A BBC ‘documentary‘ called Sickness and Lies sparked hundreds of complaints from people. It revealed the figures in a fortnightly bulletin. And it’s no wonder that so many people kicked off. Because the show was nothing short of toxic.
Sickness and Lies: an ironic title
As The Canary previously reported, Sickness and Lies is about chronically ill people who other people accuse of faking or exaggerating their conditions. It looks at a Reddit group which accuses chronic illness influencers of these things. But the show was riddled with problems.
It presented incorrect assumptions about illnesses. The documentary showed that sometimes the Reddit group didn’t know what it was talking about. It platformed somewhat dubious psychiatry. But moreover, it fed-into the age-old stigma that chronic illness is ‘all in people’s heads’.
The psychologisation of physical illnesses has been happening for many years. That is, when a doctor can’t find a physical cause for a person’s illness, they claim their mental health is causing it; ‘psychosomatic‘ or, it is ‘all in their heads’. Generally this is nonsense.
Medical misogyny is another factor in accusations of fakery. The majority of people Sickness and Lies featured were women. The insinuation that a woman is wrong/stupid, or is making her illnesses up, is all too common in the medical and scientific communities – and in society more broadly.
Not that the BBC seemed to care. Because the show is still up on iPlayer. But people affected by chronic illness were furious and distressed.
BBC: a token gesture
So, as Disability News Service (DNS) reported, the BBC ended up deleting the tweet promoting Sickness and Lies. One social media user had screen-grabbed it:
The original tweet does not reflect the full context of the programme and was removed.
“LOL” may be an apt response to this. Because a lot of people felt the BBC tweet did “reflect the full”, noxious “context” of the show. So much so they complained in their hundreds.
Complaints roll in
Sickness and Lies got the BBC its most complaints in nearly two months. 615 people felt so strongly they contacted the BBC over it. Previously, over 6,000 people complained about its coverage of the Euros 2020 broadcast on 12 June. Prior to that, the BBC had not got this level of complaints over a programme since 23 May.
Thousands have now signed a petition calling on the BBC to take down the show. You can add your name here.
People made their feelings clear on social media. Rhiann Johns called Sickness and Lies “abhorrent”:
I, like so many others, write and talk about our health conditions online to raise awareness and so that we and others no longer feel alone. For a documentary and on the @BBC no less to insinuate that we are faking for fame or attention is abhorrent https://t.co/HywHHpSjzh
One Twitter user who wished to remain anonymous complained to the BBC. They got a response. It was obtuse at best. The BBC said:
it was important to investigate this story and give a voice to the lived experiences of those who have chronic illnesses
Yeah. That’s really not what happened in Sickness and Lies, though – is it?
Do not watch it
As writer Morgan Peschek, who curates the site A Kinky Autistic, said:
So, should you watch this wildly irresponsible and/or directly malicious documentary? Honestly, if you’re disabled, I wouldn’t recommend it – you won’t learn anything new, you’ll just be reminded how many people think you’re a liar and just how unsafe disabled people are in the world.
There’s no excuse for the BBC making then broadcasting Sickness and Lies. And the reaction of people with lived experience of chronic illness sums this up.
ASDA is still in the firing line over its sacking of a disabled worker. So far the corporate giant isn’t backing down. But the situation represents a growing problem for chronically ill and disabled people who work.
ASDA: in the firing line
As Essex Live first reported, ASDA sacked Mark Misell from its Shoeburyness store. It claimed this was because he was smoking in a place he shouldn’t have been. Misell had worked for ASDA for 30 years. He lives with learning difficulties. These mean he cannot read or write. But even after decades of service, ASDA chose to fire him for what appears to be his first offence.
ASDA decided that Misell’s actions were gross misconduct. It then fired him without notice. The Mirrorreported that ASDA:
caught [Misell] having a cigarette in a trolley bay while at work on May 25 this year.
But [Misell] – who can’t read or write – claims he didn’t understand the store’s policy on smoking in the car park due to his learning difficulties.
He could now face homelessness because of ASDA’s decision. So, the GMB Union has got involved.
Enter the GMB Union
It said that Misell was a car park porter. The GMB Union said in a press release that he:
was proud to go to work so that he could assist customers.
On the day in question, [Misell] chose to have a cigarette within the car park so that he did not have to stop his work and walk to the designated smoking shelter.
Throughout the farcical disciplinary process, ASDA’s management incorrectly claimed that the allegation was a breach of the law and that [Misell’s] learning difficulties and inability to read and write had no bearing upon the matter.
ASDA must adhere to the Equality Act 2010 and start to make reasonable adjustments for employees with disabilities.
ASDA, who have previously signed up for the government’s Disability Confident scheme which makes the most of the opportunity by employing disabled people should be ashamed of their actions…
GMB London Region have passed this matter onto our legal teams to bring to an employment tribunal so that justice can be achieved for [Misell].
But the story shows a wider problem for chronically ill and disabled people in England.
A bigger problem?
As Disability Rights UK wrote, in July 2013 the government brought in fees for people wanting to take employers to a tribunal. It noted that after the government introduced these:
the number of disability discrimination cases dropped considerably. In the two years prior to the introduction of tribunal fees, an average 1,827 disability discriminations went to tribunal every three months. After fees were introduced, the average number of cases dropped to less than half, averaging 876 cases per three-month period. Since the fees were declared unlawful by the Supreme Court in a case brought by Unison in July 2017, the volume of disability discrimination cases has started to return to pre-tribunal fee levels. Since July 2017 there have been an average of 1,673 disability discrimination cases going to tribunal each quarter, and in… July to September 2019… over 2,000 disability discrimination cases were brought.
ASDA appear to be operating a revolving door scenario where those with disabilities are pushed out of the business to be replaced by non-disabled colleagues.
Gone are the days when ASDA would respect their workforce and support those with disabilities.
It is becoming common practice for colleagues with disabilities to be challenged upon their work rate, work speed or matters to which they have no control.
We do not comment on individual colleague circumstances and we have advised Mr Misell and his representatives as to the next steps following the final hearing
An entrenched problem?
But as the Mirrorreported, Misell feels that ASDA has discriminated against him. He said the boss that fired him:
has made assumptions about my understanding of policy, and my mental health, where he could not have been able to do so, and that this led to him making the wrong decision as an outcome to the disciplinary.
This has put me at a disadvantage due to my disabilities and is disability discrimination due to my learning disabilities not being taken into consideration.
Sadly, Misell’s cases is one of thousands every year in England. The fact that disability discrimination is barely less widespread than it was almost a decade ago, shows that something is still very wrong with the way employers treat chronically ill and disabled people.
A BBC documentary calledSickness and Lies has received a huge backlash on social media. And the angry reaction from people affected by the film is entirely justified. Because the programme is little more than dangerous and trashy propaganda.
A new BBC documentary: Sickness and Lies
The BBC shared the new documentary on Twitter:
Are some chronic illness influencers faking it on social media for fame and money?
Sickness and Lies is about chronically ill people who people are accusing of faking or exaggerating their conditions. But the documentary has caused anger on social media. And if you have experience of chronic illness, it’s easy to understand why.
“Faking illness”?
I have lived experience and a vested interest in Sickness and Lies. My partner is chronically ill. She lives with 15 different illnesses and conditions. These include the genetic connective tissue disorder Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS), myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), and different types of seizures.
Journalist Octavia Woodward made and presented the documentary. As the show notes describe:
The chronically ill community has exploded in the last few years, with high-profile members like Lady Gaga, Selena Gomez and Lena Dunham. With 15m people in England alone living with a long-term condition, and numbers rising, it’s no surprise chronic illness influencers on social media are attracting huge followings.
But, as their profiles have grown, so have accusations of fakery. Can the accusers be right? Are some influencers faking illnesses for fame, money and attention?
Woodward delved into the world of chronic illness and accusations of fakery. But Sickness and Lies barely holds up to scrutiny.
No clue
For example, Woodward notes:
I’ve had some of the procedures that these influencers post about. And I understand everyone reacts differently. But some things just don’t add up. Influencers asking for multiple types of feeding tubes, at once, into stomachs that supposedly no longer work – and still eating normally.
With this was a picture of a social media post. It was quoting someone living with a chronic illness who posted a photo of a plate of food. The quote said:
She “can’t swallow” but chooses to order this
My partner lives with gastroparesis (where her stomach doesn’t empty). This would be an example of someone who can have a stomach that sometimes ‘no longer works’ but can also eat. She has been hospitalised on numerous occasions for uncontrolled vomiting. As I write this, she’s in the middle of a flare now. The vomiting will probably last for about 20 hours. She’ll take several days to recover, but the majority of the time she can eat. She also has dysphagia (difficulty swallowing). But again, this comes and goes – contrary to the social media screenshot Sickness and Lies showed.
The point being – people can have feeding tubes or not be able to swallow properly for periods of time and eat at others. Some of the influencers mentioned are likely to be in that situation.
The dark world of Reddit
Sickness and Lies goes on to discuss the Reddit group which sparked Woodward’s investigation. A quick scan of it shows it’s littered with people commenting on things they have little understanding of. For example, someone lifted a picture of an Insta post from someone talking about Lyme disease. The Reddit caption was:
“There is no cure for Lyme disease” Maybe try some antibiotics Ash? Oops never mind, your doctor refused to prescribe them bc you tested negative for Lyme with RELIABLE tests in the doctors office
The person talking about Lyme disease, whose Instagram post was then put on the Reddit group, is Ashley. She lives with multiple chronic illnesses, and she’s currently being tested for Lyme disease – which in this context would likely be so-called chronic Lyme disease. Contrary to the Reddit poster’s assertion, chronic Lyme cannot be treated with antibiotics. Testing for it is limited and unreliable. Yet the Reddit poster seems certain that Ashley is making this up.
Psychiatry or quackery?
Woodward goes on to talk to “eminent” psychiatrist Marc Feldman. He created the condition Munchausen by Internet (MBI). Feldman describes it as:
a pattern of behavior in which a person seeks attention and sympathy by feigning illnesses in online venues such as forums and social media sites.
Sickness and Lieslists some of the warning signs of this condition. But a quick scan of them shows that some are chronically ill people’s day-to-day lives. Or, they are just Feldman speculating over things he doesn’t understand. For example:
“Near-fatal bouts of illness alternate with miraculous recoveries”: that is chronic illness for many people
“There are continual dramatic events in the person’s life, especially when other group members have become the focus of attention”: some people’s chronic illnesses fluctuate wildly in the space of a few hours.
“There is feigned blitheness about crises that will predictably attract immediate attention”: if you live with a chronic illness, you’ll understand that quite often ironic cheerfulness over your body is part and parcel of living with it.
Just for balance
Seemingly for balance, Woodward goes on to claim she was struggling with the idea people could be faking illness. But she then finds a person who’s sister was pretending to have cancer. It’s the only concrete, evidenced example given in the programme. Moreover, Woodward then goes on to quote people who cast doubt over just how ill a chronic illness influencer who died in April 2019 was.
Sickness and Lies also speaks with one of the moderators of the Reddit group who is a “medical professional”. This person claims a friend at university pretended to have her illnesses. The point being, that’s what’s driven her to ‘out’ people she believes are faking their conditions. Woodward then speaks to a forensic psychology researcher who backs up some of the Reddit group’s claims.
At the end, Woodward does conclude that this “callout culture” is extreme. And she notes how it has affected some of the victim’s lives.
Unprovable. But we’ll run it, anyway.
Woodward concludes of the chronic illness influencers:
without access to their private medical records, there’s no way of knowing what’s really going on with them.
But the BBC and Woodward decided to make Sickness and Lies anyway – without being able to prove anything.
There’s a lot to unpack with the programme and Woodward’s reporting. But overall, it has pushed various, highly damaging ideas with no concern for the consequences for chronically ill people.
PACE trial
Not least of these issues is that, as one Twitter user said:
chronically ill people are literally dying because they can’t convince anyone, including medical professionals, that they’re ill, and you’re fine with posting irresponsible shit like this?
ME is a prime example. People living with it have for decades been disbelieved, stigmatised, given incorrect treatment, or told it’s ‘all in their heads’. Much of this comes from the now-discredited PACE trial. It was a study, part-funded by the UK government, into treatment for ME. It found that people could recover from the disease by having cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). In other words, people living with a very-real, viral-based illness should just ‘think themselves better’. Essentially, the trial pushed the notion that the disease was part-psychosomatic or ‘made up’ by patients. But the trial’s findings haven’t held up, with its proponents accused by some of scientific fraud and causing potentially the “biggest medical scandal of the 21st century”.
Long Covid next in line
The psychologisation of physical illnesses has been happening for many years. That is, when a doctor can’t find a physical cause for a person’s illness, they claim their mental health is causing it; ‘psychosomatic‘ or, it is ‘all in their heads’. Generally this is nonsense. For example, my partner was sectioned under the UK Mental Health Act (committed to a mental institution) because doctor’s said she was making her illnesses up.
Psychologisation has gained traction, and it’s partly due to governments trying to deny people social security and also pushing psychiatry and antidepressants because they’re cheaper than finding out what’s physically wrong with someone. And as I previously wrote, people with long Covid may well be next in line to be subjected to this.
Medical misogyny is another factor in accusations of fakery. The majority of people Sickness and Lies featured were women. The insinuation that a woman is wrong/stupid, or is making her illnesses up, is all too common in the medical and scientific communities – and in society more broadly. For example, EDS disproportionately affects women. Yet it takes on average 19 years of symptoms before a medical professional diagnoses someone with EDS. In my partner’s case, it wasn’t until the age of 32. She’d been symptomatic from the age of around five.
The problems with the BBC as a public service broadcaster is another factor. As The Canary has documented, it repeatedly pushes government agendas over impartial, public interest broadcasting. In this instance, as one Twitter user summed up:
BBC News is perpetuating a toxic mythology in order to pave the way for denying benefits to people with #LongCOVID. That’s why they figured it’s an awesome time for a story about malingering for money. You don’t even have to connect the dots, they’re on top of one another.
