OH Insist: Atos bullies demand dismantling of critical Facebook sites

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Disability campaign groups have started receiving threatening messages from OH Assist, the new face of Atos Healthcare.

The messages have been posted to Facebook pages belonging to the Welfare News Service, Black Triangle Anti-Defamation Campaign in Defence of Disability Rights, The People Vs Government, DWP and Atos and Atos Miracles (so far).

They state: “We ask kindly that you remove this page as it incites hatred towards our staff and members. Thank you.”

The wording carries an implicit threat of litigation, as an administrator on Atos Miracles explained: “They are threatening to take legal action on those allegedly defaming them, as it incites hatred towards their staff. So can we take legal action for how they’ve treated the sick/disabled and vulnerable?

“As someone said, you take one of us on, you take all of us on.”

The post continued: “We have a right to our opinions, just as they think they have a right to (in conjunction with the cowards at the DWP) bully, disrespect and shamefully and callously treat the genuinely sick/disabled!

“People have died at the above’s hands. That is the reality.

“So, OH Assist, Atos, or whatever name you will now practice under…

“See you in court.”

Vox Political has not received any messages from OH Assist or Atos – which is curious as the DWP, at least, reckons this blog is about a “‘cover-up’ of the number of Incapacity Benefit and Employment and Support Allowance claimants who have died” following Atos assessment.

Perhaps this is tacit admission of the validity of the articles on this site – who knows?

If that is true, it seems strange that they do not appear to have considered another fairly obvious conclusion – we all talk to each other.

Vox Political considers that any attack on sites that criticise Atos – under any of its many names – for the horrific results of its work capability assessment ‘medical’ tests is an attack on us all, and stands ready to assist any colleagues who come under such fire.

To OH Assist, we say: “What’s the matter, fellows? Aren’t you aware that UK law allows anyone to provide their opinion, or fair comment, on any subject, person or company, providing it is supported by factual evidence?

“If you were able to provide information that the number of deaths following Atos assessments dropped after November 2011 (the last month for which figures have been provided) you might have a leg to stand on. These figures would have to be verified by an independent source like, perhaps, the UK Statistics Authority in order to give them meaning.

“Why don’t you just come up with some evidence to show that you haven’t done what everybody believes?”

In other words:

Put up or shut up.

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BBC confirms ‘Tory mouthpiece’ accusation with updated lies about ESA

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abuse, allowance, andrew dilnot, Atos, BBC, benefit, Black Triangle, Britain on the sick, Channel 4, Conservative, contempt, crime, defamation, defamatory, Department, disability, disabled, Disabled or faking it, Disabled People Against Cuts, Dispatches, DPAC, DWP, employment, error, ESA, falsehood, fit for work, hate, hatred, IB, identical, inaccuracies, inaccuracy, Incapacity Benefit, Income Support, lie, medical, mouthpiece, offense, offensive, Panorama, Pensions, report, ridicule, Severe Disablement Allowance, Sheila Gilmore, sick, sickness, statistics, story, support, Tories, Tory, uk statistics authority, UKSA, update, WCA, withdraw, work, work capability assessment

I have complained to the BBC and the UK Statistics Authority about this disgrace.

Today (January 25) the BBC published a scurrilous little screed claiming that “nearly a million people who applied for sickness benefit have been found fit for work”. Needless to say, the figures come from the Department for Work and Pensions and aren’t worth the time it took to type them in.

The story states: “The DWP claims 980,400 people – 32% of new applicants for Employment and Support Allowance – were judged capable of work between 2008 and March 2013.

“More than a million others withdrew their claims after interviews, it adds.”

It goes on to say that disability campaigners had stated that the work capability assessment tests were “ridiculously harsh and extremely unfair”, but says nothing about the fact that an almost-identical story was withdrawn last year after it was found to be riddled with inaccuracies – if not outright lies.

