Having a Heart Attack? You Shirker...

The Daily Mirror carried a story today with what must be the most twisted and sickening tale yet of the Government's "fixing" of the benefits system. We heard a few weeks ago about ATOS writing to a woman to penalise her for not attending her disability benefits assessment - the fact that she was in hospital in a coma had apparently been lost on their thick skulls (even although they had been notified).

But today, somehow, feels worse. A man was attending a work capability assessment in Oldham when he had a heart attack and even the nurse conducting the interview decided she should terminate it (I say "even" because there have been many bizarre instances of distinctly uncaring assessments by medical staff employed by ATOS).

Two weeks later, he had his benefits stopped because the Department of Work & Pensions decided he had "withdrawn" from the assessment. Twisted beyond all measure of belief, this decision goes to the heart of this pernicious process, the signature policy of Ian Duncan Smith, who is allegedly a deep thinker.

Well, maybe he is and this is all part of his plan. While he sits in front of TV cameras trotting out platitudes of how the reassessments are designed to support people in genuine need and " not leave them unseen for years", the truth is somewhat different - hundreds of terminally ill people denied benefits in their final weeks, other people put through processes where meetings can be (and are) procedurally deemed to have happened even when they have not taken place, and then really spiteful decisions like this one - you withdrew from the assessment because of a heart attack? Man up and get back in there!

The system is dreadful and its effects sick. But that is almost certainly what its architects, the rightwing Tories and their Lib Dem Orcs, have intended.

Yet complicit in this too are the staff who take jobs with ATOS and the DWP and who then reach decisions like this one penalising a heart attack victim and then producing a letter like the one sent to him. It may be argued they need a job, but at what cost? Ian Duncan Smith did not phone up the issuing Job Centre and tell them to send out the letter to the sick man - someone on site did that.

Over two years ago, there was an instance of an ATOS employee referring online to people attending capability assessments as "parasitic wankers". He was roundly condemned. It is to be hoped that his attitude is not the default culture of DWP staff as well now - there is evidence to the contrary, but the Oldham instance begs the question and with much DWP work contracted-out to profit seeking companies, it is not at all surprising if the attitudes they engender are somewhat less supportive and humane than was the case under the old public service.

It seems that the default position, as part of the official, government-set process, is to be as harsh as possible. Otherwise caring staff appear to be being forced into dreadfully twisted decisions and positions. It is obviously down to individual conscience, but ultimately, there is a difficult choice for staff instructed to implement this vicious policy to make, one which it would be easy to trivialise or portray as simple if you don't work there for your own livelihood but a question they really need to ask themselves nevertheless: should you stay or should you go? 

Guest Blog: Edward Thomas on Syria's Disabled Future

As Britain, France and the USA step up their preparations to supply weapons to some of the rebel factions in increasingly divided, sectarian and violent Syria, Edward Thomas, who has worked on a wide range of children's rights projects in Africa and the Middle East, writes on the unreported plight of disabled children in the emerging warzone.

This article originally appeared on 14 May on the Middle East Research & Information Project website, here

For background, see Peter Harling and Sarah Birke, “The Syrian Heartbreak,” Middle East Report Online, April 16, 2013.

Jamal is not yet a teenager. His school closed in 2011, soon after the Syrian revolution turned into an armed conflict, and his father found him a factory job. One day in 2012 as he returned from work there was a battle going on in the main street near his home. Jamal immediately started carrying wounded children smaller than he is to shelter in a mosque. Then Syrian army reinforcements arrived, clearing the streets with gunfire and hitting Jamal in the spine. The youngsters who took him to the hospital advised him to say that “terrorists” had caused his injury. But Jamal did not want to lie -- he told the doctors that a soldier had fired the bullet. The doctors told him to shut up and say it was the terrorists. But they treated him anyway.

From "The Guardian" 28 May; Steve Bell on William Hague
& Vladimir Putin's arming of Syria's fighters.

Syrian hospitals are at the front line of the conflict. Bullet wounds in children’s bodies are regarded as signs of sedition. Security men prowl wards disguised as medical staff; there are checkpoints outside hospitals and snipers on the roofs. Arrest and torture await doctors who treat opposition fighters or demonstrators, instead of handing them over to the security services.[1] Doctors loyal to their jobs or salaries are sometimes targeted for kidnapping by criminal gangs or armed opposition groups. [2] Health workers in conflict zones cannot get to work and vaccination systems are disintegrating -- the government reported in March that 36 percent of its hospitals are out of service. [3] Many pharmaceutical factories have been destroyed, leading the World Health Organization to express worry about shortages of life-saving medicines. In opposition-controlled areas, makeshift field hospitals slopping with infections offer crude, agonizing surgical procedures.

Things are worse in areas contested between the government and its revolutionary adversaries. Up to half of Syria’s population -- including Jamal’s family -- lives in informal urban settlements, relatively poor districts that provided the vanguard for the revolution and now are often battlegrounds. [4] These settlements mostly populated by rural in-migrants are also places where over the past four decades the Baathist state created a new Syria of textile and service industries, with free education, health and social services, and electricity and running water in nearly every home. Syria largely avoided foreign debt on its path to development. Instead, the country amassed “strategic rent” -- aid from Iran, and before that from the Soviet Union and Saudi Arabia. Syria traded with these donors its resistance to US hegemony; alternative possible futures for the Palestinians; and a version of the Arab state that was not dependent on Israeli or US guarantees.

