Tag Archives: Opinion

Cameron’s workers v shirkers scam has at last exposed the Tory law of benefit cuts

I think we have been desensitised as a nation or is it perhaps just good old fashioned brain washing?  Whilst we continue to demonise people for what is often essentially bad luck like illness infirmity, sudden redundancy’s  that leave people long term unemployed.

Why also is there so much stress on work above  everything else? We work to live rather than live to work unless we are lucky enough to have a vocation of course. The fallacy that  can all work our way out of any hardships is simply not the case.  the universe doesn’t do equal opportunities, but we as human beings can control some aspects and even things up. 


Powered by Guardian.co.ukThis article titled “Cameron’s workers v shirkers scam has at last exposed the Tory law of benefit cuts” was written by Aditya Chakrabortty, for The Guardian on Tuesday 31st March 2015 05.00 UTC

It was the raw early days of the coalition, and one of David Cameron’s lieutenants was giving a frank answer to my blunt question: what would it take for the government to pull back on its planned cuts? You didn’t need a Mensa membership to see that this topic would define the next five years.

On that sunny autumn afternoon, the newspapers were full of students besieging Conservative central office, but Cameron’s aide coolly judged that they’d blown it by picking the wrong target. Had they swarmed on Lib Dem HQ “that would really have put Clegg under pressure”. So what would change Tory minds? “The crunch will come when the Mail puts on its front page pictures of some Iraq war veteran in a wheelchair who’s lost his disability benefits.”

That ugly logic has underpinned this government. Cameron and Nick Clegg have justified social security cuts by reciting a litany of false oppositions. Strivers v skivers. Workers v shirkers. The bedroom tax, the arbitrary removal of benefits from those infringing some bureaucratic small print, the judging of sick people as fit for work£17bn of cutbacks have been sold by ministers, and bought by the public, as falling on the undeserving poor: the mickey-takers on a gigantic, taxpayer-funded bed-in.

What my contact foresaw back in 2010 was that if this political link were ever broken, and money seen to be taken from the plainly deserving, the central plank of austerity would snap in two. However, that Mail front page has never appeared, and yesterday Cameron was able to warn of Labour “chaos … higher taxes for every working family to pay for more welfare”. Even so, the Law of Welfare Cuts has just taken two shattering blows.

The first was delivered by the Conservatives themselves, in the form of a leaked paper discussing options to make more benefit cuts. Commissioned by the Tories, written up by senior civil servants and already under discussion by ministers, the proposals include taking allowances from about 40% of carers for the sick; the scrapping of government compensation for those who’ve suffered industrial injuries; and the taxing of disability benefits.

The Conservatives have tried to stamp all over this story, and with excellent reason. Where’s the justice in taking cash off someone who’s mangled an arm on a construction site, or who’s had to cut back on work to look after a sick child? These savings manifestly break the coalition law of welfare cuts: that they must be seen to be fair.

And they don’t even save that much money. As with so many “reforms” since 2010, these reductions would turn people’s lives upside down, plunge some into debt and tear families apart – and in some cases raise little more than loose change. It may be that we have passed the high tide of public support for cuts in social security – and it would be for exactly the reason predicted by that Conservative aide in 2010. The Tories have set a goal of cutting another £12bn a year from welfare by April 2017. This target is so stupidly implausible that it will force any future government led by Cameron into ever more manifestly unjust benefit cuts. That fictional divide between deserving and undeserving poor may be on the verge of collapse.

How much of a fiction that divide really is can be seen in a new report published by academics at the LSE. Is Welfare Reform Working? is based on two rounds of interviews, first in 2013 and again in 2014, with 200 people who live in the south-west of England, from Plymouth to Bath to just outside Chippenham – where Cameron launched his election campaign yesterday.

In my years writing on this subject, I have read scores of reports and books on welfare reform – but I’ve never seen anything like this. Here are hundreds of people, all living at the sharp end of austerity. Every interviewee is a social-housing tenant of working age, which makes them the number one target of this government. Last September Iain Duncan Smith, in an interview with the Express headlined “We are breaking up Shameless housing estates”, boasted: “We’re making real progress into that stubborn part of the out-of-work group who are in housing estates …” The work and pensions secretary was talking about exactly the LSE interviewees – and this report allows them the right of reply: the LSE authors let their subjects do the talking.

