Charities: Govt rhetoric on welfare leading to inciting attacks on disabled people..

[treelover]

'Welfare to Work policy 'casts the disabled as cheats'

Flagship initiative threatens safety of the disabled by suggesting that they are scroungers, say charities

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jul/24/welfare-policy-incites-hatred-disabled.



The Observer is reporting that a report for an alliance of over 50 charities has claimed that the constant drip of leaks, smears, and misinformation by the Govt, Chris Grayling(actually personally named and blamed in the report) and then the natioanl media is leading to verbal and sometimes physical attacks on disabled people.One woman has said how she now ''thought hard about going out at night''. While a CEO of a disability charity has noted a recent survey carried out by Scope found ''more than a third (37%) of people said attitudes towards them had got worse over the past year.''

Jaspal Dhani, chief executive of the United Kingdom Disabled People's Council, said: "The language portrays disabled people as scroungers, as lazy – a drain who are not playing their part and making a contribution

I have been hearing about this anecdotally from people i know with disabilities, some are wary of sitting outside, doing the gardening or going for a walk as they fear being asked ''why they are not at work'', others have noted workmen making ''nasty/unpleasant comments'' when they have come round to do some repairs, etc. N/L started this process and of course it has been expanded by the C/D's, sometimes the media has looked like certain papers of the 1930's, etc.

If this was any other 'community' there would be uproar, but not this group...

 

[treelover]

from CiF

' I took her in her wheelchair as she cant walk more than half a dozen steps before she falls to the floor completely exhausted.... she has severe fibromyalgia, a very nasty dibilitating condition, whilst we were out, not only did i see people staring at her, judging her, i actually heard people discussing her in the cafe where i took her for a cuppa, they actually said 'scroungers like that' about her. I was furious, if they had to suffer one single day of her pain they would not say things like that. '

 

[SpookyFrank]

' I took her in her wheelchair as she cant walk more than half a dozen steps before she falls to the floor completely exhausted.... she has severe fibromyalgia, a very nasty dibilitating condition, whilst we were out, not only did i see people staring at her, judging her, i actually heard people discussing her in the cafe where i took her for a cuppa, they actually said 'scroungers like that' about her. I was furious, if they had to suffer one single day of her pain they would not say things like that. '

That genuinely brings tears to my eyes. I think I'm less angry at the government (and the previous one) for being so evil than I am at the people who are stupid enough to believe all this bilge about scroungers and parasites. Have we abandoned the idea of society completely or what? Is there any level off bullshit people won't swallow if it gives them somebody to hate?

 

[_angel_]

To be fair, there have always been some people like that, even before the drip drip drip of all disabled people are workshy.

 

[SpineyNorman]

This is nothing new, as treelover rightly points out it was happening under Labour too. I occasionally volunteer for an independent benefits advice centre that does advocacy and campaigning work too, used to volunteer full time but don't have the time anymore, and the stories disabled people tell of being shouted at in the street for scrounging etc. make my piss boil.

We had the local Blairite cunt MP, [name removed to avoid possible trouble] come over to talk to us in a workshop we were doing and I pulled him on the bus adverts (you know, shop a scrounger), pointing out that benefit fraud isn't in fact a problem, accounting as it does for far less than 1% of the total spend, which is a very good rate, that it was dwarfed by the figure for unclaimed benefits and that it was negligible when compared to tax avoidance/evasion. I asked why there were no shop a tax cheat bus ads, since this was clearly a far bigger problem. I asked him to apologise (this was after Labour had lost the election). His response? He thought they were a good idea. There was a "public perception" that benefit fraud was a problem so they wanted to be seen to be doing something. I wanted to knock the cunt out. Apart from the fact I'm not convinced that many people do fall for it, they should have been educating people, letting them know it wasn't the problem Murdoch and co want us to believe it is, they certainly shouldn't be pandering to peoples' prejudices.

And @the OP: People are in uproar. I don't know if that was a thinly veiled dig at "the left" but if it was it's miles off target. I'm involved with the SP in Sheffield - one of our members is working on setting up a claimants union and it's a top priority for us. Even when I was in the SWP in another town, for all the SWP's faults they campaigned on this issue - there's only a very small branch in that town and almost half the activists gave up at least a day a week at the centre. Just because we don't boast about it on internet message boards or hold set piece demos waving lollypops around doesn't mean we aren't doing anything.

