My St George’s Day bid to kill the ESA/WCA ‘dragon’

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'ad hoc', allowance, benefit, benefits, blog, burden, campaign, dead, death, Department, die, disability, disabled, dragon, DWP, employment, ESA, Facebook, figure, FOI, Freedom of Information, government, Group, harassment, health, IB, ICO, Incapacity Benefit, Information Commissioner, mainstream, Media, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, mortality, number, organisation, Pensions, people, personal, politics, release, sick, social, social security, St George, statistic, support, suppress, Twitter, vexatious, Vox Political, WCA, website, welfare, work, work capability assessment, work-related activity, WRAG

Confrontation: Let’s hope the FoI tribunal ends as well for Vox Political as his encounter with the dragon did for St George. [Image: bradfordschools.net]

Vox Political is going to court.

A tribunal on April 23 – St George’s Day – will hear my appeal against the Information Commissioner’s (and the DWP’s) decision to refuse my Freedom of Information request for details of the number of people who died while claiming Incapacity Benefit or ESA during 2012.

The aim is to find out how many people died while going through the claim process, which is extremely stressful for people who are – by definition – ill or disabled; and also to find out how many have died after being put in the work-related activity group of Employment and Support Allowance claimants, as these are people who should be well enough to work within a year of their claim starting.

The Department for Work and Pensions has guarded these figures jealously, ever since an ‘ad hoc’ statistical release in 2012 revealed that, every week, an average of 73 people in the above two categories were dying.

According to the rules of the process, these were people who should not have come to the end of their lives while going through it. Clearly, something had been going wrong.

The DWP has strenuously denied this, and has made great efforts to promote its claim that it has improved the process.

But when at least two individuals asked for an update to the ‘ad hoc’ release at the end of 2012, all they received in return was delay and denial.

That’s what prompted me to make a very public FoI request in mid-2013. I published it on the blog and suggested that readers who felt the same way should follow my example.

The DWP claimed that this meant I had co-ordinated a campaign of harassment against it, and answering all the requests it received would create a severe burden on its already-taxed resources. It refused my request, claiming that it was “vexatious”.

In its own words, the DWP is an extremely-large, customer-facing government department with 104,000 employees. It is claiming that it received 23 requests that were similar or identical to mine in the period after my blog post – but I have not seen these and it is possible that this is inaccurate.

Severe burden? Campaign of harassment? It doesn’t seem realistic, does it?

I reckon I have a good chance of winning this – which brings me to the next issue: Winning is only part of this battle.

It won’t mean a thing if nobody hears about it.

Vox Political is a small blog. Agreed, some articles have been read by more than 100,000 people (presumably not all DWP employees) and hundreds of thousands more will have heard of them – but these are rare, and there are more than 60 million people in the United Kingdom.

If I win, I’m going to need help to get the information out to the public. I can’t rely on the mainstream media because they tend to support the government and may suppress the information. Having said that, I do intend to put out press releases and give them the opportunity to do the right thing.

But I also want to hear from people on the social media who want to help get this information out – either on blogs, organisations’ websites, personal websites, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. It doesn’t matter how many people follow you; if you want to help, please get in touch.

Please also feel free to suggest people or places that might help if contacted.

Reply using the ‘Comment’ box at the bottom of the article. I won’t publish your details but will use them to create a list of participants.

When I receive a verdict from the tribunal, I’ll put out an announcement and we’ll have to see how much noise we can make.

This is a chance for the social media to show what they can do.

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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How about a live blog on the benefit debate?

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Atos, benefit, benefits, blog, campaign, Commons, debate, disability, disabled, Employment and Support Allowance, ESA, house, Iain Duncan Smith, IB, Incapacity Benefit, live, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, Parliament, people, petition, politics, sick, social security, Vox Political, WCA, welfare, work capability assessment, WOW

I’m thinking of doing a ‘live blog’ on the WoW Petition/incapacity-disability benefits debate in the House of Commons tomorrow (Thursday).

Previously I had intended to go along myself, but donations to the site have been almost non-existent this month, meaning I don’t have the financial wherewithal. It occurs to me that this might be a better use of my time.