Blatant prejudice
There’s another important but uncomfortable point that has to be made.
Most chronically ill people I know would not have even considered making this programme. People’s furious responses in the Twitter thread show this. Yet disabled journalist Woodward chose to – and seems pleased with it. This sadly sums up a tiny, but generally unspoken problem within the disabled community. People with physically visible impairments (like Woodward, who lives with spinal muscular atrophy) sometimes don’t understand, or even dismiss, people living with chronic illnesses.
I’ve witnessed it first hand with my partner. She has experienced this from a minority of disabled people and disabled people’s organisations (DPOs). It’s like the conditions of chronically ill people are less valid than people with visible, physical impairments. The fact that Woodward had the idea to do this documentary, let alone make it, for me shows that. Would anyone question her diagnosis, given she is visibly, physically disabled? I very much doubt it. But for people living with invisible impairments, they’re clearly fair game.
Toxic programming
Sickness and Lies is utterly toxic programming from the BBC. The size of the issue it claims to address is tiny. Therefore, it serves no other purpose than to compound the stigma and discrimination that exists around chronic illness. The programme is riddled with holes. Woodward should have known better than to even begin this project. But moreover, editors at the BBC should have immediately flagged it as unsuitable for broadcast. Yet they still released it anyway.
There are potentially millions of people who spend their lives trying to prove how ill they are. To have an entire programme perpetuate the stigma and hate that they’ve experienced is catastrophic. Not that anyone involved in its making seems concerned. But why would they be? It probably doesn’t affect them.
I now have to go and empty my partner’s sick bucket. Maybe Woodward and her team would like to come and watch her vomit for 20 hours – just in case she’s ‘faking it’.
The Disabled Children’s Partnership (DCP) has launched a campaign calling on chancellor Rishi Sunak to properly fund disabled children’s social care in the wake of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. Maureen Muteesa has shared an open letter in collaboration with DCP detailing her son’s experience of the pandemic.
Muteesa claims that services denied her son treatment, and he didn’t have access to education for a year. Research by DCP suggests that this was the case for hundreds of disabled children and their families during lockdown. The coalition is asking members of the public to sign the open letter urging the government to support disabled children and their families.
The pandemic has left my family and myself isolated, depressed, and we feel forgotten.
In her open letter to the chancellor, Muteesa details her 15-year-old son’s experience of lockdown. She states that because Calvin’s school lacked the resources needed to provide remote learning, he missed an entire year of the education he’s entitled to. Reflecting on his year of social isolation, Calvin stated: “I missed all my friends”.
According to his mother, Calvin has complex medical needs and requires 24-hour support. She adds that because he couldn’t attend school, he also didn’t have access to physiotherapy. As a result, his muscles have deteriorated. He can no longer walk safely, and now needs an operation. She states that the limited access to support services throughout the pandemic “has left a massive mental toll”.
Highlighting that even before the pandemic, she had to fight to get minimal and insufficient support for her son, Muteesa concludes:
The government has to do better for families like mine. It needs to invest so that children and families can recover from the missed services during the pandemic.
Hundreds of families without support
The DCP is a coalition of organisations working to improve health and social care for disabled children, young people, and their families. Research by the DCP suggests that the Muteesa’s are not alone in their experience of lockdown. 48% of respondents to the survey of 1,200 families stated that they could no longer access support at their child’s school as a result of the pandemic. Nearly three quarters of respondents stated that the management of their children’s conditions worsened due to the pandemic. And disabled children and their families reported high levels of social isolation.
This experience of isolation and inadequate support is nothing new for disabled children and their families. In 2017, the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities urged the UK government to implement a number of major changes to ensure the rights of disabled children and young people are respected. This came after a 2016 report stating that Tory austerity, cuts and reforms had resulted in “grave and systematic” violations of the rights of disabled people. For years, families have been calling out for adequate resources and support, but they were met with further cuts to disabled children’s social care services.
Ahead of the autumn spending review, the DCP coalition is calling on chancellor Rishi Sunak to properly fund disabled children’s social care. This includes a top-up to “fill the £434 million pre-pandemic funding gap in disabled children’s social care services”. The coalition is also urging the government to establish a fund to resource research and innovation in disabled children’s social care services.
The coalition is calling on members of the public to join the campaign to support disabled children and their families in the wake of the pandemic. People looking to get involved can start by signing and sharing Muteesa’s open letter to the chancellor.
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is cutting payments for some Universal Credit claimants. It’s starting from Sunday 1 August. But the DWP barely gave claimants a month’s notice.
Universal Credit and self-employment
As the website Turn2Us said, the Minimum Income Floor (MIF) is for self-employed people. It stated that:
If you are self-employed and your earnings are low, your benefit may be worked out on higher earnings than you have… [The MIF] is set at the level of the national minimum wage at the number of hours you would be expected to work. How many hours this is depends on your circumstances. For many people it will be 35 hours per week but if you have a disability, have caring responsibilities, or look after children, it might be less.
The minimum income floor only applies to Universal Credit and to some Council Tax Support schemes, not to other benefits.
In other words, the DWP says if you’re self-employed, you’re expected to be earning the full-time minimum wage. And your benefits are calculated accordingly. It stopped the MIF in April 2020 because of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. But now, from 1 August, it’s bringing it back – which will mean an effective cut to some people’s payments.
Another DWP cut
The Mirrorreported on 8 July that the DWP was starting the MIF again on 1 August. At the time, the department said it would give people a month’s notice. Then, on Thursday 29 July, the DWP confirmed the cut would be going ahead. Some claimants won’t see the effect until September. The Mirror added that:
Jobcentre work coaches will also have new powers to suspend the MIF for two months at a time, up to six months in total, on a “case-by-case basis”.
The minimum income floor applies if you are working or looking for work, but not within the first 12 months of you working for yourself.
You need to be in the “all work-related requirements group” for the minimum income floor to apply to you.
Charities and campaign groups have been warning that the cut could seriously hit some people.
Hitting hard
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said that the DWP could be cutting around 450,000 households’ money by up to £3.2k a year. Citizens Advice went further, saying it could be up to around £7.6k a year. But of course, the problems surrounding the MIF aren’t new. In 2020, parliament’s Economic Affairs Committee took evidence from people for an inquiry into Universal Credit. One anonymous person summed up the situation with the MIF. They stated that:
Almost a million people are now in zero-hours jobs… Unscrupulous employers classifying people as “self-employed” can evade workers’ rights and leave those on UC [Universal Credit] vulnerable to the Minimum Income Floor, where they can end up with nothing. The MIF doesn’t work for people whose hours vary. It also doesn’t work for many who run their own business. Calculated monthly rather than spread across the year, it completely fails to take into account that income can be seasonal.
UC is designed to force everyone to work for 35 hours or more a week, regardless of job suitability, with few exceptions. This puts immense pressure on people who are already in work but can’t increase their hours… The MIF makes businesses that might otherwise have survived go bust, a bad economic strategy that fails to recognise the many contributions lower earners make to society. Art, music, literature and other creative businesses are dismissed as “hobbies”, only available to the financially comfortable or retired, creating a cultural deficit.
Cutting to the bone
Of course, this cut comes as the DWP is also cutting the £20-a-week uplift in September. Yet the department seems unwilling to budge. A minister said:
Our specialist Work Coaches will consider the circumstances of each claimant individually, so it will take time to return to our normal processes.
We have always been clear that these would be temporary measures, keeping them under review in light of the latest economic and public health context – as such, we have extended the MIF suspension on two occasions since March 2020.
This will be little comfort to around three quarters of a million self-employed people who claim Universal Credit. The DWP may now be pushing countless more people further into poverty.
The United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) has called on the international community to immediately suspend Indonesia from the UN Human Rights Council over a shocking assault on a young deaf indigenous Papuan that has been likened to the George Floyd tragedy in the United States.
The treatment of Steven Yadohamang, 18, who was crushed under the boot of two Indonesian military policemen in Merauke on Tuesday was the latest incident “in a long history of systematic racism and discrimination against my people”, said ULMWP interim president Benny Wenda.
“The reality of everyday life for my people in West Papua is violence and racism at the hands of Indonesian soldiers, police and intelligence officers,” he said in a statement as the assault caught on video sparked angry condemnation by community leaders.
How Asia Pacific Report covered the assault on deaf Papuan Steven Yadohamang on Thursday. Image: Screenshot APR
In the middle of a pandemic, Indonesia had continued to launch military operations, displacing more than 50,000 people, Wenda said.
“We have suffered trauma, we have suffered the impunity of the Indonesian colonial regime since the illegal invasion of 1963,” he said.
“There is no difference between what happens to African Americans in the US and what happens to West Papuans at the hands of the illegal Indonesian occupation.”
He said the images of Yadohamang being crushed under the foot of an Indonesian police had been compared to the images of George Floyd before he died at the hands of US police in May 2020.
‘Papuan Lives Matter’
“My people rose up against racist treatment in 2019 [the Papuan Uprising], and followed the global BLM [Black Lives Matter] movement with our own cry: Papuan Lives Matter. What we are suffering is the same as the Rohingya, the same as South Africa under apartheid,” Wenda said.
He said Indonesia’s systematic, institutional racism against West Papuans violated international law.
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which Indonesia has ratified, ban racial discrimination.
“Indonesia’s military operations, racial abuse, ethnic cleansing, and systematic destruction of our health and educational opportunities represent clear violations of these conventions,” Wenda said.
“The international community must respond by suspending Indonesia from the UN Human Rights Council immediately. If our international human rights protections mean anything, there must be a global response to what is happening to my people.”
Reuters reports that the Indonesian government had apologised for the actions of the two Air Force military officers it said used “excessive force” to pin down Yadohamang’s head after a video of the incident was widely shared online.
In a statement on Wednesday, presidential chief of staff Moeldoko said his office condemned what it characterised as “a form of excessive force and unlawful conduct”.
The statement also said the Papuan man was unarmed, did not resist and had been identified as a person with a disability.
Indonesian Air Force spokesman Indan Gilang Buldansyah said the two officers would be tried in a military court.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
It’s not new to anyone that the Olympics has a bit of an issue when it comes to gender equality. John Coates’ treatment of Annastacia Palaszczuk at the moment of triumph was a textbook example of what women have been putting up with for eons. But even prior to this masterclass in mansplaining, there were painful examples of sexism and discrimination.
With 11 years until Brisbane hosts the 2032 Olympics, we can hope that there’s been wholesale reform of Olympic practices by then – though in reality many of the rules about participation, uniforms and compliance which have been the source of recent grief are outside the control of the host city.
Where the host city and country do have control is EVERYWHERE ELSE. And if we start right now we could make the Brisbane 2032 Olympics the most inclusive and diverse yet.
Each Olympics Games is a decade long infrastructure, tourism and communications project, with some sport at the end. The Brisbane Olympics is no different. Slated to cost at least $4 billion, the Brisbane Games will drive infrastructure and transport investment, develop new technologies and be supported by huge logistics and promotions campaigns. What’s that got to do with gender equality, diversity or inclusion?
Well, all expenditure creates a decision point about who gets the business and what gets purchased. The same as you or I might buy from one company because it aligns with our values, every dollar spent by government is an opportunity to direct funding to particular businesses or markets, to set minimum requirements in procurement, to decide who to engage with when identifying outcomes, to set targets for inclusion and safety, and to establish reporting and accountability frameworks. This called Gender Lens Investing, Innovative Finance or putting your money where your mouth is.
Brisbane’s bid already committed to sustainability – it can also commit to diversity and inclusion through some pretty straight forward action in four core areas which are all within the direct control of the relevant governments.
First up, commitment to diverse leadership and staffing in all parts of the government machinery preparing for and implementing the 2032 Games. There should be gender equality and representation of First Nations Australians, people of colour and people with disability (including beyond the Paralympics) across internal and outward facing leadership roles and in staffing across Olympic structures. And make leaders accountable – put inclusion in their KPIs and make it a senior someone’s job to drive and report on the whole commitment.
Second, spend that huge budget well. Set minimums for procuring services and products through women, First Nations and disabled people owned and run businesses. Insist on minimum diversity standards through the whole procurement chain, ensuring that only those who comply with key diversity and inclusion standards get a slice of the action. Put Gender on the Tender for construction and other male dominated industries, creating a market for those industries to demonstrate the meaningful action they are taking to attract, support and retain women workers.
Next, engage those with lived experience to identify challenges, and commit time and funding to co-designing and implementing solutions. Work with disabled people to move beyond wheelchair accessible stadiums – let’s talk buses and toilets, ticketing websites, accessible experiences for those with hearing and vision impairments. Talk to expert women’s groups about how to make the Games safe – for those attending and working at the Games and for those at home. Work with community organizations to harness opportunities in Olympic advertising and messaging to promote positive and inclusive messages to combat sexism, racism and ablism.
Finally, represent diversity in EVERY. SINGLE. ASPECT. In the art and designs used, in who gets to speak, in who is represented in promotional materials, in signage, ticket sales, volunteers – everything.
We’ve got 11 years to get this right, but we need to commit now. And we need to get started now.
Amy Haddad is the Director of Gender Inclusion, Disability and Social Inclusion at Tetra Tech International Development Asia Pacific, and the Chair of the Criterion Institute’s Power of Policy Advisory Committee.
A report has raised human rights concerns regarding decades of failed government privatisation in the UK. A campaign group said it identified potentially ‘serious human rights breaches’. And one of its authors, former UN investigator Philip Alston, is no stranger to criticising UK political agendas. Indeed, it was Alston who wrote a damning report on poverty in the country in 2018.
“Public Transport, Private Profit”
Alston is the former special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. His 2018 report was scathing in its criticism of the UK government. Now, he’s helped put together another damning assessment.
The new report is called Public Transport, Private Profit: The Human Cost of Privatizing Buses in the United Kingdom. It looks at the state of bus services across the UK since Margaret Thatcher’s government privatised them in 1985. Alston co-authored the report with Bassam Khawaja and Rebecca Riddell. They are co-directors of the Human Rights and Privatization Project at New York University’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. They’ve pulled together facts and figures and collected testimony from passengers across the country.