The first thing to come screaming out of the report is how many of the interviewees didn’t plan to be out of work. They’ve got a disability, or they were caring for children or a sick parent, or they were just laid off. You meet Mrs Spencer, who spent seven years out of the jobs market to nurse her daughter through cancer. The daughter died two months ago and the last of their savings went on her funeral. Now her husband has been made redundant after 27 years of work. He’s 59 and has only one eye.

Well over half the respondents claim to be coping. This sounds like good news – until you discover what they mean by that. Getting by means falling behind on rent or into debt; managing means eating less or going without heat. “I’ve got a dog and I’ve got to make sure he’s OK,” one says cheerfully. “If need be I’ll eat his biscuits.”

Re-read that sentence, remembering that you and he live in one of the richest societies on the planet.

How has the government helped? The bedroom tax “is a tax on my disability”, according to one interviewee who used his second bedroom to take oxygen. Respondents hate the jobcentre, which just holds up ever higher hoops to jump through – or else it sanctions them. Another interviewee tells of how his sanction meant that he lost his home, and now sleeps on a sister’s couch.

These people represent a society that has been cut adrift by politicians of all parties: a society that will go unaddressed by the election campaign, and uncourted by any major party. And yet these people talk just like you and me; they just have worse stories to tell.

In that same Express interview, Duncan Smith claimed that he had moved the Shameless estate-dwellers from a “dependency culture” to independence. Here is a different version of events from one of the LSE interviewees: “My best friend committed suicide in March – she went through … relentless reassessments, and found the forms very confusing. She was disabled but they were questioning her over and over again. DWP hounded her for information. It’s a horrible feeling, knowing that your friend was pushed over the edge like that. I’m pretty certain that if these welfare reform changes weren’t going on, I’d still have her with me.”

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The biggest privatisation in NHS history: why we had to blow the whistle

Another reason why we should all keep our eye on the ball


Powered by Guardian.co.ukThis article titled “The biggest privatisation in NHS history: why we had to blow the whistle” was written by Kate Godfrey, for theguardian.com on Monday 16th March 2015 12.16 UTC

I’m not a journalist, but as of this morning I know what it feels like to be part of the biggest leak in NHS history.

Published on openDemocracy, the memorandum of information for the £700m sell-off of Staffordshire cancer services is now available for the 800,000 directly affected and 3 million indirectly affected patients to read online.

That document, together with others relating to the joint £1.2bn privatisation of cancer and end-of-life services in Staffordshire, was sent to me. They are commercially confidential, secret agreements that will rebuild NHS services for hundreds of thousands of people, but are for the eyes of the bidding companies only.

Not only is this the first billion-pound NHS privatisation, it is the first time that it has been deemed acceptable to put care designed to meet the needs of our most vulnerable patients on sale.

Uniquely for a privatisation on anything of this scale, there has been no public consultation, simply a series of weak “engagement” events led by paid “patient champions”. For the past year unpaid patients have not been able to have their say. Thanks to the brave person who shared the documents, now they can.

The background is this: Staffordshire commissioners want to hand the management of all care for cancer and end-of-life patients to a private company, a “prime provider” that will take responsibility for the delivery of care, subcontracting and performance management.

There are lots of firsts here. It is the first time that cancer or end-of-life care has been contracted out. The first use of the prime provider model on anything like this scale. The first privatisation without formal consultation. The first huge international NHS contract that could fall under TTIP. Transfer these services out of the NHS now, and we may never get them back.

The leading bidders are all US private healthcare companies, some of them implicated in failures of care elsewhere. One is Optum, the US brand facing allegations over the American hospice-packing scandal. (Optum is defending itself against the allegations.) It is the first time that the commissioning responsibility held by local clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) – the right to spend a billion pounds on behalf of the NHS – will simply be gifted to a private company.

And it looks like it will be a private company. There are clauses in the published document that simply have no place in a project that will stay within the NHS. Bidders are encouraged to explore a “VAT efficient model”. Not only is this disturbing in its own right, but NHS bodies don’t pay VAT. This is a strange level of detail to find in a document that is otherwise so imprecise.

