Middle Class Solutions To Working Class Problems Is Why Charities Like MIND Keep Getting It So Wrong

Reblogged from JohnnyVoid, with thanks https://johnnyvoid.wordpress.com/2015/02/13/middle-class-solutions-to-working-class-problems-is-why-charities-like-mind-keep-getting-it-so-wrong/ Iain Duncan Smith must be pissing himself. A report released at the end of last year by mental health charity MIND could not have gone further in endorsing the core ideas that lie behind his bungled and brutal welfare reforms. The report is titled “We’ve Got Work To Do” and claims to demand ‘fundamental reform’ of the workplace and social security system to better support people with a mental health condition. Sadly it is calling for nothing of the sort and is underpinned by the exact same lies and toxic assumptions that have driven both Tory and Labour welfare reforms. Just like the DWP, MIND have adopted the flawed medical consensus that work is good for your health. The charity does acknowledge that this isn’t actually always true, but falls short of saying that work can be bad for your health, instead arguing that “inappropriate or poor quality work can have as negative an effect on people’s mental health as not being in work”. They base this opinion on research carried out in Australia that found that “the mental health of those who were unemployed was comparable or more often superior to those in jobs of the poorest psychosocial quality.” In other words work can be worse for your mental health than being unemployed, rather than just equally bad as MIND claim. It is not nit-picking to point out the discrepency between what this research found and what MIND say it found because it reveals the charity’s opinions to be based on ideology, not facts. This same factual slippage occurs elsewhere in the report when MIND begin by saying that most people with mental health conditions want to work, which later becomes everyone with a mental health condition wants to work. The truth, as revealed in the footnotes to the report, are that only around 58% of people out of work due to a mental health condition strongly agreed they wanted to return to work whilst 20% did not feel they were well enough. These two distortions – or let’s call them lies – have allowed the despised Work Capability Assessment, benefit sanctions and workfare all to be misrepresented as ‘support’ or ‘help’. In truth these measures destroy lives. The medical consensus that work is good for you does often not apply to those on the lower end of the income scale who face being forced by Jobcentres into the kind of work likely to make them ill. MIND’s Chief Executive Paul Farmer claims at the beginning of the report that there have been “improvements in how people with mental health problems are supported”, although it is unclear what they are. There then follows an emotive journey about someone’s journey through the benefit system after leaving work due to depression. This is actually where their journey would stop, because unless they could provide reems of medical evidence to the Jobcentre they would be disallowed benefits for giving up work. That this reports begins by misrepresenting the benefit system as it currently functions just shows how removed these giant disability benefits charities have become from the lives of those they claim to support. Instead the ‘fundamental reform’ they call for is actually more of the same or worse – such as the dangerous idea that sensitive health information from the Work Capability Assessment should be passed over to Work Programme providers like A4e and G4S. This is like your boss having access to your medical history and appallingly MIND relaxed about this as well. Much of the early part of the report is taken up by calling for improvements in the working environment for people suffering mental ill-health. Which is fine, everyone wants that, except greedy employers who worry it might cost them money or who harbour nasty little prejudices about mental health. According to MIND themselves this is about 40% of them. Yet one of MIND’s recommendations is that the Maximus run ‘Fit To Work’ service – the new telephone helpline which will be used to certify time off instead of GPs – should more effectively engage with employers. About the only decent thing about Fit To Work, which is designed to bully people back into the workplace before they are better, is that currently you have the right to keep your boss out of any discussions. The final part of the report discusses what future welfare-to-work schemes should look like for those with a mental health condition. The charity are calling for “new specialist scheme for people with mental health problems on ESA”. A scheme which should be run by those who “have expertise and experience of working with people with mental health problems”. And here lies the real reason for this report. It’s a fucking advert to any incoming Labour Government to give MIND a lucrative contract to run a new welfare-to-work service. There is no longer any doubt that endless Atos assessments, workfare and benefit sanctions are creating a crisis in the lives of those with a mental health condition. The tragic death toll rises ever higher. Yet nowhere in this report does MIND call for these brutal policies to be scrapped. Even if MIND were handed a contract to be nicer to people on ESA this would still leave those who have been found fit for work abandoned and dumped onto mainstream unemployment benefits alongside those whose condition