation won the right to have a judicial review.

Relatives of Errol Graham were granted permission for a judicial review of DWP policies after the department failed to review and revise them itself, following his death.

The DWP ignored its own safeguarding advice to deprive Errol Graham of his benefits, This Site reported previously.

Left with no income, Mr Graham starved to death.

He had been receiving incapacity benefit, and then ESA, for many years as a result of enduring mental distress that had led to him being sectioned.

The DWP stopped Mr Graham’s Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) entitlement – and backdated that decision to the previous month – after making two unsuccessful visits to his home to ask why he had not attended a face-to-face Work Capability Assessment (WCA) on August 31, 2017.

He had not been asked to fill in an ESA50 questionnaire, though.

The government department managed to stop an ESA payment that had been due to be credited to his bank account on October 17, the same day it made the second unsuccessful safeguarding visit.

Its own rules state that it should have made both safeguarding visits before stopping the benefits of a vulnerable claimant.

Not only that, but the DWP had needed – but failed – to seek further medical evidence from Mr Graham’s GP, in order to make an informed decision about him.

In fact, it seems this would not have made much difference as Mr Graham’s GP had not seen him since 2013, or recalled him for vital blood tests or issued prescriptions since 2015, despite medical conditions including significant, long-term mental distress and hypothyroidism.

Because he had lost his entitlement to ESA, Mr Graham’s housing benefit was also stopped.

When bailiffs knocked down his front door to evict him on June 20, 2018, they found a dead body that weighed just four and a half stone. The only food in the flat was a couple of out-of-date tins of fish.

Mr Graham was 57 years old.

Solicitors Leigh Day, acting for Mr Graham’s family, revealed they had won the right to have a judicial review last week.

And on Tuesday – the day before Parliament rose for the summer recess – the DWP told Parliament’s Work and Pensions committee that it had changed the rules.

Permanent Secretary Peter Schofield said: “If we tried all of that [contacting the claimant by phone and carrying out two safeguarding visits] we would then take that back and have a case conference about the individual and particularly, obviously if it’s someone with vulnerabilities that we know about, then we would seek to involve other organisations that might have a different way of knowing about that individual.

“And then we would seek to understand what do they know about that individual and how can we support them.

“And if that fails that could then be escalated to the safeguarding leads. And in that way basically what we’d seek to do is provide support not removal of benefits.”

Do you believe that?

Tessa Gregory of Leigh Day seems sceptical, still: “Today’s announcement that the procedures have changed is news to us and news to our client.

“Whilst we cautiously welcome the announcement, it is imperative that the Secretary of State publishes the relevant guidance immediately so that our client and the public can see whether it actually requires decision makers to liaise with different agencies in cases like Errol’s and whether enough has been done to ensure that the vulnerable are adequately protected.”

This Writer thinks the best way to achieve that aim is to go ahead with the judicial review. Why were these changes only brought in when the Tory government was facing humiliation in court?

Source: DWP chiefs quietly change rule on stopping benefits after man starved to death – Mirror Online

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Disabled man starved to death because TORIES omitted him from ‘clinically vulnerable’ lockdown list

This’ll prove that the Tory government has used the Covid-19 crisis to eliminate people with disabilities, then.

The list of people who were defined as “clinically vulnerable” by the government was deliberately written to omit people with many life-inhibiting disabilities.

As a result – well, read it for yourself:

A disabled man starved to death during the coronavirus lockdown because he could not access essential food, an MP said.

Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy said she was aware of a “tragic” report that a man in her constituency of Streatham, south London, had died after being unable to access food essentials.

She asked charities giving evidence to the Women and Equalities Committee what they felt about the Government’s “reluctance” to expand the clinically vulnerable list amid people with disabilities struggling to get food through priority delivery slots.

They said people are still finding it hard to get deliveries, some cannot socially isolate in supermarkets because they are blind, carers are being disbelieved when they say they are shopping for more than one person and customers are being asked to “prove” their disability.

That’s right – the Tories deliberately ensured that people with disabilities would not be able to access food.

This Site’s long-term friend Samuel Miller had it right when he tweeted:

The oversight was that thousands of serious ill & disabled people were excluded from the government's priority list and I'm frantic with worry because some vulnerable people might starve to death. Let's call in the British Red Cross & the army to provide them with food shipments.

— Samuel Miller (@Hephaestus7) May 2, 2020

Anyone who voted for the Tories is complicit in these deaths.

Blood on their hands.

