Universal Credit 'helpline's' glib response: "Call a friend"

My friend and Honorary Kwuggie Kate Belgrave writes on her Kate Belgrave | Talking with people dealing with public sector cuts blog http://www.katebelgrave.com/:

Learning/literacy difficulties & can’t use online Universal Credit? “Find a friend to help,” says DWP. This is dire

Posted on October 12, 2017

11

Yesterday, I rang the Universal Credit helpline number (0345 600 4272) to ask about DWP support for Universal Credit claimants who have learning and literacy difficulties, and who struggle to use computers. (I’ve posted a transcript of a recording I made of the call at the end of this article).

This is crucial.

Universal Credit is an online system which claimants must manage online. There is a charged-for helpline which people can call if they get stuck. [£33 per hour, Dude Swheatie adds] The charges for this are controversial. People who have no money can’t afford the calls.

This is crucial.

Universal Credit is an online system which claimants must manage online. There is a charged-for helpline which people can call if they get stuck. The charges for this are controversial. People who have no money can’t afford the calls.

10am 11 October 2017:

UNIVERSAL CREDIT: Is that a case of [someone] sort of not being able to do the online procedures?

KB: Yes. [This man] has learning and literacy difficulties and he’ll be moving to [town name removed] which I think is rolling out [Universal Credit later this year]?

UNIVERSAL CREDIT: Right, okay. So, I would normally say unless there is any source of help local, whether it be friends, family in the area that they are familiar with, if they’ve got friends over there… what we would normally recommend is that a friend or family member help out…separate to that, see if they’ve got a local Citizens’ Advice....

 And so I came up with the following placards in response.

"Call a friend" was a feature of 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Quiz Show'
Where are the friends with the expertise required to help someone
navigate a tricky Universal Credit online form?
Where are the Citizens Advice Bureaux that are not in meltdown?

The quiz show referred to here was 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire', hosted by Christ Tarrant. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Wants_to_Be_a_Millionaire%3F_(UK_game_show)

The UN disability committee Chair has described what is going on in the UK regarding the benefit sanctions impact on claimants as a "human catastrophe." https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/uk-faces-un-examination-government-cuts-caused-human-catastrophe/

Enforcing people to do what they cannot do with non-existent help furthers such 'human catastrophe', and it must be stopped. Adapting a sentence from Rabbi Joachim Prinz, President of the American Congress of Jews in a speech made at the same event at which Revd Dr Martin Luther King Jr made the famous [but too little understood] 'I Have a Dream' speech, "Britain must not become a nation of onlookers [in the way that Germany did with the rise of Hitler.]" https://www.haggadot.com/clip/rabbi-joachim-prinz-march-washington-speech-august-28th-1963

We need to get others to join us, to form a 'critical mass' sufficient to
halt the perpetrators of this human catastrophe in their tracks

Placards by Dude Swheatie of Kwug, Human Placard Flower of the KUWG

Appealing against State Terrorism beyond the 'mandatory reconsideration' stage is an act of counter-terrorism

Benefits & Work Publishing report:

Even by our standards this is a pretty gloomy newsletter.

We have the disappointing news that the success rate for disability living allowance (DLA) to personal independence payment (PIP) transfers is almost at the lowest level it’s ever been.

Then there’s the unsurprising news that a survey has found that PIP assessments are harmful to your health.

There’s the revelation that repeat testing of ESA claimants is back with a vengeance. There are now more repeat assessments than fresh claims, in spite of a DWP promise to stop unnecessary testing.

And the number of warnings that speeding up the universal credit rollout from next month will lead to a catastrophe for claimants is growing.

