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.

Heres just an example of those that have comited suicide..........

Testimony for UN hears of food banks and suicides (members only)
Created on Monday, 02 December 2013 08:41
Category: Latest news

Disabled people have travelled from across the country to have their testimony about the impact of government cuts recorded so that it can be passed to a UN human rights expert.

They spoke of friends who had killed themselves in despair after losing their benefits, of disabled people forced to use food banks, and of being unfairly found fit for work through the government's work capability assessment (WCA) system.

Many also spoke of the importance of the Independent Living Fund - which the government wants to close - in maintaining choice and control in their lives.

A recording of the session will be sent to Shuaib Chalklen, the UN's special rapporteur on disability, whose job is to monitor progress around the world towards equal opportunities.

He had been due to visit London to attend the meeting, and the launch of a human rights report the following day, but had to postpone the trip at short notice.

Jimmy Telesford, from south London, who previously worked at Brent Association of Disabled People (BADP) before it collapsed earlier this year, told the session: "At Brent for the first time I had disabled people come to me saying they had got no money and they had no-one to help them."

He described how one woman with learning difficulties was sanctioned by Jobcentre Plus because she didn't realise she had to look for a job.

Telesford, who is now trying to build up BADP again, said: "You are not talking about people who don't have enough, you are talking about people who have no money.

"We are supposed to be the seventh richest country in the world and I have to say to people that they have to go to this food bank.

"So whether somebody eats is down to a group of volunteers, and I think there is something fundamentally wrong about that."

The writer and performer Sophie Partridge said: "I have been receiving funding from the ILF for almost my entire adult life and that has enabled me to live independently and do the things I do.

"I work, I am involved with my community, my family, my friends, because I am able to employ my own PAs to provide pretty much a full-time care package which is pretty much all day every day.

"I am really, really concerned that the ILF is reopened and reopened to new users so every disabled person with high access needs can have the same quality of life as I do."

Another activist, Robert Punton, said: "I am a disabled person living in a disabling society. Like everybody else in this room I have one major occupation and that is to ensure I continue to live independently in society and continue to do the things that I do."

He said the support workers he employed "provides valuable pounds to the economy".

He added: "We are not scroungers, we are not people sitting around, we are people doing jobs to ensure that everybody in society continues to live."

He said that for every disabled person giving testimony there were "thousands and thousands of disabled people living in prisons in their own homes, isolated, who cannot be here today to make their points. Those are the people the UN should be aware of as well."

Angela, from Brent, another disabled person who was providing testimony, said: "There is not enough support for people like me. At the moment I am relying on my brother to help and he has mental health problems. If he gets ill, I really will be on my own."

She added: "I am glad disabled people are not sitting quiet. We need to expose this injustice."

Anne Pridmore, one of the five disabled people who successfully took a court case against the government over its decision to close the Independent Living Fund (ILF), described how ILF had transformed her life.

She said she only had 20 minutes of care in the morning and another 20 in the evening when she was first "thrown in the hands of social services" in 1984. Now, thanks to ILF, she receives 24-hour care.

Pridmore, director of Being the Boss, a user-led organisation which supports disabled people who employ personal assistants, said: "If ILF finishes, my life is over. They could put me into an old people's home.

"ILF has enabled me to travel all over Europe fighting for human rights; I have run some major organisations in this country.

"It has been an absolute godsend for me. Without it, I just don't want to go on living."

Maria Nash, who took an unsuccessful but high-profile court case against Barnet council over the outsourcing of local services. and is a director of Barnet Centre for Independent Living, said: "The government needs to take action and stop threatening us with the loss of benefits. It is creating huge problems, we are losing the will to live.

"Every day we are hearing that people are losing benefits and people are committing suicide."

Several of those giving testimony found it hard to restrain their emotions.

Paula Peters described how her friend, who had bipolar disorder, had been found fit for work and told her doctor that she wanted to die, before jumping to her death at a train station in 2010.

Peters attempted to take her own life in January 2011. She said the stress of dealing with the WCA system was "horrendous" and although the "relief was massive" when she was found not fit for work, her fear soon returned. Her mental health has never stabilised.

She said: "This process is inhuman and so torturous. It has killed 18 of my friends through the stress and worry of it.

"I only want to ask why. There are thousands of people who have died due to the WCA and I just want this to stop."

Another emotion-charged moment came after Martin Tolley, from Ipswich, described the constant pain he was in due to a chronic medical condition.

He said his health "took one heck of a nose dive" when he was going through the WCA process. He said DWP had failed to take his circumstances into consideration, and that when he told his physiotherapist he had been placed in the work-related activity group - for those expected to move towards employment - she "hit the roof".

