Here’s my latest podcast episode on Liz Kendall’s plans to cut benefits for sick and disabled people:
“You know how you get these sick bastards who abuse their partners by controlling the family’s bank accounts and throwing a few coins at Mum for food and clothes if she behaves?
Liz Kendall is just like that on taking money from benefit claimants – you know, “this might hurt you sweetheart, but I’m doing it for your own good.”
Feelgood abuse is what it’s all about.
Domestic abuse charities call this behaviour coercive financial abuse, but in political circles it is known as mission critical welfare reform.”
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In this episode, we talk about failed back to work schemes, money wasted on voracious private “employability” companies and how so-called “tailored” back to work support for disabled people can feel more like a tailored attack.
If Liz Kendall wants to improve working options for disabled people, people with mental health issues and everybody else tbh, she needs to raise the national living and minimum wages to £20 and more. People would be a lot less depressed if they could earn enough to meet their bills and then some.
Then Labour needs to tax major corporates like Amazon for the kind of money that would pay to make every workplace and space accessible.
How true. Ive been experiencing a coercive work coach at my local jobcentre who wants to force me to volunteer. Ive explained I don’t have any references as I lack any social circle, and am severeley long term Jobless, and I’ve explai ned politely, and calmly I can’t be forced.
Ive made a formal complaint to Universal Credit, and now wait for an outcome.
Hope it goes ok – feel free to let us know.
Thanks Kate
The so-called ‘Work & Health programme’ aka “Better Working Futures” in my area provided by Reed in Partnership, was all about convincing people with a variety of health problems that they were fit to work, no matter what was wrong with them, and that work is the cure for all ills. In my case His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunal Service ruled otherwise, thankfully.
What a shower. Seriously. The same companies, the same phrases (“tailored support”, anyone?) and even the same amounts proposed for “getting disabled people into work”: £1bn. Cameron said it, Osborne said it, Australia, New Zealand’s ridiculous disability minister – it’s always £1bn or $1bn.
Kendall doesn’t even have to copy and paste the Tories’ welfare flop these days. AI just guffs it out for her
But isn’t AI supposed to replace the majority of jobs? So where do they want us all to work?
Very good point. I’m a web editor by day and fully expect to be replaced by an algorithm at some point.
That’s one of the many issues innit. Liz Kendall keeps saying that she’ll put people into “good” work and that “good” work is good for mental health and blah blah blah. That’s because she knows that there’s mainly “bad” work out there and that bad work is absolutely not good for mental health or income or anything at all except the bank balances of corporate employers.
Fortunately, I’m now retired and have used my freedom from micromanagement by the State to become what Hereford Times Editor told me last year was/is “a long time and valued contributor” to the letters page. That’s what I call real volunteering.
Into my regular letters, I channel personal experience and insights into my regular letters; and that seems to irk the local far right. My letters take up far less of my time than an application form for jobs I never had a chance of getting but was told to number-crunch on.
In passing on personal experience here, I would advise current claimants to contact their local MP. A member of Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group reported to us when I was a member, that her local MP Malcolm Rifkind helped her overturn a jobcentre sanction. You might also mention that work coaches, as Kate has pointed out elsewhere, have excessive caseloads that make a nonsense of ‘tailord support’, and Dr David Webster (adviser to Child Poverty Action Group) has pointed out that about 60,000 Universal Credit sanctions [before appeal] were issued in November 2024.
Alan Wheatley
Now living in Hereford
Your letters are excellent! You should actually put them in a book. They’re really good.
They should also increase carers allowance so that unpaid carers who save their local authority thousands of pounds can pay their bills.
Spot on there. £300-ish a month for working 24/7. It’s appalling. Liz Kendall is a bit quiet on that. 2 of the women in the podcast had to give up pretty good jobs to become full time carers to their disabled children. Now they have very little indeed.
Dear Kate
I would summarise the situation you are reporting here as taxpayer-funded human trafficking, in which Liz Kendall & Co are in league with what has been euphemistically termed ‘the global public service delivery sector’. And of course, you are more willing to listen to those who are treated as ‘cargo’.
I can add that that term ‘global public service delivery sector’ is, as I recall, a term I picked up around 2005 from the website of A4E ‘Action for Employment’, of which Emma Harrison was CEO to become David Cameron’s ‘Family Champion’!
My Green Party friend Anne Gray — who took the lead role in authoring the Green Party’s response to Labour’s 2008 ‘No-one written off’ Welfare Reform Green Paper — outlined that kind of human trafficking in her 2004 Pluto Press publication ‘Unsocial Europe: Social Protection, or Flexploitation’.
See also Anne’s press release for ‘Writing off workfare: For a Green New Deal, not the Flexible New Deal’
That is a very good way of putting it.
Emma Harrison made enough dosh thank you very much, out of the lucrative New Labour A4e (Arses for Elbows) contract to buy a castle in the Derbyshire Peak District where she started her own brewery. And all the while A4e was getting those government contracts David Blunkett was on the A4e board of Directors.
So now Liz Kendall is gone, replaced by centre-Right Pat McFadden, a prior adversary of Jeremy Corbyn. Doesn’t exactly bode well for anyone relying on the Benefits system.
Pat McFadden eh. Jesus Christ.
Not literally.
DWP job centres to speak to all sickness benefit claimants in ‘new plan’
“Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden has launched a new crackdown on people claiming sickness benefit”
Sickness benefit recipients will shortly face regular contact from Jobcentre Plus personnel for the first time, as part of a DWP scheme to cut the welfare bill by targeting two million people who are presently not obliged to seek employment or prepare for future work.
“Thousands of claimants suffering from mental health conditions, back pain, and other ailments who currently receive unconditional benefits will now be provided with skills training and assistance to become work-ready. Ministers have directed job centres to focus on what they term a “shocking” rise in long-term sickness absence.”
Cont.
https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/cost-of-living/dwp-job-centres-speak-sickness-32530556
McFadden’s new plan to call all sick benefit claimants into the jobcentre for some extra hassle …I mean “help”, is fatally flawed. It would have to be voluntary because whilst classed as LCWRA UC you don’t have a Claimant Commitment or any work-related requirements, therefore you don’t have to attend or participate as you cannot be Sanctioned. It would require an Act of Parliament and a change of the law. Conclusion = McFadden is full of hot air and is talking shite.