I am sorry you are unwell, but this is hysterical nonsense.

You live in one of the most advanced states on the planet offering a free health service and one of the best safety nets for people unable to earn sufficient income to provide for themselves. Despite this, you have the impertinence to describe government policies as akin to eugenics!!!!!

What arrogance dictates that your “human rights” are more important than those of the children currently starving in Ethiopia

Without wishing to be un-pleasant , can you explain to me exactly why it is you cannot get a job?

What a ridiculous article? Seriously why can’t you work? You make no mention of your impediments to working? You don’t even make mention of the benefits you may or may not loose? This whole article can be summed up as “Ohh the evil government are going to do scary things to me and I might die and they are like Nazis”. If you can”t provide details to substantiate your seemingly dire position then surely we are within our rights to assume that you are deliberately obfuscating the real facts. Finally, can I just point out that making suggestions that they “might do it to pensioners next” is the same kind of weak tactic employed by people like Glenn Beck when they make comments like “I’m not saying Obama’s a terrorist, but…” – you’re deliberately using an emotive but entirely unsubstantiated point to support your position.

Pedantic historical point – the version of Niemoller’s quotation you;ve given was never once given by Niemoller himself.

It’s actually an innaccurate citation of version given in testimony to the US Congress in 1968 by Howard Samuels, a representative of a business organisation, and reflects Samuels own agenda.

Samuel’s ordering went Jews, Catholics, Trade Unionists/Industrialists and finally the Protestant church, despite the fact that it was only Jews and Trade Unionists that were actually subjected to systematic persecution.

There is no definitive version of the quote that is fully attributable to Niemoller, because Niemoller, himself, used a number of variations on different occasions, but so far as academics have been able to ascertain, the earliest verified versions of the quote, dating to 1946, use the following sequence…

Communists
Incurably sick
Jews or Jehovah’s Witnesses (Niemoller used both)
People in countries occupied by Nazi Germany

Interest in Niemoller underwent a bit of revival in the 1970′s and in interviews Niemoller used this sequence:

Communists
Trade Unions
Social Democrats
Jews (an sometimes Jews who had become Protestants/Protestant ministers – things often get lost in translation but on one or two occasions the language Niemoller used suggests that he was referring specifically to cultural jews rather than orthodox jews)

The other main sequence, dating to the 1950′s, comes secondhand from academics quoting their own conversations with Niemoller and runs

Communists
Socialist
Schools
The press
Jews
The church.

In all, perhaps the real power in Niemoller’s famous ‘quotation’ is that it can be easily rewritten and reordered to suit almost any agenda, provided that you keep communists and Jews on the list and that anything else you add might plausibly have been persecuted by the Nazis.

Firstly I’d like to say that I didn’t know this would be on LibCon, though, as ever, I’m delighted that it is.

It was written for my blog and most of my readers have a good overview of the issues involved. We “speak to ourselves” there in a way I accept the wider public might feel uncomfortable about

Nonetheless, I stand entirely by this post. Those that call it “hysterical nonsense” are doing exactly what I say in the article – “turning a blind eye”

I have a terrible, lifelong condition. The government are all but abolishing sickness benefits. As I say in the article, I can choose to get a job which will probably kill me (this is certainly not hysterical, I nearly die on a regular basis) OR I can give up, allow my family to go bankrupt and hope the state will not let us starve/end up on streets.

This IS the reality for hundreds of thousands like me.

It’s totally your prerogative to “turn a blind eye” but that does not in any way make my article mis-informed. Sadly, it is terribly well informed.

Paul Newman @ 2

Without wishing to be un-pleasant

That would be a first.

can you explain to me exactly why it is you cannot get a job?

I doubt Sue could explain this to you, given that you are a fucking Tory scumbag with the morals of a dung beetle.

People like Sue have been explaining to the Tories why they cannot work since before Cameron came to power, but it has fallen on deaf ears. No amount of medical evidence is considered sufficiently serious enough to warrant sympathy, so it is highly unlikely that an incurable and progressive disease will sway you cunts on this occasion.

