Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

re; the atos thingy.

I know two people who are in receipt of disability payments.

Both were worried about the so called tests, and I helped them fill the papers in.

After reading the horror stories about atos assesments, I thought they would have problems. Not because they were not genuine, but because the game seemed loaded against you.

In both cases, they were declared no further action, and so kept their benefits.

It's not all one way.

Maxk..................................Your an angel for doing what you did


Well done mate, you should see some of the inhumanity cases I come across each weekend.

I dont think Hays in reality would accept whats really going on.

max - i equally know first hand of the reverse, though in one case i can just about see the point of the refusal .... i won't bore you with detail

I also was involved with making an application for disability benefit and carers allowance. There was not the slightest problem with either.

c.

Do bore us with the the facts.

It might help to mitigate the figs bandied about about how one million formally disabled people have suddenly found jobs.

ie, one million formally disabled peeps have come off the register, yet no increase in unemployment figs.

Where have they all gone?

They havent found jobs, they have been taken off the register.

Reason, they have income from a private pension. Told by employers they are no longer fit for purpose.

BUT 2 faced tories STILL give money to assholes who havent made provision for later life.

Totaly against their hard working propaganda.

Remember this Hays, be carefull what you wish for , life as a tendancy of doing a U turn on you and your dearest and biting you on the bottom.

Think about it.

Don't be silly, they haven't all got private pensions. I doubt that many have. A lot of the people with disability benefit are long term disabled and probably have never worked. The numbers being denied their benefits are not enough to show up in the unemployment figures, especially as unemployment's is falling.

ABSOLUTE TOSH.

You havent done your research here have you Hays and I find that disappointing of you. Disappointing of you especially.

I expect a lot more from you.

If its not a private pension its some kind of small income eg. letting of a house.

But yet we get Camoron and Sir Giddeon spouting we will look after you if your an HARD WORKING FAMILY.

Nothing more could be further from the truth, ESA which took over from sickness benefit is a MEANS TESTED BENEFIT, that means those that have paid into the system if they are slightly over the job seekers allowance of £78 per week , ie income coming in........ THEY GET NOTHING.

This is usually the hardworking people Camoron and co keep bleeting on about.

BUY if you have nothing including immigrants and you apply for ESA you get the full whack.

Now tell me this doesnt go against TORY (SO CALLED) POLICY.

Like I said earlier get a life.

Petition – Sack Iain Duncan Smith and have him investigated for crimes against humanity



We the undersigned demand that Iain Duncan Smith be immediately removed from the office of Minister for Works & Pensions and that an urgent criminal investigation is instigated against him regarding not only fraud, but also crimes against humanity.

The reasons we demand the above is that as Minister for Works and Pensions Iain Duncan Smith has knowingly pushed through changes via the Welfare Reform Act that have had no risk assessment carried out and that these changes have resulted in the death of at least 73 people a week, (according to figures published in April 2012, with the DWP refusing to publish current figures which are assessed to be hundreds more a week), who had had their benefits removed due to Atos, (the governments disability denial contractors), finding them fit for work. This alone, especially as it is clearly being done knowingly, is only one allegation of crimes against humanity against Iain Duncan Smith and that does not even take into account the suffering and hardship caused to hundreds of thousands of other people through loss of ESA, benefits sanctions and the Bedroom Tax that has been led by him.

The demand for a fraud investigation comes from the evidence that is in the public domain that he lied on his CV, (an offence others have received prison sentences for), when he put himself forward to be an MP and that he paid his wife an income for a job out of government funds when she did no work for this pay making this fraud.

We ask the government, dismiss this stain on humanity from his position and have him investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent for the crimes it is clear that he has committed.

http://iainduncansmith.com/petition-sack-iain-duncan-smith-investigated-crimes-humanity/

Please click on the above link and sign the petition. REMEMBER one day it could be you, your family, your relations, your freinds.

http://tompride.wordpress.com/2014/01/10/dwp-blames-cancer-patient-for-her-illness/

i too could complain very loudly about a number of gov't institutions and the way they handle cases and people, from HMRC onwards
however, i get the feeling, for i do not read most of these posts, that certain guys are trying to blame all on the present incumbents.
total tosh to do so of course, though that rather spoils the thrust of their argument

ohhh shut up Cyners and get complaining then.

Who's to blame for the crisis, bankers or benefit claimants?

Class is the real dividing line in British politics, but politicians only talk about the middle class. That will have to change

Seumas Milne
The Guardian, Thursday 16 January 2014

Visitors pose in James Turner Street, featured in Channel 4's Benefits Street, which kicked off with a Little Britain-style portrayal of unemployed claimants as criminals, scroungers and addicts. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for The Guardian

David Cameron's is a government of naked class interest. Its leading party is the political wing of the City of London. For all its Liberal Democrat fig leaves, it is waging war on the poor while slashing taxes for banks, corporate giants and the richest people in Britain. Its cuts have hit the most deprived, the disabled and women hardest.

In crucial ways – the scale of its attacks on social security, service privatisation and falling living standards for the majority – Cameron's coalition has outdone even Margaret Thatcher. Its austerity programme halted recovery for four years and has cut most people's real terms pay deeper and over a longer period than at any time since the 19th century. Wealth is being energetically redistributed up the income scale.

