In my latest podcast episode, we take more piss out of Liz Kendall and Keir Starmer’s barely-watered-down plans to cut PIP and disability benefits.
We talk about the fact that one of the reasons that people claim PIP for mental health problems is that life is so difficult for so many people. Wages are low and rents are impossibly high, and people can’t cope. Hardly a surprise, is it.
Why don’t Kendall and Starmer focus on that?
We also talk about the fact that a lot of people can’t work because the support they need doesn’t exist.
I talk to Megi in the podcast. Megi is the mother of a profoundly disabled autistic 8-year-old. This girl is bladder and bowel incontinent, non verbal and has violent meltdowns every single day. She barely sleeps.
She is dangerous to herself and others. She can’t be left alone for a second, including through the night. Megi had to leave a good job to become her daughter’s fulltime carer. She now gets a measly £300-ish a month in carer’s allowance. Great.
My latest podcast episode on Liz Kendall’s plans to cut disability benefits and support money:
“Forget Kendall’s bollocks about protecting disabled people who are “most” in need (whatever that means) from her vicious benefits cuts.
Because the truth is that governments actively go after people who are most in need.
I would also like say that it is my considerable experience that when you cut support money for sick and disabled people, a lot of them just get sicker and often, you know, die – as opposed to rushing out and enthusiastically looking more work or whatever it is that Liz feels greater poverty motivates sick and disabled people to do.”
As a person who has been campaigning for benefits and decent housing for all for more than 20 years, I have to ask – does Liz Kendall not realise that the job of destroying disability benefits and disabled people has already been TOTALLY done? 14 years of Tories mate.
It is already very, VERY hard to get PIP thanks Liz. How about you try it. And it is also very difficult to get benefits which don’t require you to work when you cannot, or to regularly attend useless jobcentre ‘courses’ on putting a CV together for the 1,00000000th time. Give me strength.
Here’s me ranting about that. Enjoy and please rant yourself.
And in case anyone who knows eff all turns up here to say that disabled people who really need support still get it – do me a favour. People who are most in need are the people whose support is targeted most aggressively, because the government feeling is that those people can’t fight back.
If you want a good example, let’s take a moment to remember the Tories’ slaughtering of the independent living fund not so long ago. That fund paid for 24/7 care support for profoundly disabled people who required that support to live their lives. The government went after them anyway.
So – time to piss off, Liz. You’re playing an old tune which was garbage in the first place.
And if Liz actually wants to hear from a real person, here’s Niki, a mother of a disabled son, talking about the absolute farce that has been trying to get benefits and support for her disabled son. She explains that getting this support is actually now her full time job. She also says that most people she knows give up trying to get benefits and housing help because it’s just impossible.
Been asking this on facebook and am still wondering:
Is the Guardian actively anti-Corbyn, or is it just trying to wind people up/thrill advertisers with anti-Corbyn clickbait? This whole scene is starting to interest me. Been reading another Corbyn Is Political Death article – this one perpetrated by someone called Kezia Dugdale. I am interested to know if anybody at the Guardian genuinely thinks that Kezia’s opinion counts. Kezia appears to be associated with Scottish Labour and even seems to want to lead it. Both of these things mean that oblivion will soon be hers and both those things make me think that her contribution to public discussion ought to rate even behind mine. To be fair, members of Scottish Labour can probably speak about roads to nowhere with some authority… but wanting the leadership? I feel inclined to take the long view of party members who actively covet the wheel of their own hearse. I can’t be the only one.
Anyway. I’ll tell you why the thought of a Corbyn win intrigues me. Mainly, it’s because the prospect of that Corbyn win is so obviously doing establishment heads in. That part is a major victory in itself and certainly reason to continue reading panicky establishment articles. I do have something more constructive, though. I like to think that for however long Corbyn lasts before the Tories or his own party rub him out, he’ll front up to PMQs with difficult questions for Cameron about the realities of social security cuts. I also like to think that he’ll rattle his own hopeless party with difficult questions about the realities of social security cuts. And…that’s about it. The truth is that the solutions to austerity won’t come from inside parliament, no matter who leads Labour. A few people could make things a little less easy for austerity’s perpetrators, though. It’s not much, but it’s better than the five-eighths of fuck-all we’ve had from Labour to date.
I’ve posted below a couple of videos I took at Labour spring conference earlier this year. They feature Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham being unbelievably useless when asked questions on the very serious topics of the work capability assessment and the closure of the all-important Independent Living Fund.
I post these not as a Corbyn supporter – I am not, because it is not in my nature to back politicians – but to give you examples of the amazing evasiveness that other leadership candidates employ when asked basic questions about social security by people who they don’t recognise and suspect haven’t been accredited.
The shiftiness you see in the videos below speaks volumes about both candidates and about the reasons why the mild-mannered Corbyn’s apparent plain speaking is sort of turning into one of the political finds of the millennium. I went to the Corbyn meeting on Tuesday in London and found it very interesting (it was packed, for starters). There was nothing particularly exciting about his presentation – he doesn’t shout much and he doesn’t punch the air, or stride around the stage a lot, or any of that sort of psuedo-radical carry-on. He just stands there in his Dad-shirt and talks about the NHS, trade union rights and housing in much the same low-key way as he probably would with a couple of mates on a walk. I think his advantage is that he’s coherent, on social security anyway. Which is more than can be said for the rest of them. My experience at Labour spring conference strongly suggested that candidates like Cooper and Burnham had nothing to say on social security and couldn’t get away fast enough when anyone asked. They were apparently so frightened of being labelled welfare-sympathisers that they just looked at questioners in horror, rattled out a few sentences that nobody could follow, and then ran for it. This was an interesting approach from people who were and are purportedly so keen on dialogue.
Here’s Yvette Cooper sprinting away and telling me to go find Rachel Reeves when I asked her what Labour would do about the work capability assessment (this is at Labour spring conference):
Here’s Andy Burnham responding to questions from disability campaigners about the Independent Living Fund closure by saying the ILF wasn’t his policy responsibility. Before he legged it, he told campaigners to get in touch with his office to set up a meeting to talk about the ILF. Curiously, he wasn’t available for a meeting when people tried to get in touch:
And while we’re on the evasiveness theme – here is Sadiq Khan departing the scene very quickly indeed when he was asked to say something to a disabled campaigner who’d been arrested at the Budget protests earlier this month. The campaigner was sitting outside parliament surrounded by police when Sadiq happened by. I realise that Khan isn’t standing for the party leadership, but he does want to be London mayor, so we’ll throw him into the mix, because he fits so well.
The amazing thing was that Khan couldn’t bring himself to say anything about the situation at all. He had absolutely nothing – on the arrest, or the disability funding cuts that people were protesting about. He didn’t say a single word. It was like he shuffled through all the press statements and Spad instructions in his head, but couldn’t find the one labelled “lines to use when meeting disabled protestors.” Unable to come up with a single accredited thought, he left. I wonder if this one of the reasons why Corbyn is doing well. He’s up against contenders who seem to think that the best way to relate to people is to race for the exits.
To say that these people can’t communicate with punters is the understatement of the decade. If social security is your thing – they can’t talk to you at all.