Posts Tagged ‘news’

27 Oct

Crippen shares a message

Posted by crippencartoons in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , .

A message from the disabled activists who took John Pring’s new book to Parliament.

Thanks to you we did it!

On 2nd September 2024, Disabled campaigners from across the UK took 650 copies of The Department: How a Violent Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence by John Pring to Parliament. Each one was in a black envelope individually addressed to each MP as a contribution from Pluto publishers.

TV stars Cherylee Houston and Lisa Hammond turned up on the day to help us carry the books along with representatives from Deaf and Disabled People’s Organisations supporting the initiative.

Contrary to the advice that we had been given on a number of occasions when different members had contacted Parliament to confirm how best to make the delivery, the books were denied entrance. This meant that the meeting we had booked for MPs to come and hear about the further social security cuts that are planned as a continuation from Tory policy was not able to happen.

Instead, campaigners took a spontaneous decision to blockade the entrance to Parliament. After hours of stand off with the police, Parliament security agreed to get a vehicle to collect the books and take them to the security centre that checks mail.

We are in the process of checking with MPs if they received their copies of the books. So far it looks as if they did. We are in the process of working out our remaining budget to send copies to devolved and regional administrations in the UK.

We apologise for not having updated you meanwhile. We are all volunteers who try our best to be active on top of living with our disablement and we apologise for not being able to do everything as good as we should. We are tremendously grateful for the money that was donated to this and the sacrifices people made.

Links to coverage:

ITV reports on Mum wants answers

DNS report on Disabled activists defy bureaucrats

DNS report on Commons confirms MPs received book

The Canary report on DWP protest at parliament

Big Issue reports on book to MPs

Disability Rights UK report on delivery of book

Disability Rights UK report on activists lobby parliament

6 Oct

Crippen hears how Mo Stewart informs the new Advisory Board

Posted by crippencartoons in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , , .

Remember how Labour decided to ignore disabled people when it sent out invitations for people to join their new Labour Market Advisory Board?

Well, our good friend disabled researcher Mo Stewart has now been invited to provide information to the Advisory Board regarding the identified public health crisis and preventable harm created by UK social policy primary legislation. Certainly a step in the right direction eh?!

The sort of information that Mo will be providing is well documented, mostly from her own work as research lead of the preventable harm project and from her many publications including ‘The public health crisis created by UK social policy reforms’.

Mo addresses her concerns to Professor Paul Gregg, Chair of the new Advisory Board and also Professor of Economic and Social Policy in the Dept of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath. She has kindly shared these concerns with me, which, with her permission I will now share with you.

Mo notes that the Advisory Board boasts significant members but no disabled member, and certainly no one with any expertise regarding the identified government induced public health crisis now ongoing in the UK. This crisis is negatively impacting on the health, wellbeing and survival of many of the chronically ill and disabled community who are unable to work.

It is also linked to a disturbing number of suicides of some of those in greatest need following relentless intimidation by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) when adopting the politics of fear using the fatally flawed Work Capability Assessment (WCA) to restrict disability benefit access. This was also identified by Professor Jonathan Portes as ‘one of the biggest social policy failures in the past 20-30 years.’

She also notes that Liz Kendall, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions for the Labour administration, has invited the involvement of the new Advisory Board when working towards her planned White Paper. However, her comments since taking office demonstrates the same disturbing commentary as the previous Conservative administration regarding the numbers of people who claim disability benefits. This continuing demonisation of chronically ill and disabled people who are not in paid employment, is based on fake news and right-leaning ideology.

Mo tells Professor Gregg that, whilst she fully comprehends that he has a job to do, he should also consider that there has never been any evidence of vast numbers of fake disability benefit claims. That the hostile political rhetoric attacking disability benefit claimants adopted since 2010 by the various governments has worked well, as indicated by the rise in prosecuted disability hate crimes which climbed by 213% during the Coalition government‘s term in office (2010-15). All this of course aided by the tabloid press.

Mo concludes by reminding Professor Gregg that we are living in very dark and dangerous times since the adoption of neoliberal politics in the UK. This, coupled with the influence of corporate America with UK social policy reforms since 1992, and the adoption of social policies introduced using a fiscal priority whilst disregarding the health, wellbeing and survival of those in greatest need, has guaranteed that many people would be ‘killed by the state’ with no-one held to account.