The idea would be that I would post developments into the article as they happen, along with appropriate tweets from other people who are watching the debate, and comments from readers who want to contribute to the discussion.

I would not be able to make the article self-refreshing, like they do on the newspapers’ websites, so readers would have to refresh the page themselves in order to keep up with what everyone is saying.

It would start with the debate – around 11.15am, with an introductory paragraph posted up earlier in the morning so that people have a web address to refresh in the first place.

Good idea?

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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Hidden plan for ministers to axe laws that protect you – with a penstroke

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Act, Another Angry Voice, bill, blog, Clark, computer, confiscate, confiscation, Conservative, correspond, democracy, Democrat, democratic, Deregulation Bill, dissent, freedom, gagging, Inforrm's blog, journalist, law, legislation, Lib Dem, Liberal, member, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, minister, MP, notebook, Parliament, people, police, politics, press, protect, protest, record, red tape, remove, repeal, reporter, reverse, revoke, silence, source, state, The Guardian, Thomas, Tories, Tory, totalitarian, vote, Vox Political, water cannons, whistleblower

Gone in a penstroke: If the Deregulation Bill becomes law, Acts of Parliament that protect your freedom could be removed from the statute book at a minister’s whim.

I have spent much of today putting old paperwork through the shredder in advance of tomorrow’s debate on the Deregulation Bill.

Why? Hidden among the plans to revoke ancient laws regulating pigsties is a clause that revokes the freedom of the press – in particular, the freedom of journalists to protect their sources.

The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats don’t want reporters to be able to protect political whistleblowers and the information they release from state harassment and confiscation.

Vox Political has long warned that the Coalition government was pushing us towards totalitarianism, and that is exactly what this apparently innocuous – but in fact deeply pernicious – piece of legislation proves.

We’ve had the gagging law, to silence organised dissent; we know that police chiefs want to use water cannons to stifle public protest; now we are faced with a cloak-and-dagger scheme to silence the press.

The removal of these privileges means the media will be unable to report anything that does not meet government approval – or face confiscation of equipment including computers, notebooks, recordings and correspondence that will lead to the identification of people who provide information that the government wants hushed up.

As a blogger who is also a qualified journalist, this directly affects me – and that is why I have been destroying paperwork. Tomorrow is only the Bill’s second reading – it must go through the committee stage, report stage and third reading before moving on to the House of Lords – but it is better to be well-prepared than to be caught napping.

Far more insidious than this, however, is the other part of this ‘red tape-cutting’ Bill that goes unmentioned. The really harmful part…

The part that says ministers should have the power to revoke any law they like, using statutory instruments (at the stroke of a pen) rather than taking the issue to a democratic vote in Parliament and, you know, actually telling anybody about it.

This means freedoms we have enjoyed for centuries-  or just a few years – could be removed with no prior notice, under the pretext of getting rid of ‘red tape’.

We would certainly be living in a police state if this were allowed to happen.

So here’s the big question: Do you think your MP even knows about this?

I only know because I read it on Another Angry Voice – from which site this article has swiped much of its information.

In his article, AAV creator Thomas G. Clark points out: “The Tories that devised this scheme… are clearly relying on the vast majority of Coalition MPs voting this through as the whips instruct them, without bothering to even read the documentation, understand the intricacies or even participate in the debate.

“If you chose to ignore the wealth of evidence and refuse to believe that David Cameron and the Tories would use these new powers to… stamp out dissent for their own sociopathic reasons, then at least consider the possibility that they are enabling the possibility of an unimaginably invasive totalitarian regime in the future. One where open justice is abolished, the population permanently monitored for signs of dissent, and dissenters are silenced in secretive Stalinist style legalistic proceedings.”

Obviously AAV and Vox Political will be right in the firing-line if this happens.

You need to contact your MP and ask what they’re going to do about this appalling assault on your freedom. Tell them about the clauses in the Deregulation Bill that have nothing to do with removing archaic regulations and everything to do with clamping down on your freedom and tell them in no uncertain terms that you won’t have it.