This is the government of foodbanks, payday loans and the bedroom tax. None of that is, of course, very popular. So to divert anger from the top to the bottom – from those who caused the economic crisis to its most deprived victims – Tory politicians and their allies have turned their fire on migrants and benefit claimants.

If they can convince enough people that the crash of 2008 and the stagnation since 2010 has been the result of too much welfare spending, rather than financial speculation and recovery-choking austerity, they're in with a shout at the next election. In this task, they have the advantage of a mostly pliable media running a daily campaign against "welfare" and immigration.

Latest up has been Channel 4's Benefits Street series about a deprived area of Birmingham, which kicked off with a Little Britain-style portrayal of unemployed claimants as criminals, scroungers and addicts. It's only one of a string of such shows whose themes are the meat and drink of Tory tabloids.

The reality of the social security system George Osborne is now aiming to cut by a further £12bn is very different. Most goes on pensions, and far more is spent subsidising in-work poverty wages and insecure jobs than the unemployed. But the distorting mirror of the press and current political debate means that, on average, people think 41% of the welfare budget goes to the unemployed, when the real figure is 3% – and that 27% is claimed fraudulently, when the government's own figure is 0.7%. That's about £1bn, compared to an estimated £70bn of tax evasion.

Which gives a clue as to which class interest the government is most concerned to protect. To listen to politicians and the media, you'd think the only class left standing was the middle class. By definition, there must be something above and below this mysteriously undefined class, but almost nobody in public life wants to mention what it might be.

Across the world, corporate elites routinely hail the growth of a middle class as the elixir of development and civilisation. In the US, it has long been the only mentionable class in political life. Britain is going the same way. But contrary to the media mythology of "we're all middle class now", most people continue to regard themselves as working class – 60% in the most recent British Social Attitudes Survey.

Those words, however, almost never pass the lips of mainstream politicians. They'll use all sorts of euphemisms, such as "hard-working people" (or "working people", if a Labour politician is being especially daring) – the implication being that everyone else is somehow part of a feckless underclass. Only Ukip's Nigel Farage, now fishing for disaffected Labour voters, uses the term regularly. For the rest, it's as if to conjure up the reality of working-class Britain – including its traditional association with unions, solidarity and demands – might be too alarming for other sections of the population.

Ed Miliband has this week promised readers of the Conservative Daily Telegraph that Labour would "rebuild our middle class", threatened by the living-standards crisis afflicting the majority in Britain. The rebuilding of the working class wasn't mentioned, only "people on tax credits, zero-hours contracts and the minimum wage" – in other words, poorer sections of the working class.

Whether the Labour leader meant his "squeezed middle", those on middle incomes (about £22,000 a year), deskilled professionals or the more affluent being displaced by the super-rich, he's right that a winning electoral coalition for Labour has always been based on an alliance of working class and middle-class support. But to treat working-class voters as the captive "poor" would only risk increasing political alienation and the toxic appeal of the populist right.

The same goes for the other side of the class coin. If the middle class is being squeezed, it's certainly not by manual or white-collar workers. But just as the working class has been airbrushed out of public debate, the ruling class responsible for the crisis still gripping Britain and most of the western world is also hardly mentioned in polite company – though it sometimes gets a walk-on part as the "elite", or the "establishment".

The crudeness of the class egotism and greed that has driven much of western politics in recent years means that can't last. In fact, class politics has been resurfacing in different forms since the crash – from the Occupy movement's targeting of the 1% to the rise of the left in Greece and the election of the progressive Democrat Bill de Blasio as mayor of New York.

In Britain, the social costs being exacted on behalf of a failed elite means class is "the real dividing line in British politics", as one Telegraph commentator puts it. Cameron and Osborne now insist they want to make small-state austerity permanent, and are threatening another £25bn of cuts as they demand welfare states be slashed across Europe. They're hoping the current increase in credit and consumption will boost real wages before the election and soften the sense of a recovery for the rich – though there's little sign of that as yet.

They're also trying to push those Labour frontbenchers who want to "shrink the offer" to the electorate to embrace more cuts and austerity. That would be self-harm. Whenever Miliband has challenged corporate and elite interests, from the energy monopolies to Rupert Murdoch, his support has grown.

The government and their friends in the media want to turn people's anger at poverty and insecurity against their neighbours. The alternative is to turn it against the bonus-grabbing bankers, tax-dodgers, rapacious landlords and employers who are actually responsible.

Twitter: @SeumasMilne

Russell Brand ‏@rustyrockets 9h
Are we ready to handle the truth? People on "benefits" are not the problem but a distraction from the problem http://www.parasite-street.co.uk/ ................

http://www.parasite-street.co.uk/

electionista ‏@electionista 18m
UK: YouGov #EP2014 poll

LAB 32%
UKIP 26%
CON 23%
LDEM 9%

Would be the first time in British history Tories not in top 2 in a national vote

electionista ‏@electionista
UK - YouGov/Sun poll:

CON 33%
LAB 39%
LDEM 10%
UKIP 12%

The polls appear to be not worth a toss if they can come up with those figs gf.