He cried as he finished his testimony by launching an attack on the government, who he said were "guilty of murder".

He said later that he had eventually been placed in the support group - for those not expected to carry out any work-related activity - after his case had been reconsidered.

Anthony Jefferson, a trustee of the National Association of Deafened People, said it was well-know that during a recession "deaf people are the first to go and the last to be employed".

He said: "They don't understand how difficult it is to get jobs out there. I am talking for all deaf people and everybody with invisible disabilities. It is about lack of patience and lack of awareness and lack of training."

Paul, another of those who presented testimony to the meeting, described how being put through the WCA system had made him seriously ill. "It has been 11 months I have been going through it, getting worse and worse.

"The advice from doctors is I have to stop thinking about it and put it out of my mind, but nobody understands the pressure we are put under when we are being assessed."

Phillip Rackham added: "They want disabled people to work, but how can we work if there are not jobs for disabled people?"

The mother of a young woman with learning difficulties and a visual impairment described how her daughter was being denied a mainstream education, with the only place offered a residential special college 90 miles away.

She said: "Our family have been left isolated, [my daughter] isn't receiving any social care support and education.

"If they have their own way she will be in residential accommodation, which is 90 miles away."

News provided by John Pring at www.disabilitynewsservice.com

I am afraid that stories individuals committing suicide have little relevance. They were clearly unbalanced and may have topped themselves anyway.

If thats the case Hays why as IDS STOPPED COMPILING THE SUICIDE STATS........he stopped counting them in late 2012.

What does he have to hide/fear?????????

I don't even know if he did stop compiling the figures. It makes no difference. The people were clearly unbalanced to start with.

Heres a stat for you..........

#3 bluesky 2013-12-05 20:39
Lets not forget the 10'600 sick/disabled who lost/took their lives in 2011 due to the harsh regime that is the work capability assessment administered by ATOS/DWP.. We will remember them..

gf
You really are so gullible and trot out false figures. The TOTAL suicides in the UK in 2011 was around 6,000. Your figure is supposedly a sub group of that figure.

You need to be more discriminating about what you read and believe.

Hays making it up as he goes along as usual.

Another ESA-related death but the DWP wants us to believe there’s no connection

The latest person to die while facing a change to his sickness benefit is Neil Groves, who was hit by a train at Surbiton station on his 46th birthday.

Mr Groves died just after 7.30pm on February 13. His father Ronald, 78, told local paper the Kingston Guardian a potential change to his son’s Employment and Support Allowance “must have” weighed on him.

He said: “He has obviously had it in his mind. They basically told him that his assessment was coming up again.

“He knew it probably would be the end of his sickness and disability and he would go back on to [Jobseekers' Allowance].

“He said he would not be able to manage on that wage a week. It is all part and parcel of it.”

Mr Groves had received Incapacity Benefit for some years, his father said, which was stopped after an assessment, and he was not moved on to ESA.

He later won an appeal against the decision.

He had recently been diagnosed with chronic depression.

You can read the story on the newspaper’s website.

The DWP, in an email to the Information Commissioner that was copied to yr obdt srvt as part of the disclosure process for the forthcoming tribunal on claimant mortality statistics, has stated: “There is no evidence of a link between the death of an individual and their receipt of a social security benefit.”

Do you think that’s accurate?

Economy 'to hit 2008 peak by summer'
The size of the UK's overall economy will surpass its pre-recession peak by this summer, says the British Chambers of Commerce.

The DWP, in an email to the Information Commissioner that was copied to yr obdt srvt as part of the disclosure process for the forthcoming tribunal on claimant mortality statistics, has stated: “There is no evidence of a link between the death of an individual and their receipt of a social security benefit.

Absolute tosh and propaganda being spread by IDS and his miserable department.

I feel like committing suicide sometimes when I read this thread.:-)

Yep thats correct alders but what you have to remember is we are next to last in the race to get to the 2008 figure.

Just Italy behind us and FRANCE in front of us.!!!!!!!!!!

USA miles out in front.

SKY NEWS put the chart up this lunch time. And the analyst wasnt over bubbling with confidence.

Just goes to show Ed Balls was right all along.

The suicide rate was the one published by the Samaritans. There has been a rise since the start of the recession as there always is with previous ones.

Yes but things like this cannot be hidden in a civilised rich country Doodles.

More and more this government are hiding and supressing bad news and not just on welfare, on everything that seems to pass through their office.

Last week eg, MR Rock.

They wanted to keep it quiet and thought they would get away with it until the Daily Mail were tipped off.

They were hardly keeping it quiet when it was number 10 that referred the situation to the police. It is also not for number 10 to publicise the situation when it is still being investigated by the police.

Hays your constantly in denial.