It’s a good bet that they won’t know what you’re talking about. Clause 47 relates to the press, as this Guardian report and this article from Inforrm’s blog make clear.

I believe Clause 51, and those following, relate to the repeal of laws by statutory instrument.

You can find contact details for your MP on TheyWorkForYou.com

If you get an email off to them quickly, there might even be a chance to nip this in the bud.

Vox Political aims to protect our freedom.
But the site is vulnerable to attack because it always needs funds.
That’s why Vox Political needs YOUR help.
You can make a one-off donation here:

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Free speech is under threat as our unelected back-door government bids to rig future elections

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38Degrees, bill, blog, campaign, charity, Coalition, congress, Conservative, consultant, control, corporate, corporation, criminal, David Cameron, demo, Democrat, free speech, gag, government, Independent, Liberal, lobbying, lobbyist, Michael Gove, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill, offence, Owen Jones, Parliament, people, politics, propaganda, rallies, rally, spending, Tories, Tory, totalitarian, trade, trade union, Transparency of Lobbying, TUC, union, Vox Political

You can tell the priorities of any administration by its programme for government.

Look at the Coalition: Practically the first thing on its agenda is an attempt to ‘fix’ the next election by ensuring that anyone supporting opposing parties (or attacking the parties in power) is gagged.

The ‘Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill’, if passed, would end free speech in the United Kingdom and usher in an era of propaganda-led “do as we say, not as we do” totalitarianism.

It will not stop corporate control of the political agenda – the threat to consultant lobbyists means Big Money will take them in-house, where they won’t have to be registered, and then it will be business as usual. This government works hand-in-glove with big business; that’s one reason it has been so easy to compare the Coalition’s UK with Nazi Germany.

(I make no apologies to Michael Gove for repeating this terrible accusation. If he wants to come and thump me, let him. Then we’ll find out how well he can work from a hospital bed.)

It will, as Owen Jones put it in his Independent column, “stifle the voices of charities, campaigners, trade unions and even blogs [yes, Vox Political would be under threat, despite the fact that it has no budget]; … shut down rallies and demonstrations; … prevent groups such as Hope Not Hate from taking on the poison of organised racism.

“Trustees of charities will fear anything that invites criminal investigation, shutting down scrutiny of government or campaigns for changes in policy. It will entangle organisations in a bureaucratic nightmare, forcing them to account for all of their spending… The TUC suggests that it could make organising its 2014 annual congress a criminal offence, as well as prevent it from holding a national demonstration in election year.

“Political blogs… could be included too, since they are campaigning entities that attempt to impact the outcome of an election.”

He went on to quote the TUC’s assessment that this is “an outrageous attack on freedom of speech worthy of an authoritarian dictatorship”, which this writer has taken as implying that an “authoritarian dictatorship” is exactly what we have now.

The campaigning organisation 38Degrees is also threatened by this proposed legislation. The government would consider its loss to be an enormous victory, as it has been a thorn in the sides of Cameron and his cronies (both in government and big business) ever since the Coalition came into office by the back door in 2010.

An email to members states: “From May 2014, draconian new rules would prevent non-politicians from speaking up on the big issues of the day. A huge range of campaign groups and charities – everyone from The Royal British Legion, to Oxfam, to the RSPB – are warning about the threat this poses.

“It’s telling that so many groups who wouldn’t normally agree with each other have united to oppose the gagging law. Groups that speak out in favour of hunting, windfarms, HS2 or building more houses are joining together with groups who say exactly the opposite.

“That’s because there’s one thing we should all be able to agree on: in a healthy democracy, everyone should able to express their views. And everyone should be allowed to get organised to highlight what politicians are saying and doing on the issues that matter to them.”

The email contains a link to a form letter that you can send to your MP, to make sure your feelings are known before they go into the debate. Then they won’t have an excuse to support the government and, if they do, you’ll have a reason (probably another reason, in the case of Tory MPs) to vote them out, come May 2015.

The link is https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/gagging-bill-MPs

“There is no question that British democracy is at the mercy of wealth and corporate interests,” wrote Mr Jones [Nazism again].

But 38Degrees tells us that more than 55,000 people have already emailed their MP, and every new email adds pressure.