is at yet undiagnosed. On twitter yesterday MIND claimed they couldn’t call for sanctions to be scrapped for people who are unemployed because it wasn’t a key issue. If your mental health condition isn’t bad enough to be able to claim ESA then tough shit seems to be the charity’s response if you get sanctioned. The thing is, naked profiteering aside, MIND are not bastards. They have dedicated front line workers who don’t get paid anywhere near enough and are sincere committed people. Workers who would probably agree that benefit sanctions and the Work Capability Assessment should be scrapped immediately. They see the carnage that is being caused everyday. The problem is that reports like these are overseen and commissioned by highly paid charity executives who live lifestyles that their service users and lowest paid staff can only dream of. These lifestyles lead them to make assumptions based on their own distorted experience of the world. Over time they become unable to avoid inflicting solutions to the problems faced by working class people based on their own middle class values because that is all they know. It is near impossible for someone on a huge salary who does a job they love to understand why someone may not feel up to working at present. That, to someone like MIND Chief Executive Paul Farmer, really does seem like madness. Likewise charity bosses have no real understanding of why it might be dangerous to allow other bosses to snoop around your health records. Bosses think bosses are lovely people who would never abuse their powers – or at least not without a damn good reason. And bosses know best, they tell each other that all the time. Charity bosses in particular have their own view of themselves as benevolent experts confirmed everyday by politicians and journalists who would far rather talk to them than someone on the dole. Their whopping salaries provide further proof of their own ability. As do arse-licking middle managers who continually tell them how wonderful and clever they are, to their faces at least. So Paul Farmer must be is right because he’s Paul Farmer and MIND are right because they are MIND and anyone criticising them just doesn’t understand. Because they are not experts. That’s how MIND alongside other disability and anti-poverty charities can so easily dismiss the demands of grassroots campaigns comprising of disabled people and benefit claimants. Groups which are more or less united in calling for benefit sanctions and the WCA to be scrapped completely. These people are not experts. At worst they might even be service users. And you don’t want them getting too uppity. Before you know where you are you’ll have working class people running organisations together to address working class problems. Then there’d be nothing at all for poor Paul Farmer to do. He might even have to get a real job. https://johnnyvoid.wordpress.com/2015/02/13/middle-class-solutions-to-working-class-problems-is-why-charities-like-mind-keep-getting-it-so-wrong/

Going hungry this christmas

This christmas many in this country will go hungry disgracefully. To be poor is not a crime – yet in Britain, the poor have been criminalized and demonized by a propaganda campaign that gives new meaning to the word 'vicious.' In the UK, with Christmas approaching, hunger stalks the land. An ever-increasing number of lives have been reduced to misery and despair, yet for those at the top, 'austerity' remains nothing more than a word in the dictionary. It is proof that British society has now officially departed the 21st century and is heading at high-speed towards the Victorian era of the late 19th century. This is the only conclusion to be drawn from a week in which it has been revealed that food poverty – or hunger, to use the proper word – is a fact of life for millions of UK citizens. A recently published report by an All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Hunger and Food Poverty in Britain leaves no doubt that the UK in 2014 is governed by a gang of rich, privately educated sociopaths whose contempt for the poor is such that they are content to let them starve. That four million people in Britain are in danger of going hungry, that 500,000 children live in families that can’t afford to feed them, and that 325,000 adults do not get enough to eat, with close to a million forced to rely on food banks (charities set up to feed people unable to feed themselves), this is a despicable state of affairs. Moreover, the fact that it is happening in a country that presumes to lecture others on human rights and justice, this comes as yet more evidence of the rank hypocrisy and double-standards which lie at the heart of the British establishment. Compounding matters are the sentiments of Tory Baroness Anne Jenkin, which she expressed during the launch of the report. Calling to mind the infamous words of Marie Antoinette who, when informed of the desperate plight of the poor in Paris prior to the French Revolution, said, “Let them eat cake,” Baroness Jenkin postulated that one of the reasons was to claim that the poor do not know how to cook and should eat porrige . Tories breathtaking hate of the poor knows no boundaries. A recent excellent post by Johnny Void over at the void the report to food banks and their use has been published last week not surprisingly the real causes for food bank use's being on the increase were not spelt out. I'll allow Johnny to do this for us "The growth in foodbanks dates back to before the current