Source: Disabled man ‘starved to death during lockdown’ MP claims – Mirror Online

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Why didn’t Matt Hancock send vulnerable Covid-19 sufferers to Nightingale hospitals rather than care homes?

Care: even the image I’ve been using emphasises the impossibility of social distancing in this context.

It’s a simple enough question.

The London Nightingale hospital opened on April 4 – that’s not such a long time to let a person (who is ill, remember) stay in hospital, is it?

The Nightingale hospitals were provided with facilities specifically for sufferers of Covid-19.

But instead, elderly and vulnerable people were carted off to care homes that did not have such facilities, there to infect many of their fellow residents – along with some staff .

These staff, in turn, moved on to other care homes, where they infected more people who would not have caught the disease if people who had been receiving treatment in hospital had not been shifted out, on the orders of the Conservative government.

The whole situation triggered a spike in excess deaths of at least 31 per cent.

Put that way, the decision looks more like a plan, doesn’t it?

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Blame game: Tories try to shift responsibility for sending Covid-19 into care homes – and fail

Care: the Tories don’t.

Pathetic, isn’t it?

The Conservative government has tried to claim that temporary care workers spread Covid-19 between different care homes to cause the huge increase in deaths there.

Those of us with a more rational outlook believe the epidemic was more likely caused by the Tory policy of shifting people with Covid symptoms from hospital into care homes as soon as possible – without caring whether those homes had isolation facilities.

Which do you think is more likely?

Bear in mind that the two possibilities are not mutually exclusive.

And who’s responsible for homes having to employ temporary workers, anyway?

The Guardian certainly seems to think the Tory government is responsible either way. It states:

In evidence that raises further questions about ministers’ claims to have “thrown a protective ring around care homes”, it emerged that agency workers – often employed on zero-hours contracts – unwittingly spread the infection as the pandemic grew, according to [a] study by Public Health England (PHE).

The genome tracking research into the behaviour of the virus in six care homes in London found that, in some cases, workers who transmitted coronavirus had been drafted in to cover for care home staff who were self-isolating expressly to prevent the vulnerable people they look after from becoming infected.

During flu pandemic planning in 2018, a report from social care directors warned ministers that frontline care workers would need advice on “controlling cross-infection”. A 2019 PHE document about flu pandemic preparations called “Infection prevention and control: an outbreak information pack for care homes” urged operators to “try to avoid moving staff between homes and floors”.

But the DHSC’s social care plan, published on 16 April, mentions nothing about restricting staff movements between homes in its chapter on “controlling the spread of infection in care homes”.

So hopeful Tories are set to be disappointed; if temporary care home staff did transmit the bug, it was because of Tory government failures.

Worse is the Tory government policy to transfer elderly people with Covid-19 symptoms out of hospital and into care homes, regardless of whether those homes had the facilities to isolate the patients. Here‘s the Huffington Post:

The government had a “policy of emptying hospitals and filling care homes” when coronavirus began to grip the country, a top care boss has said.

Martin Green, chief executive of Care England, said Boris Johnson should have stopped the spread of Covid-19 to social care settings, where elderly people, many of whom have underlying health conditions, were particularly vulnerable to the disease.

He also criticised the discharge of patients from hospitals to care homes, saying people who either “didn’t have a Covid-19 status or were symptomatic were discharged into care homes” which were full of people “with underlying health conditions”.

Green, whose body represents care home providers in England, said homes should have been isolating residents who returned from hospital – as those in some other countries have – but many did not have the right set-up.

Whichever way you look at it, the Tory government was responsible for what has been an absolute massacre of vulnerable people who were supposed to be enjoying the best possible care.

So we come back to the big question, with the Tories found to have been responsible for causing these infections and deaths in care homes.

Was this result intended?

Source: Agency staff were spreading Covid-19 between care homes, PHE found in April | World news | The Guardian

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Austerity made UK less-prepared to tackle Covid-19 crisis, health expert says

This isn’t rocket science.

Of course austerity contributed to the fact that the coronavirus pandemic found the UK’s Tory government sitting on its collective thumbs.

Professor Sir Michael Marmot, director of University College London’s Institute of Health Equity, said that the lack of financial support given to the health and social care systems during the 2010s is partly to blame for the overwhelming issues now facing the country.

I’ve got an infographic about that. Let’s see…

Sir Michael was particularly sharp about the cuts to social care:

“We’re terribly worried about the health of workers in social care. The reduction in adult social care spending over the last decade was 7 per cent in real terms. But in the most deprived 20 per cent of areas the reduction was 16 per cent. In the least deprived 20 per cent the reduction was 3 per cent.”