Again, the link is https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/gagging-bill-MPs

Make your voice count – while you still can.

Waiting for the ‘snail media’ to catch up

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38 degrees, agenda, andrew dilnot, Atos, BBC News, blog, Conservative, consultation, Department for Work and Pensions, doctor, drive, DWP, Employment and Support Allowance, ESA, Grant Shapps, health, Iain Duncan Smith, Incapacity Benefit, insurance, Jeremy Hunt, NHS, political, private, Sheila Gilmore, Skwawkbox, snail media, Steve Walker, three, Tories, Tory, uk statistics authority, Vox Political, website, year

‘Snail’ media: The BBC News website was nearly two months behind the political blogs in its reporting of a major story.

“On Tuesday, this was a serious Conservative Party policy proposal, being reported in national newspapers. Now, it’s ‘never’ going to happen,” trumpeted web campaigners 38 Degrees in an email last night.

They were, of course, referring to the Tory idea that it would be all right to restrict consultations with an NHS doctor to three per year per person – presumably the Rupert who dreamed it up thought everybody who mattered would have private health insurance instead, and this seems to be borne out by the material in the rest of the policy document.

I’m perfectly happy with this result. In fact, I think it is blogs like Vox Political that helped make it happen because – as you’ll know, o loyal reader – Vox reported on this particular scandal on Sunday, two days before.

I’ll admit, the material in the article was sourced from the newspapers, but what’s interesting is that it took a further two days for the mass – or as I intend to call it from now on, the ‘snail’ – media to cotton on that the whole idea is utterly ludicrous and the public won’t fall for it.

During that time, the Vox article went viral, and Vox readers have never really been known for keeping their opinions to themselves.

A ‘snowball’ effect then ensued, leading to reports in the papers of the public reaction and the 38 Degrees petition, which resulted in Jeremy Hunt’s grumpy tweet: “In case being misled by ‘neutral’ 38Degrees e-petition, it IS NOT and WAS NEVER going to be Conservative policy to limit GP appointments.”

He’s only upset because we spoiled his fun, I expect.

Vox Political was not the only blog covering this story, as far as I’m aware, and I certainly don’t want to suggest that it was any more instrumental in this little victory than anyone else. What I’m saying is it demonstrates that bloggers are starting to drive the political agenda.

The problem is the length of time it takes the mass – sorry, ‘snail’ – media to catch up.

Consider this story on the BBC News website (powered by Atos, in case anybody forgets) yesterday:

Under the headline ‘Incapacity benefit test claims ‘conflated figures’ – watchdog’, it states: “Suggestions that 878,300 benefit claimants dropped their claims rather than take a medical test have been challenged by the statistics watchdog.

“Tory chairman Grant Shapps was quoted saying that nearly a million people had “taken themselves off” incapacity benefit instead of sitting the test.”

Again, it’s great that this nonsense has been challenged, and the challenge has been reported. What’s not so great is the timescale.

Because the Skwawkbox blog, run by Steve Walker, challenged this nonsense almost two months ago.

The comment in the BBC story – by Andrew Dilnot, the now famous head of the UK Statistics Authority – was that “research by the Department for Work and Pensions suggested that one important reason for those cases being closed was because the person ‘recovered and either returned to work or claimed a benefit more appropriate to their situation’ instead.”

That is uncannily close to Steve Walker’s comment that “this represents nothing more than ‘churn’ – a turnover of claims withdrawn because of perfectly normal things like people getting better, or finding a job they can do even if they’re ill” – published on April 2!

I’ll accept some people may dispute the blogs’ influence on the outcome of the ‘NHS consultation’ issue, but on this one it seems unlikely there can be any doubt. Mr Dilnot’s letter followed an inquiry from Sheila Gilmore MP, who follows Vox Political and is certainly likely to have read my report on this matter. It seems likely that she also follows Skwawkbox. The amount of time between those articles’ appearance and the piece on the BBC website is the time it took for her to receive a response to her inquiry on the matter from Mr Dilnot.

Isn’t it a shame that the BBC didn’t do any fact-checking for itself?