Actually, I just noticed this bit :

“What arrogance dictates that your “human rights” are more important than those of the children currently starving in Ethiopia”

Sorry but I have no idea at all how this relates to the article?

“What arrogance dictates that your “human rights” are more important than those of the children currently starving in Ethiopia”

Sorry but I have no idea at all how this relates to the article?

My point is that you have no more inherent entitlement to human rights than does the starving Ethiopian.

You are fortunate enough to live in a wealthy place where you have no real prospect of being denied food, shelter or any other basic needs, and yet you do nothing but complain.

Remember that it is not the government that provides you with ESA and other benefits but your fellow citizens, who pay for it by way of taxation. It might be appropriate to utter a few words of gratitude to your benefactors rather than make demands for more.

@Pagar et al.

I’ve never bothered to inquire after Sue’s actual condition but in view of your comments I’ve taken the liberty of looking at what she’s written on her blog.

She has Crohn’s disease – which is incurable – and, from the look of things, her symptoms are pretty severe, bad enough to have required surgery and also to, as a rough guess, place her at risk of internal bleeding, particularly after any significant physical exertions, and of developing septicaemia.

As for the pain she experiences on a regular basis, I’d suggest you try that for yoursefl by shoving a hosepipe up your arse far enough to reach the colon and then pouring hydrochloric acid into the free end of the pipe. Give it quick swirl round – a couple of minutes with a hula hoop should do the trick – then rinse, wait a couple of hours and pop back and lets us all know how you’re feeling.

Maybe then you’ll understand why Sue has difficulties finding a job she can do without it having adverse effect on her health.

@8 – Pagar

That argument is absolute nonsense – because the situation for some people in the world is worse than the situation in the UK, nobody should fight for their rights to be treated with dignity, and to live with a relative degree of comfort.

It’s the race to the bottom encapsulated in one self-satisfied post.

@ Unity

I am sorry you are unwell

These were my first words on this thread but Sue is attempting to use the natural sympathy felt for the ill and disabled to justify the assertions she makes about public policy.

I actually think there is a very real debate to be conducted about the way the government is using outsourcing companies to implement their ESA policies but trying to use such personal testimony to influence the debate is not likely to illuminate it.

I accept that when Sue wrote the post she did not intend it to end up here and with the current headline so perhaps the blame lies with the person who decided it was a suitable piece of propaganda.

@11

Nothing someone says before the word “but” means anything.

For example:

I’m sure you’re a perfectly nice in person and that you’re just as caring as the next man, but you come across as heartless, disgusting, moronic scumbag completely lacking in empathy and basic human decency.

@11 Er, you did follow that little statement with a ‘but’ you know. In the exact same form as “I’m not a racist, but…”

@11

The blame for what exactly? Communicating to people how much this government is screwing disabled people? I don’t think there need to be any apologies for that decision.

Thanks Unity, few would want to deny Sue help. Why then is she not enraged that we are lobbing £12billion at pointless international aid, £6 billion at the EU ,god knows what on ridiculous Public Sector Pensions extracted from the wealth producing sector and sick note unemployed who certainly can work
Of the 20,000 Public Sector earners in the top 1% ( over £117k appx.) about 16,000 are Doctors
It must be odd for Sue to see people like that so often , many of whom earn close to £200,000 and rake off the sales of surgeries as well.

“It might be appropriate to utter a few words of gratitude to your benefactors”

Are you quite sure you wouldn’t prefer her to get down on her knees and beg?

Pagar @ 11

but trying to use such personal testimony to influence the debate is not likely to illuminate it.

Why ever not? Surely the test of any policy is the effect it has on the people who are supposed to benefit from it? If someone with an incurable, debilitating illness has been passed ‘fit for work’, surely even the most hard eyed Tory in the Country must be able to see that the system is deeply flawed?

I love these comments threads! The people who comment are so much more outrageous than I would ever think to be – either here or on my own blog.

