Tuesday 30th November 2021

[refitman]

Morning all.

[refitman]

Only the brightest & best for the Shadow Cabinet?

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/ ... 1e550a9491

[gilsey]

[AnatolyKasparov]

I think that's not a bad line myself (though yes, I am biased)

[Sky'sGoneOut]

We are now in the incredible situation where even Jenny Harries is being slapped down by the government for saying something sensible.

[frog222]

@Sky, checked the LiveBlog , and she's the least expert of the experts but for once comes out with some sense !
The Marginal Propensity to Consume on the high street is this govt's main concern ?
--------------------------------------------------------------

The Steve Bell



Strummered17h ago 301
Yvette Cooper is back on the front bench as shadow Home secretary, this can only be a good thing, she'll run rings around the idiot Priti Patel.


TonyStopyra Strummered17h ago 70
...and almost certainly lose her seat at the next election, however effectively she deals with Patel (and I agree, she very probably will). Her majority is wafer-thin, collapsed spectacularly between 2017 and 2019 and she survived only thanks to the presence of a Brexit Party candidate.

The Tories will be gunning for her big-time in 2023 and I very much doubt she'll survive. What's the betting the Tories will lean very heavily on the latest iteration of Farage plc - sweet-talking their chums, in other words - not to put up a candidate in Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford?

https://discussion.theguardian.com/comm ... /153381861

Thread follows, there IS mention of WCA and ATOS ...

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Even harsher new ESA medical approved

https://www.benefitsandwork.co.uk/news/ ... l-approved

13 April 2010

Tens of thousands of claimants facing losing their benefit on review, or on being transferred from incapacity benefit, as plans to make the employment and support allowance (ESA) medical much harder to pass are approved by the secretary of state for work and pensions, Yvette Cooper.

The shock plans for ‘simplifying’ the work capability assessment, drawn up by a DWP working group, include docking points from amputees who can lift and carry with their stumps. Claimants with speech problems who can write a sign saying, for example, ‘The office is on fire!’ will score no points for speech and deaf claimants who can read the sign will lose all their points for hearing.

Meanwhile, for ‘health and safety reasons’ all points scored for problems with bending and kneeling are to be abolished and claimants who have difficulty walking can be assessed using imaginary wheelchairs.

Claimants who have difficulty standing for any length of time will, under the plans, also have to show they have equal difficulty sitting, and vice versa, in order to score any points. And no matter how bad their problems with standing and sitting, they will not score enough points to be awarded ESA.

In addition, almost half of the 41 mental health descriptors for which points can be scored are being removed from the new ‘simpler’ test, greatly reducing the chances of being found incapable of work due to such things as poor memory, confusion, depression and anxiety.

Fuck you Yvette.

[AnatolyKasparov]

This assumption that 2019 Brexit Party voters will all go Tory next time is *extremely* simplistic. That's all I will say for the moment.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Well well, when I was 'migrated' from Incapacity benefit to ESA in 2011, I failed the Work Capability Assessment (made more difficult by Yvette Cooper), then had to spend a year appealing the decision only to have it reversed in 5 minutes by a tribunal, I always blamed Iain Duncan Smith.

Smith you see had the genius idea of retesting everyone being moved from Incapacity to ESA, even those like me with lifetime awards who'd been told they'd never have to be tested again. It was a disaster for claimants and the DWP alike leading to untold human misery and a system which broke under the strain of a huge backlogue.

I didn't know this at the time but according to this article if Labour had won in 2010 Cooper was going to do exactly the same thing.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/joe ... ty-benefit

Yvette Cooper, work and pensions secretary, said the government would press ahead with next stage of reforming the Incapacity Benefit system and will next week announce plans to start retesting the more than two million people currently claiming the old Incapacity Benefit.

"In order to lift millions from a lifetime of benefit dependency, doctors will assess 10,000 long term sickness benefit claimants each week," a DWP statement announced.

All these years I've been blaming IDS when all he was doing was following something Yvette Cooper had already set in motion.

[AnatolyKasparov]

Ah yes, Amelia Gentleman - she's had plenty of practice in this sort of thing since then, of course.

[Willow904]

Well well, when I was 'migrated' from Incapacity benefit to ESA in 2011, I failed the Work Capability Assessment (made more difficult by Yvette Cooper), then had to spend a year appealing the decision only to have it reversed in 5 minutes by a tribunal, I always blamed Iain Duncan Smith.