So there you have it: If you want proper political news – and proper analysis of events – forget the ‘snail’ media and go to the blogs. We’re faster and more accurate, and what’s more, we make things change.

For the better (in case Iain ‘We’re changing their lives’ Smith was wondering).

Is the algorithm method stopping my messages from multiplying?

Tags

alert, algorithm, blog, captcha, Coalition, Conservative, conspiracy, defamation, Facebook, filter, government, libel, Lords, mark mcgowan, message, NHS, privatisation, privatise, regulations, snout, spam, theory, Tories, Tory, toy pig, trough, wordpress

What is going wrong with the social media giant Facebook?

By now, we all know that Facebook took it upon itself to target and attack bloggers – primarily with WordPress, as I understand it – who use the site to publicise their articles, last week. Vox Political was one of those sites.

The censorship took the form of an alert message that appeared on readers’ screens when they clicked through from Facebook to an article by the writers who had been targeted. This message stated: “Facebook thinks this site may be unsafe. If you’re not familiar with it, please provide feedback by marking it as spam (you’ll be brought back to Facebook).”

Anyone trying to ‘share’ a link with other Facebook users was subjected to the infamous and annoying ‘Captcha’ box – this is the time-consuming and difficult method of proving you are a human being by reading a series of letters or numbers, that have been stretched or bent on the screen in a way that we are told prevents automated ‘spam’ systems from understanding it, and then typing the sequence correctly into a box. This is off-putting as it takes time and effort, and many users may have decided not to bother.

All this took place around the time the House of Lords was voting on the regulations that will allow private firms to compete to run NHS services – the privatisation of the NHS; and it also coincided with bowel cancer sufferer Mark McGowan’s crawl from King’s College Hospital to 10 Downing Street, pushing a toy pig with his nose to highlight his view that the privatisation marked out the Conservative-led government as pigs with their snouts in the money trough.

I can’t comment on how this affected anybody else, but my own site certainly suffered as a result, and I complained to Facebook about this treatment, pointing out that the alert message clearly lowered me in the estimation of right-thinking members of the public generally, and caused me to be shunned and avoided – fulfilling not just one but two criteria necessary for an act to constitute defamation – otherwise known as libel.

The problem appeared to resolve itself just before the weekend. Facebook said that it was all a mistake, made by its automated spam-filter algorithms. It seems that WordPress sites all over the world were affected, and there was discussion of it on the WordPress user forums, ending with a post from a staff member saying that “the problem seems to have been fixed on Facebook‘s end on or around April 26th.”

And that should have been the end of it, right?

Well… were these automated systems malfunctioning again on Sunday and Monday? That would seem very strange behaviour, so soon after an initial ‘mistake’ that was so widely discovered, reported and discussed.

Still, I posted an article yesterday and, when I checked this morning, found that – according to Facebook statistics – it had reached a total of 16 people. The previous article, a link to a reblog that I also posted yesterday, had amassed more than 1,700 readers (according to the stats). The article before that – more than 2,000.

That was seriously odd, I thought. Nobody loses 2,000 readers in a day.

Still, I had another article to promote, so I posted the link to “Tory department of dirty deeds swings into pre-election action”. Half an hour later – by which time I would normally have expected to see a ‘total reach’ in the hundreds, that number had stalled on two.

That’s right – two.

“Yes,” said one of my readers in response to a (Facebook) status report asking what the devil was going on, “the government is putting pressure on Facebook to delete some posts and groups which contain political themes, and to slow the process of certain posts being sent for others to see.  Guess Cameron is feeling the heat.”

Conspiracy-theory nonsense? Or a rational response to the evidence? I thought about this for a while. Then I decided to put it to the test.

If Facebook is using spam-filtering algorithms to censor certain messages, then it must be programmed to detect particular words, or combinations of words, I reasoned. Maybe my use of “Tory” alongside “dirty deeds” was what got the article kicked into touch?

So what would happen if I posted a link to the very same article, but this time with an innocuous – if unlikely – headline such as “Peace and harmony breaks out between the British political parties”?

I’ll tell you what happened: ‘Total reach’ of 542 people within half an hour – that’s what! More than the original link – to the same article – had achieved all day. More than it has achieved as I type this, in fact.