Alston: a “master class in how not to run” a public service
Over the past 35 years, deregulation has provided a master class in how not to run an essential public service, leaving residents at the mercy of private actors who have total discretion over how to run a bus route, or whether to run one at all.
In case after case, service that was once dependable, convenient, and widely-used has been scaled back dramatically or made unaffordable.
The absence of a strong public bus system affects a great many people’s economic opportunities, but also their means to participate in their communities, travel to football matches or libraries, and visit family and friends.
These comments were just the tip of the iceberg. Because the report itself detailed how the UK’s bus network is failing the poorest people the most.
Spiralling financial chaos
There are overarching problems with the services. For example:
Average bus fares have risen by 403% since 1987. Yet the government has frozen fuel duty on cars for the past 11 years.
Prior to 2013, bus companies made an average profit of £297m a year. But they only reinvested between 0.2-1.5% of turnover into services.
As of 2019, the public was paying for 42% of funding for bus services in England, to the tune of £2bn a year.
Since 2009, local authorities have cut more than 3,000 bus routes in England which they were subsidising.
The end result of all this? A service that’s falling apart.
Unreliable
As the report summed up:
Deregulation has failed to provide a reliable bus service. Passengers said buses were frequently late, did not show up at all, or often broke down.
The report didn’t document the statistics for bus punctuality and reliability. But the latest government figures show:
“Frequent” bus services in England were on average 1.7 minutes late in 2018/19.
This lateness varied across local authorities. For example, in Gloucestershire it was 6.1 minutes. A lot of local authorities did not report their data.
Meanwhile, “non-frequent” bus services in England (outside London) were only on time 83.5% of the time in 2018/19.
Again, the local authority figures for this varied. For example, in Leicestershire only 63% of non-frequent services ran on time.
The report was clear on where the blame lies for this run-down industry.
Deregulation has made it impossible to run the type of integrated network of services that is taken for granted in many countries around the world. The government argued in 1984 that a free-market approach would outperform an integrated, regulated system, confidently predicting that “informal measures of co-operation between operators will develop to ensure that their services connect. But deregulation of bus transport has led to a deeply fragmented system that would shock those not accustomed to it: multiple private bus operators competing in the same areas and sometimes on the same routes, timetables that do not line up between operators or other modes of transportation, and multiple ticketing options that add needless complication to bus journeys.
So, what is the effect on passengers?
Passengers at the sharp end
The report found multiple failures in bus services for passengers. For example:
Between 1982 and 2016/2017, passenger journeys on local bus services dropped by 38% in England (outside London), 45% in Wales, and 43% in Scotland. Yet under the government-regulated Transport for London in the capital, they rose by 89%.
A 2012 study found that 19% of workers turned down a job offer because of “the quality of bus service”.
Almost 300,000 children cannot reach a secondary school within 30 minutes using public transport.
Less than 50% of rural households live within a “13-minute walk of an hourly bus service”.
By 2019, over 3 million people couldn’t “reach any food stores within 15 minutes by public transport”.
And bus privatisation has hit poor and disabled people the hardest.
Poor people
The report noted that around 40% of “low-income” people don’t have a car. Yet as it said:
those on lower incomes take the highest number of bus trips.
Such individuals can face severe barriers to public transport and are heavily impacted by rising costs and service cuts. They often have worse bus access, may not be able to afford it, work non-standard hours, and are more likely to rely on the bus as their only option. An inability to afford transportation can prevent people from accessing necessary services, limit access to work, reduce quality of life, increase health inequalities, and lead to social isolation.
Disabled people
For chronically ill and disabled people, the law says buses have to have at least one wheelchair space. But this doesn’t mean buses are fully accessible. A 2019 report found numerous barriers for chronically ill and disabled people in London. These included:
Ramps not working.
Bus drivers prioritising pushchairs over wheelchairs.
Some buses only having one wheelchair space.
Also, up until last year, the government had not made accessibility a legal requirement on rail replacement bus services. Figures showed that six out of 10 of the vehicles train operators used did not comply with accessibility requirements. Moreover, England’s disabled person’s free bus pass only permits off-peak travel. So if chronically ill and disabled people want to travel at busier times of the day, they have to pay. In 2019, only 60% of disabled people in England (excluding London) were happy with bus services.
2021 bus strategy for England doubles down on the role of private companies to deliver a public service, without addressing the reasons they have failed in the past or meaningfully expanding options for public ownership and control.
The proposed reforms do little more than tinker with the existing system. The strategy does not commit the government to legalizing new municipal bus companies or removing the severe barriers to achieving bus regulation that local authorities face. It does not address power imbalances between local transportation authorities and bus operators. And it does not impose an obligation on local authorities to provide a minimal service, leaving the core of the deregulated system fully in place.
The report also compared the aims of bus privatisation according to Thatcher’s government with what the UK government now says about it. This essentially shows the government admitting that privatisation has failed:
The UK government says…
The government disagreed with the report’s conclusions. As the Guardianreported, a spokesperson for the Department for Transport said the new bus strategy would “completely overhaul services”, and:
Services across England are patchy, and it’s frankly not good enough.
They added:
We will provide unprecedented funding, but we need councils to work closely with operators, and the government, to develop the services of the future.
But overall, it seems that little is going to change. This is despite the UN already expressing concerns over the UK’s public transport system. And as the report notes, it’s not just the detailed issues around bus services which are the problem here.
There is currently no right to a minimum level of public transportation set out in UK law or policy. And public transportation is not traditionally regarded as a right in and of itself. Yet it is abundantly clear that lack of transportation has severe impacts on people’s ability to live a decent and fulfilling life, including their access to work, education, healthcare, and food.
It also noted:
The privatization of public transportation raises significant human rights concerns. There is a strong case to be made that human rights law requires States to directly provide public services or ensure the provision of public services by a public body where the service is essential for realizing one’s rights—and that increased privatization of rights-related services undermines human rights.
There is only one conclusion to take from this report – the government must urgently amend bus legislation and provide proper support to councils to move towards public control and ownership. There are now just months left before England’s National Bus Strategy locks us into bus deregulation for another generation. Failure to act will leave the UK on the wrong side of history – and the government in serious breach of its human rights obligations.
The United Kingdom is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and can afford a world-class bus system if it chooses to prioritise and fund it. Instead, the government has outsourced responsibility for a vital public service, propping up an arrangement that prioritises private profits and denying the public a decent bus.
Given the UK government previously ignored UN reports into its human rights violations against chronically ill and disabled people, it will probably not heed this report’s findings. But Alston and the team’s report provides a valuable and much-needed insight into the state of bus provision in the UK. It’s one that campaign groups and trade unions can use to drive the narrative around our public transport system forward. And hopefully, the report will lead to change in the future.
The Tories are still going to cut Universal Credit by £20 a week. Now, a think tank has given a stark warning about the effect this will have. But will the government listen? And was the £20 uplift really adequate in the first place?
Universal Credit chaos
As The Canary has documented, the DWP’s provision of Universal Credit during the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic has been marred by chaos. There’s been a lot of debate about the £20 a week uplift. In April 2020, the DWP increased the rate of Universal Credit by this amount. Then, chancellor Rishi Sunak confirmed in his Budget on Wednesday 3 March 2021 that the DWP would keep the £20 uplift. But as the Mirror pointed out, 6 million people still faced a:
£20-a-week cut
This is because Sunak and the DWP have only put the £20 increase in place until September 2021. From the 6 October, the Tories will be cutting £20 a week from Universal Credit claimants.
Now, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) has released new research into how the cut will affect people. And it’s another damning assessment of the DWP and the Tories’ actions.
“Five facts”
The JRF pointed out what it called “five facts” about the Tories’ cut. It said:
The Government would be responsible for the biggest overnight cut to the basic rate of social security since the birth of the modern welfare state. This will be a huge shock for millions of people on low incomes who will have £20 less to spend each week.
Half a million more people are set to be pulled into poverty, including 200,000 children.
Working families make up the majority of families who will be affected by the cut to Universal Credit and Working Tax Credit.
Families with children will be disproportionately impacted. Around 6 in 10 of all single parent families will experience their income falling by the equivalent of £1,040 per year because of the cut
Despite a commitment to ‘levelling up’ the impact of the cut will be the greatest across the North of England, Wales, the West Midlands and Northern Ireland.
Already in poverty
It also gave illustrations of how the cut would financially impact people. The JRF took the average situation for a “three children, where one adult is working full-time, and the other is working part-time (living in Kernow West, a medium cost area)”. It calculated that:
In 2013/14, they would have been £271 a month above the poverty line.
Cuts and freezes in the decade leading up to the pandemic eroded their income, so that even with the £20 increase in 2020, they are now below the poverty line.
If… the cut goes ahead, they will be a huge £150 per month below the poverty line.
This fact that the JRF pointed out – that even with the £20 uplift this family would still be in poverty – is crucial.
“Inadequate”
As The Canary previously reported, research from the Welfare at a (Social) Distance project found the £20 uplift to be “inadequate”. It looked at the situation for new and existing claimants of Universal Credit in 2020. It found that even the £20 uplift didn’t make the social security payment enough for people to survive on. The project’s research found that for new claimants:
Over 50% said their income had fallen by more than 25%:
Over 50% said their outgoings either stayed the same or increased.
Around 62% of people couldn’t even save £10 a month. And roughly the same number wouldn’t have been able to buy something like a fridge if theirs broke.
These last two were classed as the “less severe” impacts of the DWP’s level of payments. Additionally, over 50% of new claimants said they either:
Struggled with affording food.
Couldn’t afford fresh fruit and veg.
Fell behind on their housing costs.
Couldn’t keep up with bills/debts.
The inadequacy of Universal Credit hit disabled people the hardest.
Giving the Tories leeway
So, given that even with the £20 uplift Universal Credit the situation is still appalling, calling to just maintain the increase is problematic. Not least because of the fact that inflation has gone up. The cost of goods and services, driven by price increases to things like food, rose by 2.5% year-on-year in June. This may well mean that the £20 uplift is now worth less than it was in April 2020.
But there’s also the possibility that the Tories will use the £20 uplift to their advantage. If they decide to keep it in place, they can claim they’ve listened and acted. But with the uplift being utterly inadequate, this won’t help the millions of people already struggling. And it’s unlikely, given the repeated lie that we’ve borrowed loads of money and are going to have to pay it back, that the Tories will increase social security again any time soon.
So, we need to be fighting for more than just £20 a week. We all need to be arguing for a social security system that is truly fit for the 21st century; one that doesn’t throw people into poverty and onto the scrapheap.
On February 25, 2019, Karrie Schaaf drove to the local emergency room, desperate to find help for her son Darik.
It was not the first time she had sought help. But because Darik, a Black man then in his mid-20s, was legally an adult, medical and psychiatric staff had repeatedly told her that they could not offer help unless he sought it himself.
This time, hospital staff called the police. When two deputies from the Riverside sheriff’s office arrived, Schaaf told them that her son was feeling suicidal and begged them to intervene. But, she recalled, no one went to their house to check on him. Exhausted, struggling with her own mental health, and worried that she might say something to make her son feel worse, Schaaf checked into a hotel for a few days. She emphasizes that, at no point, was she ever afraid of her son.
Three days later, the sheriff’s office asked her to come to the precinct. She panicked, assuming that Darik had died by suicide and they were asking her to identify his body.
When she arrived, she said that deputies interrogated her about her son’s behavior. Exhausted from work, sleep deprivation and constant worry, she tried to convey her fears that Darik might harm himself. What she didn’t realize was that her words would be used to justify arresting and charging her son with several felonies, which, if convicted, could mean a life sentence. Darik has remained in jail awaiting trial ever since.
Schaaf, who is white, emphasizes that she made a conscious decision not to call 911 on her Black son and instead turned to the local hospital for help. She had long known that calling 911 when Darik was in crisis could be a death sentence. Her fears are not unfounded: The Treatment Advocacy Center estimates that at least one quarter of all fatal police encounters are of people with serious mental illness. Furthermore, just as police are more likely to brutalize or kill Black men than their white counterparts, they are also more likely to kill unarmed Black men who exhibit signs of mental illness than white men demonstrating similar behaviors.
“I guarantee that if Darik were white, we wouldn’t be talking right now,” Schaaf said.
Darik Schaaf sits with his dog, Old Man Reggie.Courtesy of Karrie Schaaf
When questioned by police later, Schaaf attempted to make them understand that her son needed help. The entire ordeal, she says, stems from “asking for help — and look where we’re at.”
Schaaf didn’t realize that her son’s mental health crisis — and her pleas for help — could be twisted into a series of criminal charges with a possible lifetime prison sentence.
Darik’s situation is mirrored in other stories from around the country. Police-perpetrated violence against people with mental illness has gained more attention lately — but even those who survive encounters with law enforcement are not in the clear. People with diagnosed mental illnesses make up a disproportionate number of people behind bars. Nearly half (44 percent) of people in local jails and 37 percent of people in state and federal prisons have a diagnosed mental illness. Even when they are not prosecuted and imprisoned, becoming entangled in the legal system can have far-reaching ramifications for those diagnosed with mental illness and mental health disorders.
“Labels of Disability Can Be Leveraged to Confine People”
A diagnosis of mental illness can mean an increase in criminalization, advocates say.
“Labels of disability can and have been leveraged to confine people,” stated Dustin Gibson, co-founder of Disability Advocates for Rights and Transition. That confinement isn’t limited to jails or prisons; they also include psychiatric hospitals and facilities, which can hold people for lengthy, if not indefinite, periods of time under similar conditions.