They make my argument for me so clearly it saves me hours.

Pagar

“You are fortunate enough to live in a wealthy place where you have no real prospect of being denied food, shelter or any other basic needs, and yet you do nothing but complain.”

We are all fortunate not to be living in Ethiopa. But you and I are also fortunate not to have to rely on Government benefits due to our ill health and we should listen carefully to those who do without dismissing what they say with such ignorant arrogance.

That Sue can write of eugenics is symptomatic of how threatened many people with disabilities feel not just by the cuts, but by the invective of politicians and newspapers attacking scroungers on benefits and by the rise in attacks (verbal and physical) on disabled people that these have provoked. Yes there are scroungers, but Sue isn’t one of them. And nor are the huge majority of benefit claimants.

I am a taxpayer but do not consider myself to be as you put it “a benefactor” of the disabled nor do I consider “a few words of gratitude” necessary. I pay it because in a rich civilised society it is the duty of those that are fortunate to support those who are not. I also have a selfish reason – because one day my good fortune may fail and it might be me who needs help.

“d one of the best safety nets for people unable to earn sufficient income to provide for themselves.”

Its actually not now as a result of the changes. If you bothered to do your research, you’ll know that once the benefits sue is entitled to become means tested, even ESA (employment and support group), then she will be entitled to nothing if her partner works and earns more than 6k. If her partner quits then the dwp will impose a penalty of 6 months loss of benefits for quitting a job with no good reason. If he successfully lies about quitting then they can both go onto benefits, and ‘enjoy’ an existence of rent for a shitty flat plus a small joint income that will allow them to eat tesco value mechanically recovered ready meals (with crohns…).

For somebody from the political persuasion that has spent the past decade moaning about perverse incentives in the benefits system you’ve got hell of a fucking nerve defending changes that have entrenched these perverse incentives,

As Unity points out, Sue is suffering from a serious illness that effectively prevents her working at all.

She should not be expected to work.

It strikes me that something has gone awry with her assessment ….. whether undertaken by the clowns at Atos or someone else.

Is ESA the appropriate benefit for her anyway?

Seems to me the new PIP thing would be more apt.

Sue…. is your GP onside? Is there something he/she could write that would get the benefits bureaucrats to see reason?

“Is there something he/she could write that would get the benefits bureaucrats to see reason?”

Probably nothing, those bureaucrats lost the ability to see reason a long time ago.

Anecdote of the week: 1 month ago my friend’s contract ran out. He had an interview for another job on the monday at 2pm. In the morning he paid somebody for interview coaching. On the tuesday he made a claim for JSA, and asked for it to be backdated by 1 day, explaining he had an interview and interview coaching.

1 week later he receives a letter explaining that he did not have good cause to delay making a claim, and so the claim would not be backdated. Furthermore, despite continuous work for the previous 2 and half years, he was not entitled to contribution JSA. As his girlfriend works part time – earning £160 a week – he is also not entitled to income based JSA, his housing benefit will be £5 a week (as it is means tested), and the full £120 a month council tax still needs to be paid. His rent is £475 a month, electric is only £50 (they like the cold). His girlfriend, otoh can get an extra £10 a week in tax credit if she can be arsed to fill the forms in. You do the maths. What kind of pressure do you think this would place on his relationship?

Good thing he’s got another job really.

When I started work at 17 I had the honour of working with a man who lost both legs in WW2. A man in his mid 40s, he was a quality inspector in a factory producing electrical parts for the automotive industry. He was in constant pain and confined to a wheelchair. But not once did I manage to beat him into work. He was always there working long before our 7.30 start. And often there long after our 4.30 finish.

Every single day was a struggle for this man, yet he was the most cheerful man I’ve ever met. He didn’t dwell for a second on his disability, his inconvenience or his pain.

Twenty years later I visited the factory again as one of their customers. He was still there working away – well past retirement – and no less cheerful or less effective. He remembered me (“the young sprog”) and I asked him why he was still working at 67: “Because I’m fit and able to work.”