Further, there is a disturbing history of preventable harm against those in greatest need created by successive UK neoliberal administrations and identified by a multitude of academics from a variety of universities, which is detailed in published evidence routinely disregarded by the DWP.

Well, that should give Professor Gregg and his colleagues on the Advisory Board food for thought. … Let’s see what they do with it?

NB: What’s also worrying is that years later, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions for the Coalition administration is still attacking the disabled community ‘languishing on benefit’ in his column in the Telegraph, without providing any evidence. It would appear that this man has a habit of using false statistics to gain attention to his hostile rhetoric and has even been challenged by the UK Statistics Authority who identified his many claims advising that they were ‘unsupported by the official statistics’. It’s also worrying that he now appears to be an advisor to the Labour government.

Description of cartoon for those using screen reading software

Professor Paul Gregg, Chair of the new Labour Market Advisory Board is sat at a large table. He is wearing informal clothing and is holding a document that says ‘Preventable harm project’ whilst on the table in front of him are other documents reading ‘Killed by the state’ and ‘High rate of suicide’. Alongside of him are a suited man and a woman and also Iain Duncan Smith (IDS) who is wearing an ID badge with ‘DWP Advisor’ printed upon it. Gregg is asking: “So is someone going to tell me who this Mo Stewart is?!”. The man and the woman are both saying; “Er …” whilst IDS is thinking: “Oh shit!”

1 Oct

Crippen asks “Fraud – What Fraud?!

Posted by crippencartoons in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , .

You may remember back in April of this year I ran a blog article about the DWP hiring more covert surveillance officers to track down disabled people who were fraudulently claiming benefits. At the time the government’s own figures showed that benefit fraud was at its lowest ever at less than 3.5%, much of which could be attributed to DWP error.

Well, having got rid of the Tory’s, we now have a labour government that has decided to continue with the harmful rhetoric that the DWP continue to pump out to a gullible public through the national press. But how did this attack against disabled people start, especially those claiming benefits because they cannot find accessible employment?

You’ll remember the Coalition administration elected in 2010? Well, it was this administration that started to change the public’s perception of disabled people. They vehemently challenged the integrity of the chronically ill and disabled community and routinely accused disability benefit claimants of fraud while failing to produce evidence to support their claims. Their often hostile rhetoric encouraged a 213 percent increase in prosecuted disability hate crimes, with successive administrations disregarded the thousands of deaths directly linked to the Work Capability Assessment (WCA).

And what with recent stats from the Home Office revealing that disability hate crime has risen by 43%. It doesn’t take much of a leap to connect this to the vitriol being pumped out by the DWP.

If you’ve read Mo Stewart’s book you’ll know how the WCA “ … was adopted using a discredited and dangerous biopsychosocial model of assessment to restrict access to long-term disability benefit. Influenced by corporate America since 1992, the UK social policy reforms guaranteed that many of those in greatest need were destined to die when, covertly, killed by the State.”

Sounds a bit dramatic, doesn’t it? “Killed by the state”. But this has exactly what has been happening since Margaret Thatcher started her devotion to neoliberal politics, which is the ideology that supports free market competition with an emphasis on minimal State intervention, would eventually be identified as being at ‘the root of all our problems’ (Monbiot, 2016).

Thatcher’s well-documented insistence that the welfare state was an unacceptable financial burden on the public purse, opened the door to the influence of corporate America with UK social policy reforms and the ‘planned demolition of the UK welfare state’ (Stewart, 2016).

Incidentally, every 30 years confidential Cabinet Papers from past UK governments are released into the public domain. In 2012, the 1982 Cabinet Papers from the first Thatcher administration (1979–83) were released, offering evidence demonstrating the political expectation to eventually demolish the UK welfare state, including the National Health Service (NHS).

