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Post by Admin on Mar 2, 2020 19:16:11 GMT
The connection between Universal Credit, ordeals and experiments in electrocuting laboratory rats Written by Kitty S Jones politicsandinsights.org/2017/10/22/the-connection-between-universal-credit-ordeals-and-experiments-that-electrocute-laboratory-rats/I’m currently writing an article about the intimacy between neoliberalism and behavioural economics, following Richard Thaler’s recent Nobel award. While I was researching, I came across an Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) document about Nudge from 2012 – Tax and benefit policy: insights from behavioural economics, which suggested the introduction of “ordeals” into the social security system. The authors claim it would “deter fraud”. Although the IFS didn’t quite commit to calling for the idea to be implemented formally via policy, they did present the idea as an incontrovertible fact. Yet it is a controversial opinion, which is not supported by empirical evidence. Introducing ordeals to social security also deters our most vulnerable citizens from claiming the support they need in order to live. Because of this, it wouldn’t be possible to determine the number of people who were intending to make a fraudulent claim. Prior to the welfare “reforms”, social security fraud was estimated at around 0.7 %. However, this very low figure also included bureaucratic and administrative errors, which resulted in overpayments.
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Post by Admin on Mar 6, 2020 17:50:50 GMT
DWP adds to confusion over ‘single assessment’ plans By John Pring on 5th March 2020 Category: Benefits and Poverty www.disabilitynewsservice.com/dwp-adds-to-confusion-over-single-assessment-plans/"The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has caused confusion after refusing to say if a newly-announced trial will test the idea of merging assessments for its two main disability benefits. Justin Tomlinson (pictured), the minister for disabled people, announced this week that DWP would be trialling the use of a new single “digital platform” to help deliver assessments for both personal independent payment (PIP) and employment and support allowance (ESA), and the equivalent of ESA under universal credit. Such a move was first suggested 12 months ago by the then work and pensions secretary Amber Rudd. The new system would aim to ensure that people in receipt of more than one disability-related benefit do not have to provide the same information multiple times. But ministers have also spoken previously of testing whether they could merge the processes for PIP and ESA (the work capability assessment) into a single assessment. Both the assessments have been blighted by years of criticism and repeated links to the deaths of claimants."
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Post by Admin on Mar 6, 2020 19:31:55 GMT
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Post by Admin on Mar 6, 2020 19:33:58 GMT
Evidence shows Tory poverty-increasing policies are pushing children to early death voxpoliticalonline.com/2020/03/06/evidence-shows-tory-poverty-increasing-policies-are-pushing-children-to-early-death/More English children are dying than should be expected – and the reason is likely to be poverty caused by Tory government policies. That’s the finding of research into the deaths. And Tory policies mean the number of children in poverty will rise from 4.1 million to 5.2 million over the next two years. This means many more children will be put under threat. Your children, maybe. Poor nutrition, poor quality housing, maternal ill health, excessive family stress and the struggle of living with the many challenges of not having enough resources to manage are all considered to be contributing factors, with poverty as the underlying cause. And children from deprived backgrounds are more likely to have complex health and care needs many of which are not covered by the NHS. That’s Tory privatisation for you!
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Post by Admin on Mar 11, 2020 0:57:57 GMT
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Post by Admin on Mar 12, 2020 9:07:04 GMT
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Post by Admin on Mar 12, 2020 15:47:20 GMT
Citizens Advice signed gagging clause in return for share of £51m from DWP By John Pring on 15th August 2019 Category: Benefits and Poverty www.disabilitynewsservice.com/citizens-advice-signed-gagging-clause-in-return-for-share-of-51m-from-dwp/"Two charities that will receive £51 million in government funding to provide advice and support to claimants of universal credit (UC) signed gagging clauses that prevent them bringing the Department for Work and Pensions “unfairly” into “disrepute”. Both Citizens Advice (CA) and Citizens Advice Scotland (CAS) signed grant agreements with Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) – worth a total of £51 million – that include the same clause. By signing the documents, it means they cannot take “any actions which unfairly bring or are likely to unfairly bring [DWP’s] name or reputation and/or [DWP] into disrepute”. It comes a year after Disability News Service revealed how several disability charities had signed contracts under the government’s Work and Health Programme that included clauses promising not to bring DWP into disrepute."