If you are intrinsically unable to comprehend that a person may be too unwell or in pain, physically or mentally, to work, there really is no purpose commenting here. You add nothing. Feel free to visit a Murdoch publication. You’ll fit right in.

Flowerpower @ 21

It strikes me that something has gone awry with her assessment ….. whether undertaken by the clowns at Atos or someone else.

You have completely missed the point, Flowerpower. There is nothing ‘awry’ in her assessment. The assessment has been deliberately designed to set the bar so low so that anyone can flop over it, irrespective of the actual disability of the person being assessed. This is the fundamental problem with the system.

The system is not actually designed to test disability; the system is designed to humiliate the disabled and mark them ‘fit for work’. Atos have got a rather nice racket going on that no-one in the private sector could even hope to buy. They are not paid to test people’s disability; they are paid to find someone fit for work because that is what the fuckwitted scumbag at the DWP want to hear. Atos get paid by results, not tests, they have a direct interest in finding these people fit for work. They have no obligation to find these people work of course, because then they would actually have to pass people fit who where actually likely to find work. We can’t have that tough because the vast majority of cases would remain as incapicatated.

If they want to reduce the number of people on benefits by say ‘50%’, they design the tests around what fifty percent of the claimants can pass.

If you actually think about for ten seconds we would not be arguing the toss about Sue’s Case because it is obvious that she is not part of the labour market. You do not need a list of ticked boxes to see that, and nor do you need that for the vast majority of cases either.

What we have done here is listen to the prejudices of the Country’s least moral people, mostly ignorant Tories it has to be said and decreed that these people must be pandered to. The fact that there is a growing number of vermin in this Country does not make this persecution right, it just makes it more shameful that no one on the Left are willing to stand up and be counted.

@ Zoe

I pay tax because in a rich civilised society it is the duty of those that are fortunate to support those who are not.

Being a ” heartless, disgusting, moronic scumbag completely lacking in empathy and basic human decency” I pay it because otherwise they would put me in jail.

@ Planeshift

I absolutely agree with you that means tested benefits are always pernicious.

“I am sorry you are unwell, but this is hysterical nonsense.

You live in one of the most advanced states on the planet offering a free health service and one of the best safety nets for people unable to earn sufficient income to provide for themselves.”

But, as this article explains, the safety net is being eroded.

pagar, Paul Newman and bgb, would you feel the same way if you were sick?

Pagar/Paul Newman: If you have so much venom within you, why do you bother visiting these sights? Just go out into the street and vent your poison in public, be upfront and tell the disabled to their faces that they should bow down before you, offering thanks for their very existence. Tell people in the real world, not online, how these lazy parasites are draining the country of cash, then have the cheek to complain it is’nt enough. Go on, spout your vile rhetoric to the public in person, then see how many agree with you. What? No? Why? Because you are, like your fellow right wingers, spineless cowards who would be the first in line, demanding help, if you were ever in the same position as Sue Marsh. People like you are not turning a blind eye, you wait with excited anticipation, desperate to see the persecution of the weak and vulnerable, like the pervs who watch kiddy porn, but think they do’nt do any harm because they did’nt commit the crime, they just watched. People like you wo’nt stand up and express those vile opinions if there is any danger that you might be challenged physically, so you hide behind the screen, anonymous, safe. Pathetic cowards, you and all of your kind. Have a nice day.

“When I started work at 17 I had the honour of working with a man who lost both legs in WW2. A man in his mid 40s, he was a quality inspector in a factory producing electrical parts for the automotive industry. He was in constant pain and confined to a wheelchair. But not once did I manage to beat him into work. He was always there working long before our 7.30 start. And often there long after our 4.30 finish.

Every single day was a struggle for this man, yet he was the most cheerful man I’ve ever met. He didn’t dwell for a second on his disability, his inconvenience or his pain.

Twenty years later I visited the factory again as one of their customers. He was still there working away – well past retirement – and no less cheerful or less effective. He remembered me (“the young sprog”) and I asked him why he was still working at 67: “Because I’m fit and able to work.””

