Tuesday 20 June 2017

The Tories are trying to kill us all

Grenfell Tower was bad enough. But there's all this:
Almost 600 “additional” suicides could be related to the Government’s Work Capability Assessments, according to a study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
30,000 premature deaths linked to fuel poverty and lack of social care.
A study published in the British Medical Journal found that for each additional 10,000 people re-assessed, there were an extra 6 suicides, 2,700 additional reports of mental health problems and an additional 7020 antidepressant items prescribed.
Statistics released by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) revealed that during the period December 2011 and February 2014 2,380 people died after their claim for employment and support allowance (ESA) ended because a work capability assessment (WCA) found they were found fit for work.
Additionally:
The NHS lost 7301 acute hospital beds since 2010. The Red Cross called it a humanitarian crisis. 20 A&E departments are set to close over the next 2 years, though the state of the government may put a stop to that.
Altogether 15,000 NHS beds have been lost in the last 6 years.
Mental health care cuts in England 'to total £4.5m'
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/mental-health-nhs-funding-cut-millions-five-england-regions-1-billion-spent-2021-scarborough-walsall-a7700476.html
Since I wrote this is it has come to light that 120,000 needless deaths have been caused by NHS cuts and austerity,
ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY THOUSAND
NEEDLESS
DEATHS
I wrote last year that people were dying at the rate of 80 per month over and above the normal death rates we expect to see in the UK, and that based on current estimates, by Jan 2018 or 2019 *at the very latest*, Tory policies would have killed more UK citizens than died in the UK during the WHOLE of WW2 as a result of the blitz and other Nazi action.
67,200 civilians died in the UK during WW2 but today's numbers make my original estimate look wildly optimistic.

The Tories have now killed nearly DOUBLE the number of UK citizens than the Nazis killed in the UK during the whole of WW2.

Just let that sink in for a minute.

Friday 16 June 2017

Journalists and Pundits and #GrenfellTower

Peston: "One reason why the Grenfell tragedy has shaken so many of us is because it exposes so much of what's wrong with the way this place has been run for years.....  It shames us all." (Peston's Post here)

Sorry, Robert, I like you better than most of them but it didn't need this to expose what's wrong with the way the country has been run for so many years. 

This was NOT necessary. It was NOT needed. Not by us, not by anyone with eyes in their head. 


The fact that it took this horrible, awful, dreadful event to shake you lot out of your self satisfied little huddle is not just shaming, it's a national disgrace. You lot are there to do the research, find the facts and speak truth to power, and instead you lap up the power and speak truth to no-one. Ashamed? You should take a year off and have a long hard look at yourselves - in private. 

Tens of thousands - hundreds of thousands of us - have been banging on about this for YEARS. 


All you journalists and commentators and pundits in your cozy little bubble - media complicit with politicians churning out the government approved version of reality, cheerfully and smugly legitimising and enabling it all. You are every bit as responsible as the politicians for this disaster. 

The supreme irony is that you dismissed us out of hand as being "in a bubble shouting into a social media echo chamber" when it was you lot all along. When our "bubble" turns out to have encompassed hundreds of thousands on behalf of - as the election has shown - millions, it's not called a bubble, it's called "the country". You few thousand in the Westminster/media compact were the ones in a bubble, and it has well and truly burst. 

And now you've got the brass balls to attempt to reclaim the narrative and mainsplain it all back to us. Bollocks, mate. Bollocks. 

We don't need your opinion, your analysis, your contrived "disaster voice" for the camera or your crocodile tears for a human tragedy that you and your chums are responsible for.

Sunday 26 February 2017

Alan Davis on The Last Leg

It beggars belief that some half-pissed millionaire "metropolitan elite" privileged Tory boy can come on a show like The Last Leg - which used to have some integrity, and incidentally used to be pretty funny - and tell the 650,000-strong Labour membership (the ones that democratically elected, and then RE- elected Jeremy Corbyn, anyway), and the wider population who for the first time in a decade or more no longer feel disenfranchised by the political landscape of millionaire and billionaires like Osborne, Mandelson and Blair, that they have no right to a voice, no right to political representation, no right to choose their representative, and all because that one person has issues with who they perceive Jeremy Corbyn to be (as if the leadership of The Labour Party has, or should have, anything to do with personality in the first place: it's the policy, stupid).

