The letter from Newcastle. (Thank'ee kindly, Sorr, 'tis more than Oi deserve.)

At first glance, this second letter (see previous post, "DWP don't only decline to answer...") looked like good news. While I'm waiting for my appeal, I'm still being paid a benefit allowance, although at not much more than half the rate I was getting before DWP & ATOS got their teeth into me: the good bit is that this benefit is being increased in April.

But, by less than the 1% announced in Parliament. Only a penny less - they've rounded the increase down to the nearest 10p. But that really is penny-pinching. Of course, they'll say, 'what's one pee?' Well, in the light of how much they're deigning to let me have, quite a lot...

At least the increase will cover my costs, I thought... the cost of all the letters I have to send recorded delivery so that I have some evidence when DWP tell me that I didn't send this or that letter; the amount ATOS decided not to pay towards my fares (when I went for my assessment) without explaining why; the amount I'm going to have to pay for a SAR because I'm clearly being mucked me around. Of course, it'll take a lot of weeks...

Then I came to the second part of the letter. Later in the year my benefit (contributions based ESA, I think) is going to stop dead. If the letter is to be believed, the payments will stop even if my appeal goes in my favour... heart-attack time - it took quite an effort of will to realise that DWP only implied that, and that in fact they have no right yet to make such a decision. However does look like the benefit will stop if - even if - my appeal hasn't been heard yet.

There is a law which applies to DWP about how they treat the mentally ill (2010, I think). It includes not springing sudden unpleasant financial surprises. They've ignored that law far worse than this with me already, but even so... how to save the mentally ill from stress, Not.

But I forgot: ATOS' physiotherapist (I still can't believe that...) has decided that I'm fine and dandy. So they can't possibly be breaking any law designed to protect the mentally ill.

I restate: my invalidity benefit was due to me as a matter of contract. You, and the state, may believe that that counts for nothing. But breach of contract by a government remains a serious matter.

This crash-stop of my benefit came as a chilling shock. Because I'm not so well, keeping up with everything do with WCA on the net and elsewhere is not always so easy: I had no idea that the same sudden stop is happening to hundreds of thousands of people who are presently on the same benefit. How are they, we, all going to live?????

Anyway, the immediate point of this post is that the increase is so small, and will last for such a short time, that it'll come nowhere near covering the costs that DWP are inflicting on me... and I don't really know what to do...

Forgive the language, but, Bugger.

DWP don't only decline to answer...

On Saturday, I got three letters, all at once, from DWP. (That makes five since January, all from different Jobcentres hundreds of miles apart.) The first two were simply contradictory and confusing, but each of Saturday's three was a pain, on a Chinese Water Torture sort of level.

About the letter from Hyde BDC, for now, (which wasn't spell-checked)... story so far:

In my post "DWP decline to answer", 2nd. February, (bottom of column to right of page until I work out how to do internal links), I copied a letter of complaint I sent to DWP in January.

It was delivered to DWP and signed for on 7th. January. On the 'phone a fortnight later, DWP confirmed that they had the letter.

Last week I wrote again, escalating my complaint because they hadn't responded.

In Saturday's letter, they told me they don't have my letter of complaint and I'd better send another.

As the citizen said in my previous post today, below: "Anyone would think they were trying to put people off complaining."

Surreal Pt 2: Complaint to ATOS requires FoI submission?

http://dwpnegligence.wordpress.com/2013/02/08/378/

Before Christmas I half wanted to escalate a complaint to ATOS (about travel arrangements).

I was ill, and my heart wasn't really in it, so I was easily dissuaded when ATOS faffed about the procedure. It's a good thing I was dissuaded, because I wouldn't have coped too well with what follows.

A citizen wanted to escalate a complaint and asked ATOS what to next. They said (s)he'd already exhausted the process (almost certainly incorrectly - there is an independent tier, it seems).

Citizen asks for copy of procedure.

Response? That'll require a Freedom of Information request...

To which was added, after more correspondence: ...from DWP, since DWP are ATOS' Data Protection Officers.

Citizen's dry comment: "Anyone would think they were trying to put people off complaining."

Indeed!

(See next my next post).

Surreal Pt 1: Banned from her own tribunal.

http://atosvictimsgroup.co.uk/2013/02/08/mother-is-banned-from-her-own-disability-tribunal-because-of-her-wheelchair/

Woman turns up for her tribunal hearing at Acorn House, Basildon, but isn't allowed in. (She's been without payments since 2011). She was by no means the first - it had been going on for months...

Reason: she's in a wheelchair, there might be a fire, health and safety...

The interesting questions never get answers:

1. Had anyone noticed that this had been going on for months? Remember, failure to be in attendance at your own tribunal reduces your chance of a favorable outcome by 85%!

2. The paperwork connected with her case was available before the tribunal hearing. Did it mention that she would be in a wheelchair? I bet it did... and no-one took any notice.

So she's had to travel to this place, and is now told she can wait another 2 months (and travel further for the next hearing). 2 months without her money.

Was this nonsense arranged by Department for Work and Pensions? or by HM Courts and Tribunals Service? If it's the latter, that really boosts my confidence that I'm going to get a competent appeal hearing!

I've realised I'm fighting the wrong battle.

ATOS assess me on behalf of DWP. I'm there on the basis of mental illness, and the decision by DWP that I'm swinging the lead is made on the basis of ATOS' physiotherapist's report; but never mind, I have to live with that... I can appeal, and do, and will be heard eventually.

As I appeal, I give DWP a statement forming the basis of that appeal. I give it to DWP because DWP tell me that's what I've got to do... an odd idea of fairness, that you have to give all the substance of your defence to your accusers... but that's what the law in this country has required since the present police caution was introduced...

I have to live with that too but, again, never mind.

What I do mind is that I have been misdirected by DWP - and I have been completely taken in.

I have been complaining - or more often remaining silent, since I really don't complain - of mental illness since I was a child. Recently I have declared that I am no longer fit for work and have claimed benefits (for which I'd paid a great deal and to which I was entitled by law and contract). I have a considerable medical history to back up my claim but, as it happens, that should be neither here nor there at this point.