The Mail have Camorons number, in fact I think he as upset someone there.

They seem to be after him.

Hays so whats the excuse for the supressed imigration report??????????

Bare-faced Lies, Bluff and Bullshit Are All Iain Duncan Smith Has Left As Millions Suffer
Posted on March 9, 2014 by johnny void

IDS The list goes on and on. The Public Accounts Committee, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the Office for National Statistics, the National Audit Office, the Archbishop of Westminster, even the Tory dominated Policy Exchange and coalition partners the Lib Dems, all of these people are wrong or lying said the increasingly bewildered Iain Duncan Smith in a rare appearance on the Sunday Politics this morning (starts at 13.20).

Much of the interview concentrated on the launch of Universal Credit, which has seen just a few thousand people start on the new benefit and tens of millions squandered due to bungled IT systems. It is difficult to know for sure just how badly the launch of Universal Credit is going wrong, but IDS did admit that the new system will now not be fully in place until 2018.

Whilst Iain Duncan Smith can bullshit his way out of awkward questions on the launch of Universal Credit – mainly because no-one, including him, knows what the fuck’s really going on behind the scenes – he quickly resorted to outright lies when asked about other benefit reforms.

The Work Programme is working according to the Secretary of State, despite the appalling performance figures which are getting steadily worse as time goes on*. IDS then lied that the companies running the scheme don’t get paid until someone has been in work continuously for six months. In truth providers receive an up front start fee for everyone who joins the Work Programme. Long term unemployment is falling he then claimed, yet the most recent figures from the ONS show that the number of people who have been out of work for over two years is up 9000 from a year earlier. He then bluffed that the scheme was better than any programme run by the Labour Government, which would hardly be a ringing endorsement even if it were true, and it isn’t.

On the Bedroom Tax IDS pretended that he didn’t mean it when he hauled the family of a disabled child through the appeal courts in an effort to overturn a ruling on a spare bedroom. Astonishingly he said he now agreed with the court decision that he spent our money appealing against. He then claimed that the courts had backed the Government on all the decisions relating to disabled adults facing the Bedroom Tax, completely ignoring a string of recent benefit tribunal decisions where local authorities lost bedroom tax cases.

On Housing Benefit overall, he lambasted the amount spent on the benefit under Labour whilst avoiding the stark fact that the number of people needing to claim for help with their rent hit an all time high last Summer. The Housing Benefit bill will only get bigger as less people qualify for social housing under new rules, and even those who have them are forced into the private sector due to the Bedroom Tax.

When quizzed about Tory think-tank the Policy Exchange’s recent mild criticism of benefit sanctions, IDS claimed they’d got their figures wrong. In perhaps his most bare-faced lie, he blustered that people who have had benefits sanctioned can ‘immediately’ and ‘straight away’ get a payment from the Hardship Fund. In truth most claimants have to wait 15 days before Hardship Payments are available (PDF – ref: 35300) and even then not everyone qualifies for this meagre support . He then claimed the DWP had a billion pounds to support people facing benefit sanctions, including Crisis Loans. He seems to have forgotten that he abolished Crisis Loans in April last year.

Finally IDS was asked about child poverty, which he repeatedly claimed was falling despite an enormous fucking graph behind his head which showed the exact opposite. According to IDS this discrepancy is because the IFS, who produced the figures, measure poverty according to the “marginal income line” – in other words how much money someone has. In future child poverty will be measured according to Iain Duncan Smith’s ever changing personal prejudices. He says he will produce new figures showing that the number of poor children is actually falling just as soon as he can be bothered to make them up.

Iain Duncan Smith is now barely even pretending to tell the truth as his welfare reforms unravel in every direction. It is a pitiful sight to watch, but the impact of his delusions are tragic. People are dying because of Iain Duncan Smith. Families are becoming homeless and children going hungry, whilst sick and disabled people are being driven to despair. Rarely has one man’s arrogance caused so much suffering. There is no more damning indictment of our so-called democracy then a dishonest and callous fool like Iain Duncan Smith being able to claw his way to power over millions of lives.

*the most recent Work Programme figures were sneaked out in the Christmas break and I didn’t have the time to cover them. They showed that the steady decline in the number of successful job outcomes is continuing

Is it my imagination or is Milibland sounding more stupid lately? I watched spouting the latest Lab policy and he appeared to becoming a cartoon of himself.

i recollect that the french economy is still shrinking though their tax rates and unemployment are spiralling, and the italians have never had a truthful base from which to work, so as usual, they'll just make it up as they go along

actually, the italians will most likely concoct some figures about their olive groves that will allow them to strip another few €m from the eu farm subsidy funds, or somesuch

cynical as ever. The poor put upon Italians!