Just so that you know:
This week, I have already spoken with:
- Homeless young mothers from the Boundary House hostel in Welwyn Garden City who’ve been placed in cramped, single-room “studio” flats with their kids miles away from their jobs and study. They were terrified (rightly) that they’d never find even halfway decent accommodation.
- A young woman (aged 22) who told me that she’d been sanctioned for missing a meeting, even though she’d let her jobcentre know that she couldn’t attend, because she’d been placed in housing out of the borough. She said that she didn’t know she could appeal the sanction decision. She also said that she hadn’t been told about hardship payments. She has a two-year-old daughter. She had no idea how to address any of these problems and nobody to ask.
- A 53-year-old man who has serious mental health issues (his depression and anxiety are so bad that he often can’t leave the house). He has to pay the bedroom tax. His council tax benefit has been cut. And now, it seems that his DLA has been stopped, or that anyway, he’s getting nothing. He filled in a PIP application form with assistance several months ago and was called to an assessment. He says that he couldn’t cope with the face-to-face assessment, though, and so the assessor told him that a home visit would be organised. But it seems that it wasn’t. He says that assessment just never happened. He contacted me on Tuesday, because no money went into his account as it did when he was receiving DLA. He says that he’s been told he has to start again with a PIP form. He’s very confused and worried. He no longer has a social worker. God only knows what has happened. The point is that there’s nobody around to help him navigate any of this. (Disabled People Against Cuts are planning a national day of fightback on 13 July against the abject mess that is the Personal Independence Payment system. Find out more here).
I just want you to know that all this is still going on while the political and media classes amuse themselves with their appalling game of thrones. I’d also say that the chances of these so-called systems being improved, or even acknowledged, in the next few years are about zero. Probably less than that.
There are other responses to ‘games of thrones’. And as one of the Craig Murray links I’ve given within a Kwug blog post illustrates, Conservative MPs seem to prefer to ‘sit pretty’. Leaders of Britain’s Green Parties call on leaders of Labour, Lib Dem and Plaid Cwmry for progressive alliance in face of snap general election
It seems that all this coup plotting is a smoke screen for electoral boundary changes. Morevover, the internal Conservative Party wranglings could have been predicted to subside as soon as the EU referendum was over, as Murray also argues. Perhaps the EU referendum served as a media smoke screen to allow the Housing & Planning Act 2016 to pass without much truly informed discussion?
Now we see the real end-game in all of this austerity. This is how effective the years of propaganda have been against benefits and welfare. There is now total indifference from the state. Not only does the system no longer care, it doesn’t even see why it should do so. Austerity and wilful neglect, hand in hand.
Yep seems to have accelerated in recent times
And I have argued that the way the UK’s EU Referendum played out, it was a smoke screen for the passing of the Housing & Planning Act 2016. Uniting against the real causes of oppression is better than poor people lashing out at the nearest scapegoat.
I love what Caroline Lucas MP says of Nigel Farage’s ‘legacy’: Farage was frontman for ‘biggest Establishment stitch-up in a generation’