The point is that DWP has found me, effectively, guilty (I must be guilty, because they are denying me my legal and contractual rights and they could only do that if I wasn't telling the truth). They found me guilty without any evidence to support that finding. They haven't shown wrong facts in my assertions - they've just ignored them,

So I'm trying to defend myself, in my appeal, by trolling out all the medical and quotidian evidence that, in fact, DWP already have or have access to. This is what they want me to do [and all their guidance, rules, etc, tell me that the appeal must be fought on the basis of what I can do (or can't do, though they don't want to hear about that)] because then the battle is being fought by their rules.

They have misdirected me into fighting on their battlefield.

The real battlefield is of course the issue of their contentions - that I'm lying - which they should prove. It's not my job to disprove their contentions, certainly not until they come up with some meat  (no-one can tackle a will-o'-the-wisp). Nor is my job to keep proving my contentions. Innocent until proved guilty and all that... My contentions, despite DWP's misdirection, are not the issue until they can establish at least the beginnings of a case that I've been lying or at least mistaken.

-/-

I write this for my own sake - I feel I'm on the edge of an important realisation, but the trouble is that I don't have the mental resources to follw through the implications.

I offer it in case it helps someone else's thinking, and in case you have any comments to offer to help me. If I'm behind the curve, and I've been stating the bloomin' obvious, my apologies.

Buckingham Palace Taser.

The other day I speculated about the guy who was wielding knives who was tasered outside Buck House. I mentioned that the event was widely reported.

Now that the reasons for his distress are in the public domain (he wants the queen to help in after he was ripped off and went bankrupt - nothing to do with ATOS after all), I googled 'Buckingham Palace Taser' to see what the press take would be. After 10 pages I got fed up.

Almost all the results I found were dated 6 days ago. A few were 5 days old (a bit slow off the mark!). The only exception, precisely ONE result (not shown 'til page 4), was more recent, reporting the name of the guy and his family's feelings.

All that noise and kerfuffle, but nobody'll actually give the poor guy the time of day.

My prayer, after World Peace and Home Rule for the Chagos Islands, is that the press would make at least a token attempt not to be simple leeches.

Mr. Grayling and the Cycle of Violence. Part 1.

It came as very little surprise to hear that Mr. Grayling hit his children*. But after that it came as no surprise at all to hear that he had been hit by his own father**.

* (out of love!)  ** (which did him no harm!)

It’s no secret that many of us, perhaps most, have smacked our children once or twice in extremis. Most of us wouldn’t shout about it, let alone boast, but it no longer surprises me that a member of the front bench extols smacking as a normal and useful part of family life.

What does come as a surprise is that Grayling’s children are content to have it published abroad that they are smacked. Have they, like their father, decided that ‘it never did me any harm’? Or do they just have go along whatever their father decides?

I wonder why the last of those seems the most likely...

It is appalling to use children as pawns in an argument, at any time, including by me now; but Grayling cannot bring his children forward in debate and then hide behind them as a defence; so, with apologies to Grayling’s children, I here use them in the spirit which Grayling has introduced. I console myself with the knowledge that they’ll almost certainly never know about my part...

(I understand that his children are 17 and 21.)

Two broad questions spring to mind:

1) Will Grayling’s children hit their children, as a matter of policy, in turn? If they do, will it be because they were hit, and ‘it didn’t do me any harm’? If they don’t, will it because they were hit and have realised how damaging a thing it is?

2) I know nothing of Grayling’s children, but I do know that when I was at boarding school, there was a very high correlation between the most troubled and the most frankly unpleasant contemporaries on the one hand and a culture of beating/smacking/threat in the homes of those same contemporaries on the other. Might we be better able to judge the efficacy of Grayling’s hitting if we knew what sort of people his children are turning out to be?

WCA Judicial Review findings.

Does anyone know when the findings of last month's judicial review are likely to be published? (And where, then, to look to find them?)

The hearings bore directly on my case and, I suspect, those of (at least) tens of thousands of others.

I thought my case would be done and dusted long before the findings came out. But now that I’ve been told that it’s going to be a least six months (of anxiety) before my appeal is heard, the findings may turn out to be timely and of crucial importance.  (A large chunk of my statement of appeal, written before I’d heard about the judicial review, covered exactly that ground.)

Render unto Caesar?

Inchoate thinking by me, as yet, but...

Ignoring all else for now:

If the state, having obliged me to contribute for years, now reneges on its obligations and refuses to provide the help which, by contract, it owes me; and

If the department appointed by the state to 'interface' with me breaks laws in its dealings with me (data protection laws, anti-discrimination laws, laws pertaining to its own procedures and possibly other laws) and then denies me access when I seek redress*:

What moral obligation am I under to continue to be a good citizen, to obey the law, to respect the representatives and officers of the state, to keep the peace, etc., etc?

* to which I add (5th Feb.):

If a government, in almost so many words, regards me and those like me as a burden and, on the face of the evidence, is indifferent as a matter of policy when those like me kill themselves, or just die; and 

If a department, acting for that government, chooses to assume that I’m lying - without any evidence whatsoever to support their contention; then places its own narrative in place of my statements without any evidence whatsoever to support their contentions, and then takes action sanctioned by that government on the basis of those politically motivated contentions (while, of course, leaving me labelled a liar... without any justification)...

 
Etc.

I was wrong: Philip Hensher was wrong. (Although I'm more likely to be tasered.)

I posted the other day (Hensher is not wrong, but he misses the point. January) that Hensher wasn't wrong, just limited. I feel that I may have been naif. I took him, as I'm afraid I've always too easily taken people, on his own terms. I happened to read johnnyvoid's posting later, which got me looking at both sides more carefully. (http://johnnyvoid.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/philip-henshers-crass-hypcocrisy/) There is some nastiness (on a few sites) against Hensher, but two points were clear: (1) his supporters were more frightening than his detractors and (2) Hensher's research was not as up to scratch as I had assumed. It doesn't change my essential point however: we on this side of the battlelines are losing the PR war at the moment - their side is more organised, after all - and we don't help our cause by abuse.

The media are quick to condemn verbal abuse by those who protest and readers are quick to nod and agree. They are both much slower to condemn the substantive abuse by the other side. Unfortunately that's the way it is. Somehow we've got to change that...

