Labour will sack Atos. Where are all you naysayers now?

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Atos, benefit, benefits, Conservative, David Cameron, Department for Work and Pensions, Diary of a Benefit Scrounger, disability, Disability Living Allowance, disabled, DLA, DWP, Employment and Support Allowance, ESA, Gavin MacMillan, Grant Shapps, Iain Duncan Smith, Incapacity Benefit, Labour, lie, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, naysayer, neo-liberal, people, politics, sick, social security, Sue Marsh, Tories, Tory, unemployment, Vox Political, WCA, welfare, work, work capability assessment

I can’t reblog Sue Marsh’s excellent Diary of a Benefit Scrounger, so I’m just going to quote it verbatim:

“Oh thank goodness!! I’m RUBBISH at keeping secrets!

“In this Guardian article, Labour have leaked tomorrow’s concrete announcements on disability. They say that they will :

“A) Sack Atos
“B) Strengthen the law on Disability Hate Crime
“C) Develop a “tell us once” assessment system for social care, benefits and work support that rolls all help into one place.

“But there’s more. MUCH more. Watch conference tomorrow for a much fuller proposal on what Labour have concluded the problems are with sickness and disability support and more proposals on how to change things.

“These ‘tasters’ are to prove they’re serious. To show that whilst there is still much, much more work to do, there are things they can announce TODAY that show they’ve listened and are starting to understand.

“Of course we will be cynical. Of course we will doubt their real intentions. We would be fools to do anything else.

“But the distance traveled from the dark days of 2010 is remarkable.”

You can read the article in its own space here.

I can already hear the naysayers lining up – people like VP commenter Gavin MacMillan, who had this to say after the announcement that Labour will scrap the Bedroom Tax:

“I hate to think what your disappointment is going to be like when/if Labour actually win the next election and return to power, and show themselves to be exactly what they were before – a party which still toes the neo-lib ideological line with regards economic management of the country. The results will be a bit of tinkering around the edges, where things have come unravelled the most. But the core works of the condems will remain untouched, indeed, will be built on with further economic policies guaranteed to boost their neo-lib credentials with their banker mates. And so the circus & gravy-train for their mates and their uber-rich masters will carry on rolling. Trebles all round for the lads, while the rest of us can think ourselves lucky if we can find space in a ditch to cower in…”

The attitude we are seeing today is deeply disturbing. People have spent years complaining that Labour has not been bringing out solid policy commitments; now that Labour is making promises, the same people are accusing Labour of lying!

Why are people so keen to write off Labour’s promises, and yet so happy to accept any proven lie that the Conservatives feel like spouting today? Have we all forgotten “No more top-down reorganisations of the NHS”, or “We will make work pay” or any of the many other outright lies that have flowed from the tongues of David Cameron, Grant Shapps, Iain Duncan Smith and the rest of them?

What a ridiculous, contradictory attitude to take.

Let the Official Opposition do its job.

Or do you want another five years of Cameron and his ghouls?

Membership figures prove Tories really are a minority party and neo-liberalism has failed

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banker, Chile, collapse, Conservative, crash, David Cameron, David Davis, economy, financier, Gordon Gecko, government, greed is good, Hayek, Margaret Thatcher, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, minority, neo-liberal, people, politics, ransom, The Constitution of Liberty, Tory, trade union, Vox Political, wealthy

Land of disillusion: Another former Conservative burns his membership card. [Picture: Daily Mail!]

The Conservative Party has released details of its membership, after it was claimed that people were leaving the party in droves.

It had been suggested that membership had dropped below 100,000 and, while the figure quoted is in fact 134,000, it is still pathetically low for a party that claims to speak for a nation of 60 million.

Worse than that, it seems membership has halved under the leadership of David Cameron; in 2005, 253,600 members voted in the leadership contest between him and David Davis.

The party itself claims 174,000 members – but this includes ‘friends, non-member donors and others’ in the numbers. In other words, people who are not members of the Conservative Party – and that figure is another dumb Tory lie.

Let’s hope this puts to rest once and for all any argument against Vox Political‘s long-held position that the Conservative Party is an ever-more rightward-leaning minority interest organisation, upholding the interests of the very wealthy and working to undermine anybody from other sections of society.

Unless you are very wealthy, they cannot represent you. They do not even understand you or your concerns. They just want you to think they do.

This revelation further demonstrates the failure of the neo-liberal philosophy that has been spouted by conservatives (in all the major political parties) ever since Margaret Thatcher held up a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty and said “This is what we believe now”.

Neo-liberalism has divested the Conservative Party of its popular membership. How could it have done otherwise? Its other achievements were to change this country from one that was being held to ransom by the trade unions into one that was held to ransom by the bankers and financiers, and later the collapse of the British economy.

Strangely enough, at the time of Thatcher, neo-liberalism’s only foothold was in Chile – where the economy also crashed.

Neo-liberalism is over. As Michael Meacher put it in a recent blog article “That world is now broken beyond repair. Yet that hasn’t stopped the political and economic establishments of all parties from striving mightily to restore it. But that is not only impossible, it’s also irrational.