Government weren’t elected as Labour’s decimation of the social security started to take its toll. The rise in benefit sanctions also began in the dying years of Labour’s administration as did the introduction of the despised Atos run Work Capability Assessment, designed to strip sickness and disability benefits from one million people. Alongside this Labour’s normalisation of workfare led to unprecedented numbers of people forced to work without pay. And then, as if things weren’t bad enough, along came Iain Duncan Smith. With him came the bedroom tax, council tax benefit cuts, the benefit cap, housing benefit cuts, freezes of almost all in and out of work benefits, more Atos tests for disability benefits, the scrapping of Crisis Loans and countless other measures all precision targeted at cutting the incomes of the poorest. Yet to read today’s report into foodbanks, you would think that none of this had ever happened. Instead it insists that the growth in people going hungry has been caused by market forces and modern economic conditions – beyond the control of us mere mortals and simply something that is here to stay no matter what we do. It is true that alongside the slow dismantling of the welfare state, the minimum wage stagnated whilst the cost of living for the very poorest soared. The erosion of social housing meant the greedy private rental sector became out of control as competition for low cost housing became ever more intense. As supermarket dominance grew, small local shops closed and with them out of the way food prices began to rise. A privatised energy market did exactly what you would expect from profit hungry vultures and fleeced their most voiceless customers, often elderly or disabled people who have no choice but to try and keep the heating on. Payday lenders and pawn shops started to appear on every high street. In some areas wherever you look you will see companies owned by the rich dressed up in pauper’s clothing as they attempt to wring every last penny of profit they can from the poor. All of these things are a direct result of government policies supported by all the major parties to allow the parasites of capital – landlords, supermarkets, energy companies and legal loan sharks – to run rampant in the name of the free market. But you won’t read that in today’s report either. Instead it proposes tinkering with the rules on prepay gas and electricity metres, vague and unspecific policies to slightly edge up the minimum wage and yet more patronising fucking garbage about cooking lessons and budgeting skills. Meanwhile calls for benefit payments to be made quicker are redundant when the government is planning a waiting period of up to six weeks for Universal Credit. This is not even mentioned in the report. They are not just willfully ignoring the cuts to social security that have already happened, but also the ones that are still set to come. The huge rise in the number of people who face benefits being stopped or sanctioned has mirrored almost exactly the growth of foodbanks. An ever more complex and draconian system now forces unemployed, sick and disabled claimants into pointless and irksome ‘work related activity’ for days, weeks and even months on end. Any breach of the rules means benefits are stopped. The report endorses this increased “responsibility to look for work”, calling it a “welcome move”. Instead it merely makes the same calls for improvements in communications with claimants and access to hardship payments that we have heard before. These bastards really think it is okay to leave someone in desperate poverty for missing a meeting with the Jobcentre as long as you write them a nice letter explaining why. This comes with a proposal for a condescending ‘yellow card’ warning system, which was first suggested by the Tory think tank the Policy Exchange. You can see their thinking on this one. Poor people like football after all, so it will be easy for our little minds to understand. Even this comes with conditions attached. Whilst they recommend claimants be given a warning with the chance to explain “their offence” before a sanction is applied, it suggests that this could come with an “additional requirement” to be met. This might as well be to go outside and hop on one leg for half an hour whilst quacking like a duck for all the good most Jobcentre requirements do to help people find work. Punishing people for their poverty is behind this idea, not helping them find jobs. Those behind the report are adamant that nothing can be done to halt the rise in the use of foodbanks. But abolishing benefit sanctions completely would slash the number of people going hungry in the UK overnight. As would scrapping the bedroom tax, council tax reform and halting George Osborne’s benefit freeze. In time honoured tradition however, politicians are clubbing together to say a functioning welfare state is over, time to move on and bring food parcels into the social security system. this. The growth of hunger in the UK did not happen by accident, it has been socially engineered. And the people who did that are the same vermin politicians who write reports telling us how terrible and inevitable it is." You can read the report at: http://foodpovertyinquiry.org/ with thanks to johnny void and his excellent blog over at http://johnnyvoid.wordpress.com/2014/12/08/savage-cuts-to-benefits-go-ignored-in-flagship-foodbanks-report-they-really-think-we-are-fucking-idiots/

Stop the sanctions solidarity with boycott workfare.