-/-

The middle-aged man tasered by the police outside Bucking Palace today (widely reported)...

The police said 'he tried to make an exhibition of himself ', holding a knife to his own throat, although he had not in any way threatened the general public. (He reacted aggressively when the police challenged him).

The knife, the tasering, the fifteen policemen, the tourists, the witnesses, all provided quite a lot of copy for the press.

Will we hear at such length why this guy was behaving in such a way? (I lay odds of 3:1 that ATOS and/or DWP come into it somewhere.)

It won't do very much good, but he had a more immediate impact on the media than did the Commons backbench debate on Work Assessment the other week. (In the latter case, it was Hensher who took the limelight over the next few days. Ho hum.)

-/-

As a matter of interest, did the backbench debate do some good? I wasn't expecting banner headlines, and I know it was part of a long and sometimes subtle battle, but I hoped for some reaction in the media.

[Of course Mechanica McVey, the most immediately concerned minister, wasn't there. She's not that stupid: if she had attended, she might have had to think on her feet... I must stop this ad hominem abuse, I know, but, thankless job or not, I can't think how in any conscientious government she would ever have become a minister.]

DWP economical with the truth. (A saving of 80%)

Further to my previous posting (below):

The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee found back in 2009 that DWP was only recording 20% of the complaints made against them. The committee commented, “It is not clear why this should be so.” [Jonathan Moore, politics.co.uk]

Have things improved? I bet my complaint hasn’t been recorded. (If it has, how do DWP report that it was ‘actioned’?)

Or am I so mad now that I can’t see that my complaint is obviously frivolous and/or vexatious?

By the way: DWP officially refer to me as a ‘customer’, and to Jobcentre Plus as a ‘business’. Hoo-ee!

-/-

I finally got around to seeking a Google listing this week. I found myself on Thursday. Just in time for what I consider to be my first truly significant posting - earlier today.

DWP decline to answer.

The following are extracts from a letter which I sent to DWP, on 4^th January (personal details removed):-

TEXT:

Assertions made in HCP’s and Decision Maker’s reports.

I refer to my recent assessment process by ATOS for DWP. I particularly refer to the DWP decision maker’s letter of explanation, together with the report from the ATOS physiotherapist at ****** (centre) whom I met for a face-to-face interview.

The physiotherapist who interviewed me asserted in her report that I presented a long standing (sic) history of depression “which was caused by childhood abuse”.

This is an outrageous assertion. I have never believed, nor affirmed to that person or to any other, that my depression was caused or initiated in any such way: her assertion is unfounded and without reasonable provenance and is profoundly offensive, hurtful and, I am forced to argue, personally damaging.

The wider implications of the assertion – including in at least two respects with regard to my assessment* - are far-reaching, and equally unacceptable.

* (a) Such an unfounded assertion must cast doubts on the professional competence of the entire interview and assessment process; and

(b) Such a misidentification of the origins and nature of my condition mean that its appraisal can only be compromised.

I note that the decision maker’s report quoted the assertion verbatim and without qualification.

[I suspect that, in this and other ways, data protection laws and statutory requirements placed on DWP with regard to my mental health have been breached - as well as procedures required of both DWP and ATOS. I shall pursue this if health allows.]

[The following paragraphs contain personal information which I don’t want to purvey.]

************

Unfortunately, the above-mentioned is only one of a series of assertions, made by ATOS’ physiotherapist (and by DWP’s decision maker), which were not only unfounded but contrary to information presented or offered by me. (This to the extent that I can find no evidence that much of the information presented by me through DWP’s original questionnaire (or directly to HCP) was ever read at all by ATOS or DWP; while it is clear that what I said in the interview was not always noted with due care*.)

 [* I felt that the fact that my doctor’s evidence was never sought by DWP was not germane to this complaint.]

[A selection of other unfounded assertions by the Health Care Professional (!) follows here.]

************

In view of the influence of these and other assertions on any determinations that are made about my future, I must regard these repeated offences as being of fundamental importance. I must therefore insist most emphatically that they be corrected. In view of the now demonstrably inaccurate nature of a substantial amount of data held about me by DWP, I believe I should then be offered an opportunity to see and correct as necessary all such data which DWP or associated bodies hold about me

If DWP is unwilling or unable to make all appropriate corrections, and to allow me to audit the data they hold about me, I request that I be advised.

Thank you for your attention.

END TEXT.

In a telephone conversation, a DWP person acknowledged receipt of this letter.

She also advised me that DWP don’t intend to reply to it.

I originally deferred posting this as a courtesy, to give them time to respond... I’m not quite sure why I bothered.

NB: I think DWP will eventually suggest that the complaint should be addressed to ATOS. But (1) DWP is at fault here and (2) ATOS is contracted by DWP, working to DWP's rules. But then, half the effect of privatisation is that responsibility becomes elusive... think 'railway accidents'.

Mr. Duncan Smith is either a fool or a fascist.

Mr. Duncan Smith has been talking about child poverty being a result of parental addiction to drugs and alcohol. Does he not know that what he says is pernicious, not to say toxic? If not he is a fool – and worse. But my betting is that he does know – and if he does, the public expression of those opinions marks him as the worst sort of elitist: combined with his power it damns him as a fascist (with eugenical tendencies)... (See also Part 2 of this post.)

Let’s be clear: there are no meaningful statistics to support the strength of his assertions and, having worked with hundreds of seriously deprived children in the poorest parts of London for over twenty years, I can say there isn’t even any great anecdotal support.

[A survey (which I saw in the Huffington Post today, but which is presumably published elsewhere as well): it is the public view, apparently, that the main cause of child poverty is parental addiction to drugs and alcohol. A shortage of money only comes fourth in importance as a cause of child poverty, according to the public’s perception!]

Well, we know that IDS has declared war: this latest wheeze is just an advance of his right flank. I think it now justifies what I’ll be writing in Part 2 of this post, which I had previously decided was beyond the pale...

It’s that public perception which provides the real object lesson for poverty campaigners, however.

We’ve got nowhere. And, in the present climate, we’re going to get nowhere.

That’s not intended to be defeatist: for me, it simply means that a new analysis, some completely new thinking, is required. It just vexes me that I – like so many on this side of the battle lines – do not have the mental resources needed.