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Post by Admin on Mar 12, 2020 15:50:10 GMT
Disabled campaigners ‘one step closer to justice’, despite court setback By John Pring on 20th February 2020 Category: Activism and Campaigning www.disabilitynewsservice.com/disabled-campaigners-one-step-closer-to-justice-despite-court-setback/"Disabled campaigners believe they are “one step closer to justice”, despite losing a legal case against the government over the potentially ruinous costs of taking discrimination cases through the courts. A high court judge yesterday (Wednesday) dismissed an application for judicial review by Esther Leighton, co-founder of the disabled-led campaigning organisation Reasonable Access. Leighton had challenged the government’s failure to reduce the financial risk faced by disabled people taking discrimination cases through the county court system. She wanted the government to extend a system called Qualified One Way Cost Shifting (QOCS) – which is used for personal injury claims – to Equality Act cases. But Mr Justice Cavanagh dismissed her application, concluding that the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) was acting lawfully because it had not yet decided whether to extend QOCS to discrimination cases."
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Post by Admin on Mar 12, 2020 19:50:19 GMT
Budget fails disabled people 12 March 2020 www.disabilityrightsuk.org/news/2020/march/budget-fails-disabled-people"Wednesday’s Budget made shockingly few significant improvements to the lives of disabled people, who have seen living standards and vital services cut over the past decade. 50% of people living in poverty, seven million, are now either disabled or have a disabled person in the household. Disability Rights UK welcomes government commitments to “levelling up” and to investing in infrastructure, but following our departure from the EU, we would like to see much more ambition to create a country where disabled people have equal rights, equal opportunities and equal access to power. Despite consensus that social care is dramatically under-funded, the Budget was silent on this national priority. Disabled people are getting too little social care, as well as being left in hsospitals or residential institutions, when they should be living with support within the community."
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Post by Admin on Mar 13, 2020 16:27:48 GMT
"‘Fascism, steeped in pathological hypocrisy, superiority entitlement & inveterate victimhood, is the group-characteristic extension of narcissism and is the Machiavellian-patriotic, militarised business model extension of joint Government & corporate engineered crisis-capitalism'. ‘Gaslighting Gilligan’ © 2017
The image was of an elderly lady struggling to push her shopping trolley, barely the strength to steer it as she sifted through the scattered leftovers on empty supermarket shelves. The news had a homeless man who’d been set on fire. Another man, an ex-soldier, had already been starved to death by DWP sanctions, as were 120,000 others murdered by a gaslight-State, some by suicide via a mass *induced* depression.
They’d all been deserted by the very same ‘Keep Calm & Carry On’ populace that panicked over toilet roll; the very same pretend-stoic society that’s spent years fearfully screaming their ‘superior’ Gogglebox-democracy opinions at the tabloid-TV propaganda hatred of refugees - literally *framed* ‘illegal immigrants’ - for fleeing US & UK Government bombs. And we’re ALL next.
You did this. I did this. We did this - to refugees and to each other, whilst the 1% sat back and engineered our downfall with our identity-differences; skin-colour, sexuality, religious institutions and cultural-clothing, language, accent and most significantly, yet invisibly, by #GenderAgenda divide and rule. They defeated us through the *normalisation* of a drip-fed #HostileEnvironment steeped in selfishness; in entitlement; in hypocrisy; in a 1980’s steeped ‘fashionable narcissism’ branded ‘greed is good’ - to engineer our own undoing; in a word ‘capitalism’.
It’s almost as if all of our worst individual and collective characteristics were deliberately tapped into and manipulated to shape a distorted worldview without our realising, that we were being made ‘oven ready’ to turn us against the ‘other’ and *on each* other upon a militarisation trigger; in a word ‘fascism’.
“The trouble with fiction is that it makes too much sense... Reality never makes sense”. Aldous Huxley."
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Post by Admin on Mar 22, 2020 22:44:46 GMT
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Post by Admin on Mar 23, 2020 17:39:35 GMT
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Post by Admin on Mar 23, 2020 19:06:28 GMT
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Post by Admin on Mar 24, 2020 10:17:15 GMT
"Its called karma Polly... But you are right. This will expose the sheer destruction the Tories have caused in our benefit and health systems and will show the Mail readers that actually there such a thing as society and that they are only a pay check away from becoming one of the very people they cheered the Tories for punishing. It's a funny old world... One that will never be the same again after this." WR The middle class are about to discover the cruelty of Britain's benefits system www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/24/britain-benefits-rishi-sunak-claimants-austerity
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Post by Admin on Mar 25, 2020 8:19:18 GMT
Tuesday, 24 March 2020 Austerity has weakened our societal immune system Hadley Coull & Chris Ogden How easily a house of cards comes tumbling down. Just as our bodies need a strong immune system to fight the coronavirus disease, so too do our societies need resilience, stability, and strength to fight the coronavirus pandemic. Yet the last two weeks has shown just how weak and arbitrary the veil of stability, order, and civilisation is in the UK. www.compassonline.org.uk/austerity-has-weakened-our-societal-immune-system/
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