Smith you see had the genius idea of retesting everyone being moved from Incapacity to ESA, even those like me with lifetime awards who'd been told they'd never have to be tested again. It was a disaster for claimants and the DWP alike leading to untold human misery and a system which broke under the strain of a huge backlogue.

I didn't know this at the time but according to this article if Labour had won in 2010 Cooper was going to do exactly the same thing.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/joe ... ty-benefit

Yvette Cooper, work and pensions secretary, said the government would press ahead with next stage of reforming the Incapacity Benefit system and will next week announce plans to start retesting the more than two million people currently claiming the old Incapacity Benefit.

"In order to lift millions from a lifetime of benefit dependency, doctors will assess 10,000 long term sickness benefit claimants each week," a DWP statement announced.

All these years I've been blaming IDS when all he was doing was following something Yvette Cooper had already set in motion.

I think this is a little unfair as we don't know how a Labour government might have reacted when it became apparent that the assessments were going wrong. The Coalition government ignored review recommendations that Labour were no longer in power to be able to respond to:


https://diaryofabenefitscrounger.blogsp ... iewer.html

[frog222]

@AK --- I approve of "this sort of thing".

[AnatolyKasparov]

Well yes, its just a shame there's so much of it for her to write about though.

[frog222]

@Willow

"I think this is a little unfair as we don't know how a Labour government might have reacted when it became apparent that the assessments were going wrong. The Coalition government ignored review recommendations that Labour were no longer in power to be able to respond to:

https://diaryofabenefitscrounger.blogsp ... iewer.html

My memory of that time is hazy , did the Labour Opposition strongly Oppose the rejection (in fact) of the Professor Harrison Report ? ?

[Sky'sGoneOut]

I think this is a little unfair as we don't know how a Labour government might have reacted when it became apparent that the assessments were going wrong. The Coalition government ignored review recommendations that Labour were no longer in power to be able to respond to.

I think you're being too kind Willow. They already knew they were going wrong, Cooper's response was to make them even more stringent as outlined in my post above. She and the Labour party at the time openly said they wanted a million people off incapacity benefit, so I'm sorry but I have no faith whatsoever that if they'd won that election things would have been any different. People forget just how hostile Labour were to benefits claimants, James Purnell spent more time writing articles in The Sun about scroungers than doing anything to help the least well off.

One thing to note is the 'descriptors', which are the criteria used to assess sick and disabled claimants have barely changed since Coopers time, if anything they are now fairer, so in 11 years of Coalition and Conservative government nobody, not even IDS, looked at them and thought, "These aren't harsh enough".

[PorFavor]

@ frog222

This (from 2015) doesn't directly answer your question -

https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/l ... -benefits/

but this (from 2016) might get nearer -

https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/y ... rs-letter/

[PorFavor]

@Sky'sGoneOut

This is from the 2015 article -

But she [Yvette Cooper] insisted that Labour had been right to introduce the much-criticised ESA in October 2008, to avoid people being “abandoned on incapacity benefit”.

So she was still trying to justify herself even by then.

[frog222]

@Sky'sGoneOut

This is from the 2015 article -
But she [Yvette Cooper] insisted that Labour had been right to introduce the much-criticised ESA in October 2008, to avoid people being “abandoned on incapacity benefit”.
So she was still trying to justify herself even by then.

Thanks PF, good reminders !

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Elves

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radi ... s-run-amok

Two stars out of five? Pah! It was great fun! A Danish family go on holiday at Christmas to an isolated island. Unfortunately for them the locals are weird, the forest is full of monster killer elves, and their daughter is unbelievably stupid. What's not to like? Perfect festive viewing as far as I'm concerned. Should have been on the BBC on Christmas day, decapitations and all.

[PorFavor]

Josefine is a collection of idiotic decisions held together by sensible knitwear.

Elves, goblins or . . . . . gnomes.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

But she [Yvette Cooper] insisted that Labour had been right to introduce the much-criticised ESA in October 2008, to avoid people being “abandoned on incapacity benefit”.

Yeah I felt so abandoned being assessed by actual doctors rather than some random 'medical professional' working for an IT company for profit.

