Alex Callinicos/SWP vs Laurie Penny/New Statesman Facebook handbags
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DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
brogdale
Coming to terms with late onset Anarchism
in other words she missed a glaring open goal, which is that people stopped claims because their illness was short term or they died
bit of research and she could have blown him out of the water, that's why having people like her as our spokespeople, with no idea how people really live, or any fucking understanding of the benefits system, is a problem
would have taken her 5 mins to look at the info linked from the tory press release that put this out yesterday, and notice that 14,000 claims for people with cancer ended before they were assessed, now why might a claim for someone with cancer end abruptly?
agricola
a genuine importer of owls
IDS would probably say that they were faking it.
Blagsta
Minimum cage, maximum cage
Brighton is hardly cosmopolitan.how is sussex uni not cosmopilitan? it's in fucking brighton...
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wobbly
it is compared to just about everywhere else along the south coast
8ball
Decolonise colons!
Favelado
J'adore South Shore
It's the San Francisco of the South East!
Yeah but up on the Fylde Coast we've got LANCS VEGAS.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Depends on what is meant by cosmopolitan. It's certainly one of the whitest places i've ever been. Sussex uni has fucking loads of foreign students though - and i my experience a fair few of them are of the diplomats daughter type.
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wobbly
You obviously don't get quite how stuck in the 50's a lot of the south is (or at least was when i left). brighton is a LOT different to it's surrounds. even if ti's not as like London as some people there want to pretend.
ymu
Niall Ferguson's deep-cover sock-puppet
Brighton is the only very white area of the country that my partner is willing to live in. It's the only very white place he's been where he doesn't get made to feel like a freak. It's an outlier, and not just because of the university. We don't know anyone from the university, AFAIK.
It's not because it's posh. The posher the area the worse the problems he experiences. Portsmouth excepted because of the Navy.
I don't know why it's an outlier, beyond having a very strong tradition of left political activism, but I suspect that the activism is because it is an outlier, not the cause of it.
BigTom
Well-Known Member
Additionally, a quick glance shows just over 60,000 people with various fractures, and 40,000 people signed off for surgical treatment who didn't complete the assessment phase, and I'm sure if you looked through you'd find many more cases where people are signed off for something for a relatively short time, and get better before they are assessed.
One general question I have about the stats is how they are recorded when someone has multiple conditions? For instance there were people on ESA with acne which I find hard to understand (but trust doctors to know things I don't) but I'm wondering if that is actually someone has acne + other conditions and really it's the other conditions that qualify them for ESA but are they are counted under all their conditions or just one, and if it's just one how is that decided?
Gosport.
equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
Certainly on the small bit of research I've done on the subject, multiple conditions are handled very badly if at all. The system simply isn't set up to cope with an individual having more than one health condition and indeed complications of those conditions. It could even be that the system lists them all alphabetically, and for statistical purposes only the first-listed is used (which would account for 'acne' in some cases).
The ATOS LIMA software is a system of drop-down menus, and the software itself is not designed to handle multiple complex health problems, and certainly not mental health issues.
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
Quite a lot of vegetarians and that sort of thing
brogdale
Coming to terms with late onset Anarchism
Though, coming from Croydon, I've often shared your perception of central Brighton's 'whiteness', the reality doesn't really appear to fit that perception. The 2011 Censal data shows that, as a whole district, Brighton's ethnicity profile is not radically different from Croydon & the South London suburbs and certainly in marked contrast to most of the South Coast:-
More of that here.
WRT the 'diplomats daughters'
D)...yes, I think from second-hand, recent reports there's some truth in that, but I think most Unis are now attempting to tap the valuable Overseas market.
andysays
Love and solidarity
Though, coming from Croydon, I've often shared your perception of central Brighton's 'whiteness', the reality doesn't really appear to fit that perception. The 2011 Censal data shows that, as a whole district, Brighton's ethnicity profile is not radically different from Croydon & the South London suburbs and certainly in marked contrast to most of the South Coast:-
More of that here.
WRT the 'diplomats daughters'
Not sure about the conclusions you're drawing from that info as presented, given that all areas with 3.3% and above are lumped in together.
That could mean that the Brighton area has about 3.5%, whereas many areas in London probably have at least ten times that. Maybe it's cosmopolitan compared to other parts of the south coast, but in comparison to areas of London I'm familiar with (which just about includes Croydon), I'm not convinced.
BigTom
Well-Known Member
Have you got a link to the press release itself or to the page that the DWP data you've linked to comes from? I'm trying to find it but I can't find the press release at all and that xls table apparently should be on this page but it isn't.
There's also this document related to this:
http://statistics.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd5/rports2011-2012/rrep762.pdf
from which this quote is quite helpful for thinking about why people close their claim before assessment:
also
from p15-17
dont think it was published anywhere, someone sent it to me
Nearly 1 million people drop incapacity benefit claim before medical test
878,300 people claiming incapacity benefit – more than a third of the total – have chosen to drop their benefit claim entirely rather than face a medical assessment, new figures have revealed. http://research.dwp.gov.uk/asd/workingage/esa_wca/esa_wca_jan2013_tables.xlsTo date, a total of 1.44 million Incapacity Benefit reassessments were carried out by doctors. Of those, the majority, 837,000 (55 per cent), were found fit to work immediately, with a further 367,300 (23.9 per cent) able to do some level of work. Only 232,800 people (15.1 per cent) were classified by doctors to be too ill to do any work at all (DWP, Outcomes of Work Capability Assessments, 22 January 2013, link).
