Is Reform.uk think tank a charity abiding by the rules, or a non-executive arm of privatising government?

Reform.uk home page rolling billboard messaging presents very mixed messaging!

The above 'screen capture' image is taken from the 'rolling top and bottom billboards' presentations that make up the bulk of the current home page of the 'think tank' Reform.uk.(1) I would argue that the messaging presented by the upper and lower 'billboards' shown in the above 'screen capture' image presents so much contrast as to be hypocritical.

I am reminded of what I recall an American singer-songwriter of the 'topical' or 'protest singer' gendre saying/writiting once of those whose standpoints he opposed: "You don't have to satirise them; you merely have to quote them."

Clashing billboard messaging

As indicated by the red dot at the bottom right of the 'upper billboard' in the above screen capture image, the 'upper billboard' message is the third of three. (The first and second of those 'upper billboard' screen captures are recruiting adverts for the organisation.) The upper billboard message shown reads:

As a charity, Reform will not be publishing or tweeting anything until after the general election.

Yet the lower billboard would seem to present this 'charity' as a non-executive arm of a privatising government:

I think Reform has made some very, very important arguments, which have really helped us as Ministers, who are trying to enact those very reforms.

Rt Hon. Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Health

Global Corporate Private Sector involvement in a UK 'charity'

Priding itself as a 'charity abiding by charity status rules' regarding involvement in a UK General Election, Reform.uk still prides itself as being exactly in harmony with the 2015/17 government's agenda. Indeed, all the lower billboard statements on offer are sourced from Tory Government Ministers.(2) I further observe that the changes in the messages from government ministers shown has changed since I did screen captures of that home page on 27 April for Kwug Blog has functioned as providing more than a static-in-time home page.(3) Looking further into to the Reform.uk content, there is an item on The future of public services: digital jobcentres, as presented by Accenture, a global corporation.(4) Accenture's branding 'strap line' is 'High Performance. Delivered'.

Screen capture of the cover page of Accenture's report for Reform.uk
'The future of public services: digital jobcentres

So, what have Accenture previously delivered to us or their clients? To answer that question, I refer my readers to the previous Kwug Blog post, Terms and conditions in 'too commercially sensitive for public access' contracts between government and corporations.(5)

That earlier Kwug Blog post reveals that in late 2011, a 'Con-Dem' government awarded the primary contractor in building the 'customer facing systems' for Universal Credit [sic] to Accenture! "High performance. Delivered"? What were they contracted to do? Discourage claiming?(6)

Conclusion: If Reform.uk is a charity, what is Charity?

So, to sum up, given

• the frustrations experienced by those who have since applied for Universal Credit [sic] because that is the only option on offer,(7) and 
• the Department for Work & Pensions' insistence that the only way to apply for Universal Credit [sic] is online,(8)

if Reform.uk is a charity, what has Charity got to do with it? Maybe it's more to do with tax breaks and a love-in between corporate privatisers of public services and right wing government?

By Dude Swheatie of Kwug

Link references

1. http://www.reform.uk/
2. http://www.reform.uk/ browsed on Tuesday, 16 May 2017 
3. http://kilburnunemployed.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/revisiting-kwug-blogs-2015-uk-general-election-posting-pollsters-vision-excludes-those-offline.html
4. http://www.reform.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/The-future-of-public-services-digital-jobcentres.pdf
5. http://kilburnunemployed.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/terms-and-conditions-in-too-commercially-sensitive-for-public-access-contracts-between-government-departments-and-corporations.html
6. http://kilburnunemployed.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/us-workfare-monger-laurence-meads-work-makes-you-free-impact-on-uk-welfare-reform.html (Sorry for the accidental misspelling of Lawrence Mead's forename in that page address)
7. http://kilburnunemployed.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/let-us-not-help-theresa-may-bury-bad-news-about-universal-credit-rollout-suicides-and-homelessness-under-a-brexit-general-election.html
8. http://kilburnunemployed.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/terra-firma-benefits-services-closures-leave-the-economically-vulnerable-in-the-lurch.html

Benefit sanctions as a mechanism for rewriting economic history at whatever cost

I find reading bullshit from 'think tank' Reform in tandem with global accountancy corporation Accenture not good for my health but better than rolling over into an inertia of doing nothing to challenge injustice.

The Bullshit

The opening paragraph of the Reform/Accenture report 'The future of public services: digital jobcentres' reads:

Up to the job?

