What value is there in continuous testing and assessing of disabled people?

Last year when it became obvious this government were not going to move on its closure programme of the Independent Living Fund (ILF) along with thousands of other ILF recipients I grimly realized that my life could be turned upside down.

However, I was quite relieved when at my care package review in April that my LA agreed to join my ILF payments with the LA budget. In fact, due in part to my campaigning Lambeth pledged to continue paying ILF budgets at their current level to all 43 recipients in the borough.

Though happy at the time, I was still very much aware that in 12 months I would be receiving another review; and that in all likelihood this review would seek ways to cut back my social care and support package.

People in receipt of social care and support packages undergo two sets of assessments or reviews each year. The first is a needs assessment. This process identifies care and support needs; and it then seeks outcomes to these needs. The second assessment is a financial process. This checks income and savings in order to determine whether the service user makes a contribution to their care or if they are ‘zero rated’. These assessments take place annually.

Yesterday I received a call from a social worker who introduced herself and went on to explain her role; and she then asked when we could meet to carry out the annual review of my care package.

ME: “In April, that’s when my annual review is due.”

SW: “You don’t understand I need to see if your needs have changed before April.”

ME: “Yes, I do understand the function of an annual needs assessment, or in this case annual needs review, it is to determine whether my needs are being met by my current care package. Or most likely where you can make cuts…”

SW: “Mr McGovern, we are obliged by law to carry out a review annually.”

ME: “Yes, I agree. Call me back in April when I’m due the review, not nine months into the annual period.

Let me explain something to you. As a disabled person I’m sick and tired of being continually tested, reviewed and assessed for this benefit or that service. If it isn’t my care package being reviewed it was ILF, or my Blue Badge, or Access to Work, or the Freedom Pass, or TaxiCard, or, when my time comes, being taken off DLA and having to apply for PIP.

This is besides routine GP appointments to monitor diabetes, visiting the asthma clinic and the respiratory nurse for spirometer tests, periodically attending hospital for neuro-physio, having US tests on my testes and going for CAT scans to monitor a benign growth on my left lung, and now, realizing that I’ve been suffering from depression for the past few months and having to arrange for a course of consultations to prop up my mental health.

A depression brought about by the uncertainty of my health coupled to real chance of me losing both benefits and services as a result of the vicious austerity cuts going on around me.

SW: “OK Mr McGovern. Maybe I’ll call back in April…”

PLEASE FUCK OFF AND LEAVE ME ALONE!

    

If you want something done go straight to the top!

My, newish, wet room is working a treat; and on the whole I'm very pleased with the work carried out, particularly the standard. The fact that I managed to get away for two weeks while the works were being carried out meant I was unable to point out to the contractor a few areas of snagging; and to upbraid him on leaving an electrical fitting exposed - in my view a potential H&S hazard.

 Midway into November last year I'd still not heard from the contractor. Nor indeed had the work been signed-off. So I contacted my landlord's agent, the  company that was dealing with the building works and arranged for the care and repair technical officer to visit me.

The technical officer came and took notes and photographs of the works. Before leaving she assured me the contractor would be in touch soon to arrange for the snagging to be carried out. 

Then....nothing. 

No call from the contractor no word from the agent. An email from me on 18th December galvanised a response from the technical officer promising to contact me on 21st December. 

Then....again nothing.

So this afternoon at 15.41 I emailed the CEO of NHHG asking was it the practice of her organisation to spend in excess of £12,000 on a wet room without the works being signed-off. 

At 16.14 my phone rang and it was the contractor tripping over his tongue with apologies and chucking dates at me to come and finish the works. Surprising where a bit of initiative gets you. 

Blairites = Moderates?

In the past few days some newscasters and TV journalists are speaking in terms of ‘moderates’ in relation to a group of Labour MPs. It appears that this strange status has been endowed upon Labour MPs who voted with the government last week in favour of bombing Syria.

The same status has also been given to the Blairites within the party. The same MPs who have in the past supported ConDem and Tory party austerity motions. These are the moderates who in the past three months have busied themselves stabbing Jeremy Corbyn in the back.

Our media is once again guilty of twisting the reality. The reality is that those MPs who voted against bombing are acting moderately. Those MPs who voted against benefits cuts and an austerity programme that is killing people are moderate. Those MPs who are supporting a Labour leader who won through democratic process by a massive margin; they are the moderates.

Let’s call upon our biased media and demand they cease their dirty tricks campaign against Corby. Let’s vote with our feet. Let’s stop buying the scum newspapers who misreport; and stop watching the TV news stations who purposely skew the news against the Corbyn leadership.  

The Farage mask slips, again

Running up to Thursday’s Oldham West and Royton by-election an ebullient Nigel Farage was predicting a close race. There was even a possibility of UKIP taking the seat by a few hundred votes, thought Farage.