(Part 2...) Talking of pernicious, I believe that any mention of the Nazis on the internet, and certainly any parallel drawn with opponents in argument, is regarded as pernicious and odious. Well, IDS has his gloves off, so here goes anyway.

(Don’t stop reading: there is a point to my madness.)

I do from time to time suffer abyssal nightmares, but on the whole such dreams as I have are pure escapism... In one of these, the other day, IDS appeared in a cameo role, resplendent in his glorious, jet-black uniform: SS-Oberstgruppenführer Duncan Smith. Boy, he looked cool. And he looked the part.

And others of that motley crew? Grayling (‘tough love,’ smirk), clearly a bully-boy SA-Mann, of comparatively minor significance. Kreisleiter of an obscure Pomeranian town, perhaps. McVey, she of the parroted speeches? A BDM platoon leader, I suggest, desperate to be noticed but wholly out of her depth. I don’t think Hague is really nicer than the others, but he somehow seems to be, so a captain in the British Army in the BEF in 1940. There’s nice. Cameron? So obviously an overprivileged public-school boy. but not, I’m afraid, a good officer. Alan Clarke? One of those foolish patricians who thought they’d be able to control the Nazis, sorry, Tories. I hesitate to compare Osborne with Hjalmar Schacht, since at least Schacht was good at his job. And Thatcher as Wagner, the great composer of the Herren-Volk legend.

Funnily enough, bar perhaps Thatcher, I can’t think of any of the motley who have the stature (!) of Uncle Adolf.

[Added 3rd Feb: Nick Clegg as Vidkun Quisling?]

Arbeit Macht Frei.

The point:

Odious to draw parallels between our government and the Nazis, almost certainly... but at a quite fundamental level, parallels do exist, however pale, especially between now and the first months of 1933: The outcasts, dictated by ideology; the demonising; the tame media; an ill-informed and submissive public in thrall to a half concealed fear; the steady ratcheting of the pressure; the willingness to let the untermenschen conveniently die...

You don’t believe it? I can assure you that what I write is felt by a growing number of the disabled and the dispossessed in this country. With my parents victims of WWII and distant relatives dead as political prisoners in Hitler’s camps (and in Stalin’s – megalomania is very equal opportunities), I don’t feel that the parallels I’ve drawn are so very exaggerated.

[Added 5th Feb: Medical assessments by doctors (!) who are serving the ideology of the state with no interest in the subjects of those assessments... Not exactly compliant with the Hippocratic Oath in either case... Maybe it's not such a pale parallel after all...]

I don't know how to prepare my appeal...

I’m supposed to be preparing my appeal. I have at least three problems doing so.

Firstly, I don’t actually know what’s wanted.

I’m not living at home at the moment, but staying with a long-time friend who’s basically keeping my show on the road... Unfortunately she lives in a well-off part of the country: the local CAB are very kind and patient, but they have no experience of benefit claimants appealing and have not been able to help; unlike in some boroughs, there’s no council-run welfare office; and legal help is out of the question. So there’s no-one who can help. There’s plenty on the internet, of course – but unfortunately there’s far too much, and it’s contradictory and confusing. Organising what’s there is beyond me: frankly, I suspect it would be beyond me at my most compos mentis, which at the moment is a distant dream. All in all, I’m on my own: which would be fine and dandy if I weren’t dealing with a system which is designed – not to put too fine a point on it – to ensure I fail.

Secondly, and following on from that last sentence... The report on which the DWP’s decision to renege on their obligation to me was based was positively Kafkaesque (or 1984esque, or something).

My understanding is that I’ve got to make the appeals tribunal understand the particular limitations I face: I would have thought I’d done that in my answers to the original questionnaire and in the WCA interview. The DWP’s final report didn’t even bother to take what I’d said out of context: in half of it they simply ignored what I’d told them (they said I could drive a manual shift car without problems – contrary to what I’d written and said: they said I was writing a book – actually yes, I was, but yonks ago. Etc.) and the other half they simply made up (details on or shortly after 7^th February, to give them time to explain - see explanation elsewhere in this blog).

Despite illness, I am (at my best) reasonably if not very articulate. But I don’t know where to begin in this world of shadows which they’ve created.

Which leads to:

Thirdly: When I was in my teens, I learned very precisely that nobody was interested in my mental problems (again, more elsewhere in this blog, I hope). I subsequently and probably consequently, spent a lifetime presenting a front to the world: it wasn’t always successful and eventually it collapsed altogether, but the point is that I lived keeping my problems private.

Suddenly some physiotherapist with no mental health qualifications spends a few minutes with me and I’m expected to break the hard-fought-for habits of a lifetime by describing everything, as if I had a broken leg. Then she scrambles – and largely invents – a narrative (nice post-modern, governmental word, that) upon which decisions affecting my life are based.

So what do I write this time? The same as before, to be ignored again (and probably to be told “it’s not new evidence”)?

Do I trust the tribunal any more than DWP? Perhaps. Do I trust myself to present my case well? Not at all.

I can’t do it. And I'm in pain.

I’m lost for words again.

Hensher is not wrong, but he misses the point.

Philip Hensher wrote an article in the Independent, last Friday, which seems to have earned him a great deal of twittered opprobrium. Well, I must be missing something, because (while for political reasons I’d rather he’d taken a different tack) I can’t see anything unreasonable in what he wrote (with the possible exception of his reference to the bicycling disabled).

There is an element of the anti-ATOS/DWP/WCA campaign which wishes to see no examination – assessment – of claimants at all at. Such a hope (however understandable when the government is being so barbaric right now) is divorced from reality: the state not only has the right but the duty to assure check up on claimants. I can’t see that there’s even a moral case to oppose that right/duty.

As for Hensher’s widely held contention that there those who shouldn’t be on benefits: a part of an assessment system should no doubt be to establish the extent of the matter.

The problem is not with the idea of assessment but with the philosophical basis – the politicised, counter-scientific and plain counter-humanitarian (or do I mean inhumane?) foundation stones - of the assessment process that’s now in place.

The attacks on Hensher are neither kind, nor well-targetted. They do our case no favours at all.

