Coming soon to a JC+ near you – Death by Sanctions…

If the government gets away with forcing people with MH problems to undergo treatment in exchange for benefits (my experience both as carer and victim is that what treatment there is inadequate, already overstretched, and hard to access**), this will undermine the basic right of patients to refuse any treatment they feel is inappropriate or harmful.

**I also feel very strongly that many of those afflicted by mental illness need the services of a skilled clinical psychiatrist, not some numpty with a gold star in counselling.

It will then, I’m sure, be only a matter of time before the whole toxic scheme is rolled out across the entire disability benefits spectrum – no treatment, no money.

How is IDS still in office? Because he’s doing so well…

A popular question on Twitter is “How is IDS still in office given he’s such an incompetent oaf?” That’s the profanity-free version.

I used to think that – and say so, with a great deal of profanity – now I’m not so sure. Like ATOS, I think he’s just working to his brief, which is to reduce the numbers of the chronically sick and disabled by any means possible.

Is the DWP institutionally insane, or purely evil?

IDS has the lunatic idea that plunging chronically sick and disabled people into penury, starvation, and homelessness will magically stop them from being chronically sick and disabled, which pretty much defines both descriptions.

Here’s a thought, IDS – since I became unable to work I’ve been homeless, and penniless, and I’ve succumbed to starvation, and guess what

The reality of the need for disability benefits…

Seeing that the few MPs who bothered to turn up for today’s CIADisability Debate seem utterly clueless about disability benefits, here’s a hint, guys – it’s not money for nothing. It’s money most of us have paid for in taxes, and continue to pay in currency rather less tangible but no less real.

This is the daily currency in which I pay for my benefits (NB: Not

2013 looms, with more cuts and the continuing persecution by IDS…

2013 ushers in the bulk of this malign government’s cuts, most targeting the chronically sick and disabled. Doubtless this will be justified with claims of not giving the skivers and the workshy, which is what IDS and Osborne would love the public to think of us as, more money than we deserve, despite that it’s a

Forget the Maya – the poverty apocalypse is already here…

Writing a comment in the Huffington Post, gently poking fun at those who stock up for the end of the world (what part of “world” and “end of” were they having trouble with?), it occurred to me that I, too, have good stocks of food, not for any mythical apocalypse but simply because, sooner or later, this benighted land is going to explode into violence – if people ever abandon their pull-the-ladder-up-I’m-all-right-Jack attitude, that is.

I mean – could you imagine, say

Blogging perspective – can bloggers work?

The claim has been made, occasionally, that if bloggers can write for themselves, they can work for an employer. Is there any truth in that?

Well, it’s been suggested that I write a year-end summary of this year’s posts. Actually counting them is out of the question – not enough spoons to concentrate for that long – but extrapolating from what I’ve written so far this month which, surprisingly, turns out to be 29 posts, including this (and there’s one more to come today), that would come out at over 600 posts for the year.

That feels

Nick Clegg – detached from reality, and from humanity…

“Clegg said the Tories would have introduced “draconian” welfare cuts if it had not been for the influence of the Lib Dems in the debate leading up to the autumn statement.” Thus the Guardian.

I have, as regular readers will know, speculated, at some length, on the sanity, or otherwise – mostly otherwise, I honestly believe – of those at the top of our government. And now I’m beginning to wonder about Clegg, too – is his close association

Britain – a country stolen by a liar…

“The test of a good strong society is how we look after most vulnerable, most frail and the poorest,” David Cameron, April 2010.

***

“We can’t go on like this – I’ll cut the deficit, not the NHS,” Notorious pre-election poster, 2010.

Compare and contrast those two statements with the subsequent reality. Over 11,000 sick and disabled people dead as a result of his government’s punitive policies, thousands more forced into virtual slavery, and potentially over a

Does Labour regard the sick and disabled with contempt?

In Lords of the Blog, Baroness Lister of Burtersett takes Osborne to task over his use of the terms “strivers” and “skivers” but, while accepting that the “strivers” are  “… generally people living on benefit,” who are “…making their way with considerable effort,” she completely fails – whether deliberately or by oversight – to mention, even in passing, those hundreds of thousands of us who are tagged as “skivers,” when we’re not