“Disabled people cycle between jails and psychiatric institutions often,” noted Talila A. Lewis, an attorney and the director of HEARD, a cross-disability abolitionist organization. Lewis explained that if a person is arrested and their “competency” — or ability to understand the criminal charges and assist in their legal defense — is called into question by an attorney or judge, they are sent to a psychiatric institution (or sometimes held in the jail) for evaluation. A judge can order “competency restoration” if the defendant is found to be incompetent during a subsequent competency hearing. Restoration often involves coercive “treatment” including forced medicating. If deemed restored or restorable by “experts” and the court, the defendant will remain confined in a medical or carceral institution as they face criminal charges. Or, if the defendant is deemed not restorable or incompetent, after months or years of failed competency restoration measures, charges against them could be dismissed, but the person can be recommitted to a psychiatric institution for an indefinite amount of time using civil commitment laws. Alternately, they may be released only once they meet exacting residence, guardianship, and other requirements.
That’s the cycle that 43-year-old Siddharta Fisher has been pushed into for the past 25 years.
When he entered junior high, however, Fisher heard complaints from teachers who accused her son of disrespect. “But when I talked to my son, I found out it was because he was holding the teacher to the same rules they had for the kids. Like you don’t call the kids ‘knuckleheads’ or berate them. He would call the teachers on that,” Fisher recalled. This was in the 1990s. The term “school to prison pipeline” had yet to be created, but Siddharta’s experience reflected what was occurring in schools around the country — Black students were more harshly disciplined than their white counterparts. This included — and still includes — disproportionate rates of suspension and expulsion as well as arrests for incidents which could (and, advocates say, should) be handled internally by school officials.
That’s what happened to Siddharta. In seventh grade, he intervened when classmates stole another student’s coat. The next day, when he attempted to return it, the principal accused him of stealing it. When Siddharta wouldn’t name the culprits, the principal called the police, who arrested him and brought him to juvenile detention. He was confined for a week. That, Fisher said, changed the trajectory of his life. “He had always been taught that if he did the right thing, things would turn out right,” Fisher stated. That experience taught him otherwise.
Siddharta began skipping school and running away. At 15, he was arrested after a friend stole a gun from a classmate’s home during a party. He also began showing signs of dissociation, talking to himself and having breakdowns. At 17, after he stole his mother’s car, authorities recommended that she bring him to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist recommended risperidone, an antipsychotic drug used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Less than three months later, Siddharta began showing signs of akathisia, an acute movement disorder characterized by an inability to sit still. He also began self-mutilating — cutting and burning himself. He complained that the medications caused him pain, but, when Fisher brought him to the emergency room, physicians dismissed his complaints. One morning in June 1995, seven months after beginning risperidone, he woke his parents. The dead, he said, were coming through the floorboards. He accused his parents of poisoning him before leaving the house and knocking on doors in an adjacent neighborhood to seek help. When no one answered, he broke a window before collapsing in the street. When the police arrived, Cindi Fisher recounted, he told them he had been poisoned and begged to be brought to the hospital. Instead, they took him to jail.
Six months later, court evaluators declared him unfit to stand trial and ordered him to Western State Hospital for competency restoration. It would be the first of over a dozen arrests and hospitalizations.
The issue of confinement for “competency restoration” is a widespread one. In 2015, Disability Rights Washington and the American Civil Liberties Union filed Trueblood v. DSHS, a class-action lawsuit charging that Washington took too long to provide competency evaluations and restorations. Meanwhile, people languished in jails — often in solitary confinement and often without mental health care — exacerbating their conditions. A federal court agreed and ordered the state to provide competency evaluations within 14 days of a court order, and competency restoration services within seven days of the evaluation.
Even before the coronavirus pandemic, that timeline was met only an average of 24 percent of the time. In 2020, that number dropped to below 7 percent — and sometimes as low as 2 percent. That includes Siddharta, who, in 2020, spent four months in jail awaiting an evaluation and three additional months awaiting transfer to Western State Hospital for competency restoration. During those seven months, he was in solitary confinement, a common placement for those with mental health issues.
The idea of competency, noted Gibson, “can’t be divorced from a broad spectrum of disability because it’s built around the idea that disabled folks of all kinds need to be under surveillance and confinement.” This includes making a person’s release contingent on limiting where they can live or surrendering control over their own finances.
On April 12, 2021, Siddharta was approved for discharge. He remains confined until the social worker arranges housing through the approved social service agency. Fisher has said that she has informed the social worker of two programs which provide housing and peer support, enabling Siddharta to be discharged more quickly. “Over institutionalizing is no less harmful and illegal than discharging to the streets,” she wrote to the hospital administration on June 22, 2021. “Such overinstitutionalization, according to statistics, negatively impacts recovery gains, wasting taxpayers’ dollars, and increases Siddharta’s risk of reinstitutionalization.”
This surveillance and confinement is not limited to people experiencing mental illness which, Lewis noted, is in itself a disability. It also extends to people with other disabilities, including deaf people, and people with intellectual/developmental disabilities, traumatic brain injury, epilepsy and dementia, among other disabilities. Lewis also underscored that many disabled people have more than one disability.
Psychiatric Hospital Expansions
In 2018, the federal government pulled $53 million of annual funding from Western State Hospital for failing to comply with standards. Inspectors found that staff had restrained a patient for hours without cause; they also found violent assaults on patients and staff and numerous unauthorized patient “walkaways.” By then, the state had accrued more than $55 million in fines for repeatedly failing to meet the Trueblood timeline.
In 2021, the Washington state legislature approved plans for a new Western State Hospital with 350 forensic beds, or beds for those who have been deemed incompetent to understand the criminal charges pending against them. Lawmakers also announced the creation of smaller in-patient facilities for civil patients, or patients who are not facing criminal charges, by 2023, allowing Western and Eastern State Hospitals to concentrate solely on competency restoration.
However, says Lewis, these reforms do not challenge the problems with the idea of “competency” itself.
“The application of concepts of competency and due process are deeply flawed,” stated Lewis. “Ableism, anti-Blackness and other forms of oppression are baked into medical and legal processes and inform lawyers’, doctors’, judges’ and jurors’ understanding of a person’s competence, culpability and character.” Furthermore, Lewis noted that deprivation of freedom and bodily autonomy are being perpetrated under the guise of “securing due process,” “treatment” and “care” despite the fundamental unfairness of the criminal legal process and violence of medical incarceration.
Fisher doesn’t think that more psychiatric beds, even in smaller facilities closer to home, is the solution, pointing to a recent Seattle Times investigation exposing the failures of Washington’s private psychiatric hospitals.
Instead of smaller versions of the psychiatric hospital, Fisher wants alternatives where those in crisis can go “that’s not going to chain them up, lock the doors behind them, or force medicate them.” She is now involved in pressing for the resurgence of the Soteria House model. Started in the 1970s, Soteria House was a residential home for people newly diagnosed with schizophrenia. Instead of hospitalization and psychiatric interventions, Soteria House operated as a safe haven, similar to today’s peer respites, voluntary residential houses where nonprofessional staff treated residents as peers rather than patients in need of psychiatric intervention.
“We understand the need for respite for people who are wealthy, white, or otherwise in positions of power when they make the same request under a different name,” explained Lewis. “For them it is called vacation or sabbatical. But when people who are houseless or traumatized, or living through deprivation and precarity, need something similar, they are labeled lazy, pathologized, or criminalized.”
“A Concrete Cage Has Been My Son’s Reality”
Darik Schaaf remains in Riverside County’s Blythe Jail. His mother Karrie cannot afford the $1,040,000 bail set by the court or the 10 percent ($104,000) required by a bail bondsman. “My son has not been found guilty of anything, but because we’re poor, he’s been sitting in jail,” she said.
Despite being the alleged victim, Karrie says she has not been contacted by the district attorney’s office. “I’ve been very clear about my stance,” she told Truthout. “I’m not supporting these charges.”
The Riverside district attorney’s office did not return Truthout’s request for comment. In June 2020, it opposed Schaaf’s motion for a mental health diversion program. The judge agreed and ruled him ineligible for the diversion. Karrie Schaaf was devastated.
In January 2021, Karrie came across a post for the Riverside chapter of All of Us or None, a national network of formerly incarcerated people fighting for their rights. She attended a virtual meeting where she spoke about her son’s incarceration. She has also connected with family members whose loved ones have been fatally shot by police responding to mental health calls. Members have helped organize protests outside the district attorney’s office, calling for them to drop charges against Schaaf. They’ve also launched an online petition demanding that Darik be released into a mental health diversion program.
So far, their demands have not been met or responded to. Schaaf’s next court date is July 30, 2021.
“My son is not a criminal and having a mental health crisis is not a crime,” Karrie Schaaf told Truthout. “I struggle trying to understand how a concrete cage has been my son’s reality since March 1, 2019.”
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) may have ‘secretly‘ investigated around 50 claimant deaths this year. That’s according to a leading disability media site. So far, the DWP has refused to say why the figures are so high. This is concerning because it represents a huge increase on previous years.
The DWP: deaths on its watch
When a claimant dies in certain circumstances, the DWP looks at the case. As The Canary previously reported:
“IPRs” are Internal Process Reviews. The DWP does these at local, not central, level. It carries them out when someone takes their own life. They also happen when a vulnerable claimant makes a complaint.
IPRs were already controversial. Previously, the DWP admitted destroying some of these reports. It claimed it was due to data protection rules. Then, it set up the Serious Case Panel to look at how it handles serious incidents like claimant’s deaths. So far, it has not reported back on outcomes from the panel.
As The Canary recently reported, the DWP denied in court that it had “systemic” issues relating to claimant deaths. This is despite there being around 35,000 deaths on its watch in recent years where questions over the department’s conduct could arise.
Now, thanks to Disability News Service (DNS), we know that the number of cases the DWP is investigating over claimants taking their own lives has skyrocketed.
Figures released by the department in response to a parliamentary question showed it had started 97 internal process reviews (IPRs) into the deaths of claimants in the two years since July 2019.
But figures previously released to Disability News Service (DNS) by DWP have shown that it completed 40 IPRs in the 2019 calendar year and another 20 in 2020, as well as just 17 in 2016, 29 in 2017 and 18 in 2018.
Although these new figures do not allow for exact calculations, they do suggest that DWP probably started about 20 IPRs in the second half of 2019, 20 across the whole of 2020 and may have begun more than 50 so far in 2021.
In other words, the rate of IPRs has shot up. If the 50 figure is correct for 2021, that’s already more IPRs than the whole of 2019.
The DWP says…
Meanwhile, the DWP has not said a lot. DNSreported that a spokesperson “refused to offer any explanation” over the huge increase in IPRs. Pring wrote that the spokesperson:
also declined to comment on whether the increase could have been due to a change of policy on IPRs, an increase in the number of deaths of claimants linked to DWP’s actions, or DWP taking new steps to find out about more suicides and other deaths of claimants so that it could investigate them through IPRs.
So, it’s not possible to say why IPRs have increased. Recently in parliament, work and pensions secretary Thérèse Coffey refused to launch an inquiry into claimant deaths.
Nothing changes
As The Canary previously wrote over the case of Errol Graham, who starved to death after the DWP stopped his social security, the department told his inquest:
it had acted “appropriately”. This stock response is similar to its other ones when claimants have died. As DNS said, coroners have again and again criticised the DWP and its actions. Yet nothing changes.
A similar thing happened just weeks ago. During the second inquest into Jodey Whiting’s death the DWP said the mistakes it made in her case were not a “systemic” problem. So nothing has changed. Meanwhile, people are still dying on the DWP’s watch, and no one is being held accountable.
The BBC has published its own research into chronically ill and disabled people’s experience of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. One campaigner called the findings “horrendous”. But the BBC inadvertently pointed to the biggest problem of all: that the government, much of the media, and society at large have ignored the experiences of disabled people throughout the pandemic.
Fourteen-year-old Josselin has a rare genetic condition, which means she has hearing loss, a vision impairment, can’t walk or talk and is fed through a tube.
Her family, who live in Wiltshire, have a vital network of services they rely on to keep her well – physiotherapy, speech and language therapy, occupational therapy, respite care. All of that stopped in March 2020.
Josselin’s mum said that her daughter “struggled”, for example pulling her hair out. The BBC noted that:
Josselin was prescribed anti-depressants and anti-psychotic medication. She was also given prescription drugs like diazepam to cope with the pain she was having in her hips and her spine because of a lack of physiotherapy.
The findings paint, for the first time, a comprehensive picture of a hidden fallout of Covid-19.
The charity Scope said that disabled people’s needs “had been forgotten”. But campaigns lead for the group Transport for All Katie Pennick disagreed. She said on Twitter that:
it wasn’t a “hidden fallout”. The impact of COVID has been well documented by disabled people.
She went on to list in a thread the disabled people-led research into the effect of the pandemic that had been published. These reports were barely mentioned in the corporate media, if at all. In July, The Canarywrote about one such report. We reported at the time:
A massive 76% of the people surveyed were dissatisfied with the help that the government offered, while a third of people believed that the government “is neglecting disabled people”.
Disabled people: ignored
But sadly, this was all predictable. As The Canarywrote in March 2020, disabled people’s organisations were already warning about the dangers of the pandemic and the government’s response to it. Now, the BBC research shows that those fears were realised. And as one Twitter user said:
BBC research documenting experiences after the event is too little too late for countless chronically ill, sick, and disabled people. Many were warning about the situation. Others predicted what would happen. Sadly, the government along with much of the media failed to listen.
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has denied that it has “systemic” problems. This was during an inquest into the death of a claimant. Instead, the department has blamed its staff – but it doesn’t appear to be fooling the judges. And all the evidence points to a system broken beyond repair, with over 35,000 deaths on its watch.
Jodey Whiting
As The Canary previously reported, Jodey Whiting was a 42-year old mother. She took her own life after the DWP stopped her social security. Because the DWP stopped Whiting’s ESA, she also lost her Housing Benefit and Council Tax Reduction. Whiting lived with various health conditions and mental health issues.These included a brain cyst, curvature of the spine, and bipolar disorder. Whiting was taking 23 tablets a day for her illnesses and conditions.
She took her own life on 21 February 2017, three days after the DWP made her last Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) payment. This was because she missed a Work Capability Assessment (WCA). According to solicitors Leigh Day:
The DWP failed to arrange a home visit for Whiting for her WCA. Instead, it arranged an appointment at an assessment centre, despite Whiting’s request for a home assessment because she “rarely left the house due to her health”.