Well, anecdotal evidence doesn’t prove much. There are people out there far more ill than he is. What is your point? That your one example of somebody disabled who was able to work is a rebuttal to Sue Marsh?

Have you considered that many of the jobs out there are much harder for disabled people to do than quality inspectoring?

It is sad how many people believe the hectoring of Grayling, Byrne, Miliband and the right-wing press and sneer at the most vulnerable. Would you like to be sick? Do you think I LIKE not working? I can’t wait for the day when I am well enough to work again!

Pagar/Paul Newman and all the other right wing scumbags, instead of posting online and spouting your venom, why not go out in public and tell the disabled what you really think, that they are a bunch of lazy, workshy parasites, draining the economy? No, do’nt fancy that idea do you, brcause you are spineless, pathetic cowards who hide behind the screen, safe and anonymous. Should you ever be in a similar position to Sue Marsh, I hope that people will walk on by, so that you can understand just what it means to feel lost and desperate. Then I hope you die a slow and torturous death, alone and without comfort, you vile, poisonous creatures.

@27 Richard

You should have been here when Pagar was whining on about banks because one of them hadn’t done what he wanted. When their cosy little bubbles are pricked the bleating is deafening!

pagar

“but trying to use such personal testimony to influence the debate is not likely to illuminate it”

Nonsense. It’s precisely because it makes people like you uncomfortable to be presented with the fact that there are real people whose lives are being affected by all this shit that it’s imperative that people like Sue continue to speak out.

These cuts have consequences, and they”re impacting negatively on many many people”s lives. That you’d rather not hear about that and would prefer to remain sheltered from the truth says it all really.

Pagar, Paul Newman and any other right wing scumbags, instead of posting on this, or any other site, why not go out in public, spouting your venomous opinions? No? Thought not, but then again, if you do’nt have the protection of the anonymous computer screen, you do’nt say those things do you? If there’s any chance that you might be physically challenged you clam up, keeping your vile thoughts to yourself, like the pathetic, spineless cowards that you are.

cath above is spot on. pagar wants to hide away uncomfortable truths

‘Atos have got a rather nice racket going on that no-one in the private sector could even hope to buy. They are not paid to test people’s disability; they are paid to find someone fit for work because that is what the fuckwitted scumbag at the DWP want to hear’

That ‘fuckwited scumbag’ was a hero last week when they were marching in defence of their public sector pension.

Its far more likely he or she is a poorly paid office drone carrying out instructions they find nauseating and unable to speak out due to fear of instant dismissal. Who would support them if they dis speak out? Not the opposition since the ATOS contract was their idea.

Black willow that’s very unfair
My name is indeed Paul Newman and I do not have venomous opinions. When I asked Sue what her problem was it was, exactly as I said, not intended in an unpleasant way. Had she realised she was posting on a site where her background was not a given she would probably have provided some brief detail. Unity having though-fully done so I feel nothing but profound sympathy for her
I have suggested some of the ways in which I feel the limited supply of tax revenue might be saved such as International AID , public sector pensions , Doctors Contracts,so as to target resources in fairer way. Isn`t that what we want ? Does anyone here deny that incapacity benefit has been mis-used ? not the Labour Party certainly as they have admitted .
Of course it has and who suffers most, the genuinely disabled. I must admit though. I don`t understand how it is somebody so ill is not getting any help.

Shatterface @ 33

That ‘fuckwited scumbag’ was a hero last week when they were marching in defence of their public sector pension.

Sorry, I think we are talking at cross purposes here. Not the office worker, but the relevant minister(s) in charge of the debacle.

Not the opposition since the ATOS contract was their idea.

Got it. Labour Party ministers need to shoulder the blame for this.

it seems there are some timid people who wish to close their eyes to uncomfortable truth and reality, especially when the facts are deeply ugly and unpleasant,
and there are undoubtedly some naive and well-meaning folk who simply cannot believe that any govt would do what this one is aiming to do.