The financial crisis precipitated the deepest peacetime recession the UK had experienced since the Great Depression. As the banking sector went into meltdown and lending to businesses dried up, the economy contracted by 6 per cent in a year.1 Many lost their jobs, but unemployment during the downturn was less acute than in other periods of economic decline... While 10 per cent of the workforce were claiming unemployment benefit during periods of the 1980s, the financial crisis saw this measure of worklessness peak at 4.7 per cent. The labour market has also proved resilient in recent years. Unemployment returned to pre-crisis levels shortly after last year’s general election, leading the then Prime Minister David Cameron to herald a ‘jobs miracle’.(1)

Time for a response in British Sign Language:


And also in American Sign Language:

The reality, or as American English would have it, 'actuality'

In reality, benefit sanctions masked the reality of the true number of 'non-working poor'. The 'claimant count' is based on the numbers of people judged to be legitimately claiming benefits, and mass sanctions serve as a mass grave for the truth. If the DWP admitted that there were targets for the numbers of sanctions to apply as 'norms', that would undermine the perceived legitimacy of the figures cited above by Reform/Accenture.

Look to what Dr David Webster has written regarding sanctions data and how sanctions are 'administered' and you will not see such a rosy picture. 

Benefit sanctions: Britain's secret penal system

Benefits claimants are subjected to an 'amateurish, secret penal system which is more severe than the mainstream judicial system', writes Dr David Webster of the University of Glasgow....(2)

Years ago, companies such as Unum and Accenture under the respective guises of Unum Provident and Arthur Andersen Consulting were found guilty of fraud. Now they talk of [heavily distorted] 'data' as the solution to benefit fraud and a think tank that has 'charitable status' goes along with them!

Mass sanctions disguise reality

And on the false premises of what an investment banker turned 'welfare reform guru' — Baron Freud the Welfare Reform Minister — has said of benefit fraud levels, the State and fraudster corporations have blood on their hands on account of sanctions deaths.(3)

Mass sanctions create mass graves.

Sanctions deaths are not so numerous as the impact of fear of sanctions, as for example Kate Belgrave | Talking with people dealing with public sector cuts attests.(4) Whether benefit claimants are sanctioned or not, they are still treated by the DWP as subhuman.

Kate's latest blog post is No-one believes anybody now. Not even on [Domestic Violence] issues.  More stories from the jobcentre(5) Thus the DWP is in effect administering violence in a public facility on a routine and systematic basis. Two comments on that blog post affirm that the domestic violence survivor Kate accompanied and who got the authorisation she attended for would not have faired so well had Kate not accompanied her.

A problem benefit claimants face regarding accompanying people to jobcentre interviews is the fear of being vicimised by the DWP, yet the motto of the Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group is, "Never attend anywhere official alone." So, please, if you have the comparative liberty to accompany people to jobcentre interviews, make the attempt. You might learn from first-hand experience witnessing how Jobcentre Plus [sic] and its associate institutions actually operate!

By Dude Swheatie of Kwug

Link addresses

1. http://www.reform.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/The-future-of-public-services-digital-jobcentres.pdf
2. https://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/resources/benefit-sanctions-britains-secret-penal-system
3. http://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/?s=sanctions+deaths
4. http://www.katebelgrave.com/?s=sanction+fear&submit=Search
5. http://www.katebelgrave.com/2016/08/nobody-believes-anybody-now-even-on-dv-issues-more-stories-from-the-jobcentre/

Terms and conditions in 'too commercially sensitive for public access' contracts between government and corporations

Global corporations, lobbyists and nasty governments as regulators of the disadvantaged

As argued elsewhere on this blog, we are in great peril once we allow global corporations and privatising governments to set the terms and conditions governing poor and disadvantaged people's lives covertly. (1)

On a point related to contracts between global corporations and government contracts, as I have discovered since writing that blog post, there are severe dangers when, say, the terms and conditions of the contracts between Atos and the DWP are deemed too confidential for public access.(2)

Exhibit the awarding by the DWP of the contract to deliver Universal Credit to Accenture (the post-Enron rebranding of Arthur Andersen Consulting) and Accenture's subcontracting to Atos. 

In November 2011 Information Age announced:

DWP awards Accenture £500m Universal Credit IT deal: Seven year deal will see Accenture manage subcontractors building customer facing systems for the UK's new benefits regime.(3)

The principal subcontractor will be Atos, which Accenture chose for "its strong track record of successfully delivering IT services for the Department of Work and Pension [DWP], and with a particular focus on delivering secure online citizen self-service applications," it said in a statement.