It also failed to take into consideration that Whiting had made the department aware she lived with “suicidal thoughts a lot of the time and could not cope with work or looking for work”.
It further didn’t complete a Mandatory Reconsideration of its decision to stop Whiting’s ESA until after her death.
In May 2017, a coroner failed to consider any role the DWP and its decisions had in Whiting’s death. So her family and Leigh Day have taken the matter to the High Court. And the court is now conducting a new inquest into her death.
Common sense?
Disability News Service (DNS) has been following the case. And the evidence coming out is damning.
The DWP has left the judges unimpressed. For example, as DNS‘s editor John Pring wrote:
Mrs Justice Farbey told DWP’s barrister David Griffiths this week that Whiting had been on out-of-work disability benefits since 2006, and had been in the ESA support group since 2012, after she was transferred across from the old incapacity benefit system.
She asked Griffiths: “Why on earth in these circumstances didn’t someone pick up the phone?”
She said it was “surely common sense” for DWP to call Whiting about her missed assessment if she had been claiming benefits for so long
But it’s perhaps the DWP’s defence of itself which is most troubling.
Whitewashing
The DWP’s defence is centred around the idea that Whiting’s death is an isolated case. As Pring wrote, Griffiths argued:
that Whiting’s death was the result of errors by individuals within DWP, but was not caused by flaws in the benefits system itself.
He said her death should be placed in the “context” of the “scale and scope” of the millions of claimants who DWP deals with.
People make mistakes. I can understand in this arena and with the tragic events that happened that those failures are highlighted, and rightly so. The system has failed but it does not fail a great many times.
[Griffiths] claimed that if there was a systemic problem then “given the quantity the numbers of people who are dealt with one would see far greater problems within the DWP than apparently is the case”.
Except Griffiths’ claim that the DWP “does not fail a great many times” is simply not true.
Countless deaths
Thousands of people have died on the DWP’s watch. Among these are:
Around 90 people a month between December 2011 and February 2014. The DWP said these people were fit for work.
Roughly 10 people a day died between March 2014 and February 2017 – a period of almost three years. The DWP had put these people in the ESA Work Related Activity Group (WRAG). This meant it told them they were healthy enough to start moving towards work.
Nearly 12 people died daily over a period of five years – between April 2013 and April 2018. The DWP was making them wait for their Personal Independence Payment (PIP) claims to be processed when they died.
That’s over 34,000 people. They died either waiting for the DWP to sort their claims or after it said they were well enough to work or start moving towards work. Moreover, in 2018 alone there could have been 750 (if not more) people who took their own lives while claiming from the DWP. But across five years, the department only reviewed 69 cases of people taking their own lives.
Clearly the DWP thinks that nearly 35,000 (recorded) deaths doesn’t constitute a systemic problem. But the judges and the family’s lawyer in Whiting’s case seem to disagree.
There are a large number of claimants. It ought to be basic stuff. This is largely stuff that the DWP does every day and it should have systems that work to surveil.
An inference may be drawn that despite the appearance of working systems, there is a non-working system in the problem of culture and training and arguably so.
The only inference… that can be drawn is that there is a systemic problem here. It cannot possibly be suggested that that is not the case.
The judges will give their decision in Whiting’s case at a later date.
“Nothing more than a scandal”
In February 2020, Labour MP Debbie Abrahams spoke about deaths on the DWP’s watch in parliament. She read out the names of some of those who had died. This included Errol Graham who effectively starved to death:
The death of any person as a result of a government policy is nothing more than a scandal. And it’s clear from the cases that I talked about… this is just the tip of the iceberg. We don’t know what’s going on. For too long the [DWP] has failed to address the effects of its policies. It must now act. Enough is enough.
This was nearly 18 months ago. From what the DWP said in court, it appears not to recognise Abraham’s point: that one death is one too many. Moreover, since she spoke, little has changed. The inquiry into Whiting’s death may bring closure for the family. It may also expose the systemic failings in one case. But whether or not it shines a light on the pernicious, human rights-abusing culture that’s pervaded the DWP and successive Tory governments for more than a decade remains to be seen.
The act, plus legal aid, helped my family to secure the help we desperately needed. Attempts to undermine it put us all at risk
If anyone had told me that my family would ever need disability benefits, legal aid or the Human Rights Act, I wouldn’t have believed them. I am sharing my story because my fear is that when the next family comes to need these same things, they will not be there.
Cameron was the youngest of our four wonderful children. He was born in 2007, and it quickly became clear he was very ill. He had to be rushed to Alder Hey children’s hospital for emergency surgery when he was only three days old. He was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, then at 18 months we learned that he had Duchenne muscular dystrophy too. I remember the consultant telling us with tears in his eyes that Duchenne was a severely life-limiting condition and my wife and I replying in unison that it would not limit Cameron’s life.
You see, we had already begged him to fight when he was three days old and promised him that if he could not live long, then we would do all we could to help him live fast. He took us at our word, and lived a life of love and laughter, pedal to the metal and without fear, for five and a quarter magical years, despite all that was thrown at him.
This coming Saturday would have been his 14th birthday, a day we celebrate his life and the happiness of his childhood despite extraordinary challenges. Two years after Cameron’s death, we won a landmark appeal that allowed us, and other parents in our position, to continue claiming disability living allowance while caring for Cameron in hospital – after those benefits were taken away from us. This year is also one that brings me a great deal of trepidation about the direction of travel for justice, rights and protections in this country.
I am saddened that the government now appears to be seeking to further reduce protections for all of us by watering down the Human Rights Act – the legislation on which we based our case – via the current review being conducted by a former judge. The Human Rights Act is not just one of the ways for UK citizens to challenge government decisions we deem to be unfair: it is really the only way.
That should scare everyone in this country. Of course, I hope no one else finds themselves in the position my family and I found ourselves in, but it could be any one of us.
The interplay between Cameron’s conditions and a blood-clotting disorder they caused was devastating, and my wife and I had to give up work to care for him during long, repeated stays in hospital, through surgery after surgery, struggling to get him home again with his sister and brothers.
We did not claim any benefits for Cameron until we had spent all of our savings and sold every last asset. Then, we reluctantly accepted that we had reached the end of the line and had to ask the state for help. We count ourselves lucky to this day that we live in a country that allowed us to effectively retire during Cameron’s life to do our best for him and his siblings. A country where generations of us selflessly pay in to help others, without thought for what and when we may ever get back.
Craig Mathieson is a father and husband who is supporting Amnesty’s campaign to keep the Human Rights Act
Labour has reportedly ditched its plans to offer free social care if elected. Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership put plans for a National Care Service in its manifestos. Now, Keir Starmer’s alleged plan to abandon it has caused outrage on social media. But the history and detail of the policy is not quite what it seems.
Free social care: not any more
Disability News Service (DNS) broke the story. It reported that shadow leader of the House of Commons Thangam Debbonaire let the policy shift slip during a virtual meeting. Editor of DNS John Pring wrote that:
Debbonaire told female party members at a meeting last weekend that introducing free social care for disabled and older people would “give the Tories a stick to beat Labour with”…
She apparently claimed that such a policy would cost “£100 billion” and would cost more than the annual budget of the NHS.
She also said that right-wing newspapers would attack the policy and that it would lose Labour the next election.
DNSsaid Labour “failed to deny she had made the comments”. But Labour’s shift in position actually rolls-back more than just Corbyn’s policy. Because the party has been planning a National Care Service since 2010.
Not a new policy
As think tank the Kings Fund wrote, in its 2010 manifesto Labour pledged that:
A new National Care Service will be established, which is intended to ‘remove unfair postcode lotteries’ and ‘protect family homes and savings’ from the costs of care. It is to be established in three stages:
From 2011 those with the ‘greatest care needs’ will receive free personal care at home
From 2014 the costs of residential care homes will be capped so that homes and savings will be ‘protected from care charges’ after two years.
After 2015 a National Care Service will be established, free at the point of use for all adults with an eligible care need, not just older people. A commission will be set up on how to finance this system.
Corbyn then picked this up again in 2017 and 2019.
Introduce free personal care for all older people, providing help with daily tasks such as getting in and out of bed, bathing and washing, and preparing meals in their own homes and residential care
It also said it would sort out funding for social care and improve care staff’s working conditions and pay. Now, 11 years of policy has gone out of the window. But what exactly has Starmer’s party ditched?
Corbyn: not clear cut
Corbyn’s manifesto on social care was not entirely clear cut. It said that free social care would be for older people. For chronically ill and disabled people, free social care was, the manifesto said, an “ambition”. It was actually during 2020’s Labour leadership election that Starmer said he supported a separate, free social care plan for chronically ill and disabled people. This was something Corbyn had not introduced.
So, not only has Starmer rolled-back years of policy, but he’s trashed a personal commitment he made too. The story also shows that the party has abandoned any notion of creating progressive policies – for fear of being annihilated by the right-wing media. But was Labour’s National Care Service all it’s cracked up to be, anyway?
The reality
Social care is already free for the poorest people. The government sets savings and assets thresholds. For example, in England, if you have less than £14,250 in savings or assets (like a home), your social care is totally free. But under successive Tory-led governments, social care has been decimated. In 2018/19, funding was down by £300m in real terms on 2010/11. This is despite demand increasing.
So, the number of people who actually get support when they need it is tiny. As the Kings Fund wrote:
In 2018/19, local authorities received 1.9 million requests for support from new clients. Around 3 in 4 people received some help, though only around a quarter were assessed as eligible for formal short-term or long-term care.
550,000 requests were from working-age adults, of which 98,000 (18 per cent) received formal short-term or long-term care, and 1.4 million requests were from older people, of which 401,000 (29 per cent) received formal short-term or long-term care.
This means that in reality a large portion of social care is carried out by unpaid carers.
The elephant in the room
There are around 13.6 million people in the UK who carry out this role. Moreover, 65% of adults will undertake unpaid caring at some point in their lives. These figures are versus just 1.5 million professional carers working in the sector in 2018. Yet Corbyn’s leadership only pledged to raise the level of social security for unpaid carers by £10 a week. At the time in 2017, it would have taken Carer’s Allowance from £62.70 to £73.10 a week – the same as Jobseeker’s Allowance.
Unpaid carers save the government around £132bn a year in care costs. In that sense, Corbyn’s proposals were hardly radical. So, while Starmer’s ditching of a National Care Service is a damning move, the idea didn’t go far enough anyway. To really address the social care crisis in the UK, we need to start from the bottom, up. The fact that around one in five of all people perform a caring role, unpaid, is the elephant in the room. It’s time the government and society finally dealt with this fact.
The TUC is calling for the government to recognise long Covid as a disability to prevent suffering employees being discriminated against at work.
The union’s survey of employees with long Covid found that respondents reported symptoms lasting over a year, while experiencing workplace discrimination as a result.
NICE defines long Covid as symptoms of coronavirus (Covid-19) that persevere beyond four weeks. The TUC wants long Covid recognised as a disability under the Equality Act. This would mean workers suffering from it would be protected against discrimination.
In addition, the TUC said the government should also recognise coronavirus as an occupational disease to give protection and compensation if employees catch it at work.
Symptoms lasting more than a year
After surveying 3,500 workers, 29% reported their symptoms from long Covid had lasted more than a year. Symptoms mentioned included shortness of breath, brain fog, difficulty concentrating, and memory problems.
More than half of the respondents said they’d experienced “discrimination or disadvantage” in some form due to their symptoms. This included employers questioning workers about their symptoms and doubting them having long Covid at all. 5% of respondents said employers had forced them out of their jobs due to long Covid.
Some employees surveyed also said they were worried about the amount of sick leave they’d had to take. 18% said the sick leave they’d needed to take “had triggered absence management or HR processes”.
One worker said they had caught coronavirus at work, and had had to work at an international event while suffering:
I was still expected to work long hours, handle stressful situations in impossible timeframes, find and fill in forms (which I struggled to do because of cognitive issues), and spend hours on Zoom calls when I struggled to talk and breathe, resulting in extreme chest pain, shortness of breath, exhaustion and severe symptom relapses.
More than three-quarters of the people who responded to the survey said they were key workers.
“Massive wave of discrimination”
The Equality Act 2010 defines disability as having a long-term impact impairing someone’s ability to carry out “normal day-to-day activities”.
The TUC argues many people who have had long Covid already meet this criteria. Recognising long Covid under the act would make it illegal to discriminate against sufferers. It would also require employers to make reasonable adjustments where required.
TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady said:
Many of the workers who have carried us through the pandemic are now living with debilitating symptoms of long Covid. And we’re beginning to hear troubling stories of a massive wave of discrimination against people with long Covid.
It’s time to recognise this condition properly – and make sure workers who are living with long Covid get the support they need to do their jobs.
Long Covid is “disabling” workers
The Office for National Statistics (ONS), estimated that as of May 2021, one million people were suffering from long Covid symptoms. Within that, 376,000 people reported the symptoms after having coronavirus at least a year before.
The TUC worked with the Long Covid Employment Support Group to produce the report. Group chair Lesley Macniven said:
Even those with ‘mild’ Covid can suffer daily with fluctuating symptoms, exhausted and alone. Promises we’ll ‘just get better’ have been proved otherwise. …
Patients need time to convalesce, then recuperate through a very gradual, flexible phased return to work, over months, to achieve a sustainable return.
Long Covid is disabling young, previously healthy workers. This key step is needed to take the effects of long Covid seriously, enable rehabilitation and protect dedicated workers from discrimination due to poor understanding of the condition.
The campaign for greater recognition of long Covid could further help raise awareness for people suffering with the similar post-viral fatigue syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, ME, and fibromyalgia.
On 15 June, Osime Brown’s mother announced that the Home Office has dropped the deportation case against her 22-year-old autistic son. This is a victory for Brown’s family and all those who campaigned against his planned deportation. But Brown suffered immense trauma at the hands of institutions that should have supported him. His case reflects the injustices that young people, Black people, and autistic people experience due to the UK’s racist, ableist state and its institutions.