Maybe I’m being paranoid – Johnny Void thinks so; he’s been trying to convince me that this really was an innocent glitch, and I’d like to believe him.

But I also want some solid answers. Wouldn’t you?

I’ve written to Facebook; let’s see what happens.

And, while we’re waiting, I might create a new page on Facebook: BASTARDS for CONSERVATISM! The description will read: “We may be illegitimate, but we know our own when we see them!”

That ought to confuse this dodgy algorithm!

ConDem government launches all-out attack on your freedoms (who’ll get your vote next week?)

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accountancy, accounts, aid, Atos, austerity, avoid, avoidance, blog, cancer, CCG, client, clinical, closed court, commissioning, committee, Commons, competition, conceal, corporation, corrupt, David Cameron, Deloitte, Department, embezzlement, Ernst & Young, Facebook, freedom, funds, G8, Group, healthcare, house, hypocrisy, insider, internet, Job Centre, Job Centre Plus, jobcentre, Johnny Void, Justice, KPMG, Labour, law, legal, legislation, loophole, mandate, mark mcgowan, multinational, NHS, Pensions, pig, press, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Pride's Purge, private, privatisation, public, Reynard's, satire, spam, speech, Steve Topley, syndrome, tax, tom pride, toy, Treasury, work, work capability assessment

Snouts in the trough: The Conservative-led government is so shameless it thinks it can get away with brutal cuts to our standard of living – the week before an election.

It’s all been about freedom this week – or the lack of it.

A couple of days ago, Mark McGowan took an unconventional journey to Downing Street. Mr McGowan, who has bowel cancer, decided to highlight the government’s privatisation of the NHS by pushing a toy pig, with his nose, the 4.1 miles from Kings College Hospital, in Camberwell Green, to 10 Downing Street in protest against regulations being discussed that day in the House of Lords. The new rules force commissioning groups to open all services to commercial competition, unless only one provider is available, in direct contradiction of the government’s own assurances.

Speaking before the event, Mr McGowan said a few words that were particularly illuminating. “Without a mandate, having concealed their health policy, this government is giving away NHS contracts to the highest bidder,” he said.

“Under the cloak of austerity, the primary purpose of this government is to move public money into private pockets, as fast as humanly possible. They are like pigs at the trough of public money.

“These people in government are liars, criminals and thieves and should be arrested for embezzlement of public funds. A staggering 206 parliamentarians have recent or present financial private healthcare connections; amazingly all of them were allowed to vote on the Health and Social Care Act.

“This is not a democracy.”

You’d have expected this expression of free speech to have received a huge amount of coverage in the free press, wouldn’t you? Well, think again because I just checked: An article in the Metro and a video on something called London24. That’s all.

Ah, but there’s always Facebook, where bloggers such as myself can freely direct readers such as yourselves to our work and highlight the subjects not covered in the so-called popular press, isn’t there?

Well, this was a story that Facebook was doing its damnedest to make sure didn’t get out.

It seems one of the earliest articles – the Scriptonite Daily blog – was unilaterally declared to be spam by Facebook, with references removed from the site, after the post received more than 1,000 shares.

Facebook then seemed to get a taste for censorship: The Pride’s Purge blog by Tom Pride received similar treatment after it posted links to an openly-satirical article (It was plainly marked ‘Satire’) about the Department for Work and Pensions and Atos.

Tom claimed in a later post that a JobCentre Plus worker “openly bragged” to him that JCP had complained to Facebook about him, and this had led to the censorship of his work.

Even this blog, which only posted links to other articles about these issues, was targeted for attack. As readers who link here from Facebook will know – you alerted me to it – we had a couple of days when visits here were accompanied by this stern warning: “Facebook thinks this site may be unsafe. If you’re not familiar with it, please provide feedback by marking it as spam (you’ll be brought back to Facebook).” As site statistics show, this was enough to put many readers off.