Jamal is seeking treatment in a neighboring country. Syria’s health care system, which before the conflict delivered better health outcomes than Saudi Arabia’s, is now too politicized to cope with a child hit by indiscriminate fire. [5] Nonetheless, many of the government’s supporters today have kept their faith that the Syrian state has provided for the people. “Didn’t we give you houses? Didn’t we give you schools? Are you tired of them?” are rhetorical questions sometimes brandished by security men in house-to-house raids or torture centers.

No Longer Free

But the Syrian success story was in trouble before the conflict began. The government was not able to supply productive opportunities for many rural youngsters, many of whom were shipped off to Lebanon’s harsh labor market. Conflicts between factions of the country’s inscrutable elite -- rent-seeking bureaucrats and businessmen -- generated periodic economic crises that pushed Syria to seek external resources and policy inspiration. [6] The crisis of the past decade prompted a reconsideration of the country’s social welfare system. In 2005, a new “social market” policy encouraged foreign investment and simultaneously cut social welfare provision. The new approach brought in billions of dollars of Arab and Asian investment in construction, banking and tourism, and opened Syria’s producers to competition from countries with less generous welfare systems. As the policy came into effect, Syria’s oil production peaked and three years of mismanaged drought walloped agricultural workers. Refugees from the Syrian countryside arriving in neighboring countries tell stories of unexpectedly low social provisions -- of unvaccinated five-year olds and unschooled teenagers. These reports suggest that the service provision in rural areas was deteriorating before the conflict -- that the drought-stricken countryside was being de-developed while the center boomed. Or perhaps that the Baathist tale of modern transformation was something of an exaggeration.

Along with the lack of rainfall, the government’s social and economic policy shifts shaped the backdrop to the conflict. Farmers were pushed off the land into cities where industrial workers were being laid off, rents were no longer controlled and Gulf capital fueled feverish markets in land. [7] Government wages and pensions no longer covered basic needs and the security forces had a correspondingly bigger role in maintaining social discipline. The new rich established private hospitals and schools, while government health spending contracted. With the support of the European Union and the World Bank, the government began to outsource health services, and out-of-pocket expenditures on health care increased. [8]

Many international institutions promote a model of health financing that stresses the state’s regulatory role, allowing a retreat from the public financing of health care. Syria’s adaptation of these international models began in 2003, with immediate implications for its small disability sector. In addition to mostly free health care, Syrians with disabilities are entitled to special schooling and cash benefits, provided by the state. Like other authoritarian socialist disability systems, Syria’s did not promote independent living. The system isolated disabled people from everyday social and economic life in special schools or residential institutions. Rehabilitation services -- the mix of physiotherapy, social activities and assistance technologies designed to include disabled children and young people in social and economic life and give them the capabilities needed to live independently -- were rare, and were mostly provided by local charitable organizations. But as Syria restructured welfare, it also opened up to the international language of disability rights that inspired the UN’s 2006 Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Syria ratified the convention in 2009, and the first lady, Asma al-Asad, pushed the language of disability rights through her charitable foundation, the Syria Trust for Development. The rights of persons with disabilities, like women’s and children’s rights, became a resource for reframing the legitimacy of her husband’s government as it withdrew investment from welfare.

Syria’s experiments in “social markets” were intended to shift costs from the state to families and small-scale social actors. This shift involved a reshaping of its constituencies -- the security men, bureaucrats, farmers and industrial workers who benefited to varying degrees from Baathist rule. In retrospect, the experiments were catastrophic. The government’s post-conflict budgets have tried to reverse the catastrophe, injecting new resources into the welfare and subsidies systems that helped the Baath Party to maintain social control for so long. [9] This generosity will eventually find its limits, though, and the forces that were prodding Syria toward a shrunken neoliberal private sector will resume their efforts. Syria will probably emerge from its current crisis into a long period of indebtedness, and its health and welfare systems will probably no longer be free.

The Neighbors

What would a debt-laden, post-crisis Syrian health and social system offer Jamal? How could that system help Jamal and his family work out how to bear the heavy financial burdens that war-induced disability has brought them -- increased health costs and loss of income? Might Syria’s neighbors, some of which have also undergone protracted conflicts, have found some solutions worth emulating? These questions, which weigh on the mind of every refugee now looking to finance health care in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq, are not easy to answer because the health and social systems of Syria’s neighbors are not at all easy to generalize from. Two neighboring post-conflict systems -- Iraq’s and Lebanon’s -- are particularly heterogeneous, but each offers some starting points for comparison. In Iraq, there is sobering evidence of the effects of sanctions and drawn-out urban bombardment on health and social systems. In Lebanon, the unique mix of markets and sectarianism provides insights into how privately financed health and social welfare systems operate.

The Red Cross estimates that 150,000 people have been disabled in the course of Iraq’s multiple wars -- they make up part of a much wider population of disabled people. [10] Article 32 of Iraq’s 2005 constitution assigns the state the task of rehabilitating and reintegrating the disabled: In practice, responsibility for services to disabled children is scattered among government and charitable associations. [11] And health care, which represents much of the financial burden of disability, suffered terribly during Iraq’s uniquely unfortunate recent history. After Iraq’s defeat in the 1991 Gulf war, its well-funded, high-performance, authoritarian health care system was eviscerated by 13 years of sanctions, which eventually replaced government finances with a cashless Oil for Food system. With the state’s coffers empty, public spending on health care fell to 1 percent of total health spending, foisting nearly all the costs of health care upon families.[12] Under the US-led occupation, health spending saw modest increases. Between 2008 and 2010, as the occupiers withdrew and the Iraqi government sought to garner popular legitimacy, per capita health spending more than doubled, from $118 to $247 ($340 at purchasing power parity). [13] Iraq’s health spending is still well below the global average and disabled people are poor -- Celine Cantat, a disability worker in Damascus before Syria’s conflict broke out, commented on the large numbers of disabled Iraqi children who were on the streets there at the time. A 2011 report on child disability financed by the UN Children’s Fund bemoaned the continuing lack of statistics on disability prevalence, the low state benefits (or social salaries) for disabled people, and the way that the state has devolved to NGOs its constitutional responsibility for disability services and their financing. [14]