There is, though, the slightly more positive news that whilst the backlog of social security appeals has almost doubled in the last year, claimants continue to win in the majority of cases – except in connection with [Jobseekers Allowance appeals]....(1)

Theresa May seeks to portray herself as a protector of the people against terrorism:

Theresa May to warn tech firms over terror content

Technology companies must go "further and faster" in removing extremist content, Theresa May is to tell the United Nations general assembly....(2)

Yet her Government itself is guilty of state terrorism as highlighted in the Benefits & Work Publishing 19 September Update and more.(4)

Disabled people could be at risk of violence, and even “killings and euthanasia”, because of their portrayal by the UK government and media as “parasites” who live on benefits, according to unpublished comments by the chair of a UN committee.
(5)

Theresia Degener, who chairs the UN committee on the rights of persons with disabilities, warns in the interview that such portrayals of disabled people are “very, very dangerous”....

Degener herself had told the UK government’s delegation that its cuts to social security and other support for disabled people had caused “a human catastrophe”,(6) comments that were repeated by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in yesterday’s prime minister’s questions [on Wednesday 14 September].

But her comments in the interview with a BBC journalist – which are believed to have not been broadcast – go even further.

Degener (pictured) says that cuts to social security have been so severe that they have become “life threatening to many disabled people”, and she then talks about the impact of the austerity cuts on public attitudes to disabled people.

She says in the interview that “disabled people being portrayed as parasites, living on social benefits, and welfare and the taxes of other people” was “very, very dangerous”.

She says that such attitudes “will later on lead to violence against disabled people, we know it, if not to killings and euthanasia”.

 So while this blogger dislikes character-labelling stuff such as 'Tory scum', I believe that appealing against nasty benefit decisions is an act of counter-terrorism. That can be far more effective at making them squirm in private than 'Tory scum' daubings and death threats can.(7)



Whether Theresa May & Co would describe blogs such as this and the Benefits & Work Publishing and Disability News Service websites that reveal more than the BBC as 'extremist' is another matter, but I note that this blog currently gets more page viewings from France than from the UK.

Blog post by Dude Swheatie of Kwug

Source link references

1. https://www.benefitsandwork.co.uk/news/3663-19-september-2017-update
2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-41327816
3. https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/?s=uncrpd
4. https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/portraying-disabled-people-as-parasites-could-lead-to-violence-and-killings-says-un-chair/
5. https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/uk-faces-un-examination-government-cuts-caused-human-catastrophe/ 
6. https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/uk-faces-un-examination-government-cuts-caused-human-catastrophe/
7. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-41237836 Title: MPs tell of death threats and abuse at 2017 election 

13 July update on Disability News Service top stories

The Kwug Blog editor knows that today is 14 July, but the actual publication day of Disability News Service was Thursday 13 July and Thursday is that publication's regular publication date.

Latest Stories

• 
  July 13, 2017 0 Activists set for ‘David and Goliath’ fight to defeat assisted suicide court bid
• 
  July 13, 2017 0 Government’s UN response ‘exposes failings on disability convention’
• 
  July 13, 2017 0 Inclusion London set to test social model job support, after £775k grant
• 
  July 13, 2017 0 Osborne shares ‘discriminatory’ cartoon ‘that breaches his own code of conduct’
• 
  July 13, 2017 0 Project aims for inclusion and a collective voice for ‘spoonies’
• 
  July 13, 2017 0 Labour silent on access for disabled MP excluded from debates
• 
  July 13, 2017 0 DPAC set for week of protests over social care, Atos and access to transport
• 
  July 13, 2017 0 Purple boss raises concerns over Disability Confident accreditation
• 
  July 6, 2017 0 New disabled MP accuses government of ‘eugenics’

June 29, 2017 headlines from Disability News Service

The latest news from Disability News Service was published today. Very few of these stories will even be mentioned on the BBC, and that is all the more reason to flag them up here, to help make readers aware of them.