“The world economy was growing at about 3% a year per capita in the ‘bad old days’ of widespread regulation and ‘punitive’ taxation for the rich in the 1960-70s, but in the last 30 years when unfettered markets dominated it has grown at only half that rate. In Britain the average annual per capita income growth in the 1960-70s was 2.4% when the country was allegedly suffering from the ‘British disease’, but since 1990 after Thatcher had supposedly cured the country of the disease and fought heroic struggles in the 1980s, income growth even before the crash has fallen to just 1.7% a year. The decade and a half of uninterrupted growth, low and stable inflation, and falling unemployment after 1992 was not, we now know, a sign of the magic of neoliberal doctrines, but rather of their deeply flawed dependence on consumption-driven boom and bust. On every other key criterion too – competitiveness, inequalities of wealth, economic imbalances, and social and environmental standards – Britain fared much worse in the 30 years following the Thatcherite counter-insurgency after 1980 than in the 30 years of managed capitalism that preceded it.”

Now, you won’t see any of the mainstream media agreeing with this viewpoint – they’ll adhere to the outdated 1980s Gordon Gecko “Greed is good” mentality just as long as they can – but the longer any of us holds onto this mentality, the worse it will be for us all.

Let’s bear that in mind while the news is full of the major party conferences.

Prepare to lose all credibility if you like Michael Gove

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academy, austerity, Baccalaureate, Coalition, Conservative, cut, EBacc, education, English, fee, Free, government, Michael Gove, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, national, neo-liberal, new public management, Parliament, pay, people, performance, politics, poll, related, school, teacher, teachers, Tories, Tory, tuition, union, university, Vox Political, YouGov

Spot the boob in this picture.

Among a cabinet of fools, the Education Secretary – Michael Gove – seems to be leading a charmed life.

His department has won praise for its “radical” policies, which have led to the creation of ‘free’ schools, plans to impose performance-related pay on teachers, the development of the EBacc exam, and the introduction of £9,000 university tuition fees.

Hang on a second!

‘Free’ schools are nothing of the kind! They cost a fortune, and suck desperately-needed money away from state-maintained schools!

Performance-related pay for teachers? How do you measure that? It isn’t a manufacturing job, you know! School pupils’ abilities vary, their temperaments vary, their concentration levels vary. They may have any number of other issues interfering with their learning experience and you can’t pin any of the above on teachers’ performance! How perverse!

The EBacc exam has been widely criticised ever since it was first suggested! Just do a quick web search for it – four out of the first five results are about reforming it! Many of the others are complaints: “EBacc has forced arts off curriculum”, “PE should be part of Ebacc exam system, experts warn”, “EBacc threatens creativity”.

And as for the introduction of university tuition fees… life is too short to discuss the dire threat to higher education in the UK that this represents.

Now we have confirmation of our worst fears about the Schools’ Dunce and his department – from teachers themselves, in a new YouGov poll.

You know there has to be something wrong when 77 per cent of teachers in the NUT – that’s the National Union of Teachers, the largest organisation representing the profession – say the current government is having a negative impact on education.

Morale has plummeted, with 55 per cent – more than half, saying their confidence in the future of their profession was either low or very low. Only 15 per cent said their morale was very high.

Taking this further, 69 per cent said their morale had declined since the 2010 general election and 71 per cent said they rarely or never felt trusted by the government.

Academy and ‘free’ school programmes were taking education in the wrong direction, according to 77 per cent of respondents.

Cuts and austerity measures were harming some or most children and their families, according to 76 per cent of those asked – and that’s before 2013’s toxic cocktail of cuts has even arrived!

And the performance-related pay argument suffered another hit when 74 per cent said children’s educational achievements were affected by their family’s income.

The EBacc was being rushed through without enough consultation, according to a staggering four-fifths of secondary school teachers (81 per cent).

Only five per cent – one-twentieth of those asked – thought the Coalition government was having a positive effect on schools.

The general opinion is that Mr Gove is rushing through changes according to an outdated philosophy, rather than taking the time to gather evidence on what might, in fact, work.

According to The Guardian, it’s called “new public management” and is a Neo-Liberal idea calling for public services to mimic the market in order to ensure high standards and accountability. The only problem is, it doesn’t work. Managers are brought in, to keep the ‘producer interests’ – teachers and academics – from controlling the system, but they then distort the system with league tables and performance targets; instead of providing a varied and engaging education, teachers are coerced into following government-imposed incentives. Education suffers as a result. And that is what we’re seeing here.

The Education Department’s response? Teaching is an “attractive” profession with vacancy rates “at their lowest since 2005”.

The changes will raise standards by giving more power to head teachers, attracting the best graduates and professionals, and helping those teaching now to do their jobs even better. How? They didn’t say. I don’t think they’ve got the evidence to back themselves up.

So teachers are the latest professionals to go on the state-starved sick list – along with the police, doctors and nurses, and anyone working in the public sector.

And Mr Gove? All things considered, if we were to tell him to modify his own surname into a word describing what he should do, he’d probably spell it “goe”.