Osime Brown’s case
Osime Brown is a young, Black, autistic, learning disabled man who suffers from a heart condition. He arrived in the UK when he was four. Brown was facing deportation having been sentenced to five years in prison for a crime he did not commit. He has since been diagnosed with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his ordeal. Explaining the gravity of his situation, Brown’s mother Joan Martin told the Independent: “If he is deported he will die”.
In February, over 30 MPs signed a letter calling on home secretary Priti Patel to stop the planned deportation. Brown’s mother, and campaign groups such as Free Osime Brown and No More Exclusions, led calls for the Home Office to withdraw Brown’s deportation order. Following protests in London and Glasgow, on 15 June Martin announced that the Home Office has dropped her son’s case. She said:
To all our wonderful supporters, who have been with us throughout this long, and painful ordeal, who believed in justice, fairness, dignity and a country that is welcoming to everyone, no matter what the colour of their skin: We thank you.
She added:
Without you, my family would have been lost and my son, Osime, would have been condemned to a very short and miserable life.
She concluded:
I hope this is a reflection and learning curve for people in power, to know that they are dealing with real people, real lives, and when they make wrong choices or decisions people are injured, sometimes to a point of no return.
A series of institutional failings
According to Brown’s mother, “his whole life has been like a conveyor belt, from bad to worse” due to negligence by the state and its institutions. She said:
I trusted Osime’s school, the care services, the police, legal system and the criminal justice system – but they all conspired against him because of his race and disabilities.
Throughout his life, the systems that should supposedly have supported Brown failed him. These failings cost him his liberty and nearly his life. Growing up, Brown didn’t receive the support he needed from his school and social services. Authorities problematised his needs and later used them to criminalise him. Brown was excluded from school aged 16. He was in care – having been moved 28 times by social services – when he was arrested and imprisoned under the joint enterprise doctrine. In prison he was subjected to racism, ableism, and violence. This led him to self-harm. Following his release from prison, authorities did not issue Brown with a care and support plan. According to Martin, the judge ruling on Brown’s deportation case refused to read his psychological report. Brown’s devastating case reflects the manifold ways in which Black and autistic young people are failed in the UK.
A prejudiced justice system
Brown was arrested and imprisoned in 2018 under the joint enterprise doctrine for the theft of a mobile phone. He did not commit this minor crime but witnessed it. The joint enterprise doctrine enables a court to jointly convict an individual for a crime they didn’t commit if they were present or aware it would take place. Highlighting the injustice of the doctrine, grassroots campaign group Joint Enterprise Not Guilty by Association (JENGba) explain:
With help from the media, there is a shared incorrect narrative that the Joint Enterprise doctrine is about gangs, broken Britain and the ‘alleged’ feral youth that needs to be served justice. This doctrine is a tool used by the police and the Crown Prosecution Service to imprison people to mandatory life sentences for crimes committed by others. People can be wrongly charged and convicted when they have been within close proximity of a crime, have a random connection with the actual perpetrator or via text or mistaken phone call or they might not even have been at the scene of the crime.
According to Law Gazette, a 2016 Supreme Court case found that judges had “wrongly interpreted” the law for 30 years. And campaigners have raised concerns that people who may have been present at a crime, but unaware that it would take place, have been wrongfully prosecuted under joint enterprise. This is particularly true for those with difficulties in foreseeing and avoiding such situations, such as young and autistic people. And research shows that Black defendants are disproportionately charged under the doctrine. Sadly, Brown was charged under this racist, ableist, deeply unjust law.
A fundamentally flawed immigration law
Having served time for a crime he did not commit, Brown lost his leave to remain under the 2007 Borders Act. Because he was sentenced to longer than 12 months in prison, the Home Office sought to deport him to Jamaica – a country he hasn’t set foot in since he was four.
In order to protect the public it is right that foreign nationals, convicted of crimes with prison sentences of 12 months or more, are automatically considered for deportation under the 2007 Borders Act.
They added:
The Home Office reviews all cases when new information is provided and all decisions are made in accordance with the law.
Brown’s case is not unique. In 2020, the Home Office sought to deport 50 people to Jamaica under the 2007 Borders Act. Campaigners reported that Lionel Shaw, one of the ‘Jamaica 50’ – a partially blind Jamaican man with no criminal convictions – was treated like an ‘animal’ while detained. Meanwhile, solicitor Jacqueline McKenzie has highlighted the ways in which the Home Office has treated victims of the Windrush scandal “with contempt” due to systemic racism. Indeed, the Home Office has been slow to pay compensation to those who lost their jobs, their homes, and access to healthcare.
In other cases, the Home Office has detained and deported people with a long-standing right to live in the UK. At least 11 of those wrongfully deported have died. Brown’s traumatic experience of detention and threat of deportation was the law working as it’s currently designed to. This situation would not be the case in a humane society.
Justice for Osime Brown
Brown is finally safe and at home with his family, where he belongs. Campaigners are now calling for an enquiry into his wrongful conviction. But justice cannot be served. No amount of backtracking can undo the years of trauma that Brown and his family have endured. And the laws and systems that jeopardised his future continue to destroy the lives of young people, Black people, and autistic people in the UK.
We must fight to repeal the unjust joint enterprise doctrine and the 2007 Borders Act. More broadly, we need a total transformation of social services and the education, criminal justice, and immigration systems to ensure that the most vulnerable people in our society receive the support that they need and deserve. Brown should never have had to endure what he’s experienced. But if we don’t see change, more people most certainly will.
On 12 June, campaigners are demonstrating against the deportation of Osime Brown. Brown is a Black, autistic 22-year-old who hasn’t set foot in Jamaica since he was 4-years-old. Campaigners are calling on those who can’t make the protest to take part in a Twitterstorm at 7pm on 10 June.
Osime Brown’s case
Osime Brown is a Black, autistic, and learning disabled young man facing deportation by the Home Office. He was imprisoned in 2018 under the joint enterprise act for being present when someone else stole a mobile phone. As a result, he lost his leave to remain. Now, the Home Office intends to deport Brown from his home in Britain to Jamaica, a country he left when he was just four years old.
Explaining that her son’s “whole life is like a conveyor belt, from bad to worse”, Brown’s mother said:
Right now, the priority is Osime’s health and to lift the threat of deportation from off his head; it’s destroying him and he is struggling to cope with this uncertainty; for him it’s a torture, like being on death row, not knowing why or when.
She added:
Each time the doorbell rings he would say they are coming to get me.
Reflecting on the injustice of the planned deportation, she said:
My grandparents came to this country 1960 and contributed and I do too. My grandmother went to Jamaica and could not return, she died there and I am looking at history repeating itself. With the situation my son finds himself; there is no shadow of a doubt that he too will die if he is sent to Jamaica.
Protest to stop the deportation
In December 2020, over 100 public figures signed a letter to home secretary Priti Patel calling for her to stop Brown’s deportation. In February 2021, MPs called on the Home Secretary to halt the deportation. The judicial review on his deportation is expected to announce its findings soon. Justice for Osime Brown is now gearing up for a protest at midday on 12 June ahead of the judicial review decision:
Labour for Free Movement announced that Labour MP John McDonnell, journalist Owen Jones, University and College Union president Vicky Blake, No More Exclusions, and Neurodivergent Labour will be taking part in the protest:
Join the demo on Saturday before Osime Brown's judicial review!
We're meeting at 12 in front of the Home Office and marching to Parliament.
— Labour for Free Movement (@labfreemvmt) June 10, 2021
Sharing a reminder about safety at the protest, Justice for Osime Brown shared:
To keep you safe we will:
·Have stewards reminding you of social distancing ·Have stewards routing the march ·Have hand sanitiser and masks available ·Be sanitising equipment (mics, megaphones etc) #StopTheDeportation
— JUSTICE FOR OSIME BROWN (Official Account) (@FreeOsimeBrown) June 9, 2021
Join the Twitterstorm
Justice for Osime Brown has asked anyone who isn’t able to attend the protest on 12 June to take part in a Twitterstorm to raise awareness about Brown’s case on 10 June at 7pm:
The prospect of care home workers being required to get vaccinated against Covid-19 has moved a step closer, with a crucial endorsement from the UK’s human rights watchdog.
Ministers are considering changing the law to make vaccination a condition of deployment for people in some professions that come into regular close contact with elderly and vulnerable people at high risk from the coronavirus.
An independent news site has revealed shocking comments Tory peers made about their disabled colleagues. They laced their views with offensive comments and discrimination – not that that’s shocking from the Tories. But at the heart of the story is also a staggering irony.
Debating democracy
John Pring, editor of Disability News Service (DNS), tweeted:
The Conservative party has refused to act after four of its peers delivered an “extremely alarming” and disablist “barrage of attack” on disabled members of the House of Lords.https://t.co/WJ6lNoqd7P
— Disability News DNS (@johnpringdns) May 28, 2021
As Pring reported, the House of Lords was debating:
the use of remote participation and so-called hybrid sittings in the Lords that some of the measures introduced during the pandemic – which include online voting and allowing some peers to take part in debates virtually – should continue when the crisis ended.
Some peers were arguing that the adjustments should stay. Crossbench peer baroness Jane Campbell said the:
capacity to join in remotely has swept away many of the barriers that some of us encounter daily
a relief to watch debates at home on my night-time ventilator and to vote. It improved my focus, decision-making and health.
All this would seem logical and reasonable to many people. In the same way remote working for non-disabled people is now becoming the norm, surely this should extend to parliament? Well, not if you’re a Tory peer.
Disability discrimination
As Pring reported, four Tory peers launched an “extremely alarming” “barrage of attack” on disabled peers. Former Tory Party treasurer lord Farmer said:
for the sake of the public who are paying our way, personal infirmity should not provide grounds for exemption from normality… parliamentary participation is for those able to bring vitality to proceedings.
He added:
if infirmities of mind or body make that vital contribution impossible, any permanently lowered bar to participation serves peers’ interests, not those of the public. The previous norm should be reinstated: those of us who cannot come to the House cannot contribute.
‘Infirmities’? Farmer appears to have taken us back to the early 20th century. No, really. Because he may as well have said that disabled people should not be peers. His Tory mates lord Howard of Rising and baroness Noakes said similar.
Trenchard: Disability discrimination? Hold my pint.
But if you thought that was bad, enter viscount Trenchard with someone holding his pint to take the abuse one step further.
those with disabilities, in poor health or pregnant should be allowed to continue to participate remotely.
He added that it’s:
an unfortunate fact that if a noble Lord’s condition or circumstances prevent his or her attendance and ability to participate fully, it is hard to argue that that member is fully capable of exercising his or her functions as a legislator
So now, disabled and pregnant people shouldn’t be peers, either. Thank god we’ve got rich, old white men to make up the numbers, hey?
Pring asked the Tory Party and the government for comment. Neither responded to him. Meanwhile, disabled peers reacted angrily. Lib Dem baroness Sal Brinton toldDNS the Tory peers’ comments were:
an extraordinary barrage of attack on disabled peers and those with underlying conditions that puts them on the clinically extremely vulnerable list.
Back in the real world
Back in the real world, and this kind of discrimination is not really shocking. For example, a 2019 study found 24% of employers wouldn’t hire a disabled person. This is despite such discrimination being illegal. Moreover, the system itself serves to do little more than entrench discrimination and inequality for disabled people. For example, the UN accused successive UK governments of “grave” and “systematic” violations of sick and disabled people’s human rights, much of it under the guise of Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) reform.
But to flip the Tory peers’ comments on their heads, as my partner Nicola Jeffery tweeted:
Well, it's very clear to these Tory peers that politically there is no place for disability & as "unfortunate" as that is it's just not "normal". That's being #Disabled working from home or pregnant btw, so should anyone who is disabled or pregnant be forced to work by the DWP..?
She’s referring to the ‘fit for work’ scandal, where the DWP was assessing sick and disabled people and telling them they were well enough to look for, or carry out, a job. As The Canary previously reported, between 2014 and 2017 10 people a day were dying after the DWP put them in the Work-Related Activity Group (WRAG) of Employment and Support Allowance. As we wrote, the WRAG is:
the part of ESA where the DWP places people aged 16-64 who it deems can start moving towards work.
Ironically, there are disabled people who can’t work even with provision, but the government is making them work anyway. Yet the peers being discriminated against by their Tory colleagues are capable of working, but the same Tory colleagues are trying to stop them from getting adequate provision. The whole thing stinks – but also shows the sickening irony at the heart of the Tory Party.
Younger people are among the one in seven adults with coronavirus (Covid-19) who go on to suffer long Covid, new research suggests.
Long Covid
US experts found that people with Covid-19 were more likely to suffer health problems stretching into the long term than those who had never had coronavirus.
They found that one in seven (14%) adults aged under 65 had at least one new condition that required medical care in the three-week to six-month period after catching coronavirus. This was 5% higher than a comparison group of people without coronavirus in 2020.
(PA Graphics)
The figures match those for long Covid produced by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which said in April that almost one in seven people in the UK who test positive for coronavirus are still suffering symptoms three months later.
The US research, published by the British Medical Journal (BMJ), looked at the period from three weeks to six months after initial infection and found that people suffered a range of conditions. These included chronic respiratory failure, abnormal heart rhythm, peripheral neuropathy, memory problems, diabetes, liver test abnormalities, anxiety, and fatigue.
The researchers said:
Although individuals who were older, had pre-existing conditions, and were admitted to hospital because of Covid-19 were at greatest excess risk (of suffering new conditions), younger adults (aged 50 and under), those with no pre-existing conditions, or those not admitted to hospital for Covid-19 also had an increased risk
A junior doctor holding his stethoscope (Hannah McKay/PA)
Study
The study used health insurance records to examine data for 266,586 adults aged 18 to 65 diagnosed with coronavirus between January and October last year.
Individuals were matched to three comparison groups without coronavirus, including one group diagnosed with a different respiratory infection.
Those who had had coronavirus were found to be more at risk of ongoing health issues than people in the other groups. The researchers said that as the number of individuals infected with coronavirus worldwide continues to rise, “the number of survivors with potential sequelae after Covid will continue to grow”.