There is no plan here, no benchmarks against which a bidder could be selected; just a hope that the shape of the contract will resolve itself as bidders make their own suggestions and time goes on.

To me, it looks as though local commissioners simply got bored, and decided they didn’t want to be responsible for cancer care any more. To the health expert John Lister, it looks worse. He says the contract is “no more than a blank cheque for whichever private firm is the most ruthlessly willing to cut services to shore up their own profits”.

The winning bidder will be free to decommission or disinvest as they like – cutting contracts with local hospices, therapeutic providers or even frontline healthcare such as radiotherapy and surgery. The bidder could simply replace them, delivering services such as radiotherapy themselves, further fragmenting the services that mean most to patients. Or they could just squeeze existing contracts. No payment structure is specified. Bidding companies can decide for themselves what they are worth, as long as their fees are self-funding within the current budget. Based on similar health privatisation contracts, £100m in fees is the minimum that a private provider will accept. This money will be diverted straight from funds currently spent on frontline care.

Those hospices and providers will be told that they can still provide care – it just has to be for 20% less, with the remainder meeting the fees of the winning bidder. They might just reduce costs, or they might cut services that cancer patients depend on. It is the postcode lottery written into an NHS contract.

The question the document doesn’t even try to answer is why. Commissioners’ own figures show cancer care in Staffordshire to be above national average. Only one of the four CCGs backing the change list cancer as an area where they could make significant improvement. There is no clear case for change, but there is an opportunity.

Time and time again we have seen Staffordshire used as the proving ground for the 2012 Health and Social Care Act. Cancer and end-of-life privatisation has been introduced here because it was politically convenient. Our history is used against us; our patients pay the price again.

Not only was there no formal consultation, but local patients were meant to get no say on this contract at all. The original plan was to sign the deal in March – before people could have their say at the polls. Labour has said it will not let the project go ahead.

The campaign group I work with – Cancer Not For Profit – fought for more time. When the awarding of the contract was put back until June, we thought that we had won a small victory.

Our source heard differently. The project wasn’t delayed, they were told, but simply hushed up. The political implications of pushing through the biggest privatisation in NHS history two months before a general election were too serious. It had to move forward with speed, and if the contract lacked benchmarks or risk management, forget it. It could all be resolved later. (It is the essence of contract law that weaknesses are generally not resolved later.) The only thing being delayed until after May was the announcement, which would now be made in June. And then a gamble that a new government couldn’t go back on a contract already awarded.

“I’m going to publish,” I told the source. “Tell me if you don’t want me to publish.” I never heard from them again.

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Don’t blame the intelligence agencies for jihadism

I can’t really relate to anything thats going on with what’s called radical Islam. Any more than I  could relate to any other fundamental religious group. Its just so far  beyond my way of thinking about other human beings, that I simply can’t get a handle on it all. 

The key thing seems to to be that someone quite ordinary turns a corner and steps over a line. Someone likely to have easily exploitable human weakness that can be molded in to a suitable image and form to do the work of others whilst believing that its of their own free will.  


Powered by Guardian.co.ukThis article titled “Don’t blame the intelligence agencies for jihadism” was written by Matthew d’Ancona, for The Guardian on Sunday 1st March 2015 19.28 UTC

We have refined our collective critique of Big Brother with the precision of picky consumers rather than principled citizens. Most of the time we don’t want BB around and complain of his intrusions, real or imagined. But when things go wrong – when a young Londoner suddenly becomes a global figurehead of murderous Islamism, for instance – we resent the state even more. To put it plainly: the only thing we object to more strenuously than MI5 taking action is MI5 failing to do so.

This is the paradox that has been evident once again since the naming of “Jihadi John” as Mohammed Emwazi. It is a commonplace to argue that the intelligence agencies in the country are powerful (and power-hungry) to an extent that threatens the fibre of democratic society. Yet good old doublethink enables such a claim to coexist with the charge that the security service was somehow responsible for Emwazi’s actions by its sins of commission (trying to recruit him) and omission (letting him “slip the net” and flee to Syria).

Over the weekend politicians rushed towards the controversy, megaphones in hand. David Davis, a big beast whose talents would have been better deployed as part of the coalition, made the baffling claim in these pages that the spooks settle for a “disruption and management” strategy when they and their colleagues in the police and CPS should be pursuing and prosecuting Islamic extremists.