NGO funding and NGO services are a sign that the state is relinquishing the financial burden of disability care. Families can cope with short-term illnesses using their own resources, but the costs of chronic disease and disability are much harder to privatize. Social institutions have to play a role. Lebanon’s private health and welfare systems illustrate the importance -- and the political costs -- of giving private institutions responsibility for health and social services. Three quarters of all health spending was in the private sector in 2011, according to World Health Organization data. Private religious associations provided most of the social welfare there, too. Private health and social welfare systems do not necessarily deliver better outcomes: In 2010, Lebanon’s gross national income per capita was more than three times that of Syria, but Lebanon’s child mortality rates and life expectancy were marginally worse. [15] 

Under Lebanon’s largely private welfare system, the financial burdens of disability are mostly borne by private individuals and the family. With severely limited public funds, disabled people need to find affiliations and networks outside the state in order to bear the costs of disability. In Lebanon’s uniquely sectarian political system, disabled people often seek assistance from religious institutions. Most institutions providing subsidized health and social care are linked to Lebanon’s officially recognized sects. They fund themselves through international charitable donations or by using their sects’ political clout to colonize the government’s modest welfare budgets. In order to gain access to this subsidized welfare system, poor disabled people and their families often have to invoke their religious identities. As in any private system, resources for poor people are limited. One way of limiting resources for disabled children is to provide services in residential institutions that separate them from family and social life. They are often known as orphanages, not because the children in them are parentless, but because underfunded institutions can limit costs by imposing the drastic condition of family separation on the beneficiaries of their services. In 2003, Lebanon’s privatized welfare system had 32,484 children in residential institutions; in 2004, Syria had 3,904 such children (Syria’s population is more than five times larger than Lebanon’s). [16]

Disabled people in Lebanon’s privatized, confessional welfare system have to negotiate its soup kitchens and emphatic sectarian markers in order to survive. Syrian refugees in Lebanon (there were nearly half a million as of April) sometimes get caught up in this sectarian system of services. Because Syria and Lebanon have a similar ethnic and religious diversity, Syrian refugees can negotiate access to sectarian services by representing themselves as Shi‘i Muslim or Greek Catholic or whatever -- in the same way that many disabled Lebanese people must. By forcing disabled and other poor people to invoke sectarian identities for food and medicine, Lebanon’s welfare systems give its confessional system a material basis, a tangibility lacking in many accounts of its curious identity politics.

From Secular to Sectarian

Syrian identity politics is a different matter. Officially, Syria still has a secular constitution and free welfare services. But all that is changing. The government keeps welfare services functioning in government-controlled areas and malfunctioning in contested or opposition-dominated areas. Access to health and social services is being reconfigured around the geography of conflict. This geography has a sectarian dimension, too, as some of Syria’s smaller religious groups are concentrated in areas where there has been less fighting. People from these areas and groups are then seen as constituencies of the regime. Syria’s religious and ethnic diversity is being turned into the basis for sectarianism, with many Syrian and international actors using religious differences to mobilize military support, build political constituencies, and include or exclude people from the state’s protection.

Possible futures for Syrian welfare financing may aggravate tendencies toward sectarian division. The government is facing an economic crisis -- although its 2013 budget envisages spending increases, the government may not be able to generate enough revenue to deliver them. [17]The government’s flirtation with neoliberalism reshaped the way civil society organized. It allowed religious organizations, financed by businessmen benefiting from economic change, to flourish. In the run-up to the conflict, over half of Syria’s charitable organizations were Islamic ones, and their beneficiaries were largely Syrians who were looking for new social networks to meet basic needs as the state retreated from welfare provision. [18] Syria’s conflict will make people radically dependent on new social networks for survival.

These transformations have serious consequences for children with disabilities. Disability services need to be comprehensive, to join up accessible education and health care with measures for social and economic inclusion if people with disabilities are to live dignified independent lives. But Syria’s welfare system is fragmenting under multiple pressures. Future state-funded welfare systems are likely to be much more parsimonious, and to impose the draconian targeting methods of Lebanon’s orphanages. Families disoriented and impoverished by disability are likely to seek out new social networks to survive -- and these networks are likely to emphasize social differences. International aid agencies are unlikely to step in. With few exceptions, these international agencies invest little in disability -- although good disability services are powerful ways to build an inclusive society, they do not offer the quick, decisive impacts that their management consultants promise them elsewhere.

Jamal did not engage in calculations about responsibility for the costs of health care when he went to help the wounded children he encountered in a street battle. Now a refugee, he has personal experience of the region’s health financing dilemmas. He mostly lies in a hospital bed, his big observant eyes set in a round childish face on the cusp of adolescence. He is cool and assured, and his morale is exemplary. Nursing staff say that with the right treatment he could walk again, and he has taken steps with assistive devices. His father, hard-working, poor, shrewd and warm, with old-fashioned country manners still intact after years of city living, is bravely hustling to gather the thousands of dollars that a spinal cord operation will cost, while trying to keep his family fed.