But I agree - the liberal left, as usual, would rather concentrate on more fashionable causes. This shouldn't surprise anyone, it's what they do.

 

[ViolentPanda]

That genuinely brings tears to my eyes. I think I'm less angry at the government (and the previous one) for being so evil than I am at the people who are stupid enough to believe all this bilge about scroungers and parasites. Have we abandoned the idea of society completely or what? Is there any level off bullshit people won't swallow if it gives them somebody to hate?

Not really.

You're always going to have a percentage of people who buy into hate of various sorts because they need to do so. It stops them looking inward and hating themselves.

 

[audiotech]

More on ATOS from, I assume to be the 'liberal left', SpineyNorman, refers to?

Neil Coyle, director of Disability Alliance, said the government was paying the company to do the test, and was then footing the bill for reviewing flawed assessments. "It's like paying for a childminder to babysit, and then going home three times in an evening to make sure they are doing their job," he said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jul/24/atos-faces-critical-report-by-mps

 

[Captain Hurrah]

It stops them looking inward and hating themselves.

Aye.

 

[Frankie Jack]

An internet friend of mine went to an Atos Recruitment evening. She recorded the event. The answers to questions by those attending the event by the Atos representative were shocking. The speaker actually parodied a disabled person walking and said they didn't care about underlying illnesses. Atos were there to judge ability not disability.

A despicable business.

 

[Frankie Jack]

Oh and Atos IT has it's finger in the pie of almost every government department from desktop maintenance to the prison system to complete department IT infrastructure. The £300.000.000 from the DWP is a drop in the ocean compared to what the government pays them for all the other services it provides. I'm sure each and every one of us is on an Atos database somewhere.

 

[SpineyNorman]

More on ATOS from, I assume to be the 'liberal left', SpineyNorman, refers to?



http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jul/24/atos-faces-critical-report-by-mps

No, by the liberal left I meant... err... the liberal left. It's unlikely that an organisation called the disability alliance would neglect disabled claimants and instead focus on fashionable causes, wouldn't you say? That's the second time in a couple of days you've made a weird, off target criticism of one of my posts, why? Is there a problem? Or am I missing something here?

By liberal left I mean the so called "left" in the Lib Dems, the Labour party, student politicos, etc. I certainly don't mean civil society organisations like the one in your post - in fact I mentioned that I'd volunteered for one such group.

 

[audiotech]

The Lib-Dem MP quoted? Glenda Jackson MP? Labour MP, Tom Greatrex? The Guardian reader quoted? The Guardian itself? Critical of ATOS. These not the "liberal left"?

 

[SpineyNorman]

And they're representative of the liberal left in general are they? Pull the other one. Actions speak louder than words as they say. Besides, ATOS aren't the problem, they're just a symptom. A symptom of the disease all these people support. You try talking to a Labour or Lib Dem MP about this - see where it gets you. I dearly wish they were onside with this, we need all the allies we can get. But I've been campaigning on this for years now and despite constant calls for help we've received no support whatsoever from these sorts. It's one thing to wring your hands in the Guardian and another to actually get them dirty.

It was a Lib Dem MP that threw us out of our premises. It was a Labour MP who tried to justify the bus ad campaign in the disgusting way detailed above. That's the 'help' we've had from the liberal left. The proper left, on the other hand, has raised money, campaigned and given time to us, despite the fact that they're probably outnumbered by more than 10 to 1 by liberals.

 

[ViolentPanda]

And they're representative of the liberal left in general are they? Pull the other one. Actions speak louder than words as they say. Besides, ATOS aren't the problem, they're just a symptom. A symptom of the disease all these people support.

The disease being the idea that welfare needs fundamental reform. The warning should sound for the public in the word "fundamental", but it doesn't, because they've been softened up with 15 years of "scrounger" rhetoric.

You try talking to a Labour or Lib Dem MP about this - see where it gets you. I dearly wish they were onside with this, we need all the allies we can get. But I've been campaigning on this for years now and despite constant calls for help we've received no support whatsoever from these sorts. It's one thing to wring your hands in the Guardian and another to actually get them dirty.

Yup. Even though I left the Labour party after they re-wrote Clause 4, I still wrote to my local MP, but I knew the whole welfare issue would just grow and grow after I wrote to him regarding the Benefits Integrity Project (remember that?) asking for details of the analysis used to justify the project, but he couldn't. He wouldn't state whether or not such an analysis had been done, but given your experience of the "being seen to be doing something" culture, it's fair to say that there probably wasn't one, and that the freshly-elected Labour party also wanted to "be seen to be doing something".

