Property moguls set to gain from Housing & Planning Bill 2016

Camden New Journal reports that property moguls are set to profit from taxpayer subsidised 'right to buy' extension in social housing. And people lacking the 'wherewithal' will be screwed rather than gain anything from being on the housing waiting list.(1)

The matter of the affluent 'playing the system' has all happened General Elections ago in Conservative boroughs such as Hammersmith & Fulham. Yet it has been refugees and asylum seekers that have got the blame, and the scapegoating has helped ensure the roll-out of such schemes nationwide.(2)

What can cause the occurrence of 'high value voids' that the CNJ reports will be sold off to sponsor 'right to buy' extensions in Camden? The viciousness of the even meaner 'overall benefit cap', for one thing. In the interests of 'informed choice' it would have been much better if Naomi Klein's classic from 2007, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism had been much more widely known before the 2010 General Election.(3)

For the sell off of 'prime real estate' on the open-to-whoever-has-billions-of-laundered-currency-to-spare is a prime example of the sell-off of national assets as outlined in that book. What satisfies the greedy friends of the 'key decision makers' who love the creation of shortages that boosts the price of commodities is not good for poorer folk. Once it was the burning of rice; now it's the creation of a 'fire sale' of social housing.

I would say that the Housing & Planning Bill 2016 should be renamed the Evictions & Scheming Bill.

Links

1. http://www.camdennewjournal.com/council-home-sales
2. http://www.communitycare.co.uk/blogs/social-policy-blog/2010/07/asylum-seekers-2m-home-but-who/
3. http://www.naomiklein.org/reviews/ms-magazine-review-shock-doctrine

NHS cutbacks and DIY treatment

By Dude Swheatie of Kwug expressing a personal viewpoint

I'm a great fan of the unorthodox approach taken by What Doctors Don't Tell You magazine.(1) That approach challenges the dominance of 'Big Pharma' and encourages the uses of natural medicine. Yet here is a link to an article related to the dangers of the NHS 'outsourcing' treatment to the patient themselves. "Talk to a hypochondriac like me before advising patients to treat themselves to save the NHS"(2)

And note that family-based carers have already saved the NHS more than the total of the NHS budget!(3) But at what cost to themselves?(4)(5)

Links

1. https://www.wddty.com/
2. http://linkis.com/independent.co.uk/7pOS3
3. http://www.communitycare.co.uk/2011/05/11/value-of-carers-outstrips-nhs-budget/
4. https://carerwatch.wordpress.com/carers/carerwatch-evidence-to-refreshing-carers-strategy/
5. http://www.communitycare.co.uk/2009/07/16/change-the-terms-of-carers-allowance-to-allow-more-carers-to-work/

English graduate debt and moral bankruptcy

While I prepare to take a break from online activity over the Bank Holiday weekend, I leave you with two headline links. One is that English graduate debt is only surpassed by that of American Ivy League universities, and the other is about the lengths to which supposedly intelligent minds in the Department for Work & Pensions have proposed that vulnerable people should shoulder even more of the burden of 'saving the taxpayer money'.

http://www.suttontrust.com/newsarchive/english-students-face-highest-graduate-debts-exceeding-ivy-league-average/
and
http://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/revealed-dwps-secret-financially-devastating-proposals-for-benefits-appeals/

The late American educational psychologist Dr Haim G Ginott asked the authors Faber & Mazlish who wrote 'Liberated Parents; Liberated Children: Your Guide to a Happier Family' and others who attended his parenting workshops. He asked them what parents have accomplished if the children they raise to be top of the class use their 'brilliance' to manipulate and bully others?

Brent Council Scrutiny Committee to hear on Tues 26 April re impact of Overall Benefit Cap reduction

Wembley Matters blogger Martin Francis reports:

How the reduced Overall Benefit Cap will impact on Brent residents

A report going to Brent Council Scrutiny Committee tomorrow (Tuesday 26 April) demonstrates how the lowering of the Overall Benefit Cap (OBC) to £23,000 will impact on residents, with a particularly severe impact on single parents and single people.

Go to Wembley Matters blog for more info.
http://wembleymatters.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/how-reduced-overall-benefit-cap-will.html

Civil disobedience led by Dr Gail Bradbrook, Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett

From Revd Paul Nicolson of Taxpayers Against Poverty

Civil disobedience led by Dr Gail Bradbrook Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett join the www.compassionate-revolution.net

THE COMPASSIONATE REVOLUTION - LETTER IN THE GUARIDAN THIS MORNING

I have signed this letter published in The Guardian this morning and will continue to refuse to pay my council tax, and with my appeal to the Appeal Court, on the grounds that it has been irrational since April 2013 for councils to tax the incomes provided by central government for survival and shelter, in a housing market creating ever more unaffordable rents, and then enforce the tax by adding the councils costs to the inevitable arrears of their poorest residents.