Would that such a simple choice were available. The problem facing any intelligence agency is precisely that the evidence required to mount a prosecution is so often lacking. It follows that a suite of counterterrorist powers must be made available to such agencies by parliament and, quite rightly, subjected to regular review and structures of accountability. But what powers, applied where, and with what degree of severity?

The coalition is at present split over the ban on extremist speakers at universities. Vince Cable, who is responsible for higher education, wants only explicit incitement to terrorism to be prohibited in the guidelines; Theresa May seeks a broader definition. Both cabinet ministers, please note, are potential leaders of their respective parties: with only 66 days to go before the general election, everything they say, or allow to be known, is entangled with these ambitions.

David Cameron’s government, of course, has already replaced Labour’s control orders with Tpims – terrorism prevention and investigation measures – which have proved to be only a couple of notches up from useless. To date, two militants have escaped this weak system and absconded to Somalia.

Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, was quite right to argue on The Andrew Marr Show that the power of relocation, which removed the terror suspect from his geographic network, should be restored. But what will parliament actually do when it considers the question, almost certainly after the election? And will there be a stable government to lead opinion at Westminster?

To delve into such questions, one must remember that politicians, like generals, are usually fighting the last war. In the long years of opposition, many Tories came to regard the counterterrorist measures proposed by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown as a subcategory of New Labour authoritarianism rather than a legitimate response to the post-9/11 threat. The Conservative party postured as “hard-nosed defenders of freedom”, which is up there with “predistribution” in the annals of political nonsense. For decades the Tories had been the party of security and law and order. Yet faced with Big Blair and Even Bigger Brown, many of them embraced a retro-libertarianism that owed more to Magna Carta than Shami Chakrabarti.

This surge of “Runnymede Conservatism” reached its apogee in Davis’s resignation as MP for Haltemprice and Howden in 2008, in protest at Brown’s plan to extend the limit for pre-charge detention of terror suspects to 42 days. This strand of contemporary Toryism also helped to cement the coalition. As the Cameron-Clegg programme for government put it: “The [coalition] believes that the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused and eroded fundamental human freedoms and historic civil liberties.”

The pieties of 2010 have been eroded by the experience of office. As home secretary, May has found herself thwarted by loopholes – notably when she sought to deport Abu Qatada – rather than reining in the supposedly tyrannous state created by New Labour. To understand the Conservative urge to renegotiate Britain’s position in Europe and the status of the European Convention on Human Rights look no further than ministers’ exasperation over the pursuit of terror suspects and the limitations imposed by Brussels and Strasbourg.

The intelligence agencies themselves are constrained by a legal web, and rightly so. No less inevitably, they have limited resources.

There is a weekly meeting at MI5 at which senior officers discuss which “persons of interest” are to be monitored intensively, round the clock. There are several thousand such people – Emwazi was one – but only a few can be subjected to round-the-clock surveillance. How could it be otherwise?

When we speak of suspects “slipping the net”, we imply counterterrorist agencies can intercept every such jihadi on his way to commit violence, every such plot to spill blood at home or abroad. Given the odds, it is frankly remarkable any are stopped at all.

It cannot be stated too often: contemporary jihadis are not like the IRA, or the UDA or Eta. They exploit what the greatest guide to the post-9/11 world, Philip Bobbitt, calls the “unique vulnerabilities of globalised, network market states” and a “connectivity that allows a cascading series of vulnerabilities to be exploited”.

Today’s Islamist militants do not operate within a cellular hierarchy, but more closely resemble local holders of a global franchise. They are self-starters, morphing capriciously from one role to another (the Madrid bombers were essentially book-keepers who became suddenly ambitious). Mohammad Sidique Khan, the presumed leader of the 7/7 plot, had indeed come to MI5’s attention a year earlier, in Operation Crevice. Yet, in 2004, he was still a relatively peripheral figure.

What made Emwazi become what he has become, able to do what he has done? What we call “radicalisation” – the walk from one side of the flaming bridge to the other – often occurs in a very short space of time, for reasons that resist pat psychological speculation: to know the reasons why would be to decode the secrets of the soul. Against such mysteries it is not the power of the state that is truly frightening, but its weakness.

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