But the point he misses is that positions are becoming so entrenched as they have done even more, including to his cost, however unfairly, as a result of his article because of the cruelty of the system which the government has set up, and the apparently gleeful cruelty with which the government watches its effects.

 -/-

Hensher deserves engagement, because his analysis was incomplete. He does not deserve the abuse he appears to have received. Just as bad: the public attitude to benefits claimants boils down to hearts, minds - and votes. The attacks on Hensher will have cost us those...

The Eternal Jew...

No-one with a grasp of History would deny that it’s a commonplace: dysfunctional government seeks – or, if necessary creates – enemies, external or internal, to misdirect its own people.

North Africa, this week, has been been a gift for Cameron. He has been able to identify yet another group of Muslims as alien, different, ‘the other’... to demonise them, to promise unceasing war... And it sounds so reasonable, doesn’t it, these awful people in Mali, about whom we know nothing...

Poor Duncan Smith: with a Judicial Review and a back-bench debate against him, circumstance this week has given him no-one new (disabled, scroungers or skivers) to assail for now. Never mind: he’s been able to come up with the figure of £5.3 billion which he can claim benefit-frauds have stolen from honest Englishmen. He has no evidence or justification for that figure which will bear a moment’s examination, but why should he care – it sounds somehow possible. So he can go on demonising, and promising unceasing war...

DWP don't reply.

Just for the record:

I've written to DWP a couple of times since I put in my appeal.

No reply to a letter of 17th December (recorded delivered on 20th), so this week I checked by phone. "We won't be replying," they said, although the letter would be forwarded with my appeal (to be heard in minimum 6 months time).

It's not that what I asked is necessarily that important: I'm just not keen on being ignored all the time. (Extracts below.)

What worries me far more is that I sent a much more serious letter in January (which they also say they're not going to answer). This was a grave complaint, with legal implications and having a profound bearing on both my assessment and my appeal - and on me. I suppose I have give them a month to change their mind and reply... Delivered to them 7th January, so full text here after 7th February. It may be my first important contribution to the whole ATOS/DWP/assessment debate.

I hope that Google and the other search engines are beginning to show this blog in their results by then... Years ago, I got my previous blog well up in the ratings very quickly, but I've forgotten how I did it!

My letter included:

1) "I understand that when I requested (the) HCP report, I was entitled to an extension of the deadline for submitting my appeal, which is not discretionary. Can you confirm that this is the case?" (I was given no extra time, so I had just six days to prepare the appeal. I was unwell; I didn't do a good job.)

2) "I recently requested from DWP a copy of ATOS HCP’s report of my face-to face interview...along with copies of paperwork (evidence) given by my carer and myself to HCP. I was promised that I would be sent all of this. I have received HCP’s report, but not the other paperwork. This consisted of a letter from my carer, and some evidence handed over by me to HCP at her request which, not intended to be handed over, had not been copied by me. I should be most grateful if this could be expedited."

3 "I also understand that the interview itself may have been recorded. Again, I should be grateful if this could be confirmed and, if so, I could be advised how to obtain a copy. Some conversation that took place might be subject to interpretation, and I need to have this material when it comes to my appeal." (I have reason to believe that there is a recording, but I can't yet prove it.)

The rest of the letter related directly to the appeal.

Who are these people who don't appeal?

Of those who are assessed 'fit to work' by ATOS/DWP, about 40% appeal.

I can understand that some people can't cope with, or simply face, the process of appeal - I nearly bottled it myself. And there are probably a few who accept that the findings are correct (tho' I can't think why - else why did they apply in the first place?)

But still, 60% don't appeal??? Who are all these people who go through the assessment process (believe me, a humiliating and unpleasant experience) and then just drop out when they're rejected by a process which they must know is superficial.

I truly don't understand.

Money is far from the only reason for appealing.

So I’m appealing against my claim for benefits being rejected.

This whole business started for me in June last year. I had a call from DWP today. My appeal will probably be heard in July/August/September this year.

Let’s just assume that I’m as ill as I say I am, subject to ‘moderately severe’ and often ‘severe’ depression: 15 months kept hanging around, you might agree, is not just intolerable but actively cruel.

Obviously, the most immediate issue is money. (Last week, I cracked a tooth, which I do quite often, since I grind my teeth badly in my sleep. Do I pay for tooth, food or heating? At the moment, I can go for two out of the three.)

But subsistence is not the only reason for my appeal. In the long term it may not even be the most important.

Reasons to fight:

1. I need the money. Of course.

2. A matter of principle. I have a contract with the government, and I did my part for three decades. Now they’re reneging.

3. Anger. When I was a child, my condition was treated negligently – and dismissed – even though I was in real trouble by the time I was 15. [The nearest I got to a diagnosis was to be told – out of the blue and on no basis - that I suffered from a masturbation complex: half a century on, I’m still reduced to gibbering fury by that...] As recently as 1990 I was told by a GP that there was no such thing as depression, and by another to ‘pull myself together’. In recent years, at last, I started to get the support I desperately needed.

The trouble is that I thought attitudes to mental health conditions had changed...

4. One of the problems with being ill is that I find it very difficult to focus. There is a number 4, but while writing the first three I’ve completely forgotten what it is. I’ll fill it in if it comes back to me. How in tarnation I’m meant to organise my appeal, I have no idea.

There’s a number 5, too: that, before all this started, I was taking active steps to get myself off benefits under my own steam, and DWP has squashed that completely. I want to write at length about this, but when I’m a bit less ill, so please ignore it for now.

Now DWP, on the basis of a short interview by a physiotherapist (why not an architect, or a professor of ancient languages?), has told me that there’s nothing wrong with me – in almost so many words that I’m lying. I am back to where I was at 15, treated like a waster. And I can’t – and won’t – forgive them for it.

-/-

It may be that Duncan Smith believes that I should be disposed of... [Funnily enough, I would accept that viewpoint as rational, if a bit National Socialist.. At least I could fight it.] He is, after all, doing everything to encompass my death. But while he and his would be far too cowardly to come out and say it, I am willing to stake what little honour I have left that there are MPs who secretly - or not so secretly - believe exactly that.

To be continued.

The Robber Baron MPs are totally laid back. Why not? Who’s to stop them?

My posting on this can join the (no doubt already extensive) parade... So what? The subject deserves repeating...

