#PIPFIGHTBACK: How demonstrators did it in Dundee

How and what did our Scottish Unemployed Workers Network friends do on Wednesday 13 July? Find out at 

National Day of Protest against PIP, 13th July 2016 – Dundee Event

https://scottishunemployedworkers.net/2016/07/14/national-day-of-protest-against-pip-13th-july-2016-dundee-event/

Revd Paul Nicolson on Appeal to Appeal Court, EU referrendum, housing crisis, caps, cuts and council tax, and Mail columnist's change of heart

APPEAL TO APPEAL COURT - I have been given until the 25th April to file my skeleton argument when the court will decided whether to allow the appeal be heard. I am hoping to be represented through the Par Probono Unit. Meanwhile I have posted on the TAP website the issues which I hope will be included in my appeal and an extended TV interview with "Windows on the World". 

TO ALL WHO SUPPORT BREXIT it is wrong to blame EU for all UK's woes when the British Parliament is responsible; something Cameron, Blair and Brown might find difficult to say. It does not appear in the Government's leaflet which arrived in Tottenham this morning. CAMPAIGN TO REMAIN is also posted on TAP website. 

Housing crisis, caps, cuts and council tax are all home made. 

PETER HITCHENS change of heart is important and unexpected in the Daily Mail. 

All good wishes, 

Paul

from the Reverend Paul Nicolson

Taxpayers Against Poverty

No citizen without an affordable home and an 

adequate income in work or unemployment. 

93 Campbell Road, Tottenham, London N17 0BF, 0208 3765455, 07961 177889, 

https://www.facebook.com/Taxpayers-Against-Poverty-extra-220051591678621/

https://twitter.com/taxpayers_a_p www.taxpayersagainstpoverty.org.uk, 

www.z2k.org, www.prohousingalliance.com

Democracy presupposes knowledge — Speak Up For Libraries Conference, Saturday, 22 Nov. 2014 in Central London

"Democracy presupposes knowledge"

— Thomas Jefferson

Announcement from Stand Up for Public Libraries. Inclusion of Thomas Jefferson quotation by Swheatie of the KUWG.

Booking opens for Speak Up for Libraries Conference 2014

22 September, 2014 Elizabeth Ash SUFL Conference

PUBLIC LIBRARIES –

THE GRASSROOTS MEET THE DECISION-MAKERS

On 22 November Speak Up for Libraries will be holding this year’s national conference on public libraries. It will bring together local campaigners, union members, library users and library workers – and give them a rare chance to talk directly to the people who make the decisions at national level. This is crunch year for public libraries, with a general election due and two major inquiries – on England and Wales – reporting soon.
Speak Up For Libraries Conference 2014 will have spokespeople from the three major political parties and the two report panels. It is vital that decision makers understand the real effects of their policies at local level. Already public libraries are suffering unprecedented damage. Government-imposed cuts to local authority funding have – too often – been unthinkingly applied to cut services, close essential local branches or pressure volunteers to take on services previously provided by expert staff.
The conference will be structured to enable people to network and discuss their ideas, before engaging directly with the speakers.

Speak up for Libraries Conference
10am to 4.30pm
22 November 2014
at CILIP
7 Ridgmount Street
LONDON
WC1E 7AE

THE LINE-UP

Helen Goodman MP (Labour shadow minister)
Justin Tomlinson MP (Conservative)
LibDem spokesperson TBA
Sue Charteris, panel member of the Sieghart Review in England
Claire Creaser, chair of the Welsh Review of the Public Library Service
Barbara Band, CILIP President, will open the Conference
Ian Anstice, editor of Public Libraries News, will chair the workshop feedback session
Alan Gibbons, author and library campaigner, will chair the panel debate

PROGRAMME

Full details are contained in the brochure, which you can download here. Speak Up for Libraries Conference 2014
Please download and share copies for those not online, to help spread the word.