Endnotes

[1] “Torture in Syria’s Hospitals,” The Lancet, November 5, 2011, p. 1606.
[2] UN Human Rights Council, Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, A/HRC/22/59, Geneva, February 5, 2013.
[3] World Health Organization, Situation Report, March 12, 2013, p. 1.
[4] Robert Goulden, “Housing, Inequality and Economic Change in Syria,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 38/2 (August 2011).
[5] UNICEF and Syrian Commission for Family Affairs, Situation Analysis of Childhood Status in Syria (Damascus, 2008), p. 26.
[6] See Volker Perthes, The Political Economy of Syria Under Asad (London: I. B. Tauris, 1995); and Bassam Haddad, “Syria’s State Bourgeoisie: An Organic Backbone for the Regime,” Middle East Critique 21/3 (Fall 2012).
[7] Raymond Hinnebusch, “Syria: From ‘Authoritarian Upgrading’ to Revolution?” International Affairs 88/1 (January 2012).
[8] Kasturi Sen and Waleed al Faisal, “Syria: Neoliberal Reforms in Health Sector Financing: Embedding Unequal Access?” Social Medicine 6/3 (March 2012).
[9] Syria Report, October 26, 2011.
[10] International Committee of the Red Cross, “Iraq: Giving Disabled People a Chance to Live a Normal Life,” October 20, 2011.
[11] Alison Alborz et al, “A Study of Mainstream Education Opportunities for Disabled Children and Youth and Early Childhood Development in Iraq” (London: Council for Assistance to Refugee Academics, London South Bank University, 2011).
[12] According to World Health Organization data available here.
[13] Thamer Kadum Al Hilfi, Riyadh Lafta and Gilbert Burnham, “Health Services in Iraq,” The Lancet, March 13, 2013, p. 946.
[14] Alborz et al, op cit.
[15] UNICEF, State of the World’s Children (New York, 2012), pp. 89-90.
[16] UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, Consideration of Reports Submitted by States Parties Under Article 44 of the Convention: Third Periodic Reports of States Parties Due in 2003, Lebanon, CRC/C/129/Add.7, Geneva, October 25, 2005, p. 60; UNICEF and Syrian Commission for Family Affairs, Situation Analysis of Childhood Status in Syria (Damascus, 2008), p. 138.
[17] Economist Intelligence Unit, Country Report: Syria, March 2013, p. 6.
[18] Line Khatib, “Syria’s Civil Society as a Tool for Regime Legitimacy” in Paul Aarts and Francesco Cavatorta, eds., Civil Society in Syria and Iran: Activism in Authoritarian Contexts(Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2013), p. 30ff.

Thatcherism After Thatcher - Challenging the Legacy

Nelson Mandela is invited to Mrs Thatcher's funeral - but some of her supporters wanted him dead years ago.

The last week has seen a surge of controversy as Britain stands totally divided on how to mark the passing of former Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.

The Coalition Government recalled Parliament specially to eulogize her and in spite of our austere financial times has also found over £8 million to pay for her funeral (most of it on security arrangements, in itself a telling statistic of her ability to divide even after life). By contrast, the Left has been left somewhat bamboozled on how to respond. A few have taken to the streets in apparent celebration, with a handful of instances of violence; while others have preferred the option of downloading a song from the Wizard of Oz, Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead, in such numbers it is expected to reach the top of the charts.

Most of the Left have been somewhat more restrained - Miliband, if he counts as left at all, unsurprisingly giving her qualified praise in the Commons debate, whist others have been rather subdued, cravenly overawed perhaps by the bullishness of the press in granting Thatcher a sort of Diana-esque beatification in death.

One in memoriam stands out, however, for being apposite in marking her passing not by gloating over the death of another human being, however flawed and unpleasant she was, but rather looking to the impact of her continuing legacy.

This was the statement issued by the National Union of Miners, the legitimate union which she once smeared as "The Enemy Within", ironically at the same time as criticising the Polish Government's suppression of the Solidarity trade union movement.

"To her family our condolences.

The legacy of what the Conservative Government did to British Industry under Thatcher is not one to be proud of if you really did want the best for the people. Of course Thatcher was the symbol of “free enterprise” and set out to serve those whose interests were profit for the few. The coal mining industry is not on its own in suffering the decimation of a world class industry in the name of the “free market”.

Thatcher lived long enough to see her beliefs demolished when the “free market” collapsed and came running to the State for support.  Unlike the Banks who gambled, cheated and were bailed out – Coal mines were closed and communities were left to suffer.

Margaret Hilda Thatcher is gone but the damage caused by her fatally flawed politics sadly lingers on."

And of course, with us now reeling under the oppressive boot of the most rightwing Government in history, this analysis is as pertinent as ever. The Coalition parties are rolling back the State further than Margaret Thatcher ever tried, but working fully in the spirit of her neoliberal ideology with its concept that Government should do as little as possible while profit-making should be introduced into every conceivable social transaction. It must have been with some satisfaction that in her final days she witnessed both the near destruction of the social welfare system and the effective privatization of the NHS with nearly all frontline services being put out to compulsory competitive tender from 1 April.

But of course, as with so many leaders, there are many myths about her which do not quite bear up to scrutiny.

- Contrary to myth, her Government borrowed vast amounts of money whilst preaching parsimony, needing it first to pay for  the record unemployment caused by her initial monetarist economic policies; and then to pay for tax cuts when she finally gave up on the doctrine so she could court re-election in 1987. She did reduce borrowing for a short time artificially by one-off sales of privatized state assets like the telecomms, energy and transport sectors, a policy castigated by her One Nation Tory predecessor Harold MacMillan as "selling off the family silver." Only in her last two years out of ten in office did she balance the books paying off £8 billion of the national debt, barely a quarter of what Gordon Brown managed (but for some bizarre reason never seemed to speak about in the 2010 election - we forget that just as she was the Iron Lady, Brown was for some years titled the Iron Chancellor).

