More Than 17,000 People Have Died While Waiting To Hear Whether Their Claim For Disability Benefit Had Been Successful

Life Has Been Made Hell For Those Who Least Deserve It.

Who could have failed to be angry looking at the photo of the skeletal 64-year-old Stephen Smith who, despite having multiple debilitating illnesses, weighing six stone, and barely able to walk, was denied benefits by this Government and deemed fit for work.
It was only when he went for free advice at the CASA community centre in Liverpool, where volunteer advisers appealed and won his case, that he received the benefits that kept him alive.

There was a typically rabid response from the right in this country to Tusk’s remarks about those who sold Brexit without a trace of a plan deserving a place in hell. But many of us agree with him.
Because they are the dangerous ideologues behind the three years of political paralysis that has made life hell for those who least deserve it.
( Brian Reade, 08.02.2019 )

In Just 94 Days, 50 People Have Been Killed On London’s Streets.

Someone very close to me has experienced something that no one should ever have to be familiar with.
Three young men he knew have been victims of gang knife crime within the last year.
Two died.
One of them, a 17-year-old, was knifed to death by a gang as he screamed for his mum in what turned out to be an unspeakably tragic case of mistaken identity.

In just 94 days, 50 people have been killed on London’s streets, including a young man just a five-minute walk from where I live.
He lost his life after being stabbed last Sunday.
Yet the last time I saw a police vehicle, which is a long while ago, it was parked up for a rush-hour traffic speed-check effort, featuring a gaggle of traffic cops.

I can’t remember the last time I saw an actual police officer, a preventer of person-on-person crime.
But there are enough traffic wardens to form an army on the streets where I live.
It’s profit over safety in my Tory-led London borough.
Parking attendants on mopeds and on foot everywhere, cameras on bus lanes (£160 fine) and at yellow box junctions (£130 fine) all making a fortune for the council.

Maybe some of that cash could be used for actual cameras that make people feel safe?
To catch criminals intent on harming people rather than criminalising drivers hard-pressed to find somewhere to park.
Where are the cameras on housing estates?
In London’s neighbourhoods?

And no, I wouldn’t be keen on cameras in my road, but many of my neighbours are and have installed their own.
In my borough the council rakes in £127million a year from fines connected to bus-lane cameras alone.
Let me work this out – so a police salary, plus pension, costs around £50,000 per year per officer, and no, I didn’t ask Diane Abbott.
By my reckoning, then, my council’s profit from bus-lane cameras could fund an extra 2,540 police officers.

Stop and search worked.
It was ditched because young black men were very often unfairly hauled over.
But can we just look at the victims of the latest London killings – the majority of them are young, black or Asian men, slain with knives, sometimes a gun.
It has to stop.  Police power alone, although a deterrent, is not enough.
It’s not the answer.  Education is the answer.

Let’s start with there’s nothing big, brave or clever in taking another person’s life.
Whichever gang you belong to. Whatever postcode you live in. End of.
( Fiona Phillips, 07.04.2018 )

The Mistake Of Over-Relying On Intelligence Evidence.

In 2014 I incurred the wrath of the Board of Deputies of British Jews when I wrote that the Israeli Government’s two-week shelling of Gaza, killing 1,000 people including 165 children, was a war crime.
The Board publicly wrote to the Lords Chief Whip asking me to be dealt with.
I don’t recall them condemning the Israeli actions.

In 2016, after the publication of the Chilcot Report into our Labour Government’s role in the Iraq war, I wrote that I’d come to agree with former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan that, as the prime aim was regime change, the war was illegal.
I used the article as a platform to publicly apologise for my role in that decision to go to war and how I had to live with the guilt.
Alastair Campbell didn’t like it.

But the mistake of over-relying on intelligence evidence could even turn out to be true about Russia’s alleged involvement with the Salisbury attacks.
( John Prescott, 08.04.2018 )

Taxpayers’ Money Spent On Sending Military Officers’ Kids To Private Schools.

The National Audit Office says the UK armed forces have a shortfall of 8,200 regular troops making it so understaffed that some operations can’t be carried out without cancelling leave.
In a separate report, it was revealed that taxpayers have spent £246million in the past three years subsidising the private education of 5,216 children of military officers at elite schools such as Eton and Harrow.

In 2011, the Government was pressurised to scrap this subsidy on the grounds it was antiquated, costly and worked against social mobility.
But Old Etonian David Cameron’s government review concluded that the grants made “a key contribution to operational effectiveness”.