BOOKING

Book your place online on our Eventbrite page.
Places are limited so don’t delay booking.
All bookings include refreshments and lunch.
We are offering an Early Bird booking rate of only £20 per person  for those who book a place by 24 October.
If places remain after this date they will be at the full price of £25 per person.
For queries or need help to book a place, please call  020 8651 9552.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

Facebook: Speak Up for Libraries

Twitter: @SpeakUp4Libs

And the hashtag for this event is #SUFLconf14

 Continue reading on Speak Up for Libraries website....

Swheatie adds

In response to an earlier attempt by Camden Council to close Highgate Library, it was pointed out by campaigners against closure of that library that Camden's 'consultation' printed document regarding spending priorities was almost exclusively accessed at the library, and the Principal of the adjoing primary school said that having the Library literally on the school's doorstep was a great boon for the children's early start in access to knowledge and research.

The Speak Up for Libraries Conference includes speakers from only three political parties. To find out what all the political parties say about policies and make your own decisions, you could try the online survey at Vote for Policies website and arrive at the 22 November SUfL conference with questions for the invited panel of speakers — or maybe even ask for the panel to include a wider array of political parties, based upon your own 'vote for policies' profile....

A longish comment on Kate Belgrave's blog piece

Shutting homeless hostels, then slapping Asbos on rough sleepers. Brilliant!

Swheatie of the KUWG writes:

Hi, Kate

Thanks for this. Friends of mine live in Notts in a safe Tory parliamentary seat — at least for the 'good constituency MP' who opposes local hospital closures and the like — and I had thought from that that the Council might be mainly Tory blue, but the Nottinghamshire Council website reveals an overall Labour majority.

The ideological background to what Nottinghamshire County Council is doing

I note also that this blog piece ties in with an article I've just read in the Social Work Action Network reply to Secretary of State for Education, Children & Families, Michael Gove MP. Gove [who was adopted by a wealthy couple when he was a few months old] has accused social workers of lacking compassion and intellect, and social work education of being riddled with dogmas that disempower; and in the Social Work Action Network reply pamphlet 'In Defence of Social Work: Why Michael Gove is Wrong' [17 authors], Mark Baldwin [senior lecturer in social work at the University of Bath and a member of the SWAN national steering committee] aptly states what is really going on as 'Blame and pathologise the victims of social forces — they are worth more that way'. He observes that "by insisting social workers should not address 'individuals as victims of social injustice', Gove is taking social work outside the law." As Baldwin states:

"Social workers are ... required to work within the Human Rights Act, which, inter alia, ensures that service users have a right to 'liberty and security of person', prohibits service users being exposed to 'inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment', and also includes a prohibition of discrimination in a wide range of circumstances including 'property', 'birth or other status'....

"[The evidence-base affirms that] the effects of poverty and disadvantage and the pernicious ways in which they deny young people opportunities for the [power to take individual responsibility] that Gove is so concerned they should have."

If Gove gets his way, who stands to gain? Answer: profiteers devoid of a social service ethos that seeks to empower:

"When the service is required to make a profit for a commercial organisation, the ethos of empowerment, the motivation to get people standing on their own despite their social circumstances, will be overtaken by the motivation to maintain those people as pathologised individuals requiring a service.

"That is why people with learning difficulties in Edinburgh, when campaigning against day centre cuts wore tee shirts saying 'we are not for sale'...."

Emphasising this point is the fact in relation to what Nottinghamshire County Council is doing, a large proportion of the UK prison population have learning difficulties and / or drug problems. And as Baldwin's article does not state but the Social Work Action Network National website does, Swan has campaigned against the sponsorship of a 'Social Workers of the Year' award by one of the most despised global corporations, G4S!

(And of course, Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group members who use jobcentres do not enjoy the 'service' they receive from that particular global corporation's 'security staff'.)

"Gove + DWP set kids up for life of misery," says Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group Secretary

"Education Secretary Michael Gove's premature and relentless testing regime and the Department for Work & Pensions attacks on social security payments are setting children up for a life of misery," Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group Secretary Alan Wheatley said today.

