Hello all 🙂
Here’s season 2 from my podcast. This season takes a close and hopefully scathing look at the vile Liz Kendall and her plans to cut disability benefits and the personal independence payment.
That woman is revolting. Her poison trickles down, unlike wealth, sadly.
This first episode features a report of an interview I did with a universal credit support worker who actually said that sick and disabled and homeless people needed to pull themselves together and model themselves on Elon Musk. True story.
That’s the kind of person that the DWP is putting out there to make decisions about who gets disability support.
I’d be interested in hearing what you think – about this episode and also about Liz Kendall. What a shower.
Surprise, Liz – people actually die when you leave them nothing to live on
I’ve made this podcast series to talk about the unspeakable effects that 15 years of cuts to disability benefits and support have had on disabled people.
And now we have Liz Kendall – another elected member who does not have the vision or even the attention span to devise social policy and welfare policy that brings out the best in us, rather than the worst – one of the myriad politicians around the world who try to swing attention from their own astounding uselessness and insatiable love of freebies by telling us all that it is benefit claimants who are bringing Fanny Adams to the great Western experiment.
The irony of that.
For more than 15 years, I’ve been interviewing and spending days and weeks with sick and disabled people who have taken the brunt of god knows how many years of global anti-welfare cuts and attacks.
Benefits are difficult to get, Liz
It needs to be said that claiming benefits is actually HARD to do. The whole process is humiliating. People are constantly assessed and picked on by bureaucrats. The facts are that most people just give up.
That part of the story needs to be heard. It is a major part of the story. It is a much bigger part of the story than the part which says everyone who claims is on the make.
Let’s tell it like it is, because Liz Kendall is talking out of her behind. Ain’t pretty.
Nice to hear you once again talking sense about the predicament of disabled people in particular and benefit claimants in general Kate.
Of course under the ‘Labour’ of Starmer & Co (whose election seems even less legitimate than Brexit given that he’s jettisoned every one of the policies he was elected leader on) the bottom line is reducing the tax burden for the very rich. Of course, they don’t pitch it like that, as they want to convince Mr and Mrs Daily Mail reader that it is they who are bearing the brunt of taxation (not exactly untrue, but as Yanis Varoufakis helpfully points out regularly, there are global corporations such as Google, Amazon and Facebook as well as an increasing number of increasingly wealthy billionaires (not mere millionaires!) who at present are next to being untaxed). There are murmurings of taxing wealth above e £10 million with a 2% surtax to raise an estimated £24 billion, but why not increase that tax rate to 10% and really raise some decent amounts so the the system cannot just be reformed, but transformed into the system that’s needed. Kendall is no better than Duncan Smith with her own particular take on Arbeit Macht Frei. Dignified work of course enhances people’s lives, but as you say, not the exploitative wage slavery that Kendall and her ilk propose for the disabled and poor. We need a system that provides both support and increasingly a way out of poverty, whether that is through an education system that is free at point of use (as it should be) or through state funded skills training schemes of the variety that used to be provided in government run Skillcentres run by the old Manpower Services Commission (god that dates me!).
For me it’s very telling that Starmer & Co have remained very silent indeed on the subject of taxing the obscenely rich sufficiently. No one needs to be a billionaire, or even a multi-millionaire, come to that.My grandfather, a business owner himself and certainly no leftie was convinced that there was no way to become rich honestly (and one of his brothers was a millionaire – so he had a fair idea how it was done!). Though my grandfather was an employer who could arguably be described as an exploiter of labour he provided stable, decently paid jobs in an area where such work was the exception. He lived very modestly and would often work alongside his workers and not ask anyone to do anything he wasn’t prepared to do himself. He was probably a Tory, but not the vile variety that seem to have infested both the current Conservative and Labour party leaderships.
Starmer and Co need to start listening to the people and not fob them off with lies. I find it very scary indeed that everything this current Labour administration does, and has done since they were elected has served to bolster the fortunes of Farage and his utterly vile Reform UK. The government needs to start listening, and could do a lot worse than listen to the message put out by Garry Stevenson on his YouTube channel Garry’s Economics where he advocates for the taxation of the richest at a rate that will deliver the finances to fix the economy. Unashamedly redistributionist, it’s the kind of thing I like to hear – good, old fashioned Keynsianism!
Liz Kendall literally has me climbing the walls.
Inquiry to review rise in young people not working or studying
“We cannot afford to lose a generation of young people to a life on benefits, with no work prospects and not enough hope.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0l7elxrr7ko
It’s like the 1970s all over again, as if Punk never happened, Chelsea singing “We’ve got a right to work”, The Adverts “No time to be 21”, Pistols “Pretty Vacant”, UB40 “I Am a 1 in 10”, Ah, those were the days. Nearly 50 years later nothing’s changed. Leaving school with no prospects and signing on.