Dude Swheatie of Kwug

Latest Stories

• 
  June 29, 2017 0 New disabled commissioner ‘astounded and offended’ by EHRC treatment
• 
  June 29, 2017 0 UN confirms that UK government’s treaty violations were both grave AND systematic
• 
  June 29, 2017 0 Court awards disabled woman ‘aggravated’ damages for ombudsman discrimination
• 
  June 29, 2017 0 Mencap care staff ‘called resident “poison dwarf” and reused feeding syringes’
• 
  June 29, 2017 0 Ministers’ silence over why WCA legislation is missing from Queen’s speech
• 
  June 29, 2017 0 Crossbench disabled peer calls for an end to austerity, and the misery it has caused
• 
  June 29, 2017 0 Disabled people ‘have too little awareness of rights’ in lead-up to Brexit
• 
  June 29, 2017 0 Disability arts misses out again, despite huge rise in diverse-led Arts Council funding
• 
  June 22, 2017 0 Queen’s speech: Government appears to dump Mordaunt’s WCA election promise
• 
  June 22, 2017 0 Queen’s speech: May ‘abandons’ election pledge on access

UK Government signed up to UNCRPD on 30/03/2007

Ten years ago this coming Thursday, a UK Government signed up to the UN Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities.(1)

I know because as the then London Green Party Disability Spokesperson, I was at a launch event at the Tottenham Court Road conference centre with a link to the signing ceremony at UN HQ in New York. The London event was hosted by disability charity Scope whose President was Cherie Booth -- the barrister wife of then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. The New York event was attended by then Disability Minister Anne McGuire who was the one that signed the paper.

Representative statistics and unrepresentative national news media

I also recall the statistic being raised at the launch event that around one in five of the population had a disability of some sort. That statistic did not matter one bit to the UK's national press, who roundly ignored the event.

I would argue that that non-attendance has been largely responsible for what has transpired since in terms of UK government's reign of terror over disabled people. The same national news media that has apparently gone overboard in covering and retreading over last Thursday's 80 seconds of terrorist events around the UK Parliament seems to have vetoed the signing up by UK Government to legislation that would impact favourably on the lives of one in five of the UK population.

Dude Swheatie of Kwug

Note

1. http://www.un.org/press/en/2007/hr4914.doc.htm

Disability News Service headlines 10 Nov 2016

1. http://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/uns-conclusion-that-uk-violated-disability-rights-is-vindication-for-activists/
2. http://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/what-do-remploy-capita-and-maximus-have-in-common-theyre-all-disability-confident/
3. http://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/devastating-unethical-cruel-disabled-people-react-to-green-paper/
4. http://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/supreme-courts-rulings-mean-bedroom-tax-will-still-unfairly-hit-thousands/
5. http://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/disabled-people-face-extreme-risk-of-harm-without-sharp-rise-in-care-funding/
6. http://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/mental-health-laws-are-intrinsically-discriminatory-says-perkins/

Deadline 21 October for responses to Important UN inquiry into care and support provision

Important UN inquiry into care and support provision – respond by October21st

<http://dpac.uk.net/2016/09/important-un-inquiry-into-care-and-support-provision-respond-by-october-21st/>

Posted: 27 Sep 2016 12:13 PM PDT
Please submit evidence to this enquiry by October 21st  if you use care and
support or Personal Assistants or are a parent of someone who uses these
services. It is important that individuals let the rapporteur know what has
happened since the closure of the ILF both to new applicants in 2010 and to
all… 

Continue Reading Important UN inquiry into care and support provision
– respond by October 21st
<http://dpac.uk.net/2016/09/important-un-inquiry-into-care-and-support-provision-respond-by-october-21st/>

Reclaiming Our Futures Alliance conference hears calls to build a stronger alliance

Disability News Service reported on 21 July:

ROFA’s conference hears call to build a stronger alliance

A campaigning alliance has called for disabled people and their organisations to join its fight to use the UN disability convention to defend attacks on their rights by the UK government.

The Reclaiming Our Futures Alliance (ROFA) was holding its third national conference in the five years since it was founded by a small group of disabled people’s organisation (DPOs) and grassroots groups.

More at http://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/rofas-conference-hears-call-to-build-a-stronger-alliance/

Deaf and Disabled people's rally in support of Jeremy Corbyn - Tuesday 19 July 2016

From Ellen Clifford

Jeremy Corbyn has been standing shoulder to shoulder with us for years. Now its our turn to stand shoulder to shoulder with him.