Even more bizarre is the fact that the story does provide the factual reason for claims being withdrawn. They “either returned to work, recovered or claimed a benefit “more appropriate to their situation”.

In other words, these people used the system in exactly the right way, yet the DWP – and the BBC – are pretending that they were trying to fiddle it in some way.

To explain what happened last year, let’s look at a letter from Sheila Gilmore MP to Andrew Dilnot, head of the UK Statistics Authority, and his response. You can find it on page 39 of the DPAC report on DWP abuse of statistics.

The letter from Sheila Gilmore states: “On 30 March 2013 an article by Patrick Hennessy entitled ‘900,000 choose to come off sickness benefit ahead of tests’ was published in the Sunday Telegraph. Please find a copy enclosed. I believe that the headline and the subsequent story are fundamentally misleading because they conflate two related but separate sets of statistics. I would be grateful if you could confirm that my interpretation of what has happened is correct.

“The sickness benefit in question is Employment and Support Allowance (ESA). People have been able to make new claims for ESA since October 2008, but those in receipt of the benefits it replaced – Incapacity Benefit, Severe Disablement Allowance, and Income Support on the grounds of disability – only started migrating across in April 2011.

“The article implied that many of this latter group were dropping their claim rather than having to go through a face-to-face assessment, with the implication that they were never really ill in the first place and had been ‘playing the system’.

“However I have checked the figures published by the Department for Work and Pensions and it would appear that the figure of 900,000 actually refers to all those who have made new claims for ESA since its introduction over four years ago, but who have since withdrawn their application before undergoing a face-to-face assessment. These people were not claiming the benefit before and generally drop out of the system for perfectly innocent reasons – often people become ill, apply as a precaution, but withdraw when they get better.

“Of the 600,000 people who have been migrated from Incapacity Benefit over the past two years, only 19,700 have dropped their claim. This is the figure that should have featured in the headline, but the 900,000 figure was used instead.”

Mr Dilnot replied: “Having reviewed the article and the relevant figures, we have concluded that these statements appear to conflate official statistics relating to new claimants of the ESA with official statistics on recipients of the incapacity
benefit (IB) who are being migrated across to the ESA.

“According to official statistics published by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) in January 2013, a total of 603,600 recipients of IB were referred for reassessment as part of the migration across to ESA between March 2011 and May 2012. Of these, 19,700 claims were closed prior to a work capability assessment in the period to May 2012.

“The figure of “nearly 900,000” referenced in the article appears to refer to the cumulative total of 878,300 new claims for the ESA (i.e. not pre-existing IB recipients) which were closed before undergoing assessment in the period from October 2008 to May 2012.

“In your letter, you also expressed concern about the apparent implication in the Sunday Telegraph article that claims for ESA had been dropped because the individuals were never really ill in the first place. The statistical release does not address the issue of why cases were closed in great depth, but it does point to research undertaken by DWP which suggests that ‘an important reason why ESA claims in this sample were withdrawn or closed before they were fully assessed was because the person recovered and either returned to work, or claimed a benefit more appropriate to their situation’.”

What he was saying, in his officialese way, was that the Conservatives had wrongly ‘conflated’ monthly figures into a cumulative total; they had misled the press about the figures’ significance; and the press release (which then mysteriously disappeared) ignored a clear caveat in the DWP’s own report that the reason the claims were dropped each month had nothing to do with fear of medical assessment but were because people recovered and went back to work, or else were switched to another benefit deemed more suitable to their circumstances.

Now the BBC has resurrected this story, with brand new, larger numbers that add in the totals for 2013 without telling you whether these were all new claims, or repeat claims, or a mixture; they are all treated as new.

The claim that 980,400 people had been found fit for work after medical tests – the feared Atos work capability assessments – is also extremely questionable – as the BBC well knows.

Its own Panorama programme, ‘Disabled or Faking It?’, investigated whether the DWP was knocking people off-benefit in order to hit financial targets – in essence, making people destitute in order to show a budget saving. A Channel 4 Dispatches documentary, ‘Britain on the Sick’, proved that this was happening. Both were shown at the end of July 2012.