And of course the coronavirus has hit the most deprived areas the hardest. You see how this ties together?

“So there’s a clear line between our lack of preparedness in the healthcare system, in the social care system and in community resources more generally – the decline of support for the voluntary sector – a clear line between austerity and our lack of preparedness to cope with this pandemic.”

Sir Michael went on to say that rather than being “the great leveller”, as some have described the coronavirus pandemic, he believed it had instead exposed “underlying health inequalities” and amplified them.

He’s saying that, since they came into office in 2010, the Tories have been using well-known funding inequalities to make deprived areas less able to cope with a crisis like Covid-19.

They may not have had a pandemic in mind (although that’s debatable) but the result is the same:

His comments followed a report by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) that found that people living in the most deprived areas of England have experienced coronavirus mortality rates more than double those living in the least deprived areas.

For those deaths involving Covid-19 that took place between March 1 and April 17, the mortality rate in the most deprived areas was 55.1 deaths per 100,000 population.

By contrast, the rate was 25.3 deaths per 100,000 in the least deprived areas.

So there’s a clear link: more than twice as many people have died in deprived areas than in affluent places – because of Tory austerity policies that hit the poorest much harder than the rich.

Source: Coronavirus latest: Britain’s lack of preparedness for tackling Covid-19 crisis linked to austerity, health expert says | inews

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Coronavirus: DWP/Post Office plan to send cash benefits to claimants at risk has one serious flaw

Cash money: it’s one of the most obvious ways possible of transmitting diseases – and the Tories want to send it direct to the homes of the people the coronavirus is most likely to kill.

We’re all being asked to use cash money as little as possible under the coronavirus lockdown because it is a notorious carrier of disease.

Those little gold, silver and bronze coins that we normally handle every day – who knows where they’ve been? This Writer knows of people putting them in their mouths so anything could be on them.

And paper money – what else has been on the hands that have handled them? Again, the mind can only imagine.

So why in blazes is the Tory-run Department for Work and Pensions trying to send this money into the homes of people whose lives are most at risk from coronavirus?

Is it a deliberate attempt to bypass social distancing procedures and make sure they catch the disease?

The DWP and Post Office have launched a joint initiative to deliver benefit payments direct to the homes of claimants shielding because of the risk of coronavirus infection.

The new service from the Post Office will enable cash benefit payments to be sent to individuals identified by the DWP as shielding at home because of the risk of infection from COVID-19 and who agree to receive payments in this way.

The joy of it – for the malicious Tories – is that if these claimants die of the disease alone at home, nobody will know for a considerable period of time and they won’t be added to the government’s already-questionable death figures.

But someone needs to have a serious talk with whoever approved this homicidal plot – and get them to find a less terminal way of paying people what they are owed.

Source: DWP and Post Office launch joint initiative to deliver cash benefit payments direct to homes of claimants most at risk from coronavirus – Rightsnet

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Look how coronavirus has changed Tory persecution of people with disabilities

Back at the end of March, This Writer warned that the Tories might ban people with certain disabilities from treatment.

The list included people with Down Syndrome, cerebral palsy, autism or any of the other reasons for receiving Personal Independence Payment, and the fear was that the Tory government would follow some US states that were denying ventilators to people with those conditions.

It turns out to be worse than that – people with disabilities are being denied food because they’re not on an extremely limited list of the ‘most vulnerable people’.

According to The Guardian:

Disabled people are being left without food after being missed off the government’s list of those vulnerable to coronavirus.

The government set up an online register billed as a way to reach “extremely vulnerable” households in England who have been told to shield for 12 weeks – either offering them food parcels via their local authority or liaising with major supermarkets to give priority for online delivery.

But it has emerged that large numbers of disabled and older people are being excluded from the scheme due to the highly selective criteria.

Among those who have been rejected are people with cancer being treated with chemotherapy, heart disease, tetraplegia, motor neurone disease (MND), myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) and muscular dystrophy.

These people have been starving to death – they can’t go out, you see – and the paper noted that one had contracted the virus.

So by making its list of vulnerable people too restrictive, the Tories have ensured that people who deserve protection are catching the virus.

Are they still improbably claiming that they care about disabled people and aren’t trying to drive them to their deaths?

Source: Disabled people left off coronavirus vulnerable list go without food | Society | The Guardian

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