Borrowing by Governments - since the war, Labour's financial record has bettered the Tories on running surpluses until having to bailout the banks. (Source - Guardian Newspaper)

- Contrary to myth, the Tory regime did not conquer inflation: it was suppressed to low levels for some years by her inducing a recession which put millions out of work, but overall it was just above 10% when she came to office, and just under 10% (and on an upwards spiral) when she left. 

- Contrary to myth, in spite of "hand bagging" the European Community, it was Thatcher's government that passed the Single European Act ushering in free movement of labour and capital across the Union, the single biggest step towards the Europe we have now. She also took us, albeit with reservations, into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, the precusor of the single European currency. She was no Euro-federalist, but in spite of the rhetoric and image, her support of the EU defies her adoption now as the masthead of the Eurosceptics: the EU we have now is in no small part down to her actions in office.

It was her Government that began the process, continued by the Major Conservative Government, of moving the long-term unemployed off the unemployment register and onto long term disability benefits. Disability/sickness benefits nearly trebled in pounds cost under Thatcher, rising from 15% to nearly 22% of the total social security bill (and to 26% under her successor John Major) as the Tories massaged the unemployment figures for political ends. This supreme example of statistical manipulation, as well as the manipulation of the lives and wellbeing of millions of vulnerable people, has now reached a viciously twisted denouement with her successors' assault on people they now decry as the LTB - lying thieving bastards. 

We could also remind the public that, as the ailing political giant Nelson Mandela, who led his nation to remarkable reconciliation, is invited to Mrs Thatcher's funeral, they might reflect that some of her supporters were keen to hold his funeral many years ago. After she derided Mandela as the leader of a "terrorist organisation" and refused to boycott the apartheid state, Mrs Thatcher was content to permit the Federation of Conservative Students to campaign for his execution by hanging.

By their works shall ye know them - and so we did and should continue to. This then is her legacy.

And yet, rather than partying at her death, the real challenge for the Left is to disseminate that legacy. The privatization of the NHS, for example, has been decades in the making - it was Thatcher who first brought in the internal market in health and ever since then hospitals and doctors have been pushed into ever-decreasing circles of both chasing the lowest price and proving their worth in terms of money rather than quality of care. Administration costs have nearly tripled while billions of pounds of public money have been robbed from the public coffers in the form of the Private Finance Initiative, yet another child of Thatcherism.

The risk now is that by courting controversy with tasteless "death parties" and the like, the Left allows her politics to be converted into some sickening hagiography that belies the truth of it : how many times have you heard ordinary members of the public saying things like Maggie would have sorted out the bankers or how she would have stopped the mess the Coalition have got us into? 

These of course could not be further from the truth - Thatcher led the way in deregulating banks and breaking the mutual building society sector; and more widely the Coalition are simply fulfilling the process which she began (and Blair continued), taking it to its next, ideological stage. Like Thatcher, they laud inequality and seek to destroy the social bonds between people, just as she once declared that there is no such thing as society. Britain under her Government became a place which was less kind, less united, where sterling replaced community. Memorably, her bleak take on the parable of the Good Samaritan had more to do with cash than care: “No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he'd only had good intentions - he had money too”

It is what she leaves behind that we should be debating. Instead, by focusing on (and, even worse, publicly celebrating) the death of an elderly woman, someone whose place would simply have been taken by someone else had she never existed, we cede the real debate about now and the future of our society. The anger may be real, understandable and shared, but it is tragically misdirected. And, in spite of all the fluster in the right wing press, the Iron Lady herself would doubtless have thoroughly approved.

Her Legacy Remains

Slave Britain

Arbeit Mach Frei, the Nazis proclaimed above their concentration camps. Well, in 21st century Britain we now have a government offering cheap or even completely free labour to employers using the most vulnerable people imagineable - prisoners, the unemployed, the physically disabled and the mentally ill. And the dying.

No, it is not a sick joke. Cameron and Clegg's Britain has today seen three blows to what little civilised restraint remained among Coalition policymakers.

1. The "Justice" Secretary hosted a seminar for employers on his plans to create 10,000 new jobs in British prisons where employers of all shapes and sizes can boost companies' profitability by in-sourcing their work to jails. Prisoners are exempted from the national minimum wage and have no employment rights. So, anything from call centres to finishing kitchen units will be carried out by prisoners earning less than £1 per hour.

2. Tescos in East Anglia had the audacity to advertise PERMANENT "jobs" paying out of work people - nothing! The jobs were advertised in partnership with the appropriately named "Monster" website. As part of a government workfare scheme, they will continue to get their unemployment benefit - Jobseekers' Allowance - plus unquantified "expenses" in return for working all night. If they turn down the work, their benefits will be cut. Tescos made profits of £1,900,000,000 in the six months to October 2011.

3. And now, sneaking in behind the controversial Welfare Bill, the Government has briefed a range of charities that disabled people will be forced to work for free for charities, public bodies and high street retailers on open-ended work experience placements or face losing their disability benefits. This will include people who are terminally ill with cancer, but assessed as having more than six months left. 

These provisions have been voted through the Commons with the support of nearly all Lib Dem MPs and all voting Conservatives. When disability campaigners objected to the work experience plans on the basis they penalise and exploit vulnerable people, the cold-hearted response was Ministers felt sanctions are an incentive for people to comply with their responsibility.