A fair adjustment of MPs’ salaries is an increase of £30,000 a year, says Parliament. And: A fair adjustment of Police salaries is a reduction of £4,000 a year, says the same parliament in the same month. (An instructive use of the word “fair”, I guess.)

While I find it a relief to know that the Elect seem to be attacking everybody outside their own little circle (and not just >>me<<), I suggest that this hubris really does beg a question.

Have they lost it completely, or do they know that they can thumb their noses at us with impunity? (Sadly, I suspect it’s the latter and that the revolutionary Marxists, the SWP, or anyone else who still believes that the People of Britain will answer to their call are finally being taught the lesson that it will never happen, whatever the Heaven-Born may on a whim decide to do.)

It has to be one or the other of those explanations (unless the MPs have a wager going on what they can get away with). Either they’re quite mad or they’re utterly, out-of-control, rapacious.

Some thoughts, before words fail me:

1. If I remember right: 25 years ago, when the  quality and/or quantity of teachers was becoming unacceptable (even to Thatcher’s mob – and she really did loath teachers with a passion), a (commission?) found that teacher’s pay was historically low, and out of step with the market. An increase of £2,000 pa was suggested in order to attract and retain staff, and restore a slightly more reasonable standard of living to teachers. A tory line at the time was (and I quote), “What would a teacher do with an extra £2,000?” The question was asked with sincerity and bewilderment.

2. It has been standard thinking for the past thirty years that the wealthy will be encouraged to work harder by being given more money – the carrot; but that the great unwashed work better threatened with the stick. But you all realised that, long ago...

3. We know where the media stand, of course. The Daily Mail produced the headline “Now we really are all in it together” over the explanation that an extra quarter of a million or so people would be entering the 40% tax bracket in the near future. (Remember, the 40% is only a marginal rate.) About 1% of the working population, and those amongst the wealthiest, mostly faced with a simple fall in net income less than 1%. (As opposed to over half of the ordinary working population + those on many benefits, who are facing a compound fall of about 1.5%. And that's ignoring their greater hurt from particular the way prices are rising).

Even the Independent referred to the poorest and the richest as being hardest hit. They went on to quote figures – the poorest will lose about £5 pw (is that all????), the richest will lose about £8 pw. I assume, and hope, that they were being ironic.

-/-

Incidentally: while I never achieved the national average wage, I paid a 40% (marginal) tax rate for years. It was part of the contract imposed on me by the state (not that I complained... much...). Now that I need the state's help, the state has reneged. 

I'm beginning to remember ancestors killed at Culloden and others hanged at Clonmel (and still others...). I'm kept in my place now solely by threat.

-/-

Words have failed me.

ATOS is more effective than Road Traffic Accidents - if you want to kill people.

If you live in the UK, you have about 1 chance in 20,000 of being killed in a road traffic accident in 12 months. Obviously, if you travel by vehicle, the chance is rather greater – perhaps, at worst, about 1 in 17,000 on average.

If you are disabled in any way and are called to an ATOS/DWP ‘medical’ assessment, it seems that you are at risk of becoming an ‘excess death’ statistic in that context, too. Presumably the risk is quantifiable, but it seems that DWP figures are rather harder to find than RTA.

Based on the 25 or so names on Callum’s list (callumslist.org), which doesn’t pretend to be exhaustive, your odds of suffering a death connected with your assessment/appeal process (by suicide or by illness aggravated by the process) would appear to be of the same order of magnitude as of dying by RTA.

However, the figures offered by various groups (mostly, by the nature of things, groups opposed to the ATOS/DWP process) vary considerably, ranging up to scarcely credible figures well in excess of 70 a week.

Calculating the odds, very crudely, I have come up with an estimate in the order of 1 in 4,000. This is based on findings reportedly made by the Church Times (not, I would have thought, a disreputable organ), which I have (nevertheless) reduced massively (up to 10x) to allow for some worthily-meant exaggeration on their part, along with evidence from other more conservative sources. It is very much an at best figure...

So, the rate of excess deaths related to ATOS/DWP is at least four times greater than the national rate of excess deaths due to RTAs.

-/-

Cameron has admitted to a couple of ‘regrettable’ deaths.

Duncan Smith and Grayling have not expressed any interest, at least not observed by this interested follower of the news.

McVey apparently doesn’t hear what’s said to her, since her response to reports of deaths, so far as I’ve seen, has been to read out scripts prepared beforehand with no reference to the death she’s just been told about – nor to any other.

Clegg seems to have remained, to all intents and purposes, silent.

-/-

I don’t actually know how many deaths have resulted from, for example, suicides by people pushed beyond hope by the benefits assessment system. It may be a handful or it may be hundreds.

What does interest me is that coroners’ courts, GPs, charities and reputable independent organisations have shown disquiet at the numbers involved, that those numbers may well be occurring at a greater rate than RTA or superbug deaths, or accidents at work, and the government has admitted absolutely no interest in investigating.

Even at the height of the plague of 1665, the government tried to keep a record of the cause of every death in the country (a fact which always struck me as quite extraordinarily impressive). 350 years later, the government itself may be causing tens, hundreds or even thousands of deaths each year by one single instrument, and . yet . will . not . investigate.

-/-

My whole case may be completely unfounded or miscalculated*. I’m open to correction.

*But I don’t think so!

Life goes on...

Just because your life seems to have been taken over by illness and trying to keep hold of your benefits - for which you worked hard most of your life and to which you had thought you were entitled etc etc - and

Just because you're using your computer to try to prepare an appeal (and self-administer a not-very-effective occupational therapy by writing a blog about it)...

It doesn't mean that Microsoft won't step in and add their tuppence-worth.

'Update Windows', they told me as they do from time to time; 'Critical, security issues blah blah blah.'

So I did.

Now the computer won't start up properly, restore point no longer works, 'save' no longer works on a whole lot of programmes. I'm scared to look further. And I just don't have the mental resources to work through the problems (yet again, because this is far from the first time). And, of course, because I no longer have any self-confidence, I'm asking if it's ALL MY FAULT...

-/-

The time is coming for me to make the decision: do I start getting this blog shown on search engines? Does it have anything to offer that isn't in dozens if not hundreds of blogs already?