In the last few days Boycott workfare who can be found on twitter @ boycott workfare and their brilliant website at http://www.boycottworkfare.org/?p=2474 Were set upon by Youth Fight for Jobs a front organisation for the Socialist party with a vicious piece ripping into them calling them all sorts and not really coming up with any real way to fight sanctions for the unemployed all apart from yes you guessed it the good old ever present call for a 24 hour general strike which lets be honest is not going to happen anytime soon in reality. The article in question which was put out yesterday on the Youth Fight for jobs website written by PCS deputy General secretary John McNally it would seem and Socialist party member was this http://m.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/17601/22-10-2013/how-civil-servants-should-fight-government-attacks-on-welfare "So it's not a moral argument, it's a political question" - err, okay, yeah. Who ever disputed that? In the piece the socialist party claim that "Labour used to draw certain lines in the sand which the Tories and big business couldn't cross" –this is Stupid and wrong from history we only look back at labours time in government and in opposition even back to the YTS scheme labour did not oppose this back then either. But these sanctions can and must be challenged and taken on. The socialist party and the PCS leadership use the saem arguments labour councils do to not fight the cuts and this is quite ironic seeing as the socialist party urge labour councils to not pass on the cuts and to instead to stand-up and fight. Well why can’t the PCS and SP members in the PCS do the same and stand in solidarity with claimants and given solidarity to the working class, the same class they claim to want to represent. The boycott workfare piece is below: Current welfare policies and reforms represent an unprecedented attack on claimants and on the welfare state itself. Conditionality, workfare and the huge rise in sanctions are driving claimants further into poverty and destitution. At the same time a vicious campaign of hatred driven by the media and political classes has stigmatised those on benefits and poisoned public debate. Workfare forces claimants to work without wages under the threat of sanctions. Those on workfare are exempted from legislation that protects the rights of people at work and denied access to union membership and representation. Sick and disabled people claiming ESA can now be forced onto workfare. Workfare drives down wages and conditions for all workers and it is in all our interests to end it completely. Between 2009 and 2011 the number of sanctions handed out to claimants tripled to reach over half a million. In January this year 85,000 people were sanctioned, suggesting that the number of sanctions could reach one million this year. People are now having benefits withdrawn for up to three years (including for failure to participate in workfare). As the PCS have said this increase in the number and severity of sanctions is purely a political decision. As conditionality and sanctions have increased and become more severe so the range of claimants subject to them has been extended. Sick and disabled people found “fit for work” by the hated Work Capability Assessment are now subject to this regime as are single parents with young children. Plans for in-work conditionality will see sanctions applied to part time workers and the self employed. The introduction of Universal Job match and a requirement for claimants to spend 35 hour each week on job search or workfare will inevitably lead to more sanctions and is intended to do so. Plans to make hardship payments a recoverable loan will force those who are sanctioned into debt. Housing benefit is increasingly being suspended where people are sanctioned. This systematic removal of welfare support is causing sharp increases in homelessness and the use of food banks. Boycott Workfare welcome the fact that the PCS have spoken out against workfare and the huge rise in sanctions. We also understand that the primary role of the PCS is to represent their members including around 84,000 staff in the DWP. It should be obvious that there is a tension here where the PCS are campaigning against policies that their own members are required to implement. But there is also the possibility that the PCS could take concerted action to defend the welfare state in the interests of both claimants and their members. Government policies cannot be implemented without workers to implement them. At meetings with the PCS we have raised the possibility of action being taken. Sadly the PCS have been dismissive of our suggestions and they have been met with arguments for inaction. PCS leadership has argued that anti-strike laws prevent action being taken in solidarity with