I wasn’t having it. I have written to Facebook, pointing out that the unfounded allegation is defamatory and demanding that reparations must be made – to charity, and to the Labour Party (of which I am a member), since this site is not for profit and the attacks seemed to be centred on left-leaning bloggers. They’ve got three weeks to respond, then I start adding noughts to the amount that I suggested.

Facebook has said the mass censorship was a mistake made by its automated systems – but you’d have to be gullible in the extreme to believe that.

So much for freedom of speech; so much for freedom of the press; so much for freedom on the Internet.

Yesterday it emerged that a man had been held in prison for two weeks after claims were made that he made a “threat to kill” during an Atos work capability assessment.

Steve Topley, a 49-year-old Hucknall father with multiple health conditions including Reynard’s syndrome, who has a heart replacement valve and lost one of his kidneys to cancer, and is on a strict medication regime including treatment to stabilise his blood levels and maintain safe blood pressure, was whisked away after he made comments about a person who was not present at the assessment.

He was arrested, subjected to a mental health assessment which offered no reason to detain him, so was re-arrested and taken to Nottingham police station where he was charged and kept in custody. He was refused bail twice in closed courts which, his family said, they were refused permission to attend.

Today (Friday) he was taken to another secret court, where he was charged, admitted the crime, and bailed – with the likelihood of a community sentence waiting for him at his next appearance.

Johnny Void, writing about this in his blog, made some particularly apposite comments on the subject, as follows: “This incident happened in the middle of an Atos assessment which are notoriously stressful and frightening for claimants. If he hadn’t been put through that, it is unlikely he would have said whatever he said, which it seems was not a very credible threat, at least as far as the Judge was concerned.

“It can make people react irrationally or angrily and they end up doing things they wouldn’t ordinarily do.  The context these events take place in is often ignored by ‘professionals’, because to them it is all just a job and they can’t understand why people are not being reasonable. The stark terror felt by some people facing courts, benefit assessments, arrests, bailiffs, prisons or even more seemingly benign institutions such as social services, Jobcentres and community mental health teams can often cause people to destroy themselves. This can happen even if ‘professionals’ concerned do their jobs properly within the constrain of the system and no-one is really personally culpable.”

So much for personal freedom – but wait. The situation here is actually worse than even this story makes out. I am indebted to Vox Political commenter vince032013, who tells us the following, about so-called ‘reforms’ to Legal Aid (italics mine):

“Things might be about to get a lot worse. The government are now planning on reforming the criminal justice system. Highlights are 1. Suspects in the police station will not be able to choose a solicitor. They will be appointed one. 2. The number of solicitors’ firms is to be reduced by 75 per cent (that’s not a typo – 75 per cent). 3. The reduction in the number of solicitors is to be achieved by putting criminal work out to tender. 4. The bidders are not allowed to bid at over 82.5 per cent of the current cost of running a criminal case. 5. The consultation which has introduced this idea states in terms that it does not want solicitors to offer any more than an “acceptable” level of service to suspects. 6. Once charged, defendants may be represented in court by someone with no Crown Court trial experience (and will not be able to exercise a choice to change that representative). If you’re interested read the consultation here

“https://consult.justice.gov.uk/digital-communications/transforming-legal-aid

“and if you don’t like it sign this petition

“http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/48628”

In other words, this Conservative/Liberal Democrat government is determined to rig the justice system against anybody who becomes caught up in it. The conditions described by the commenter are utterly corrupt and offer nobody in this country any chance at justice – unless they can afford it. So the really serious criminals and gangsters have nothing at all to fear.

Meanwhile…

Today we also discovered that the so-called “big four” accountancy firms – Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers – who were brought into the Treasury to help the government draw up tax laws, have been using the ‘insider’ knowledge they have gained to help wealthy clients avoid paying taxes. They have been telling multinational corporations and wealthy individuals how to exploit loopholes in the legislation they have helped to write – according to the House of Commons’ public accounts committee.

This represents a staggering betrayal of the working- and middle-class citizens of this country, who have no choice but to pay all the tax that the government demands from them or face imprisonment – and an appalling display of hypocrisy on the part of David Cameron, the British Prime Minister who, only yesterday, said he planned to use the UK’s chairmanship of the G8 nations to tackle what he himself described as “staggering” worldwide levels of tax evasion and avoidance – levels that he, himself, is helping to boost.