Part of my problem is that I'm actually a very private person. I don't want to go putting myself and my problems about to total strangers... on one hand I believe that every one of us has a responsibility to go on record... on the other, I'm not sure how many people actually give a damn...

One thing is for sure. Senior tories are repeatedly on record as saying the class war is over.

Why, then, are they still fighting it? Do they really hate the most vulnerable that much?

(It is clear to me that a lot of what's going on has very little to do with money and a lot to do with a very ancient ideology which would not object to seeing a return of the workhouse. I wouldn't bet that eugenics don't come into it somewhere, either.)

Is it beholden on me to fight back?

I won't win, I know that. But do have to I fight?


By the way: the time of posting shown at the bottom of each of mine seems to be way off. Rocky Mountain Time? I'm GMT - it's just after 11 am.

Forsworn.

I wish I knew how to express this in more portentous language...

Apart from Boy Scout promises to honour God and the Queen, and suchlike, I've sworn two sacred oaths of loyalty in my time, one in uniform and one as a civvie.

To the Queen and, as I recall, her heirs and successors, and to her government and duly appointed ministers. Or words to that effect.

[Mind you, aged about 15, I also had to swear not to commit fornication (when I was apprenticed to a city guild)...]

The young man I was when I swore those oaths of loyalty took them seriously: I regarded them as binding. Even when I was older/more cynical, and the time came when I had second thoughts, I continued to regard myself as honour-bound.

It's impossible not to face the fact that sometimes the government commits criminal acts, against the laws of our own country as well as international law. To my shame, however, it was not until Iraq, in 2003, that I realised that I must, and could only, regard my oath as conditional.

-/-

For a moment, I don't ask you to understand why I should now feel so strongly about the present government's attack on so many of the most vulnerable. Unless you've been at the receiving end of it yourself, there's no reason why you should. I will say this, however: it's only partly about the money - a great deal has to do with the contract which I always believed the government would, at least within limits, respect. (I don't why I should have believed that; there's very little history of them, for example, respecting their contract with our servicemen - more of that anon, perhaps.)

However, I will ask you to respect my view that it is so cruel, and so calculated, that:

Today I tore up, in my own mind, any and all obligation that I have felt stemming from those long ago oaths.

And I am certain of this. It is not I who reneged, but them.

Good Officers (Continued...)

One of the illusions that I was able to foster as I grew up, in the 1950s and 60s, was that (on the whole) our MPs knew what it meant to be a 'good officer'.

Many of them had been officers in the services, mostly during WWII - which produced the most politically educated officer class in British history. On the whole, they understood the obligations of their commissions in the forces, and brought that understanding with them into Parliament.

[This is not for a moment to say that everything was fine and dandy - you have only to remember Suez to know that that wasn't the case; but...]

And there was a sense of obligation towards the weakest and poorest in society. Not always sensitive. Not always competent. Often bureaucratic. Often patronising.  But it was there.

I knew that it was there then, and I know that it isn't now.

The question is, can I put a finger on it? I'll set aside the benefit cuts and the efforts to stop benefits altogether for so many people - I'm too deep in those issues to be objective.

And I'll set aside the increasingly shaky future offered by pensions, private and state - with the way they were set up, the way they were mangled by politicians (that means you in particular, Mr. Brown) and asset stripping management, and the way the economy is so fraught, the issue of pensions is just too complex for the thesis I'm trying to put right now.

But consider the following. At this time of increasing financial pressure on the poorest (say 10 million), which started before 2008, the government legalises loan sharks, so that the poorest are paying interest rates of 4,000% plus without meaningful legal protection. How does the endless promotion of loans which would have the lenders in jail in most countries show good officership? It doesn't.

Similarly, the government has not only legalised betting, but has has both directly and implicitly encouraged its spread - while at the same time MPs from Oxfordshire say it must be the fault of the feckless poor/northerners, because there are no betting shops in their constituencies. (I do hope I don't need to explain how unrestrained gambling opportunities will always hit the poorest communities, without any great sin on their part...) How does the endless promotion of gambling on our televisions show good officership? It doesn't.

Pay freezes... but not on those at the top of the pile...

Privatisation - schools, trains, NHS, energy, not because it leads to greater efficiency (there is no scientific evidence of that - efficiency is a matter of management, not of profit: state-owned British Airways and London Transport and privately owned aircraft builders were efficient; state owned coal and privately owned car makers were not, and in each case it was because of management) but for ideological reasons. Fine, except that the fares and fees paid by the poorest across a whole range of fundamental services are going not to the services involved but to the shareholders.

Privatisation hits the poor. Every time.

I may be utterly wrong here, but have you seen any assessment by government of the impact of privatisation on the poorer half of our population? I haven't.

Non jobs, under-employment, minimum wage, NEETS, etc., etc., but MPs are still seriously talking about increasing their own pay by £30,000 pa.

I'm beginning to make my point, but...

I'm doing it again - losing track of my own arguments. I'll come back to this.

Bah Humbug.

Once again, my apologies to those who already have a much deeper understanding than I have demonstrated.

The benefits cap - a damned lie or a statistic?

The forthcoming benefits cap (1% p.a.) doesn't really affect me; I'm probably not getting any benefits at all for the next year, and after that I'm on a decimated pension.

But stopping benefits, capping them, what have you, it's all part and parcel of what's going on... so I do have an interest.

The ministers' position is that the benefits that are to be capped have risen faster than inflation over the past five years. It's transparently a fix, but the blue rinse brigade, the Daily Mail and 14 millions readers (+ whoever else) have leapt on that statistic, and they applaud.

It's on a par with saying that because the daytime temperature reached 38C one day in 1976, lower temperatures in 2012 prove that there's no global warming. You can always take an extreme position in the past and thereby fudge the present: that's why a statistic is so much more toxic that a simple damned lie.

When I came onto the job market over 40 years ago, I was lucky in that I never needed the dole (unemployment benefit). But some of my friends did. £4.50 a week it was. In today's terms, even by the government's rather conservative calculation, about £140 per week.