I have complained to the BBC and to Mr Dilnot about the deeply offensive and defamatory way in which these lies have been resurrected, in order to encourage the general public to hold people who are genuinely ill in hatred, ridicule and contempt. If you believe this cause is just, go thou and do likewise.

This behaviour is even more appalling when one considers the rise and rise of hate crime against the sick and disabled.

Members of groups such as DPAC or Black Triangle may even wish to take libel action against the corporation and the DWP on the basis of this report.

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UK Coalition revealed as comic-book villains.

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benefit, benefits, bigot, Coalition, Conservative, Daredevil, Democrat, empower, enemies, enemy, food bank, government, hate, hatred, ideological, immigrant, influence, Lib Dem, Liberal, Mark Waid, Marvel Comics, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, people, politics, power, prey, Tories, Tory, victim, Vox Political, weaponise

The enemy within: Superhero comic Daredevil dishes out a warning that we, in Britain, need to heed – beware the ‘friend’ telling us what we want to hear in order to set us against each other. A Conservative friend? A Liberal Democrat friend?

Tell me this doesn’t describe the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Coalition government:

“A group of ideologically-motivated power-seekers has infiltrated society, hiding inside the political system and behind ambiguous words to increase their fellow citizens’ bigotry and hatred against each other and thereby increase their own power and influence while everybody else is looking the other way.”

If you agree that it does, well, you’re mistaken. It’s actually about a group of villains in the superhero comic Daredevil, released by US publisher Marvel.

In the latest issue, a friend of the eponymous hero broadcasts to the city of New York, warning the population to beware of the infiltrators who say they are friends but are in fact the worst kind of enemy. Her words (by scriptwriter Mark Waid) are chillingly relevant to today’s United Kingdom. Here’s what she has to say:

“If we… are going to take our home back from a band of manipulative bigots, we have to rise above our anger.

“They want you angry at the world.

“They need us all to feel like victims. [bolding mine]

“And it’s an easy get, because times suck. Every day is a battle. We all feel like we’re on the wrong end of the wrecking ball.

“We feel at the mercy of forces beyond our control, and that makes us scared. And that’s rocket fuel for S.O.B.s like [these].

“They prey on us when we’re frightened. They tell us our enemies are the immigrants down the street, or the food [bank] family next door.

“They encourage us to turn our fear into rage, and we fall for it because it’s ’empowering’.

“Except it’s not.

“We don’t become ’empowered’. We become weaponised.

“So that while we lash out at one another, they can take from all of us.”

In America, it seems, they can see what’s happening here and turn it into part of their artistic culture.

In Britain, it should be on the news.

Why isn’t it?

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Failings over race earn Theresa May a figurative rap on the knuckles – twice!

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Bad taste in the mouth, Theresa? Not nearly as bad as the flavour that faced British citizens, wrongly accused of being illegal immigrants because of your race vans.

Anyone with an ounce of brain in their head knew the Home Office was going to be banned from using its advertising vans again – the ones telling illegal immigrants to “go home”, in the language of “knuckle-dragging racists”, as Owen Jones so memorably phrased it.

That is, anyone except everyone working at the Home Office, including the Secretary of State – Theresa May.

The Advertising Standards Authority ordered the Home Secretary not to put the vans on the streets again, saying the phrase “go home” was indeed a reminder of a racist slogan and “clearly carries baggage”.

The authority also said the posters on the vans referred to inaccurate arrest statistics, claiming there had been 106 arrests in the area in the past week. The ASA said this was misleading as it did not relate to accurate arrest statistics for the specific areas where people would have seen the vans.

They were out in Barking and Dagenham, Redbridge, Barnet, Brent, Ealing and Hounslow – areas the Home Office believe many illegal immigrants live and work.