In a linked editorial, Elaine Maxwell from the National Institute for Health Research said:
Healthcare professionals should be alert to the possibility of long Covid in anyone with confirmed or suspected Covid-19. How to treat these longer-term consequences is now an urgent research priority.
Insecure workers died of coronavirus (Covid-19) at twice the rate of people in other jobs. That’s the finding of new research into the pandemic. It’s shone a damning light not only into the government’s response but also the state of employment in the UK more broadly.
Insecure jobs
The Trades Union Congress (TUC) has researched how the pandemic impacted insecure workers. It says these are people whose:
contract does not guarantee regular hours or income (including zero-hours contracts, agency work and casual work) or… are in low-paid self-employment (earning less than the government’s National Living Wage). In total, this is one in nine in of those in work.
But as the TUC said, insecure work is not just people like app-based taxi drivers. It said that the following percentages of workers were in insecure jobs:
15.6% of people in “caring, leisure and other service roles”.
18.4% of those in “elementary roles, such as security guards, taxi drivers and shop assistants”.
17.2% of “process, plant and machine operatives”.
Working chaos UK
A lot of what the TUC found about the pandemic and insecure work was unsurprising. For example:
Between those the government ‘excluded‘ and people who didn’t get help for other reasons, some three million people missed out on any kind of coronavirus support.
In April 2020, two million people were not getting the minimum wage. Of these, 1.3 million were on furlough.
Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) was not fit for purpose. 1.8 million employees had no entitlement to it. 70% of these were women. A third of people on zero hours contracts could not get SSP versus 6% of all employees.
Care workers hit hard
Care workers were particularly hard-hit. For example, the government put in place the Adult Social Care Infection Control Fund. It was worth over £1.1bn. The fund was for care companies. Part of it was to pay staff who had to stay off work due to coronavirus. But as the TUC wrote:
a UNISON survey of care workers revealed the money did not get through to workers, with more than two fifths (44%) saying their employer is offering just statutory sick pay (SSP) of £95.85. Around one in 12 (8%) workers say they and colleagues were not paid at all if they needed to stay at home.
Overall, the TUC also said marginalised communities bore the brunt of this.
Marginalising the marginalised
It’s research found that the following percentages of people are in insecure work:
7.1% of women versus 6% of men.
16% of BAME workers versus 10% of white workers.
12.1% of BAME women versus 6.4% of white women and 5.5% of white men.
Also, bosses are more likely to employ disabled people on zero hours contracts (3.8%) than non-disabled people (3.1%).
But it’s the death toll of coronavirus on insecure workers which is particularly shocking.
Shocking coronavirus death figures
The TUC found that insecure workers were more likely to have died from coronavirus. It noted that the death rates were:
51 per 100,000 for men in insecure work. This is versus 24 in 100,000 in “less insecure” work.
25 per 100,000 for women in insecure work. This is versus 13 in 100,000 in “less insecure” work.
In short, the coronavirus death rate for insecure workers was double the national average. The TUC noted that the more insecure the industry, the higher the coronavirus death rate was:
The TUC wouldn’t commit to why the rates were higher in insecure work. But it did note that:
many of these occupations include work outside the home and that many insecure workers lack decent sick pay.
In other words, people in insecure industries had no choice but to go to work in the middle of a global pandemic. Despite the risks, they could not afford to protect themselves and their families fully from coronavirus.
The pandemic has exposed the lack of dignity that many insecure workers face. Society relies on these workers to carry out vital roles such as caring for sick people and delivering vital food and other services. In return, a significant number of these workers will have no job or income security.
It says that three things need to change:
“Increasing and enhancing sick pay entitlement”.
“New rights for workers to benefit from the protection that collective bargaining brings”.
“A ban on zero-hours contracts”.
After such a devastating time for so many workers, you’d hope the government would listen. Whether it will or not remains to be seen.
Government figures have shown a “shocking rise” in disability hate crime on trains. That’s the verdict of one union. It says this is a “wake-up call” over the erosion of the UK’s rail network. The stats also highlight the ongoing lack of true accessibility on public transport for disabled people.
Disabled people: transport discrimination
The Department for Transport (DfT) has released a set of statistics about disabled people’s access to transport in England in 2019/20. Overall, the figures show that non-disabled people still have better options than disabled people.
For example, disabled people used buses and taxis more than non-disabled people:
Disabled people made 55% more trips by taxi.
They made 40% more trips by bus.
When disabled people travelled by car, around a third of them were a passenger. This compares to a fifth for non-disabled people. It ties in with driving licence figures. The DfT found that of those aged 17-64:
60% of disabled people held a driving licence. The figure was 78% for non-disabled people.
Given the modifications that are available for cars, the number of disabled people with driving licences should be higher. The stats also revealed disabled people’s feelings about public transport.
Less satisfied overall
The DfT found that outside of London:
47% of disabled people were “satisfied” with “overall transport and highways services”. The figure was 50% for non-disabled people.
60% of disabled people/59% of non-disabled people were satisfied with local bus services
67% of disabled people/65% of non-disabled people were satisfied with taxi services.
52% of disabled people/51% of non-disabled people were satisfied with cycle facilities.
46% of disabled people/56% of non-disabled people were satisfied with pavements and footpaths.
Overall disabled people were less satisfied across the board on transport information:
But looking at the DfT stats in more detail, certain problem areas emerge.
Varying issues
Taxis were one issue. In London, all black cabs were accessible. But outside the capital, the figure drops to 82%. Then, for licenced vehicles overall (for example, private hire firms) in London, only 17% were accessible. This dropped to just 10% outside the capital. Also, as the DfT noted, police in England and Wales prosecuted 32 cases of discrimination against disabled people by taxi drivers or firms. This was for the year ending 31 March 2019. These were for:
71% of passengers with “restricted mobility” rated airports “good or excellent”.
Invisible illnesses
Another figure stood out. It was about so-called “maritime” transport (cruise ships and ferries). The DfT said that:
Maritime transport satisfied 60% of disabled people living with visible impairments.
But only 42% of disabled people with invisible conditions were happy with it.
It’s important to note this analysis of visible/invisible illnesses and impairments was not available for other transport. The government must give more insight into this area. Because 25% of disabled people live with a mental health condition. Also, a further 18% live with invisible conditions, illnesses, or impairments.
Rail travel
Crucially, disabled people’s satisfaction with rail was lower than non-disabled people’s. The biggest difference was in the steps between trains and platforms:
And it was on rail travel where hate crime saw a surge.
Between 2014 and 2016, the numbers of disability related hate crime incidents in England reported to the British Transport Police decreased by 37%…
However, since 2016 the number of incidents has seen a slow but steady increase, increasing by 24%
This fits with the bigger picture on disability hate crime in England and Wales. In 2019/20:
There were over 7,300 disability hate crimes.
But the police only charged 1.6% of these.
Cases of violence rose by 16% to 3,628.
Online hate crimes rose by 46%. They made up one in 10 of all reported ones.
“Cost-cutting”
On the rail network, the RMT union was clear why it thinks hate crime has risen. It blamed the:
cost-cutting that has emptied staff from trains and stations
The Canary previously reported on this. As we wrote in 2020:
Train companies only fully staffed 10% of UK stations.
They staffed 45% “some of the time”.
Train companies never staffed the other 45%.
A similar thing has happened on board trains. So, it may be of little wonder that hate crime is up. Moreover, this could be why disabled people’s satisfaction with rail is lower than non-disabled people’s.
So, it seems that while UK laws reflect the need for disabled people to have equal access to transport the reality is different. It’s clear that transport operators are still leaving disabled people disadvantaged. And the government also needs to do more to ensure equality is ensured across the country.
Sunday 21 March is Census day in England, Wales, and the north of Ireland. We all have to complete it by law, and this time people are raising awareness about one of the questions. Because an accurate answer from everyone could help shape the future of a whole community of people.
anyone, including children and adults who looks after a family member, partner or friend who needs help because of their illness, frailty, disability, a mental health problem or an addiction and cannot cope without their support. The care they give is unpaid.
Many carers don’t see themselves as carers and it takes them an average of two years to acknowledge their role as a carer
The last Census in 2011 showed there were 6.5 million unpaid carers in the UK.. But organisations like Carers UK say the figure is much higher.
Millions of people
Overall, before the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic hit there were around 9.1 million unpaid carers. This doesn’t even include young carers, under the age of 18. But since then, the number has exploded. Now, Carers UK says there are around 13.6 million unpaid carers. So groups are calling for these people to make sure that they say they’re carers on the Census:
Census Day is tomorrow on Sunday 21 March. When answering question 24 make sure you identify your caring responsibilities.
Data from the census will have an impact on future services and help ensure that communities get the help they deserve. Let's make sure we #CountCarersInpic.twitter.com/bO3yX8t35V
— Young Carers Matter Norfolk (@YngCarersMatter) March 20, 2021
We want to make sure carers are officially recognised and understood. Help us paint a better picture of caring in the UK by ticking yes to question 24 in the Census 2021, if you care, unpaid, for someone #CountCarersInhttps://t.co/LHLuPDgIJB
It’s important that unpaid carers recognise that they’re on the Census. The government gives examples of what an unpaid carer does. It includes:
helping with washing and cooking
taking the person you care for to a doctor’s appointment
helping with household tasks, like managing bills and shopping
Unpaid carers don’t just provide physical support. The government also makes clear that unpaid caring involves emotional support, too. It only changed the official description of an unpaid carer to recognise this in 2020.
Juggling responsibility
Moreover, unpaid carers often juggle this with other things in life. For example, five million unpaid carers also work. 63% of all unpaid carers live with their own illness, impairment, or health condition.
They shoulder a great responsibility with their caring role, with figures showing:
6 out of 10 people (61%) said their physical health has worsened as a result of caring, while 7 out of 10 (72%) said they have experienced mental ill health.
Fill out the Census question
It’s against this backdrop that the Census is so crucial. Because currently unpaid carers save the government £132bn a year. That’s around £19,336 for each of them. Yet, as Carers UK writes:
Carer’s Allowance… is £67.25 for a minimum of 35 hours, the lowest benefit of its kind.
And of course, the £67.25 a week Carer’s Allowance is also taxable.
All unpaid carers need to fill out the section on the Census. This includes people who may not even recognise that they’re carers. The government continues to use people’s commitment and love for others to save itself billions of pounds a year. As Carers UK said:
Social services and the NHS rely on carers’ willingness and ability to provide care and without it they would collapse.
If we have a true picture of the scale of unpaid caring, however, then maybe things can start to change.
#FacistBritain has been trending on Twitter. But can we quantify whether the UK is descending into a modern, fascist state? Simply put: yes, we can.
Fascism’s “defining characteristics”: nationalism and disregard for human rights
Che Scott-Heron Newton tweeted how she believed fascism was “presenting in modern Britain”. She noted four areas. One was “Powerful and Continuing Nationalism”. In this instance, she gave the example of police protecting a Winston Churchill statue:
Defining characteristics of fascism and how it’s presenting in modern Britain:
Disregard for human rights: people are more likely to approve of longer incarcerations of prisoners, look the other way
She gave the example of the current furore of the so-called ‘Police Bill’. But the degradation of UK human rights has been ongoing for a long time. Back in 2016, the UN accused successive Tory-led governments of “grave” and “systematic” violations of sick and disabled people’s human rights. With the UK’s potential withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights, things will only get worse.
Tory attempts to clamp-down on universities ‘cancelling‘ far-right bigots from speaking forms part of this. Or, as The Canary‘s Maryam Jameela put it, the Tories attempt to ” quash dissent”. Then, you have the Tories’ attacks on “lefty lawyers” doing human rights work. Meanwhile, in recent years, they’ve also cut public arts funding by 35%.
The recent Policing, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (the ‘Police Bill’) is a case in point. As Liberty said, it includes:
dangerous measures including restrictions on protest, new stop and search powers, a “Prevent-style” duty on knife crime, and a move to criminalise trespass.
Also, the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Bill allows intelligence services to break the law on UK soil.
So, Heron summed up some major indicators of fascism well. It was in-part based on historian Laurence Britt’s 2003 work on the signs of a fascist regime.
Picking apart his remaining ten points, how does the UK look?
Scapegoats and sexism
Britt noted:
Identification of enemies/scape-goats as a unifying cause.
The recent clamping-down on vigils and protests in the wake of Sarah Everard’s murder is a chilling sign. Not that Tory misogyny is anything new. For example, just in the social security system you had the so-called ‘rape clause‘ and the benefit cap hitting lone mothers the hardest.
The mass media and national security
Britt also listed:
A controlled mass media.
The UK media is already controlled by a handful of right-wing billionaires. Now, withGB News, Rupert Murdoch’s News UK TV, former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre potentially heading-up the media regulator Ofcom, and a Tory donor being put in charge of the BBC – it’s going to get even more dystopian.
Britt added:
Obsession with national security.
The Tories’ upping the cap on the number of nuclear weapons the UK can have is one example. Its review looking at left-wing “extremism” is another. Amnesty called the Investigatory Powers Act (which allowed mass surveillance) “among the most draconian in the EU”.
The new religion and corporations
Another marker of Britt’s was:
Religion and ruling elite tied together.
Flip this into capitalism being the new religion – the mantra that guides how we all live our lives – and it fits with Britt’s description of fascism being marked by a ‘manufactured perception’ “that opposing the power elite was tantamount to an attack on religion”. The Tories blocking of anti-capitalist teaching in schools sums this up.
A crucial point of Britt’s was also:
Power of corporations protected.
This has been ongoing for decades. But it has reached a crescendo in recent years. The Tories allow big companies to pay tiny amounts of tax. Also, the revolving door between big business and big government is constantly open. As the Weekwrote last year:
Facebook has hired ten former UK government policy officials with insider knowledge of regulatory processes since the beginning of 2020, an investigation has found. …
The new claims about the so-called “revolving door” between politics and the private sector come just a week after J.P. Morgan announced that former chancellor Sajid Javid has been appointed as a senior advisor to the banking giant.