*Prices I happen to remember from that time:

Beer, 7p per pint (I was a student) - say £2.25 now;   potatoes, 5p for 7lbs - say 20p per lb now;
rent (on the low side) for a three bedroom flat in West Kensington, £4 pw - say £1.20 now.
Cigerettes, 15p (£4.70) for 20;                                  petrol, 15p per gallon - £1 per litre now.
Good 3-course lunch in the cafe in Gloucester road by Karnak's, where I worked for a while: 17.5p.
Paperback novels, around 12.5p

The MPs are asking for another £30,000 a year on top of what they're getting at the moment. They may well deserve every penny (no sarcasm implied or intended). But to ask for it in the same week as they lie about and cut the little that the poorest get - who often work just as hard - is mind boggling.

Who's doing this to me?

I’m in the middle of a nightmare. I’m being treated not just negligently but derisively by a group of people (Cameron, McVey, etc.) who long ago gave us reason to hold them in contempt; and I don’t think I can be faulted if I admit that I don’t like it.

[Summary. In a blog I was trying to run five years ago, well before he became Prime Minister, I said that Cameron was not going to be (as still used to be said when I was in uniform) ‘a good hofficah’. (Go to www.plagueyear.com, dormant but still just about in existence.) If you’ve ever served, you will know that the other ranks can tell...  often instantly... ‘Not a good hofficah’ was one who didn’t understand the special relationship between a proper officer and those beneath him.]

It may help if explain that I’m nearly 64. My age gives me a particular perspective, which I realise is different from that of younger people around me; simply, I grew up in a different world.

There may be no point in looking for someone to blame for what’s happening to me; but it’s only human nature to do so. But, actually, I don’t blame Cameron or his motley crew: they are, if truth be told, only creatures, fronting something much deeper and rather nastier. I don’t even blame the Lib Dems – the economic liberals of whom, like Clegg, have long been closet tories - although Beveridge Liberals, if there are any left, should be hiding their heads in shame at their party’s collaboration

The ‘nastier’ is the Old Tory spirit which has plagued our Parliament for the best part of 300 years, which resisted inter alia the reform bills, and the abolition of slavery, and home rule for India and Ireland and so on. 

Change of direction, just for a moment... National economic ‘success’ (never mind for a moment its pros and cons) comes in one of three ways –

            1) Solid growth, based on long term investment, planning, etc., etc.

                        Steady, but slow – decades or even centuries.

            2) Boom... oh so attractive, massive fortunes made, etc, etc,

And so often based on the parasitic devouring of the inherent structures and wealth that had been built up by previous solid growth (see 1 above). A few years, decades at most, but glorious while it lasts. For a few people. Or

3) Serendipity (Norway and North Sea gas, Brazil and resources) or inverted serendipity (Germany and Japan after WWII, or China and India, although this requires a disciplined and educated workforce.).

Sometimes you get more than one of these at a time: the British Industrial revolution (which was 1 and 2) built massive fortunes for a few by devouring the heart of our nations – so that the working population of 1900 ate less well, worked longer and harder, enjoyed less leisure and poorer health, died younger, and had a more miserable time generally than the English peasantry of 1500; but, at the same time, new structures were put in place that created the wealthier Britain that followed.

Return to the core issue. The Thatch-Blair boom. Glorious profits to be made, for a while... at the expense of the majority (and if you hold home ownership as the argument against my thesis, boy are you deluded). Manufacturing gone; skilled employment decimated; national assets sold at a loss; infrastructure owned not just by other nations but often by other governments; etc. The boom of the last 30 years has been parasitic, self-devouring, with nothing put in its place. (I think we’re following the route which Spain followed 400 years ago.)

And even our chance at serendipity (North Sea Oil) thrown away (like Spanish gold). So that the rich could enjoy some tax breaks. Which are already frittered away.

The trouble is that the parasitic boom seems to the dazzled to burn so much more brightly than the hard slog of steady growth... and there are always those who think the rest of us can go hang so long as they get a bit of it.

Worse.

It’s not usual for a government to connive at ripping the heart out of its own country.

And who’s paying? The poorest and weakest. While the richest are still, for a while, enjoying the boom. T’was ever thus.

Two different arguments going at once here, really. So be it.

So, another marginal comment; why not! People talk about Thatcher (criticism, for those who criticised her) as having the values of a grocer. But she didn’t: she had very little understanding of the values of a grocer. Grocers don’t sell off the goods on their shelves for pennies for a quick profit... (well, there are sales, of course...) BUT they certainly don’t then go and sell off the whole shop cheap. However, that’s exactly what Thatcherism did.

Thatcherism, but not Thatcher. She, too, was the creature – ambitious but still a creature – of that deep toryism. More of a Chernenko than an Andropov. So I don’t really blame Thatcher, either. (Although, in passing: Why was Thatcher too young to serve in WWII when my Mum, who was younger, could command an Ack-Ack battery in London? Just a thought.)

The one I do blame is Brown. That man, who could have stopped the rot, combined economic incompetence with personal arrogance to a quite awesome degree. ‘The end of boom and bust’!

Supremely ironic, really, that Brown, who plotted to help the poorest, is largely responsible for what’s happening to them (me!) now.

So what am I saying? It is that we have enjoyed (!) a boom for a few years that has burned up centuries of our future, that most of us were fooled by the appearance of a prosperity that didn’t really exist. Now the crunch has come (why, oh why, didn’t Brown read the Bible, 7 years of plenty followed by 7 years of famine and all that?) and we’re beginning to pay the price (only beginning – more and more people are going to be sucked into ‘austerity’ and it won’t end). I’m paying the price, as the state reneges on the agreement by which I paid taxes (without complaint, at a level which is now unacceptable to the richest) - in return for the promise that I would be looked after should the time come when I needed it. Foolish man that I was.

I think my point is made, somewhere in all that. I apologise for the lack of polish and finish – I really do suffer from depression and the exhaustion that goes with it, and I haven’t the mental resources to give you quite the organised arguments you deserve... though I will try to tidy this posting up, if better health permits, at some point in the future.

I really don’t know if I’ve written sense. Part of the problem with depression – my intellect’s shot... But I do know that the point of my argument is sound...

Something to think about, anyway; I hope. (Apologies to those who were there long ago – although I have to ask why you haven’t been kicking up a more of a fuss recently.)

Posted unedited and therefore with apologies. But please comment.