It was a Lib Dem MP that threw us out of our premises. It was a Labour MP who tried to justify the bus ad campaign in the disgusting way detailed above. That's the 'help' we've had from the liberal left. The proper left, on the other hand, has raised money, campaigned and given time to us, despite the fact that they're probably outnumbered by more than 10 to 1 by liberals.

Quite. The liberal left died a death when they allowed themselves to be used to drive neo-liberal political and economic policies. Once you've crossed that Rubicon, there's no going back - you're part of the problem, not the solution.

 

[audiotech]

@ Spinney Norman. Sorry to hear you've had problems. My Labour MP assisted me in a dispute I had with the DWP. Very likely other constituent Labour MP's presently will be doing similar to assist their constituents.

 

[two sheds]

Saw the headlines of the Daily Mail and Express today along the lines of "3 out of 4 benefits claimants actually fit for work". I usually feel like pulling the papers out all over the floor but I'd probably get done for criminal damage and get 4 years inside.

Someone ought to do fake Daily Mail front pages that you could just print out and lay over the top of the stack saying something like '3 out of 4 Daily Mail readers actually paedos'.

 

[Urbanblues]

As early as 1998 I wrote to Alistair Darling asking him why, despite the Benefits Integrity Project's abject failure to weed out the legions of disabled benefits' cheats infesting the economy, he, and his government, were in tacit agreement with the scum press and shite-end of TV documentary makers in their hounding of disabled people.

Darling's response, or that from his researcher, brushed me off with some freedom of the press guff; and, the media, especially the print side, carried on with their propaganda to the point where disabled people are today roundly demonised within society.

Fast forward to 2011. Disability hate crime and harassment is rife. The Scum and Daily Hate have made disabled bashing an accepted form of sport. Chris Grayling when challenged on the misrepresentation of benefits' fraud and the tie-in with disabled people blurts out "I do not control the editorial approach of the tabloids, and sometimes stories run in ways that completely bemuse me and are certainly beyond any expectations."

No Pontius, off course you or indeed any government minister should not interfere with the freedom of the press. No, but you should protest in the strongest terms when the press take your figures and conflate them and through processes of aggregation use them as propaganda against people, the overwhelming majority of whom have done no wrong other than being disabled.

One of the duties of a free press is to hold the government of the day to account; to inform the public of what those who governing us are doing. They should keep the public informed, in an objective and accessible way, of the news as it happens, not as they choose to fashion it.

 

[Paulie Tandoori]

In what I think is an unprecedented move, the Chair of the Commons Work and Pensions, Dame Anne Begg MP, has today written to the Minister for Employment, Chris Grayling.

Mrs Begg expresses serious concerns at the most recent misrepresentation of DWP statistics on benefit claimants in some sections of the media yesterday and today.

She calls into question the timing of the release of official statistics that “coincide” with the release of the Work and Pensions Committee report on the WCA.

She highlights the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, as being “particularly egregious example of the way they can be misused. The headline in today’s Daily Mail was “The shirking classes: just 1 in 14 incapacity benefit claimants is unfit to work”.”

Finally, Mrs Begg goes onto seek assurances that Mr Grayling will “be contacting newspaper editors again to urge them to ensure that the reports they carry about ESA claims are factually correct and that they avoid pejorative terms such as “shirkers” and “scroungers” which are irresponsible and inaccurate.”

Link to the letter

I look forward to Mr Grayling’s response with interest….

 

[Urbanblues]

Someone ought to do fake Daily Mail front pages that you could just print out and lay over the top of the stack saying something like '3 out of 4 Daily Mail readers actually paedos'.

Except, it would excite the average Hate reader's curiosity; and, he'd feel compelled to buy a copy just to see who the other paedos are!

 

[SpineyNorman]

I'd love 5 minutes alone in a room with the cunt who wrote that headline

 

[ericjarvis]

I look forward to Mr Grayling’s response with interest….

Since Grayling has directly lied about the figures in press releases and public statements I am expecting him to simply bullshit whilst assuming that the media won't question whatever total bollocks he comes out with.

This is not a case of the press misrepresenting what politicians tell them. It is about CORRUPT and DISHONEST politicians creating work for companies that donate large sums of money to their parties by creating a public demand for new initiatives against "benefit fraud". It's lucrative for the companies involved. It's lucrative for the political parties. And the politicians don't give a toss about integrity or honesty, concepts they assume don't apply to them other than as something they can use to demand people withdraw criticism.