claimants. But the interests of claimants and PCS members are intertwined and these policies directly impact on the working conditions of PCS members. Increased aggravation between PCS members and claimants put both at risk. And under Universal Credit many DWP staff will themselves face conditionality and sanctions. The right of workers to withhold their labour is fundamental. Laws which undermine this right do not comply with international obligations and should be challenged. Without those prepared to take risks and challenge injustice we would not have unions or a welfare state. This is not about blaming those PCS members tasked with implementing unjust policies. We know that the blame lies elsewhere. This is about the role that unions could and should take in building solidarity between workers and claimants and in empowering workers to take action. If the PCS are sincere about campaigning for social security justice then they should refuse to cooperate with the implementation of unjust policies. Words are not enough. Boycott Workfare therefore calls on the PCS to take action to protect welfare provision and to frustrate the imposition of policies designed to undermine it. Boycott Workfare would like to thank those PCS branches who have signed our pledge and those members who have taken part in our actions. We are grateful to members of the PCS in the Civil Service Rank and File Network who put forward a motion to this year’s PCS conference. We urge all PCS members to call for proper debate and practical action on challenging sanctions With thanks to Boycott workfare, The Civil Service-rank-and-file Network

Workfare the blight of Britain

The Tories plans are for mass workfare in affect lowering the minimum wage to a new level that is below poverty wages. Working for your benefits is the new workhouse I’d say. So many people who are out of work will experience workfare at some point if they cannot find a job. George Osborne's latest idea to be presented at Tory party conference this week which his latest attacks on the poorest in society and the unemployed. His latest idea is to force everyone who is looking for a job to attend the job centre every day in a working week to sign on. This is similar to a punishment for not having a job. Anyone can lose their job through all sorts of reasons and could turn from a hard worker to being on the doll at the turn of the day. Workfare is horrible and very degrading for anyone having to work for your benefits becomes working for low pay not seen for a long long while. Workfare could be the new low pay society in this country where labour costs are driven down to a new level. This is all in order to make the UK competitive again on the world market apparently the global race for capital to become profitable once again. Take the Tories latest idea that the unemployed which are all stereotyped to be lazy work shy scroungers of course are to pick litter for their benefits. Those out working will maybe think oh good they shouldn’t be getting something for nothing as George Osborne would most probably agree. Yet cleaning litter is already someone’s job. Not a very well paid one granted but by paying someone’s benefits to pick litter is taking someone’s job further division even more. Can you start to see yet where this is all going? It is clear to me that workfare on a mass scale will likely become the norm if capital in Britain gets its way. Fighting back is a must but so many are on the verge and finding getting by incredibly hard as it is. The threat of losing their benefits which are at a low level is something many do not wish to go through with so does end up going along with it. I think this is where solidarity must come in. Those of us who are in jobs should in my view be looking to set up hardship funds for those who are possibly looking to boycott workfare to help out those who will lose their benefits as a result. I am not sure how this could work but this is certainly something I think could help if we are going to look to take on workfare with mass action. Making people aware of what workfare is and who is still involved in the scheme is key. The actions taken by boycott workfare for example calling out companies and charities involved in the scheme is a good way of targeting them but clearly bigger action is needed to really take it on. Another question is will we see workfare workers in the public sector such as the fire service, police etc? Could we see this? It’s possible I guess with the help of the private sector no doubt. This is the route we are heading unless we do something about it. This post is simply highlighting my fears and thoughts of workfare and where we are heading. I would be interested and happy to cover anyone who has been on workfare and their stories keeping your identity hidden if you so wish.