It’s all there folks, you just have to dig for it as John Pring, disabled Editor of Disability News Service (DNS) and Mo Stewart, disabled researcher and lead on the Preventable Harm project, have done. Mo writes:

“Thatcher’s social policy right-leaning neoliberal legacy has been continued by every successive administration. This included introducing American corporate influence for the development of UK social policy reforms by the Major administration (1990–97) (Stewart, 2018); the adoption of American social and labour market policies by the Blair administration (1997–2007) (Daguerre, 2004; Daguerre and Taylor-Gooby, 2004); the adoption of the Work Capability Assessment in 2008 to limit access to the new Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) disability benefit by the Brown administration (2007–10) (Gentleman, 2011); and the increased use of sanctions, which removed all income to successfully intimidate disability benefit claimants, and to starve some of them to death (Pring, 2020a), by the Cameron-Clegg Coalition administration (2010–15).”

In the Independent Living review of John Pring’s book they comment that: “As demonstrated in the ‘Department’, a disturbing number of chronically ill disability benefit claimants committed suicide, linked in no small measure to persecution by the DWP, and to the fear instilled by the relentless threat of sanctions that meant the total loss of their only income which guaranteed destitution.”

Description of cartoon for those people using screen reading software

The PM Keir Starmer and a Civil Servant are standing each side of a large Labour Part Press Release statement hung on the wall. It reads ‘Disabled benefits claimants are all work-shy scroungers with most of them fiddling the system and taking your hard earned money!’ On a table in front of them are four other cards. One reads: ‘Benefit fraud at its lowest rate ever’, another reads: ‘PIP fraud at zero!’, the third one reads ‘Disability hate crime up 43%’, and the final card reads: ‘DWP ignores research re 600 suicides linked to WCA’. The civil servant is asking the PM: “But Sir – what about the facts?!” whilst pointing at the cards upon the table. Starmer replies: “Facts – when have they ever played a part in politics?!”

25 Sep

Crippen hears that Labour has sidelined disabled people from DWP ‘inactivity’ board

Posted by crippencartoons in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , .

Remember when Labour’s general election manifesto stated that it was “committed to championing the rights of disabled people and to the principle of working with them, so that their views and voices will be at the heart of all we do”.

Well, you’ll be forgiven for thinking that another party won the election because everything that they claimed to do on our behalf seems to have gone right out of the window!

As reported in Disability News Service (DNS), Disabled Rights activists have criticised the Labour government’s “hugely disappointing” and “exclusionary” decision to set up a board of experts to examine “economic inactivity” without appointing a single representative of a disabled people’s organisation.

Work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall appears to have failed to appoint any disabled experts to the Labour Market Advisory Board, even though she made it clear that its key aim was tackling the “spiralling inactivity” caused by a record number of people out of work due to long-term sickness.

But the eight members of the board, labour market experts from across business, industrial relations and academia, do not appear to include any disabled experts and certainly do not include representatives of any disabled people’s organisations (DPOs).

Disabled researcher Stef Benstead, author of Second Class Citizens, which describes the harm caused to disabled people by a decade of cuts and reforms, said: “It should not be thinkable for any modern government department to have an advisory board that does not include representatives of the community impacted by the policy proposals.”

Dan White, policy and campaigns officer for Disability Rights UK, said it was “hugely disappointing that not one disabled people’s organisation or disabled people’s expert representative” was on the board, despite Labour’s past commitments to involving disabled people in developing policy. Would any other group be left out of an expert board that is focused on their future?”

Inclusion London said it was “extremely concerned” that disabled people were “once again missing from an important forum where programmes targeting us will be shaped” with their senior policy and campaigns manager Julia Modern adding that:

“Under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the government is obliged to consult with disabled people”.

You can read the full article in DNS.

Description of cartoon for those using screen reading software

Labour politicians Starmer, Reeves and Kendall are attending the Labour Party Conference 2024. Reeves is holding a card that reads ‘Disabled are scroungers’. Starmer’s card reads ‘Recycled Tory Speeches’ whilst Kendall’s card reads ‘DWP work not welfare’. Two disabled activists representing GMCDP and DPAC are in front of them looking angry. One is holding a card that reads ‘UN Convention – Government is obliged to consult with disabled’ whilst the other one is saying: “So not only DON’T they consult with us – they’re also peddling the same Tory lies about us!”