The terrible, inhumane thinking behind these "schemes" is bad enough. But the fact that the Government feels it has demonised  the weakest people of all in our country to such an extent that it can pursue them so vindictively and so openly and unashamedly is beyond appalling - it is positively chilling. If this is what they are like after 18 months, what about another three years of people with mindsets like theirs running our society?

Disablism Update: Big Rise in Abuse of Disabled People following Government Attacks

Several national disability charities are reporting significant increases in verbal and physical abuse of disabled people following their stigmatising as scroungers by both the Government and populist media. The regular Scope survey of the experiences of disabled people has shown a rise in disabled people experiencing at least one incident of abuse from 41% of respondents to nearly two-thirds over the four months to last September alone. Anecdotal evidence since then suggests no decline in this level of hostility - rather the opposite.

This rise in hostility has been parallelled by the passage of the Welfare Bill through its first two (of three) stages in Parliament and has been accompanied by increasingly hostile press coverage. Ministers have added to the atmosphere by portraying disabled people as scroungers and muddling their own pronouncements on benefits, including Nick Clegg's assertion that he wants to get 400,000 people off of disability living allowance and back into work. However, Disability Living Allowance is not actually an out of work benefit - instead it is a payment intended to support disabled people's additional costs in participating in society. Many DLA recipients already work - without it, many may no longer be able to afford to get there and end up on the dole.

But of course, with a Prime Minister who thinks its ok to make jokes in Parliament about disability, what chance is there?

More on this here.

Disablism, Con Dems and Lib Dems: No More Excuses

From The Morning Star newspaper

As I write, the Con Dem Government is comprehensively voting down in the House of Commons various amendments passed a couple of weeks ago in the House of Lords which would have partially mollified some of the harshest aspects of the new Welfare Act. These amendments included extending from one to two years the period of time people previously on Incapacity Benefit would keep the new Employment Support Allowance before it becomes means-tested (at which point, if the disabled person's partner earns more than £7,500 p.a., they get nothing). This amendment has been removed today even although the Government acknowledges that at  least 94% of those on the new ESA Work group will not find employment within twelve months.

The Lords' amendments also included exemptions from loss of benefit for cancer sufferers and widening eligibility criteria for young people. However, the Coaliton MPs have swept these aside and, a few minutes ago, they voted to cut disability living allowance (to be renamed personal independence payments) to disabled children.

Concerned that the Lords might reimpose their amendments when the Bill goes back there for its next reading, the Government has invoked the Parliament Act and declared the legislation to be a financial measure. Now, to be sure, the Act will involve spending money; but on this basis, virtually all legislation would be classified as financial. The Parliament Act was introduced a century ago to ensure that the Lords could not block indefinitely a Budget passed by the Commons - so it is stretching the spirit of the law far beyond breaking point to try this sort of ruse. But, there again, as the Government has already written to many disabled people informing them of the changes to their benefits from April, when the necessary legislation has not yet been passed by Parliament, perhaps they are in a bit of a hurry.

Never has the assault on the literally most vulnerable people in our society been so full on, so evident and so utterly vicious. The whole Act is petty and narrow-minded in its conception and unyielding and bigoted in its execution. This Government, led by a Prime Minister who has had to apologise for making so-called jokes about disabled people, is the most unashamedly wicked in modern history. Not even Thatcher pushed through such mean-spirited legislation.

"Proof the Tories know nothing about real life!" I noticed someone blog today.

Well, yes, many people do think we have a Tory Government. It has certainly out-Toried every previous one by a long shot. But never, ever let us forget that this is not a majority Conservative Government. It is a Conservative-Lib Dem Coalition. And today, these measures have been passed only with the vital support of Lib Dem MPs. Oh yes, a handful of them rebelled, and plenty of them doubtless wrung their hands and muttered about the deficit. But they still put their hands up to support this pernicious assault on some of the poorest and sickest people in Britain. They are not passive bystanders helplessly witnessing some unfolding tragedy; rather, they are active participants in a crime against society.

Yes, they whine and shake their heads apologetically alongside people like Nadine Dorries MP who declare people not to be disabled if they are able to text or twitter; alongside people like Philip Davies MP, who thinks people with mental health problems should be exempted from being paid the national minimum wage, and alongside Tories who echo and support the words of Cllr Luke MacKenzie of Basildon who thinks "unwashed" disabled people should move to North Korea.

I am married to a disabled person who got her letter informing her of her ATOS assessment for future eligibility last week. She had been expecting it for some months but needless to say, the prospect of an employee of a French IT company deciding whether or not she is disabled enough after a forty minute interview (if it lasts that long) is not an appealing prospect. And in the climate of hostility engendered by the Government, with its peddling of myths about scroungers and the workshy, she has, like many others (including police statistics) tracked a rising degree of overt hostility from complete strangers in recent months. This is fuelled by the lies repeated over and over again by Con Dem MPs, who often muddle things like Incapacity Benefit and Disability Living Allowance - I choked with bemusement and anger listening to Nick Clegg talking about the need to get people off DLA and back to work last year: DLA is not an out-of-work benefits, but rather paid in recognition of the higher costs faced by disabled people in participating in society. Frequently, DLA is the vital aid that ensures many disabled people CONTINUE to work. Without it, tens of thousands now in work will end up on the dole.