So thank you, Alan Davis, for putting us all straight there. We'll just go back to marching in our millions against an unjustified war for oil that you probably think was a jolly good wheeze (since you hate Corbyn so much and he's almost the only surviving politician who spoke against it) and have our rights and benefits stripped from us and continue to pay our taxes with no representation.

Cheers. Don't expect me to allow your face on my telly again any time soon though.

And as for The Last Leg - I expect they'll have Katie Hopkins and Kelvin McKenzie on next, so we can be told we've no right to keep going on about Hillsborough or seek justice over Orgreave. 


I know they justify this stuff with "hey, we're a comedy show, it's all just a big laugh" but really - this is a show which started its life during the Paralympics, FOR the Paralympics, as it were - hosted by people with disabilities - which has gone on to give disabled people a voice, visibility, credibility and so on, and used to stand for something, unless I'm very much mistaken.

For that show to use cheap personal abuse to continue the utterly unjustifiable hounding of Jeremy Corbyn from office when they know full well that in the last 7 years

  • Thousands of people have died from benefit sanctions; 
  • All disabled people specifically have had £30 a week cut from their already meagre incomes; 
  • Some people now have to have baths naked in a paddling pool in the front room because their houses have been taken away; 
  • People have been made homeless or driven to ruin over the hated "bedroom tax"
  • Thousands of disabled people have lost their jobs, and effectively their whole lives, having had their mobility vehicles stripped from them;
  • Thousands more stand to lose their homes altogether now that landlords have a free reign to charge anything they like for homes that do not even have to be fit for human habitation but housing benefit is severely capped. 
  • The disabled of this country are being shoved off a cliff edge by the same millionaires that are, and vote for, the Tory party. Millionaires like Alan Davis.


Have some fucking integrity with your "comedy", mate. Jeez.

Thursday 26 January 2017

Workhouses For The Disabled Just Got One Step Closer

Step One:
Make sure everyone has their motability vehicle taken away.

Step Two:
Declare everyone "fit for work".


Step Three:
Corral everyone into "care homes".   <---- We Are Here

Step Four:
Because no-one has any transport and the "care home" is miles from anywhere, bring the work to them.


Step Five:
Make being "allowed" to stay in the "care home" dependent on doing the work you are told to do, regardless of your ability or will.


Step Six:
Make sure your friends in the media call this anything BUT an enforced slave labour workhouse.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/25/disabled-people-disabilities-health-care-homes?CMP=share_btn_tw

Sunday 8 January 2017

Your government hates you and wants you to die.

I'm starting to believe that somewhere in the late 2000's the Tory think tanks decided that the population of the uk needed to be cut by around 5-20% if there were to be any chance of enslaving the rest of us for their personal profit and pocketing every last red cent, and for the last 6 years we've been seeing the start of the cull.

Look at the Red North posts, the state of the NHS, the suicides, the tens of thousands of deaths attributable to "austerity" of the old, the homeless… look at all the available evidence and tell me I'm wrong. 

Please.

Since this written it has come to light that NHS cuts and austerity are being blamed for 120,000 needless deaths.

ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY THOUSAND.

NEEDLESS.

DEATHS.

This is reported on social media everywhere at the moment and also in the MSM like the HateMail (to whom I will not link).

When I wrote this originally people were dying needlessly at the rate of about 8o a month.

Based on this - the premature deaths of over 9,500 welfare claimants and 27,000 "extra" deaths among the elderly - I estimated that by the end of winter 2017 or *at best* 2018 the Tories would have killed more UK citizens that the Nazis did in the whole of WW2 - a mere 67,200.

Today's report makes that look WILDLY optimistic. They have already surpassed the death toll of the blitz and the bombings of Coventry and elsewhere by nearly double.