Darkly and separately there are a tiny minority of noisy stooges who actively and wilfully seek to bury the truth under a cloak of propaganda and disingenuous argument.

Sue Marsh and others are absolutely correct in speaking out on this very disturbing issue!

Northern Worker – One of my dearest friends is quadriplegic. He broke his spine during officer training at Sandhurst. He took years to adjust to such a horrific event, but in time became the CEO of an international spinal research charity.

He still works now over 30 years on.

He’s a general all round genius – he writes for the Economist and The Telegraph amongst others and he is well aware that someone who is ill like me will probably have much greater barriers to work than someone who is physically disabled in the way he is.

You can adapt a workplace for someone in a wheelchair, but it’s much harder to employ someone who has to have regular hospital treatment and endless appointments or who vomits into a bucket every 20 minutes. He also gets the full support of the state for care, mobility, housing etc and is allowed to keep those benefits if he works. I am not.

Things just aren’t as black and white as they seem.

FlowerPower – To clarify, I haven’t been reassessed yet.

The problem is the descriptors used to determine whether I can work or not are “Can you physically swallow?” “Can you do up a button?” “Can you walk?”

Well of course! I have bowel disease, lol.

The ONLY symptom the assessment is allowed to take into account is incontinence. The cannot include my seven life saving operations, or the daily pain, or the constant vomiting or the debilitating nausea or the chem0-style medications.

I will only qualify if I regularly and “completely evacuate my bowels without control”

Ignoring how terribly terribly humiliating that is (I never told my husband until I had to tell an assessor) almost no bowel disease patients will be able to answer “yes to this question”. If they can, they probably have a stoma or other aid that would mean they don’t qualify after all.

If you need any other evidence of just how disgraceful these assessments are, if you have cancer and take chemotherapy by infusion, you will qualify for sickness benefit. If you take your chemo orally, you will not.

Whilst I can appreciate the point of the OP and the general feeling, can I suggest everyone toens down their rhetoric somewhat?

Calling people who disagree with you ‘Tory Scumbags’ and comparing them to the Nazi’s does your arguments little credit. it makes you look over the top, and alienates people who would potentially alienate you.

My housemate is relatively right wing, but would be supportive of someone in OP’s position in general ( which I think is the position of the majority of people in this country), but as soon as he’d see her make a comparison to the Nazi’s or calling people like him ‘ Tory Scumbags’, he won’t be on your side anymore.

In order to challenge things like the Governments Welfare reforms ( some of which I personally agree with, others I don’t) you need a broad church of individuals from all sides of the political spectrum. By calling people Tory Scumbags you are alienating anywhere between 25-38% of the British Population. People you NEED on side in order to ensure success.

I have massive sympathy with the OP. I knew someone at Uni who had Crohns, but she does herself or those who support her cause no favours by comparing people to the Nazi’s. If nothing else don’t do it because it gives the likes of Tim Montogomerie at Conservativehome ammunition to attack the left with.

Paul Newman – ” I must admit though. I don`t understand how it is somebody so ill is not getting any help.”

I know. I don’t understand it either. Daily I wonder how on earth this happened to me and the two million people like me who stand to lose all or a large proportion of their social security.

Seriously, I say to myself every day. “I just don’t understand how we are allowing this to happen”

‘Potentially Alienate you’ should read ‘ potentially support you’….

Steve I take your point. I don’t know if you read the comments, but I didn’t write this for LibCon.

Nonetheless, if you read my blog, you’d see I am one of the fairest, most reasonable campaigners. I have mentioned eugenics twice in the whole time I’ve been writing.

Also eugenics is not Nazis. Yes they embraced it enthusiastically and we all know where that led, but eugenics has been popular around the world – Japan, Canada, Norway, the US. In some cases programmes were only phased out in 1996 and to a degree it still exists in things like genetic selection and IVF.

We are campaigning very hard and sometimes it IS relevent to remind the politicians who read my articles that the line is now very close. Believe me, they want me to use the “e” word about as much as they want to get caught fiddling their expenses.