To be fair, the Lib Dem federal conference voted substantially against most of what the Government is doing. Many Lib Dems are far more than slightly uncomfortable about the changes. But Lib Dem members can't have it both ways - their MPs and Peers have, with a handful of honourable exceptions, consistently voted for this legislation. Their leader and parliamentarians have ignored their demands and concerns. So if ordinary members really disagree with this most disgraceful piece of legislation, targeting vulnerable people and using dubious parliamentary methods to rush it through it time, the only true course left to them is to leave their party. If they genuinely hold to any shred of socially progressive belief in the welfare state or a vaguely humane society, they will walk away from a party which is now simply one of the twin engines of a vehicle driving forward on full-throttle the most extreme rightwing project in British history. There can be no more excuses.

If they don't leave, if they stay in collusion with the rank disablists who run our government, then as the saying goes, by their friends shall you know them.

UPDATE: New survey by Scope shows massive increase in abuse of disabled people following Government and media stigmatising of benefits claimants. More here.

A Joke No More...

Morning Star Online reports: Disabled Face Welfare Chaos

The Government's "reforms" of disability support continue apace, ill-informed and liable to cause serious damage to the lives of hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people. Part of this is a ham-fisted attempt to cut disability living allowance costs by 20% in the ignorant belief, now incorrectly parroted by several government Ministers as well as the gutter press, that DLA is paid exclusively to people who are out of work. In fact, it is a payment recognising that disability adds to people's costs, for example in travelling to work, and is therefore a vital means of ensuring that many disabled people are able to continue in employment. If it is cut or withdrawn, many will face significant financial hardship and some will be forced out of employment, leading to increased social security costs. Neither ethical, nor financially efficient.

Britain's only genuinely left wing national daily newspaper, The Morning Star, covers this issue in its online edition today:

Scottish disability campaigners voiced fears today that the assessment criteria for those forced to switch from disability living allowance to a lower benefit scheme will be too "rigid and restrictive."

Inclusion Scotland and the Independent Living in Scotland project met the Department of Work and Pensions in Edinburgh to raise concerns over British government plans to force disabled people out of disability living allowance and to assess them instead for a "personal independence payment (PIP)."

Read the full article: click HERE

Crippling the Disabled - Where Compassion Comes With an Invoice

The last twenty four hours have seen Britain's social care system plunged into genuine crisis on several fronts.

Most graphic has been the secretly filmed abuse of residents with learning difficulties at a hospital facility in Bristol. An undercover journalist spent five weeks posing as a member of staff to record images of residents being doused with water for not obeying instructions, beaten, stamped on and verbally abused by the people responsible for their care and well being.

Next came the news that Southern Cross, the country's biggest care provider and landlord to over 31,000 elderly people with care needs, is in deep financial trouble. It has staved off bankruptcy by securing temporary rent reductions from its own landlords, but only until October.

And finally, but by no means least, a group of senior clinicians wrote to the Guardian condemning the Con Dem Coalition Government's heartless pursuit of hundreds of thousands of people with mental health problems on Incapacity Benefit and Disability Living Allowance. Since their election a year ago, the Government has massively revamped the already widely criticised tests for disability brought into operation for new claimants only in 2008. In addition, it announced that all claimants are to be reviewed, eventually every six months, in what amounts to a blatant attempt to hound some pretty vulnerable people off benefits into an uncertain future where jobs are relatively thin on the ground and where many employers are clearly deeply prejudiced against disabled people to begin with. The result, the clinicians warn in their letter, has been to increase the stress and mental health problems of the people targetted, with growing evidence of both attempted and actual suicides by deeply distressed people facing the loss of the pretty tenuous safety net that has been in place until now.

But what if they can't work?

ATOS Origin, a large French-based IT and facilities group, has been engaged to carry out the review, which will cover some 1.5 million people. Buttressed by pronouncements by Conservative Ministers that at least 20% of people on disability benefits should be in work (a rather arbitrary figure with no research to support the assertion), ATOS to date fail or cut payments to over 90% of people who go through what should be a comprehensive assessment lasting an hour or longer. Many claimants emerge with tales of 10 minute gallop-throughs, with surreal lines of questioning including imagining how people with walking difficulties might cope better in a wheelchair; or how a blind person with a guide dog has consequently no disability. Terminally ill people have been ordered back to work - though perhaps the most bizarre incident was where a woman dismissed by her employer as permanently unfit for work after an assessment by an ATOS occupational health therapist was sent for a IB review with ATOS, who decided there was nothing wrong with her.

On appeal up to 2/3s of people have their benefits reinstated, but only after some months and after a deeply worrying time for them. And many are then called back almost immediately for a new assessment - harassment in all but name. With the drip-drip of Government propaganda increasingly portraying disabled people as a burden on society, the last year has seen a rise in aggression and violence towards disabled people according to a survey by Scope, and terms of abuse such as "spastic" and "mentalist" are creeping more and more into the acceptable lexicography of the mass media. So-called comedians such as Frankie Boyle are feted and awarded TV shows in spite of "jokes" about disabled babies.

Disability has long been an awkward issue for society. I have worked with organisations providing disability support for the last 21 years and can only put this down to ignorance at one end of the spectrum and real, genuine evil at the other. The media is frothing spectacularly at the abuse filmed in Bristol, but this is the same media that routinely denounced those with mental health and other less physically evident disabilities as scroungers, malingerers and frauds. The Con Dems play up to this with stunts like the list of excuses put forward by people found to be defrauding disability benefits earlier this week - implying that fraud is widespread when in truth every audit carry out confirms the level as around 1% of total spend, costing the exchequer some £2 billion p.a. - not insignificant and not to be ignored, certainly, but where is the same pursuit of tax avoidance which robs the nation of at least £20 billions p.a. in lost revenue?