Since 2010 Deaf and disabled people have been targeted for cuts and seen hard won rights and freedoms pulled away whilst the rich got richer – UK is now the first nation state to be investigated for grave and systematic violation of Disabled people’s rights under the UNCRPD. Through all this, while the rest of Labour were competing with the Tories on who could be the toughest on welfare, Jeremy and John stood with us and opposed the cuts.

Tuesday 19th July, 6-8pm, Unite the Union, Unite House, 128 Theobalds Road, WC1X 7TN (Nearest Tube Holborn)

Speakers:
John McDonnell MP (Shadow Chancellor)
Paula Peters (DPAC)
Sean McGovern (TUC Disability Councillor)
Geraldine O’Halloran (StopChanges2AtW)
Claire Glasman
more tbc….

BSL provided and venue is wheelchair accessible.

http://dpac.uk.net/2016/07/event-tuesday-19th-july-deaf-and-disabled-people-stand-with-corbyn/

Paula Peters of DPAC at KUWG

Paula Peters from DPAC (Disabled People Against Cuts) came to speak to KUWG this week. She talked about their actions against benefit cuts, ATOS and Maximus over the past 5 years. DPAC have got results. ATOS no longer does WCA (Work Capability Assessments) assessments. Ester McVey is no longer an MP.

DPAC have reported the UK to the UN on the grounds that benefits cuts especially axing the Independent Living Fund breach the human rights of disabled people.

Paula also looked towards the future. All the signs are that Stephen Crabb will try to make cuts to PIP (Personal Independence Payments) after all. He is due to make a speech on 12^th, which we will watch with interest.

DPAC's website is at http://dpac.uk.net

Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech

Uploaded by Dude Swheatie of Kwug

I believe that this video has resonances with the striving for disabled peope's striving for equality in the UK of today.


Eight years ago (31 March 2007), a UK Government signed up to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), to little mass media attention.(1) A century before MLK's 'I Have a Dream' speech was launched in the capital city of the USA, President Abraham Lincoln gave the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address during the American Civil War. (2) (3)

Both King and Lincoln died from assassins' bullets. Blacks now considerably outnumber white people in American prisons. And since the UK's signing of the UNCRPD the life prospects of disabled people in the UK have actually got worse not better. Whoever is elected into UK Government today, we must reclaim our power and put more pressure onto mass media to publicise our case. We must not leave it to an undemocratic mass media to spell out what our 'options' are.

We must not give in to what King called 'the tranquilising drug of gradualism'. He said that the gulf between previous proclamation promise of equality for American blacks and the subsequent realities had been explained away by 'insufficient funds'.

I say, "Beware the rights denying halucinogen of 'austerity'. What really matters? What is priceless to our society?"

Further Reading

Disability News Service search finds re UNCRPD. (4)

Notes

(1) http://www.communitycare.co.uk/2007/03/30/uk-government-signs-un-convention-on-disabled-peoples-rights/
(2) Emancipation Proclamation - Hear and read the full text https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM3HS3rr-w0
(3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4Bojjx_Dew
(4) http://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/?s=uncrpd

Further questions for MP aspirants

By Dude Swheatie of Kwug

1. High interest rates and inequality
   In early 2005 pressure group Debt on Our Doorstep (DoOD) launched a campaign against the charging of wildly excessive interest rates to poor families who were declared 'high risk borrowers' by those banks who exploited their vulnerability with 50% interest rates for having defaulted in the past.(1) Since then we have had the bursting of a 'housing bubble' leading to general economic collapse and the rise of TV advertised loan shark interest rates alongside public spending cuts and punitive welfare reforms dictated by a millionaire political class who have been extremely stingy in the allocation of European Social Fund (ESF) assistance to poor people. Is this justifiable, and if not, what would you do about it?
2. Fiscal responsibility and equal rights
   A Labour Government signed Britain up to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) in 2007 and yet the prospects of a vast majority of poor disabled people and their carers have arguably been made much worse since, as if we have received a cheque marked 'insufficient funds'.(2) (3) (4) Is such equalities legislation useless and expensive red tape or a pathway worthy of investing in for the greater good of society?