"When the market rules people's lives and workers become commodities, the market also colonises children and their childhood," he said. "Testing is used to measure the value or otherwise of children rather than monitor the support they require. Against that backdrop, successive UK Governments have sided with turning children's impairments into disabilities as money spent per child to support their development is cut and misappropriated by channelling it into endless testing. A June 28, 2002  Times Educational Supplement article by Ted Wragg is aptly headed 'Humane rights of the tested'.

"The impact of cuts in poor families' income is recognised in a Kellogs televised commercial that pledges to give money to sponsor poor children's breakfasts when people buy a Kelloggs breakfast cereal. Cuts in housing and council tax benefits also lead to disruptions in  children's home life as councils such as LB Brent have become renowned for implementing central government cuts. At the same time, overseas millionaires leave UK properties unoccupied as gambling chips in a bid to increase house prices beyond the reach of even public service workers such as teachers."

Details of the London teachers' march can be found on the Camden Trades Council website. "It is great that the teachers unions are co-operating in strike action," Mr Wheatley said; "in that, they have a lot to teach the jobcentre unions." PCS Union members in jobcentres take far more industrial action than the more-short-term-contract GMB members in jobcentres, and this lack of joint working has led to apparent apathy of even PCS union members at Kilburn Jobcentre who have demonstrated great reluctance to so much as form a picket line on an official strike day.

God Help Us All

As more and more details of this so-called comprehensive spending review are emerging, it is looking more like what it actually is not what it claims to be. It isn’t anything even remotely close to a nation’s budget. This monstrous document is a fiercely aggressive and monumentally mind-blowing draconian supernova.
The financial meltdown of 2008-9 and Labour’s mismanagement of the treasury gave the Tories once in a century chance of finishing what Thatcherites started in the 80’s:
• Replacing Keynesian policies with neo-liberalist ones.
• Stripping the society of all that is good, just and charitable.
• Turning this country into a barren post apocalyptic land of capitalism, where social justice is stuff of science fiction.
• Truly, actually and factually turning Britain into the junior partner of America; where everything is run by money hungry corporations, where mentioning free health care and welfare state is synonymous with being a billion times worth than Stalin and Mao put together.
If I didn’t know anything about Cameron and Osborne’s politics, and someone asked me to draw an honest mental picture of them just based on the spending review, I would say they most definitely grew up dreaming of playing Frisbee with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher while being tutored by them, learning how to pin all the problems that exist in every single society on the poor, the unfortunate and the working class.
If anyone just looks at the housing benefits section of the spending review, it will be as clear as day that how brutal and devastating the effects are going to be. Cuts to the housing benefits will result in a mass exile of at least 2 million people from inner London, likes of which are unheard of in contemporary peace times. They will have to move closer to M25 or even outside of it in order to be able to afford a place to live; they won’t be able to commute to central London to their jobs and very likely will have to find employment elsewhere. There will be a vacuum of employment in inner London. Even some Tory politicians such as Boris Johnson are opposed to this social cleansing. Somebody needs to tell Mr Osborne that a cosmopolitan city such as London could not survive without working class people. Somebody needs to shout and scream at Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne and tell them:
“if you have what it takes, if you have a single shred of courage blame the budget deficit on people who caused it, crucify the sleazy corporate fat cats of Wall Street who caused the financial meltdown that brought our planet to the brink of bankruptcy, the working class people, the poor and impoverished haven’t done anything wrong, leave us alone and let us be…”.
But the chancellor would never do such a thing, he would never go after the bankers and financial feudalists, he is a trust fund child himself, he would never harm his own kind.
We all need to seriously dig deep and do a thorough cultural shake up; we need to rid ourselves of this culture of political masochism and apologism. We are all living in very dangerous times and a very important period of our domestic modern times. If the government goes ahead and implements all these policies, the negative and sinister effects of them could not be reversed, full stop. If I was a man of faith I would say may God help us all.