So. Basically I can look forward to Grayling's response, if any, with nothing but despair.

 

[two sheds]

I'd love 5 minutes alone in a room with the cunt who wrote that headline

Yes, the thought came to me that they need something like a couple of broken legs to start understanding what it's like.

 

[_angel_]

I've got a friend who works as an assistant OT who sees all her patients routinely being turned down for their DLA, yet she still has got the idea, from somewhere, that there are tons of people "playing the system". Not sure where she's getting the information from - unless it is media - and what is weird is she sees the opposite happening on a daily basis in her work.

 

[Urbanblues]

Since Grayling has directly lied about the figures in press releases and public statements I am expecting him to simply bullshit whilst assuming that the media won't question whatever total bollocks he comes out with.

This is not a case of the press misrepresenting what politicians tell them. It is about CORRUPT and DISHONEST politicians creating work for companies that donate large sums of money to their parties by creating a public demand for new initiatives against "benefit fraud". It's lucrative for the companies involved. It's lucrative for the political parties. And the politicians don't give a toss about integrity or honesty, concepts they assume don't apply to them other than as something they can use to demand people withdraw criticism.

So. Basically I can look forward to Grayling's response, if any, with nothing but despair.

It is also about the press accepting the government line. It is about the press taking and manipulating figures in order to serve their own interests. And, it's about symbiotic relationships between the government and their contractors.

 

[treelover]

Anne Begg is a fairweather friend of disabled claimants: when she was Disabilities Minister she fully endorsed and pushed forward Purnell's ESA reforms, they just don't like the brutal language as they know it will at some point induce a backlash against the reforms, Milliband has compared benefit cheats to City sharks and wants to reform DLA..

 

[Paulie Tandoori]

Anne Begg is a fairweather friend of disabled claimants: when she was Disabilities Minister she fully endorsed and pushed forward Purnell's ESA reforms, they just don't like the brutal language as they know it will at some point induce a backlash against the reforms, Milliband has compared benefit cheats to City sharks and wants to reform DLA..

You're completely confused. Dame Anne Begg isn't Anne McGuire - the former is a wheelchair user who, I would say, is eminently capable of understanding issues of disability and is more than qualified to be angry about media portayals; the latter was Minister for Disablity under Labour before Jonathon Shaw took over (and what a complete fucking joke he was).

Further, Anne McGuire may have a degree of culpability but compared to Maria Miller, she was priceless in standing up for disabled people about certain key principles in terms of independent living and so on.

 

[dynamicbaddog]

Anne Begg is a fairweather friend of disabled claimants: when she was Disabilities Minister she fully endorsed and pushed forward Purnell's ESA reforms, they just don't like the brutal language as they know it will at some point induce a backlash against the reforms, Milliband has compared benefit cheats to City sharks and wants to reform DLA..

Purnell is on Newsnight this evening, talking about alternatives to the welfare state.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Yes, the thought came to me that they need something like a couple of broken legs to start understanding what it's like.

As I said to a mate, when he suggested breaking James Purnell's legs back when Purnell was shitting on people with disabilities:

"Why would I break 'em? Breaking 'em means he gets to go back to 'normal life'. Chop the fuckers off!".

 

[ViolentPanda]

Purnell is on Newsnight this evening, talking about alternatives to the welfare state.

Bad cess to the shitcunt!

 

[SpineyNorman]

@ Spinney Norman. Sorry to hear you've had problems. My Labour MP assisted me in a dispute I had with the DWP. Very likely other constituent Labour MP's presently will be doing similar to assist their constituents.

I don't want to turn this into a bunfight, but why didn't these Labour MPs do anything about this when their party was in government?

Although I think, while I'm slagging off Labour, I should point out that there are some half decent Labour councilors in the area. When the Tory county council, backed by Lib Dems, cut all the funding to the centre (£30k a year, for which they got a full time manager, part time admin worker and a team of about 20 volunteers, all taking on work the jobcentre and DWP advisors couldn't or wouldn't do - so much for the big society) a few local Labour councillors managed to find some funds to help the enable the centre to stay open. Unfortunately I can't see any of them getting anywhere near a parliamentary seat.

Sorry to dwell on this but the whole thing makes my piss boil.