Suppressing labour and cronyism
Britt then moved on to:
Power of labor suppressed or eliminated.
The Tories moves to restrict protest is a current example. And in 2015, The Tories put in place what the Guardiancalled the “biggest crackdown on trade unions for 30 years”. The gig economy helps this. And the consistently low minimum wage puts the power in the hands of the bosses.
Perhaps Britt’s most recognisable point was:
Rampant cronyism and corruption.
This is the Tories all over; not least during the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. As Byline Timeswrote on 16 March:
A company owned by a Conservative Party donor has surpassed £200 million worth of Government contracts during the Coronavirus pandemic
‘Nuff said’.
Election fraud
Finally, Britt noted:
Fraudulent elections.
The 2015 election was marred by allegations of Tory election fraud. So was the EU referendum. The establishment corporate press helped get Boris Johnson into power in 2019. But the Tories are taking their election rigging agenda further. Our First Past The Post voting system has consolidated their power. And now, they’ll be rolling it out to all English elections. As City A.M.reported, in London Assembly elections this:
would “wipe out” many smaller parties like the Liberal Democrats and The Green Party
So, is all this truly fascism? On paper, the signs are there. But there’s probably a better name for it. And that is “corporate fascism”.
“Corporate fascism”
As Johanna Drucker wrote for Riot Material on the US under then-president Donald Trump:
Fascism is defined as the alignment of power, nationalism, and authoritarian government. We are there. The power is capital linked to politics. Capital is not merely the currency of money, but a force with nearly animate capacity for agency. The nationalism is an inflammatory rhetoric that galvanizes affect from responses to actual conditions (the real erosion of social infrastructure) in combination with a fantasy of entitlement grounded in long-standing myths of American exceptionalism. And the authoritarianism is an increasingly evident fulfilment of the worst fears of the founding designers of Democracy, as its checks and balances are put aside in favor of the interests of corporate wealth and its beneficiaries as a grotesque populism feeds on lifestyle fantasies and delusional identification.
Corporate fascism is wanton, virulent, and unregulated. Wanton because it has no regard for consequences (psycho-socio-political pathology is without constraints). Virulent because the full force of inflamed populism is fuelled by self-justified rage and unbounded triumphalism. Unregulated because the capital is now amassed in extreme concentrations of wealth without any controls. Corporate because Citizens United created the legal foundation for corporations to act with the same rights, privileges, and protections accorded to individuals, thus sanctifying the role of disproportionate power within a mythic construct of corporate entities.
Johnson’s government is also using that MO. It’s no exaggeration to say that corporate fascism has been creeping into the UK for decades. And it now appears the situation is only going to get worse.
The Department for Work and Pensions’ (DWP) £20 uplift to Universal Credit is facing a legal challenge. It’s from people on so-called legacy benefits. And the case may open the floodgates for thousands of other claimants.
DWP uplift: one rule for workers
The £20 uplift for Universal Credit from chancellor Rishi Sunak and the DWP has been contentious. This is because the government hasn’t helped people on things like Employment and Support Allowance (ESA). Recently, Martin Lewis interviewed Sunak. It was after Sunak said in the budget that he would extend the uplift until September 2021. During the interview, Lewis asked him why he hadn’t increased so-called legacy benefits in line with Universal Credit.
— ??? ???????? ?????????? (@imajsaclaimant) March 6, 2021
Now, a legal case could answer that question.
A legal case
Disability News Service (DNS) has reported on a legal challenge to the uplift. Two disabled people are using legal aid to mount a judicial review. Firm Osbornes Law is representing them. The firm is looking at the government’s decision not to give an uplift to people on ESA. The case will argue that this is discrimination under the European Convention on Human Rights, because the claimants are disabled people.
Philip Wayland is one of the claimants. He toldDNS that the DWP’s lack of action for ESA claimants was “blatant discriminatory policy”. Wayland said:
Their claim is ‘we have put our arms around the most vulnerable people’, when they have categorically not done that.
After 10 years of it, that is what pushed me into it, because I have had enough.
It was an accumulation of the last 10 years, feeling as though we were being treated as second-class citizens, of years of feeling ignored and treated badly.
Systemic negligence
Sick and disabled people having to take the government to court in the first place is concerning. And this has happened before. As The Canary previously reported, the DWP lost a court case over Universal Credit in 2018. And as we predicted, this ‘opened the floodgates’. Because the ruling forced the DWP to change policy.
For some, the issue of the £20 uplift may well be a clear case of discrimination. And ultimately, it shows the DWP’s systemic negligence towards sick and disabled people. It shouldn’t take a court case for the government and DWP to admit they’re at fault. But in this instance, the legal route seems to be the only one that might bring the change that’s needed.
A doctor shared his experience of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) on Twitter. But he may not have expected the response he got. Because it led to other professionals telling their horror stories of the UK’s social security system.
Second class citizens
Dr Adrian Heald is a specialist doctor and a vocal campaigner on the NHS and social issues. And he recently turned his attention to the DWP, which has hit the headlines throughout the pandemic. Not least because of the issue of the £20 a week Universal Credit uplift.
The Canary recently reported on chancellor Rishi Sunak’s comments about this. Sunak said that the uplift was designed for “workers”. So you could read his comment as meaning that him and the DWP think sick and disabled people are second class citizens. And judging by the story Heald shared, Sunak’s thinking is par for the course.
“Outraged”
Heald tweeted that:
I remember calling the DWP as a patient had to come in due to an emergency, somebody without a medical degree told me "If he is well enough to go to the hospital and see a Dr, he is well enough to to come in" – my jaw dropped, I was outraged
Heald’s tweet seemed to hit home with a lot of people. Because others were sharing their stories. Some people had supported claimants. Belinda Walker said:
I had the misfortune of contacting DWP for a man who lost the ability to write following a stroke. They did not believe it possible and flatly contradicted me. I am Neuro Specialist Speech and Language Therapist with 26 years experience. She still insisted she knew more than me
I have had DWP “assessors” question a patients diagnosis with absolutely no medical background at all. This was face to face with me supporting the patient because their PTSD was so bad.
Claimants and their friends also shared their experiences.
I felt hounded back to work after a brain tumour. After my SSP [Statutory Sick Pay] finished, I had to deal with DWP, they were calling me at home, asking about my illness, it was awful. I’d never ever claimed benefits before, it was a horrible experience.
People without medical degrees have told me that my many invisible illnesses don’t affect my life on a daily basis, I get fed up of applying for PIP and it getting rejected
I know someone who had their benefits stopped as they had to wear a portable heart monitor for 48 hours, they cancelled their DWP appt as doc told him he must rest during these 48 hours – DWP was 2 long bus rides away, sanctioned as doc’s advise was too vague.
But, sadly, these stories are nothing new.
Systemic problems
The Canarywrote in 2017 about DWP sanctions. As it noted, examples of bad DWP decisions include:
Sanctioning a man, living with learning difficulties, for not completing his job search on the computer. He hand-wrote it instead, because he did not have the IT skills to use the DWP system.
Sanctioning a woman with mental health issues for missing a Jobcentre appointment. This was because her mental health prevented her from leaving the house on that day.
Then there was the scandal of DWP staff asking people ‘why they hadn’t killed themselves’. And there was the story of a benefit assessor asking someone when it was that they had ‘caught’ Down’s syndrome. Also, the DWP previously had to tell assessors not to ask claimants to show self-harm scars.
DWP negligence and cruelty is nothing new. But it seems that after years of disastrous conduct, things have not got any better.
Rishi Sunak just made perhaps the most damning admission of the 2021 Budget. His comment was about the £20 a week Universal Credit uplift. And it actually exposed why he and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) haven’t done the same for legacy benefits. In short, workers are worthy of extra money. Sick and disabled people are not.
The £20 DWP Universal Credit uplift
Campaigner and financial journalist Martin Lewis interviewed Sunak on the Thursday 4 March edition of Lewis’s ITV Money Show. The host was putting the public’s questions to Sunak. And during the show, the question of the DWP £20 Universal Credit uplift came up.
The Canaryreported that in his Budget, the chancellor said the uplift was staying until September. But as we noted:
Some people still claim so-called ‘legacy benefits’. These include Employment and Support Allowance (ESA). And the government has not increased their social security payments in line with the Universal Credit/Working Tax Credits uplift.
The Oldham Timesreported there are 2.2 million legacy benefit claimants, and that “three quarters of these are disabled people”.
On the Money Show Lewis read out a question on this. And Sunak’s answer was damning.
Up the workers
Lewis said that Clare asked:
I’m [a] shielding adult; disabled son for nearly a year; huge extra expenses due to Covid. Why have people who are on legacy disability benefits… not been included in the extra £20 a week [uplift]
Sunak made it very clear why he and the DWP had not uplifted legacy benefits. He said:
The original rationale for doing the temporary uplift in Universal Credit [UC] was to help… people in work but on lower incomes, whose incomes were going to be affected by the crisis. And it’s UC and Working Tax Credit that are the benefits that capture the vast, vast, vast majority if not all of those people.
What he said is not true. First, under ESA people can do permitted work. This is where they can work up to 16 hours a week and earn up to £140. Also, some people aren’t on legacy benefits, but they still claim social security.
Destitute and disabled? Move to “UC”
Back to the Money Show. Sunak then repeated his line on workers:
The intervention for UC was to help those in work
In other words, the Tories think sick and disabled people don’t need extra money due to the pandemic. But campaign group Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) said this is not true. For example, sick and disabled people have needed things like extra PPE and help with the costs of food deliveries. So, as DPAC said:
disabled people’s unavoidable expenditure has sharply risen as a direct result of the pandemic
So, what if you’re sick and disabled, on DWP legacy benefits and are destitute? Sunak’s answer was:
it is also possible for those that can… [to] transition to UC
But as Jules Pick tweeted:
#MartinLewis#RishiSunak wants disabled people on legacy benefits to move to UC to receive the uplift. But they will eventually lose their severe disability premiums, will end up significantly worse off on UC, £80 a week.There's been zero extra help for those on legacy benefits.
Here’s the thing. Sunak said before that the £20 uplift was for “low-income households”. So, his admission that the extra money was actually for “workers” is revealing. Because it makes clear that the Tories still think sick and disabled people are “second class citizens”. As Rosina Cantaldo tweeted:
It’s blindingly obvious this government don’t give two shits about the economically unactive severe disabled. The decision to NOT uplift legacy benefits along with UC is clear evidence. Sunak even looked like he was relishing the refusal#Sunak#MartinLewis#MartinAndRishi
In 2016, the UN accused successive UK, Tory-led governments and the DWP of “grave” and “systematic” violations of sick and disabled people’s human rights. The chair of the investigating committee went further. She accused them of creating a “human catastrophe” for sick and disabled people. She also said the situation in the UK had become “life threatening” for many.
Nothing has changed. In fact, Tory contempt for sick and disabled people is now entrenched. It was already violating their most basic human rights. And now, during a global crisis, it has made the “human catastrophe” even worse. Sunak implying workers are more worthy of financial support than sick and disabled people is the thin end of the wedge. Over a decade of human rights abuses has led to this point.
Rishi Sunak just showed his contempt for sick and disabled people. Because his Budget contained no extra support for countless numbers of them. And overall, Sunak may have deprived over one million sick and disabled people of some of their most basic needs.
Sunak: £20 here, £20 there
The chancellor confirmed in his Budget on Wednesday 3 March that the £20 uplift to Universal Credit would stay. But as the Mirror pointed out:
6 million [people]… face £20-a-week cut
This is because Sunak has only put the £20 increase in place until September. As the Mirror noted:
That means millions of Brits face a new ‘cliff-edge’ in Autumn.
It’s understood the Chancellor expects the £20-a-week to end in a brutal cut-off for millions of families.
The Canary previously reported on how some research called the £20 uplift “inadequate” anyway. It found that people were still financially struggling on Universal Credit. This was even with the extra money. But there are over one million people who have had no extra support at all. And Sunak did nothing in the Budget for these people.
Legacy benefits = no support
Some people still claim so-called ‘legacy benefits’. These include Employment and Support Allowance (ESA). And the government has not increased their social security payments in line with the Universal Credit/Working Tax Credits uplift.
The Oldham Timesreported there are 2.2 million legacy benefit claimants, and that “three quarters of these are disabled people”. The campaign group Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) has been vocal about this issue. It’s been collecting stories from people on legacy benefits about how the lack of extra support has hit them. DPAC shared what some claimants think £20 extra a week could do for them. Their responses were stark and damning.
The most basic needs not met
People said:
“I could buy proper incontinence pads instead of sanitary pads which leak”.
“Could put the heating on earlier and not suffer the arthritis pain I am because I only put the heating on after 6pm”.
“I could add credit to my phone so I could talk to someone as I haven’t spoken to anyone for months as I am shielding and do not have family”.
“I would be able to bathe more”.
“On chemo[therapy]… need to eat properly”.
“It would make washing a permanent feature in our home”.
These are basic needs many people would take for granted. But for people on social security like ESA, Sunak’s inaction and lack of support has left them in an appalling situation; deprived of fundamental things.
A “human catastrophe” that has never stopped
DPAC said in a press release:
The government often claims to protect what it calls ‘the most vulnerable’ but once again it is precisely those who are ‘most vulnerable’ whose needs are being ignored. This has created a two tier social security system, giving the distinct impression that disabled people’s suffering is of no concern to this government… the government has absolutely no interest in even knowing what the right thing to do for disabled people is.
But this is nothing new. In 2016, the UN accused successive UK governments of “grave” and “systematic” violations of sick and disabled people’s human rights. The chair of the investigating committee went further. She accused UK governments of creating a “human catastrophe” for sick and disabled people. Over four years since the UN’s report, little has changed. For Sunak and the Tories to leave over one million sick and disabled people without additional support during a global pandemic is a disgrace. And it’s one that the chancellor’s Budget just compounded.
(@Mcguinness2A) August 13, 2021
Join the demo on Saturday before Osime Brown's judicial review!
?????????? (@imajsaclaimant) 