Farage was wrong. He was wrong to the tune of almost 11,000 votes, the margin by which the Labour candidate John McMahon won. Yet despite the Labour candidate winning the seat with a 62% share of the votes cast Farage is unhappy. Accepting defeat with the grace of a sewer rat, Farage is blaming the postal ballot and the fact some of the Oldham West and Royton constituents didn’t speak English

Farage told the BBC: "The northern correspondent of the Guardian wrote last Saturday that she knocked on the doors of a street in Oldham where nobody spoke English, nobody had ever heard of Jeremy Corbyn, but they were all voting Labour…”

There is no prerequisite under UK voting rules that demands voters must have English as a first language. Neither is there any rule that states voters must be familiar with the party leadership structure of their preferred constituency candidate.

The UK does not operate a presidential election system. Voters in bye- or general elections vote for a constituency MP, they do not vote for the leader of a particular party or indeed the prime minister.

Once again the cheeky chappie one-of-boys persona Farage likes to masquerade behind is exposed as a front; and the true message of UKIP as an ultra right-wing racist party comes shining through.

All votes exercise conscience

Don’t we exercise our consciences as part of our thought and decision-making processes?  

So this week’s talk of votes of conscience and of giving free votes on non-political issues is interesting. Thinking things over every vote in Parliament is a political vote; and each time MPs are asked to consider a motion their consciences will be a considering factor.

Give Corbyn a chance!

A FB friend commented: "I was enthused by Jeremy's huge win as Leader, It was inspiring to see the Blairites roundly thrashed".

I responded:

“You make it sound as though it was a grudge football match. Winning the leadership can only be viewed as the first step in changing Labour. For all those who joined the Labour Party as affiliates, voted for Corbyn, then walked away. Well, they did him a massive disservice.

If they had the conviction to vote for him as leader, on his winning they should have joined the Labour Party as full members (obviously those who were permitted – and yes the party needs to root out all corrupt rightist elements) to help Corbyn win from the bottom up.

People are joining; they’re beginning to populate Branches and CLPs. Will they win over the Labour Party to a body that looks to the interests of the 99%? Is 4.5 years enough time to cleanse the party of twenty years of Progress neoliberalism? Many doubt it. Yet unless those of us who are willing to give Corbyn a chance fight on the right will prevail.”

If only our bombs fell on Daesh alone

If only we confined our actions to bombing Daesh. In recent military adventures overseas, and nearer, has this country’s armed forces been able to restrict its action against armed forces or military targets alone?

The civilian bloodbaths of Iraq and Afghanistan stand testimony to the inability of armed forces, with or without ‘smart’ weaponry, to contain their violence. Of course civilian deaths in these conflicts have been sanitised in the Orwellian-speak of collateral damage; the language of the accountants of death who measure life in ‘bottom lines’ rather than in lives of children, women and men.

Modern methods of bombing densely populated towns and cities have proved that this method of warfare does not discriminate. From the Blitz 75 years ago to Syria today we know that the greater causalities will be non-combatants, often as not women and children. Sure a few of the wring ‘uns get caught up; but enough to justify the deaths of those innocents?

On the question of our support for right wing politicians in the past – ok, let’s leave that in the past and move forward. One way of moving forward is to tell any MP – and I don’t care if they’re called Beckett, Benn, Umunna or Watson – that if they can’t accept our Labour values then they stand a strong chance of being deselected.

Finally, statements such as: “But to simply withdraw support for MPs who want to fight Daesh in a different way to ours…” are an obscenity. 

In the first instance those MPs who voted for war last night will not be fighting; no they’ll be sending others to fight and to fight from the relative safety of 15,000 feet and higher.

In the second instance it isn’t only Daesh who they’ll be fighting, as it is inevitable they will draw civilians into the fighting arena they create with their bombs. And anyway, isn’t a fight a two-or-more sided affair with all parties trading blows? How can bombing civilians be classed as a fight when only one participant is actually raining down blows?

Here we go again

As I was in bed before the 'War' vote was carried last night I awoke today to the sad news that we were once again raining death down upon innocent civilians.

Thanks to Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and all those other MPs who voted against the terrorising of women and children; and thank you to Helen Hayes, my MP, for voting against the air strikes.

Listening to the odious rat Nick Robinson interviewing John McDonnell on Radio 4 this morning strengthened my resolve not to support the BBC if it runs into problems. How can the BBC claim to be independent; where is the journalistic objectivity when this public news service tows the government line.

Nick Robinson’s disgraceful interview of John McDonnell on Radio 4 shows just how low the BBC has sunk. Robinson, a rank Tory, demonstrated no objectivity at all. In my view the BBC is finished. I certainly won’t support the corporation when the vampires come for it.