Solidarity – Paul Nicolson

o   Link to the video to post on social media, e.g. I’m joining the Golden Rule Tax Disobedience #taxdisobey because I want real democracy in the UK – join me! –https://goo.gl/U5RrbQ

o   Pledge address – it’s essential for as many folk as possible to pledge on the CR website, because we now have to get to 5,000 people! – this is where to pledge: https://www.compassionate-revolution.net/

THIS LETTER WAS PUBLISHED IN THE GUARDIAN THIS MORNING 

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

Dude Swheatie of Kwug adds:  Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett co-wrote 'The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger'. Those who advocate compulsory 'treatment' or loss of benefits for  people with mental health probllems should note this extract from the linked review:

"Wilkinson and Pickett's description of unequal societies as' dysfunctional' suggests implicit criticism of the approach taken by Britain's 'happiness tsar' Richard Layard, who recommended that the poor mental health of many Britons be 'fixed' or improved by making cognitive behavioural therapy more easily available. Consumerism, isolation, alienation, social estrangement and anxiety all follow from inequality, they argue, and so cannot rightly be made a matter of individual management."

Freudian slips, pauper funerals and 'fit for work' tests

On 23 November 2012, the Telegraph reported:

The Tory peer [Lord Freud], a former banker and descendent of Sigmund Freud, who is helping to push through a radical overhaul of the welfare state, insisted he understood the reality of living on benefits, arguing "you don't have to be the corpse to go to a funeral."(1)

At that time, there had already been several deaths of disability benefit claimants who had been found 'fit for work', including Nygell Firminger of South Kilburn who had committed suicide in the week that the Welfare Reform Bill 2012 was passed by Parliament.(2) In July 2013, the North London Coroner ruled that Nygell's suicide had been brought on by the stress induced by homelessness;(3) and since then suicides related to the 'fit for work tests' that the Freud Report of 2008 brought in have mushroomed, as has the campaign against such corporate homicides.(4)

Is it not time that someone challenged Baron Freud to eat his words, including his 2008 incorrect assertion that Incapacity Benefit tests were conducted by the claimant's own GP? Regarding that 'basic error', Kate Green, the then CEO of Child Poverty Action Group remarked: 

"Ministers will surely be alarmed that the man charged with major reform of the welfare system and family security rights gets basic facts wrong about benefits that he could find out in a second with a Google."His suitability must be under question for the task Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell has set him."Claimants were assessed by independent doctors - rather than their own GP - after 28 weeks, she added.(5)

Maybe someone should remind the Welfare Reform Minister of his unfortunate metaphor, that might be called a Freudian slip? Atos has been replaced by Maximus as testing company for Employment and Support Allowance claims, and at greater expense to the Government and thereby the taxpayer, yet someone might challenge Lord Freud with some of the last words of 'fit for work' test victim Larry Newman:

His widow, Sylvia Newman, recalls that one of the last things he said to her, as doctors put him on a ventilator, was: "It's a good job I'm fit for work." He was trying to make her laugh, she says, but it was also a reflection of how upset he had been by the conclusion of the medical test.
"He was so hurt by it. It made him so upset that they thought he was lying, and he wasn't," she says. "I think it added to him just giving up."(6)

It could be argued perhaps, that investment banker David Freud only believes in rewarding the risks taken regarding the reputations of already notorious global corporations in becoming even more 'toxic' as brands.

Notes

(1) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9698985/Lord-Freuds-welfare-lifestyle-comments-show-nasty-party-is-back-say-Labour.html

(2) http://kilburnunemployed.blogspot.co.uk/2016_03_01_archive.html

and http://kilburnunemployed.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/supporting-and-commemorating-sanctions.html

(3) http://kilburnunemployed.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/north-london-coroner-said-vulnerable-person-took-his-own-life-as-a-direct-consequence-of-his-being-evicted-by-genesis-ha.html

(4) http://blacktrianglecampaign.org/2016/04/14/preventable-harm-is-government-policy/

(5) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7223687.stm Two million 'wrongly get benefit'

(6) http://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/jul/24/atos-case-study-larry-newman

Service users, disabled people and social workers side-by-side for social justice

Latest newsletter from Shaping Our Lives: a national network of service users and disabled people

• End austerity now national demonstration, Saturday 16 April 2016 http://www.shapingourlives.org.uk/archives/end-austerity-now-national-demonstration
• The Social Work Show 2016 in Manchester on 16 May 2016 http://www.shapingourlives.org.uk/archives/the-social-work-show