Now, I’m not voting in the elections next week. There isn’t a poll in my part of the country. But if you are planning to vote…

Considering the way the government has pushed through its plans to sell the NHS to the highest bidders (without a mandate, having concealed its health policy); considering the way it has been implicated in attempts to stop the public from finding out about the plans and what they mean (in conjunction with Facebook); considering how its servants take it upon themselves to subject very-ill individuals to extreme pressure and then imprison them on the basis of what they say in those circumstances; considering the plan to deny justice to the poor and make high-quality legal advice available only to the extremely rich people, including rich criminals, who can afford it; and considering the fact that it has opened the door for those who should be paying the most tax in this country to avoid doing so altogether – while claiming it is doing the exact opposite…

Taking all those issues into consideration, if you are a working-class or middle-class person planning to vote Conservative or Liberal Democrat next Thursday, then for your own safety, submit yourself for medical assessment because you must be barking mad.

Mind your tweets and shares, activists are warned

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activist, blog, Chile, Conservative, Facebook, General Pinochet, government, Home Secretary, John Cooper QC, Margaret Thatcher, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, people, Pinochet, police, politics, secret court, social media, The Independent, Theresa May, Tories, Tory, Twitter, Vox Political

Political activists had better be careful what they put on social media – presumably including blogs like this one – or face the possibility of imprisonment.

According to The Independent, police are monitoring key activists online, in the same way that they used to seize suspected drug smugglers’ Filofaxes and mobile phones, back in the day – it seems the villains used to record the weights of the drugs in graphs at the back.

According to John Cooper QC, a human rights lawyer, political activists can use Facebook, Twitter and the blogosphere to get their message across.

But if they use those sites to discuss tactics, they might as well be having a meeting with their opponents sitting in and listening.

Obviously he was talking about people who incite riots and other illegal behaviour.

But here’s the thing:

We have a government, and a Prime Minister, who want to introduce ‘secret’ courts. If that happens, what’s to stop them monitoring activists who oppose them, in ‘secret’? What’s to stop them arresting those people, in ‘secret’? What’s to stop them imprisoning those people, in ‘secret’?

Are we, perhaps, only a few short steps away from the kind of police state they had in Chile under Pinochet, where the mothers of people who had been taken by the ‘secret’ police danced silent and alone in protest? Former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was a big fan of General Pinochet, I believe.

I’m not going to modify my comments to give credence to such threats. If I disappear, you’ll know it’s time to batten down the hatches and get ready for full-on repression.

Mr Cooper QC said the principle that the police need to establish relevance should not be diluted and it would be wrong to establish a general rule that private communications should be handed over to the police.

But isn’t that what Theresa May wants? The ability to monitor private Internet communications? As Home Secretary, the option of handing over whatever she finds to the police would be an easy one.

I’ll be back soon… I hope!

Let’s get Ed on-side

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appeal, Atos, BBC, benefits, blog, Britain on the sick, Channel 4, cheats, Chris Grayling, claimants, claims, Daily Mail, Department for Work and Pensions, Disability Living Allowance, disabled, Disabled or faking it, Dispatches, DLA, DWP, Employment Minister, Employment Support Allowance, ESA, fit for work, fraud, government, GP, harassed, harassment, Iain Duncan Smith, IB, Incapacity Benefit, NHS, Panorama, Richard Hawkes, Scope, scroungers, Sonia Poulton, state, support, tribunal, WCA, work capability assessment, work-related activity, workshy

The Daily Mail columnist Sonia Poulton has written a letter to Ed Miliband, in order to secure his opposition to the DWP/Atos work capability assessment regime that is killing 32 disabled people every week. She has invited readers to ‘sign’ her letter by filling in their names and postcodes in the Comments column of her blog. It will be closed to new signatures from midday on Saturday (August 4) so get yours on quick! Here’s the link:

http://ramblingsofafibrofoggedmind.wordpress.com/2012/08/01/open-letter-to-ed-miliband-please-add-name-and-postcode-if-you-agree-with-contents/#comment-1723