Update: I am amazed at how widely this blogpost is being shared. Despite being live for just 3 days it is being read on every continent apart from Antarctica. Evidently trade unions everywhere are anxious to learn from PCS and UCU's outstanding good practice in how to treat disabled trade unionists. I'm being completely inundated by comments, which overwhelmingly are positive and supportive, and I haven't been able to keep up with managing and moderating them, sorry.
Anyone who remembers my article "Police move on campaigners for 'criminal acts against DWP'" should read this. It's the story of that night and its consequences, by the victim of those actions. And it tells a very interesting story, especially when it comes to the identities of the people who set the police on her in the first place...
Disgusting
Substitute disabled person for black person, substitute Wales for Alabama a few years back…
This is so depressing; divide and conquer in action.
It gets more like Germany,circa 1933 every day,the propaganda,the scapegoat mentality.Blame the poor not the bankers.
When will it be,Sieg Heil,for Cameron and his cronies,we are getting there slowly but surely.
A interesting read.
Fascism and Big Business is a book first written in 1936 by the French historian and anarchist Daniel Guérin. The book, which was written before the Second World War broke out, examines the development of nazism in Germany and fascism in Italy and its relationship with the capitalist families there. Its main thesis is that Fascism supported the heavy industrial sector (represented in Germany by Krupp, Emil Kirdorf, etc.) to the detriment of lighter industrial sectors, dedicated to building consumer goods. It points out the failure of “corporatism,” which in effect meant the dismantling of trade unions and worker’s inability to elect their own representatives, who were nominated instead by the fascists.
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism_and_Big_Business
Grandstanding, short-term opportunism, posing as Left but aiding the Right, suppression of dissenting voices and -above all – hysterical calls for a General Strike … looks like Trots are loose in the PCS… with friends like those, we won’t need enemies!!
The person concerned posted this on Facebook tagging senior members of the union –
” what PCS needs is a good many disabled people going down the jobcentres round the country and setting ourselves alight in front of them or otherwise committing suicide in horrific ways to show the fuckers what they’re doing to us. I volunteer to go first, I’m fucking exhausted and I don’t want to play anymore.”
– the police called round as a welfare check. Welfare checks are the calls at people’s homes that police make to check someone is alright when they are considered to be at possible risk of harm. What if the PCS hadn’t acted and the threat was serious?
That is not what the person concerned says happened. She says they turned up at close to midnight, accusing her of harassment, alarm or distress against the DWP. That’s not a welfare check. Were you present at the time? If not, I think we should accept the word of someone who was.
I am the person concerned. As Adamski knows full well (because I called him for help, sobbing, during the police visit), it was far from being a welfare check. It is a shame that Adamski is allowing his personal dislike for me to get in the way of addressing the very serious issues this incident raises. Fortunately the overwhelming majority of people who have read the post are not fobbed off with the Trotskyist dismissal that this was a “welfare” visit.
More details can be found in my following blog post, “UCU’s Sally Hunt sides with the Trots”.