What do

1. "successfully delivering IT services for the Department of Work and Pensions [DWP] and
2. "a particular focus on delivering secure online citizen self-service applications"

mean exactly?

Exhibit Why eforms are unsafe:(4)

Why electronic forms (eforms) are unsafe: A key feature of the DWP’s ambitious digitisation initiative is to shift all responsibility for entering data onto the claimant. Eforms are the DWP’s method of choice. Take e.g. Universal Credit which is designed to be claimed online. Under Universal Credit claimants have no choice but to claim through eforms. … Continue reading (5)

Disability benefit claimants initially failed to score eligibility points on their disability benefit claims forms, largely because the forms allowed too little data entry space for them to state the conditions of their eligibility properly. (That was many people's experience with claiming Employment & Support Allowance, and more recently so with Personal Independence Payments [PIP].)(6) So the cause of the claimant's unsuccessful initial application for that benefit was Atos' "successfully delivering IT services for the Department of Work and Pensions."

Link addresses

1. http://kilburnunemployed.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/britains-meps-and-poor-folk-face-threats-imposed-by-brexit-including-dodgy-trade-deals.html
2. http://www.whywaitforever.com/dwpatoscontract.html
3. http://www.information-age.com/it-management/outsourcing-and-supplier-management/1666348/dwp-awards-accenture-£500m-universal-credit-it-deal
4. https://dwpcomms.wordpress.com/?s=eforms
5. https://dwpcomms.wordpress.com/why-eforms-are-unsafe/
6. http://z2k.org/2016/06/personal-independence-payments-and-additional-evidence/

Digital jobcentres to heighten isolation and reduce solidarity?

As was stated at Boycott Workfare's Welfare Action Gathering in Manchester, DWP moving toward digital signing-on sessions will increase the isolation of jobcentre clients from possible unemployed activist group support.(1)

I also reckon that it will tie in with the findings of Stanley Milgram's experiment into torture, that stated that torture is more easily delivered in terms of reducing the torturer's resistance to being inhumane, where the torturer has no real face-to-face contact with the victim of the torture.(2)

And now I see that the think tank known as 'Reform' has released a report entitled: The future of public services: digital jobcentres.(3)

I also notice that the pdf of the report bears the branding of 

     >

accenture

Accenture, as I recall, was a rebranding around the year 2000 after Arthur Andersen Accounting had been embroiled in the Enron scandal.(4)

So perhaps after global high stakes companies are found guilty of fraud, it seems, given the existence of dodgy American insurance company Unum — formerly Unum Provident — as advisers to successive UK governments on 'welfare reform' since 1994 despite an intervening record of fraud, there is still the potential to carry on uninterrupted as advisers to UK government on how to more fully screw up the lives of disadvantaged people?(5) (6)

Dude Swheatie of Kwug

Link addresses

1. https://scottishunemployedworkers.net/2016/07/15/sharing-knowledge-in-the-face-of-further-attacks/
2. https://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?p=stanley+milgram%27s+experiment&fr=yfp-t-423
3. http://www.reform.uk/publication/the-future-of-public-services-digital-jobcentres/
4. https://uk.search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A9mSs2ECaJpXUn4AE4JLBQx.;_ylc=X1MDMjExNDcxNzAwMwRfcgMyBGZyA3lmcC10LTQyMwRncHJpZANNSmgyQU9iX1FkbU1DLkVBWVM3WEpBBG5fcnNsdAMwBG5fc3VnZwMwBG9yaWdpbgN1ay5zZWFyY2gueWFob28uY29tBHBvcwMwBHBxc3RyAwRwcXN0cmwDBHFzdHJsAzc4BHF1ZXJ5AyUyMmFjY2VudHVyZSUyMGFydGh1ciUyMiUyMCUyMmFuZGVyc2VuJTIwYWNjb3VudGluZyUyMiUyMCUyMmVucm9uJTIwc2NhbmRhbCUyMgR0X3N0bXADMTQ2OTczNzMzMA--?p="accenture+arthur"+"andersen+accounting"+"enron+scandal"&fr2=sb-top-uk.search&fr=yfp-t-423
5. http://kilburnunemployed.blogspot.co.uk/
6. http://www.whywaitforever.com/dwpatoslettersgbbc.html#BBC