Surely anyone with half a brain can deduce that military operations would be far more effective if, instead of giving the officer class millions to pass their privilege and wealth down a generation, we used it to hire more troops?
Or maybe the majority of us who went unsubsidised to state schools don’t have a brain educated enough to understand that.
( Brian Reade, 21.04.2018 )

United States Added To List Of Most Dangerous Countries For Journalists.

At least 63 professional journalists were killed doing their jobs in 2018, a 15% increase over last year, said Reporters Without Borders.
The number of deaths rises to 80 when all media workers and people classified as citizen journalists are included.

The world’s five deadliest countries for journalists include three, India, Mexico and, for the first time, the United States, where journalists were killed in cold blood, even though those countries weren’t at war or in conflict.
Reporters Without Borders said the three most dangerous countries for journalists to work in were Afghanistan, Syria and Mexico.

Meanwhile, the shooting deaths of five employees of the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, in June propelled the United States into the ranks of the most dangerous countries for the first time.

Reporters Without Borders said 348 journalists were being detained worldwide, compared with 326 at this time in 2017.
China, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt hold more than half of the world’s imprisoned journalists.
( Reuters, 19.12.2018 )

What About The Jacks And Jills Out There?

I have no children or grandchildren.
My quality of life will not be affected.
I am all right, Jack.
But what about the Jacks and Jills out there?

Are they to be stripped of their rights on the whim of those who peddled rubbish in the referendum and are afraid to be challenged in another?
I was a government whip when Harold Wilson was prime minister.
He said that anyone who claimed that membership of the European Community was a black and white issue was either a charlatan or a simpleton.
I leave your Lordships to adjudicate on that one.

Which brings me to Mr Boris Johnson.
His campaign bus did not proclaim, “Say yes to no deal”.
We were promised an easy ride with a cash bonus thrown in.
The question ​on the ballot paper did not ask us to choose between a hard or soft Brexit, a Canadian or a Norway-plus deal, or a deal that would separate Northern Ireland from the rest of the United Kingdom.

Nobody dreamed that we would be frantically preparing for worst-case scenarios.
We are now paying the price for a referendum that was dominated by falsehoods.
Brexiteers promised the world but ignored the social and political realities festering in our own country.

Now, parliament is convulsed, Whitehall is pulverised and Downing Street has become a drop-in for chilled wine and persuasive chats, while industry and business are alarmed and our friends and allies are bewildered.
Who can possibly blame them?
( Baroness Boothroyd, January 2019 )

The Customer Doesn’t Come First, Big Profit Does.

Depression and anxiety are rising off the scale.
Is it any wonder?
Our overcrowded island has changed from one where common pleasantries were regularly swapped with strangers, to one where eye contact is actively avoided.
It’s dog eat dog.  It’s all for one.  Not one for all.

Lifestyle envy is a plague at the same time as homelessness is burgeoning.
Our society is one where every shyster is competing with every other shyster to catch us out, hook us in and screw us up.
Where pride in customer service has been replaced by disdainful disregard and false claims to sell us “bargains” that don’t exist.

We’re slaves to the greed of massive corporations, who go to any length possible to squeeze our last pennies into their humungous accounts.
Encounters with corporate giants are like being stamped on by a very large boot.
The customer doesn’t come first, big profit does.
More than it ever did before.
( Fiona Phillips, 28.04.2018 )

The Hostile Environment For Disabled People.

More than 17,000 people have died while waiting to hear whether their claim for disability benefit had been successful.
Ministers have been accused of “failing people at the most vulnerable point in their lives” after figures revealed 17,070 disability claimants have died while waiting for decisions on their personal independence payment (PIP) claims since 2013.

One in four (4,330) of those who died were suffering from a form of cancer, while 270 had anxiety or depressive disorders.
In more than half of cases (9,020), the main disability was not recorded.
Waiting times for PIP claims have risen over the last year, with the latest figures published by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) showing that the average waiting time for new claims is 14 weeks, a rise of a month since March 2018.

Shadow disabilities Marsha de Cordova accused the government of allowing a “cruel and callous” PIP assessment process to create a “hostile environment for disabled people”.
“Disabled people are being forced to wait months for vital social security and all too often face a lengthy and traumatic appeals process, resulting in a system in which thousands of people die before their PIP decision is reached,” she added.

Philip Connolly, policy and development manager at Disability Rights UK said the figures were further evidence that the government was struggling to deliver a benefits system which is fit for purpose.
“Disabled people shouldn’t have to wait for so long for assessments for PIP,” he said.
“How vulnerable do you have to be before the government will change how things are done and ensure people get their assessments in a timely manner? Tax payers have a right to expect a decent service funded by their money. And disabled people have a right to an accurate and timely assessment so they get the benefits they qualify for promptly.”
( May Bulman, Independent, 14.01.2019 )