Notes
(1) http://www.communitycare.co.uk/2005/02/17/families-as-shark-bait/

(2) Re UNCRPD, see Disabled People Against Cuts Manifesto http://dpac.uk.net/2015/03/manifesto-asks/

(3) Re 'insufficient funds', see what Revd Dr Martin Luther King Jr said in his 'I Have a Dream' speech on the centenary of President Lincoln's 'Gettysburg Address': http://quotesnack.com/martin-luther-king/we-refuse-to-believe-that-there-are-insufficient-funds-in-the-great-vaults-of-opportunity-of-this-nation-martin-luther-king-jr/

(4) For an individual case study on the cumulative impact of public spending cuts on one Kilburn man with learning difficulties, see Kate Belgrave's blog piece: http://www.katebelgrave.com/2015/04/update-on-the-house-mould-pictures-and-people-who-are-excluded-from-political-representation/

Don't let IDS cut sickness benefits

People's need before the wealthy's greed

Swheatie notes that there was a time when disability campaigners realised that 'the Atos test' or 'Work Capability Assessment' by which Employment & Support Allowance was administered was really a targeted benefit cut. (Sort of like sanctions are now to JSA claimants, while an estimated average of 356 Londoners are sanctioned daily.) And the 38 Degrees campaigning website did not recognise that campaigning against the testing regime should be a voting option for its campaigners to vote upon prioritising.

And serial retesting for ESA has been a form of 'Russian Roulette'.

The petition authors say that they have worked all their lives. Too many disabled jobseekers, meanwhile, have been punished for 'not fitting in', however hard they have tried, until they/we have claimed disability benefits and won them after tribunal. I am a very slow learner but now apply my understanding to campaigning with Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group. By what fruits do the purveyors of callous indifference toward disadvantaged minorities measure their lives? Each attack on the life prospects of disabled people is another notch on the record of how successive UK Governments have defaulted on the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities.

Now 38 Degrees seems to have grown up and woken up. So let us support this petition and encourage 38 Degrees to go further.


Proceed to Don't cut sickness benefit petition to Secretary of State for Work & Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith

KILBURN UNEMPLOYED WORKERS GROUP

MEETING AGENDA,
THURSDAY 10 OCTOBER 2013

VENUE: KINGSGATE COMMUNITY CENTRE, 107 KINGSGATE ROAD, NW6 2JH,
TIME: 3-5:30PM

1. Gather and decide whether to start with a brief meditation — and do so not
2. Appointment/selection of facilitator/chairperson and minute-taker
3. Present
4. Apologies
5. Cases &; Members' Wellbeing(Pt 1)
6. Break
7. Reports and Consultations:
   1. UN consultation prior to investigation into UK Government defaulting on UN Convention on Rights of People with Disabilities [with 10 November deadline for responses]; UK Government response to that [a consultation with 2 week deadline for responses]; and
   2. Request from Trust for London — who fund London Unemployed Strategies — for experts by experience to come forward toward talking with media in the context of TFL's 'London Poverty Profile', report launch of which is Monday 14 October
   3. Friday 4 October: 'Winning the argument on welfare' conference at TUC HQ report by Alan
   4. Sunday 6 October: Demo against the Daily Mail, report by Angela or Giselle
   5. Wednesday 9 October: Leafleting at Kilburn Jobcentre
   6. Committee report by George
8. Draft Minutes of group meetings held 3 October 2013
9. Workshop date suggestions/proposals:
   1. 'The precariat' (a term that merges 'precarious' with 'proletariat'), possibly integrating discussion abouty holistic health?
   2. Work Programme — aka 'Non-Work Programme' — 'conditionality', sanctions and maybe the 'Claimant Commitment'?
   3. Housing
10. Justice for Herbert & All Claimants planning
11. AOB, incl Cases (Pt 2) if necessary, and prompt exit by 5:30pm, with tables and chairs put back in storage space.