Misleading headlines stigmatise claimants

Of course, the elephant in the room with all three of the crises brought to the public's fleeting attention is that the profit motive features in all of them: the Bristol hospital is run by a private contractor, Castleback Care. Southern Cross, meantime, is a large business, complete with its Investor Centre (click here). which has happily ratched up five figure profits in the not-distant past (and its former Chief Executive was personally £13 millions richer when he left them after heading up a tendfold their expansion in Southern Cross' operations). Meantime, ATOS Origin stand to make over £300 million from their efforts to stamp down on disabled people, with unconfirmed rumours that additional bonuses (or perhaps bounties would be a more appropriate word) payable for each person knocked off the incapacity benefit or DLA registers.

Prime Minister David Cameron claimed that the disability of his late son, Ivan, had opened his eyes to the prejudices and barriers facing people with disabilities. Poor little Ivan is sadly gone now, but his father's awareness appears to have passed away with him - referring to disability benefits as a "something for nothing" culture and slashing hundreds of millions from local authorities social care budgets, leading to the closure of day centres and the isolation of thousands of disabled people, unable to leave their homes or access any sort of beneficial social interaction. And yet, perhaps unsurprisingly, he seems content with arrangements that pour good money after bad into the pockets of companies that seek to make a profit out of welfare, creaming off cash from compassion.

Society, it has been said, even by Mr Cameron, is judged by how it treats the vulnerable. By that standard, Britain is failing badly and its Prime Minister is encouraging its failure, forging a society where compassion comes with an invoice. Good care and support is not cheap; it comes at a price, one which society should be more willing to meet, rather than take the narrow view that sees vulnerable people as a burden on everyone else. If for no other reason, the blinding truth is that effective welfare and social care is important to us all because, whether we like it or not, in the end, we are all at least potentially vulnerable
.

UK Government wants to deport 5 year old disabled girl with cerebral palsy: Rania Must Stay!

Rania Abdechakour came from Algeria to Britain to live with her aunt and uncle in Bolton, Lancashire, on a six-month visa in 2008 as a toddler, to give her mother a break and help her condition. As it emerged just how ill she was, her stay was extended so she could seek more medical help.

Rania has quadriplegic cerebral palsy and has a number of medical conditions including epilepsy, is partially sighted and more recently diagnosed with reflex and anoxic seizures in which her heart stops beating.

The British Government has now ruled that she must be sent back to Algeria, even although the treatment she has had here and which has significantly improved her condition, is not available there and indeed Algerian society is even more prejudiced against disability than our own. Rania's aunt, Jo Taleb, and her husband Moussa, had begun adoption procedures so that they would be legally recognised as her parents - Rania regards them as her mum and dad - but the deportation order has cut across this.

Rania Must Stay!

Rania's deportation is being appealed, but if it is lost, she will be sent back to a country and people who she does not know. Her aunt fears she is so ill, having had to personally resuscitate her, that she will die if she is sent back.

Whatever views people may hold on migration, are we really prepared to say that Britain has no room for this little child, even when there is a loving, working family looking after her now and who want to continue to do so?

Please support keeping Rania in the UK. Write to your Member of Parliament and sign the online petition by clicking here. Thanks!


Please share this and encourage people to sign.

"Why don't they start with the bankers?"

The British Government has announced its programme of cuts in public spending today. Carefully crafting a wide range of substantial reductions in spending so that the average cuts per Government department come in at 19% over four years rather than Labour's planned 20%, the Con Dems betray the essential unity of the three main parties around a monetarist, free market agenda. Their little school boyish prank may make waves in the Westminster Village, a bit like waving condoms about in a Prefects' Room, but the impact on a wide range of poor and vulnerable citizens will be even worse than feared, with £7 billions more than expected off disability payments - £50 per week taken from people on Incapacity Benefit for more than 12 months - and a 50% reduction in the social housing budget. At the same time, precisely nothing is done to tackle the massive tax evasion and corporate tax exemptions that plague Britain.

So amidst the gloom, it was good to see this video (below) of Green Party leader Caroline Lucas MP railing passionately against the cuts as socially damaging and economically illiterate - worsening the crisis of the deficit rather than tackling it. Clearly angered by the Chancellor's approach, she calls for action on investment in sustainable jobs and action against tax evasion. Government led spending on a range of activities such as improving public transport and developing renewable energy would pay dividends in a multiplicity of ways - generating jobs and tax revenue, cutting the deficit, reducing our dependence on foreign energy and cutting our carbon emissions.

This type of Keynesian economic theory,on which the "Green New Deal" is based, used to be the economic orthodoxy that worked for a coherent society. By contrast, Monetarist theory adopted by right wingers in the 1970s onwards changed that - placing economic objectives above social ones and seeking to reduce government involvement in the economy and socirty as a whole. As Nigel Lawson, Thatcher's Chancellor, explained on BBC Radio 4 last night, "I wasn't much bothered about damaging solidarity and social cohesion." All he was bothered about was creating space for tax cuts for the wealthy and a chance to flog off the national assets.

As the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats contemplate the biggest sale of public assets ever, as well as cutting deep into the welfare state, the Con Dem regime is emerging as one of the most avowedly ideological governments in British history, rolling back the shrinking public sector further than Mrs Thatcher ever dared imagine.

At least, hearing Caroline Lucas' speech, there is clearly a voice in Parliament showing that there IS an alternative to an agenda that turns citizens into numbers and shuts its eyes to real human suffering. Let's hope it keeps getting louder. And heard.