To Labour's eternal shame they brought in an assessment for sick and disabled people which was a replica of the American healthcare insurance assessment model used by Unum Provident insurance. The very same Unum who were fined $31.7 million in 2003 in a class action law suit in California for running ‘disability denial factories’ and and $15 million in 2005 by the California Department of Insurance Commissioner, who stated that ‘Unum Provident is an outlaw company. It is a company that has operated in an illegal fashion for years.'

The designers of the WCA and ESA were both funded by Unum. One of them was the chief medical advisor to the DWP.

Labour knew all of this, there was a debate in parliament in 1999 about Unum refusing to pay out on income protection insurance policies in this country.

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/c ... 1h01_head0

Yet Labour under both Blair and Brown ignored it, all of it, and decided to put the most vulnerable people in the country through an assessment copied from a model used by an insurance company which had been fined millions for denying disabled people their money.

Yvette Cooper, according to your link above, was still defending those decisions years later.

So as I said above, fuck you Yvette.

Source: https://www.sochealth.co.uk/2015/09/15/ ... e-reforms/

[PorFavor]

Quite. The quote wasn't meant to be taken as a defence of Yvette Cooper - quite the opposite, as I hope my post indicated.

Edited to add -

"So she was still trying to justify herself even by then." That bit was a comment from me, and not a quote from the article.

[Willow904]

I did say a "little" unfair. I agree it was a wrong policy to pursue, but my concern is Labour are being judged on the Coalition and Tory government's execution of that policy, when those who actually implemented it should be the ones held accountable.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Quite. The quote wasn't meant to be taken as a defence of Yvette Cooper - quite the opposite, as I hope my post indicated.

It did. Wasn't it Kinnock who warned people not to fall ill under the Tories?

Well it wasn't the Tories who outsourced assessments to a French IT company (ATOS) who allowed physios to evaluate people with complex mental health problems (for example) and deprive them of their entire income including rent.

Would Labour be any different now? I'm not convinced.

[PorFavor]

"I warn you not to be ordinary, I warn you not to be young, I warn you not to fall ill, and I warn you not to grow old." Neil Kinnock.

The Labour Party is worryingly silent about Benefits (except for murmurings about Universal Credit).

[PorFavor]

Atos delivers its PIP assessment contracts through Independent Assessment Services, a trading name of Atos IT Services UK

[Sky'sGoneOut]

I did say a "little" unfair. I agree it was a wrong policy to pursue, but my concern is Labour are being judged on the Coalition and Tory government's execution of that policy, when those who actually implemented it should be the ones held accountable.

To be honest IDS did me and millions like me a big favour, his idiotic attempt (inherited from Cooper according to her own words) to 'migrate' everyone from Incapacity to ESA and assess them all led to such an enormous backlogue it broke the system, ATOS ended up losing their contract and ESA claimants had two years added to their 'award' (the length of time you get before being assessed again). So instead of one year of peace I ended up with three years. Covid has forced the DWP to do the same thing again.

The Coalition and Tories did many shitty things but I was granted a lifetime Incapacity benefit award by a panel including a doctor, a psychiatrist and a lawyer under John Major's government. That became worthless the moment ESA was introduced by a Labour government in thrall to a racketeering American insurance company. Now I can be judged by a chiropractor. Labour did that. Nobody else.

Sorry if I sound a bit angry about it all...but, you know, I am (but not at you ).

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Yvette Cooper booo. There that's it I've got it out of my system. For now.

I went to Tesco earlier, it had gone from 90% not wearing masks to 90% wearing masks. I was pleasantly surprised.

Although according to Steve Baker that means most of us are going to Hell which seems a bit much. Maybe Steve needs to get out more. The real Spartans used to comb each other's hair and wrestle naked before battle.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Whereas nude Spartan wrestling seems to be something done by very bendy ladies if my google search is anything to go by. I only watched it for about 5 minutes.

[PorFavor]

Everybody knows that "Going to Hell in a facemask" is a traditional saying.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

[PorFavor]

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Is there a specific weedkiller you can buy that kills bluegrass?

[Sky'sGoneOut]

[Sky'sGoneOut]

[PorFavor]

So you still don't like it. Never mind, I'll try again some other time. It'll give you something to look forward to.

[PorFavor]

Night night.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

It's not that I don't like it, it's more that I want to destroy it utterly.

Unless it's being used in a knowingly 'ironic' way in a Coen brothers film.

[Sky'sGoneOut]