Whilst the figures show that not a single person with a terminal illness has been classified as able to work, injuries such as ‘sprains and strains’, ‘repetitive strain injury’, ‘allergic reactions’, ‘blisters’ and ‘acne’ have seen big reductions in the numbers of people claiming benefit (DWP, Analysis of WCA outcomes, 12 September 2012, link).
Conservative Party Chairman Grant Shapps said:
“Welfare makes up a third of this country's spending - so it's our job to make sure it's getting to the people who really need it.
“Our reforms are about freeing people from a system of dependency that's trapped them and their families for decades - and people are getting back into work as a result.
“These figures demonstrate how the welfare system was broken under labour and why our reforms are so important.”
ENDS
BigTom
Well-Known Member
cheers, that answers my question as to where the 800k figure came from as it's from the first link in that, to January's figures not the last link to september ones which you posted up earlier.. oddly the figures are not as detailed.
So looking at the data..
262k - so nearly 1/3rd of people who closed claims before the assessment phase were logged under "Mental and behavioural disorders"
I'm guessing that a lot of this will be short term stuff, people signed off for depression for a few months or similar (I have no idea how things like schizophrenia or agorophobia or anything else might come and go).
Other big categories are: Injury, poisoning and certain other consequences of external causes (181k) - likely all short term stuff that would never be expected to last the 13 weeks before the assessment phase kicks in, let alone make it to assessment itself.
Symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings, not elsewhere classified (124k) - this is an odd one, I don't really understand it, but I imagine a lot of this will be things that appear and the disappear with no apparent explanation.
and Diseases of the Musculoskeletal system and Connective Tissue (96k) - don't know what this would cover.
equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
My bets for the last item would be the following, for example, and in all degrees of severity:
- Arthritis of any kind, which would likely include rheumatoid, osetoarthritis and Ankylosing spondylitis
- MS
- Bursitis
- Brittle Bone Disease
- Ehlers–Danlos syndrome - hypermobile joints which can dislocate with the merest movement
- Back pain (which could be anything from a soft tissue injury through to spinal degeneration and extreme curvature)
- Marfan syndrome
- Stickler syndrome
- Alport ayndrome
- Lupus
http://www.merckmanuals.com/professional/musculoskeletal_and_connective_tissue_disorders.html
As for the 'symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings', sounds like the medical equivalent of 'miscellaneous' to me. Clear evidence that there is something wrong but no idea what it is/doesn't conform to expected textbook symptoms. Could also mean pre-diagnosis, although I'd be surprised if that were the case for more than a handful of cases.
Poisons could mean things like asbestos exposure and the attendant diseases. Bound to be a lot of those given how prevalent its use was.
ymu
Niall Ferguson's deep-cover sock-puppet
The national statistician has created many headlines by scolding ministers in public. This is the public archive of correspondence: http://www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/reports---correspondence/correspondence
Write to him?
On acne and other apparently trivial reasons for being off sick, this is like the appalling stuff a couple of years ago where the Mail was scoffing at people for being on disability for asthma or diarrhoea, completely ignoring the fact that asthma is life-threatening for a minority with very severe disease or serious sequelae, and the diarrhoea is likely Crohn's or ulcerative colitis.
Acne can be severe enough to limit the ability to live a normal life, as well as being a side-effect of some treatments. It is rare, but it happens.
Also worth noting that ESA is the sick-pay system for the growing group of self-employed people. There will be lots of short-term sign-ons because that's one of the purposes of it. It's why the assessment phase takes 13 weeks to complete; there's no point in assessing everyone immediately because many will never be long-term let alone forever claimants.
ymu
Niall Ferguson's deep-cover sock-puppet
Back injuries, bone breaks, torn or damaged muscles too. Lots of short-term stuff that usually heals fairly quickly in there, I think. Like most of the rest of it, where the condition is not life-threatening.
This "unemployment and sickness as permanent characteristics" style propaganda has to break down soon. There's nearly a million people who know these stats refer to them and their legitimate period of sick leave, and between them they know most of the rest of us. Ditto for those losing DLA, many of whom will be forced out of workplaces who do not want to lose them. There are just too many people being fucked over for this not to touch most of our lives personally if not directly. They can' sustain this, once enough people realise that the targets are people just like them.
There's a nice story somewhere about a guy who was speaking to a group of elderly Americans about Mitt Romney's "47% are takers who pay no federal income tax" remark and asked what they thought, and they approved. Until he asked how many of them paid federal income tax, and they realised that Romney was talking about them. It's a really useful focus of counter-propaganda, IMO.
Anyone got the skillz to redo that Uncle Sam poster? IDS: he's targeting YOU, sorta thing.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/04/where-are-the-activists-austerity?CMP=twt_gu
Laura has written an article on the amazing Sussex Occupation in the Guardian
Laura has written an article on the amazing Sussex Occupation in the Guardian
tenniselbow
Active Member
Bakunin
I am Noodle's bitch.
Hyperbole is one of Penny Dreadful's strong suits.
Honesty, accuracy, integrity and a sense of proportion? Not so much.
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