The report stated: “The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told the Home Office to ensure that in future they held adequate substantiation for their advertising claims and that qualifications were presented clearly.”

The ASA had received 224 complaints about the vans from individuals, campaign groups, legal academics and the Labour peer Lord Lipsey, who is from Vox Political‘s home constituency of Brecon and Radnorshire, we’re proud to say.

But in an impressive display of tightrope-walking the ASA said the van campaign was not offensive or irresponsible. While the “Go home” slogan had been used in the past to attack immigrants, its report said, the Home Office was now using it in a different context.

Oh! Well, that makes it perfectly acceptable, doesn’t it? Never mind the possibility that nobody seeing those vans in the street was ever likely to consider such a nuance, it was “unlikely to incite or exacerbate racial hatred and tensions in multi-cultural communities” because the intention was different!

What about the message implied by these vans – a message that was clearly pointed out by commentators at the time – that Conservative-leaning voters should treat with hatred, suspicion and contempt anybody who is not a white, Anglo-Saxon protestant?

What about the way they encouraged suspicion that another person may be an illegal immigrant?

What about the way the Home Office Twitter account spent the week-long pilot period in which the vans were traipsing round London tweeting messages about the number of illegal immigrants it wanted us to believe had been detected or turned themselves in? Can we believe those figures, if the number on the vans themselves was fake?

What about the photographs transmitted by the same Twitter account, of suspects who had been arrested, before they had been charged? Does anybody remember if any of these people were the white Anglo Saxons mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago?

What about the spot-checks at railway stations, where anybody who was not clearly white could be stopped by immigration officers wearing stab vests who demanded to see identification proving they were in the UK legally? How galling was it for British citizens – people who were born and raised in this country – to be faced by a flak-jacketed fiend who (it is claimed) became unreasonably aggressive when challenged over their right to behave in this manner without direct cause for suspicion?

What about the fact that the Home Office undermined its own arguments by being unable to reveal the different ethnicities of the people who were stopped – information that was vital in determining whether they had been breaking the law?

What about the fact that all of this effort was hugely out of proportion when considering the number of illegal immigrants it was likely to net? Forget forced labourers who are brought into the country but kept hidden by criminal organisations – these are not responsible for what happened to them and their cases are likely to be part of criminal investigations into the people holding them captive. Who does that leave?

And what about the possibility that this was not about illegal immigrants at all, but a sop to all those people – many of them Daily Mail readers, we expect – who believe that immigration of any kind is out of control? These are people who need to get to grips with the facts. As reported by this blog and others back in August, the UK has a lower immigrant population than almost any ‘developed’ nation; they are assessed via a points-based system, only seven per cent are asylum-seekers and only a third of asylum claims are accepted. They do not have access to most of the benefits available to UK citizens and what they do receive are nowhere near the same value. They are one-third less likely to claim those benefits, meagre as they are, than UK citizens.

The Unite union has been seeking legal advice over this matter, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission has also been investigating this. It will be interesting to see what they say.

But a rap on the knuckles over bad information is a good start. Naughty, naughty, Theresa May!

On the same day, the Home Secretary – along with Justice Secretary Chris Grayling – faced questions from two Lords committees on the UK’s 2014 opt-out from EU police and criminal justice measures, as part of a reopened inquiry.

If this opt-out is exercised, the Coalition government has listed 35 measures that it would seek to rejoin, and it is these that prompted the Lords to reopen their inquiries.

Parliament’s own website said they were likely to face questions on how they defined the national interest in selecting the 35 measures the UK would seek to rejoin, and whether the changes will break the UK’s obligations to European arrest treaties.

And there were questions to be answered on whether non-participation on measures dealing with xenophobia and racism (the issues at the heart of the matter with the advertising vans) sent an “unfortunate” signal to other EU member states that the UK, under a Conservative-led government, no longer regards those issues as important.

Fortunately for Theresa May, these proceedings do not appear to have been made public.