If it makes other people reading feel uncomfortable, then sorry, but I think that’s good if the time has actually come to make such comparisons.

Hopefully the other 99.9% of my articles will reach out to people like your friend.

Eugenics was chiefly embraced in this country by the Fabian society actually . Sue leaving your own case to one side are you really suggesting that the 2,000,000 currently supposedly to ill to work are in fact all deserving of hard earned tax payers money ? That`s rather a different question to the process of evaluation which has evidently failed you.
How do you feel about the vast amounts poured into the EU and International AID when we are unable to afford a decent old age for able bodied people , never mind your good self ?

Paul. No – I’m suggesting around 2 million will be found completely fit for work. They are the “scroungers” the media focus on, though I take great issue that the figure.

No, the ADDITIONAL people I’m talking about will either lose all of their ESA, all of their DLA, possibly both or have care packages cut.

These are people who are ill or disabled.

They will have been assessed as ill or disabled under incredibly tight rules (see above) yet STILL they will either lose everything after a year or lose their DLA when PIP is bought in.

Just because the government say “we can’t afford it any more” (Yes that is the excuse they have all used, Grayling, Cameron, IDS, Miller…….)

@34:Okay Paul, maybe the way you put it gave the wrong impression. Fair enough, but the point is, people like Sue are being forced into a position where they either, keep fighting to hold on to the money that they rely on, wish for a lottery win so they can tell the government to fuck off once and for all, or, the favoured outcome for the government, they drop any claim to the money, enabling the DWP to strike another one off the benefits bill. Multiply that by several hundred thousand and, KERCHING! A massive saving for the department, a pat on the back from Cameron and Osborne and the figures for benefit claimants tumble. The fact that all those people will be left to struggle financially, on top of dealing with whatever condition blights their lives, that becomes unimportant. If they do’nt appear on the official figures, they do’nt exist, therefore, they are not a problem that needs to be dealt with.

Sorry, that should read “ADDITIONAL 2 million” people (meaning 4 million in total)

@43 Whatabout whatabout whatabout…

Steven Hayes @ 39

My housemate is relatively right wing, but would be supportive of someone in OP’s position in general ( which I think is the position of the majority of people in this country), but as soon as he’d see her make a comparison to the Nazi’s or calling people like him ‘ Tory Scumbags’, he won’t be on your side anymore.

Then your housemate is a pretty nasty piece of work then, isn’t he? Are you saying that this person will look at Sue’s position, but will see her treatment by the government as justified because someone else hasused the term ‘Tory scumbag’ to describe the bastards that want to remove her from her house? What do you want to call these vermin? Nice people? Heh, no way, I call it as I see it. People who have done this are scum and there are no two ways about it.

Paul Newman @ 43

How do you feel about the vast amounts poured into the EU and International AID when we are unable to afford a decent old age for able bodied people , never mind your good self ?

What a horrible person you must think Sue is. Are you suggesting that because she suffers from a horrible illness, that she would turn into a nasty misanthrope as well? What kind of person would wish ill on other people just so that they could share the suffering?

This is why I despise the Tory people and use terms like ‘scum’ to describe them. Here is a woman driven to despair by a terrible disease and a spite driven Government and the ‘best’ the Tory scum can muster between them is to try and score political points and offer her a hate figure (or in this case, several) to scream at instead. You cunts never miss a trick, do you? You could never just condemn this action on its own terms, no, not the Tory Party, they have to turn this into an anti EU debate or a rant at the AID as well as an attack on public sector pensions.

Whatdo you people get out of this? Why has everything got to be about the EU, the public sector or the World’s poor? Is there nothing, nothing that you cunts can never attempt to turn into hate for someone else?

Here is something for you guys. Seeing as you and a few other Tories that infest the board are always whinging about how bad this Country is, why not hire a bus, get all you people in it, and drive off a cliff? Then it will be all over and you will have cheered us all up in process.

@ 45 Paul

“How do you feel about the vast amounts poured into the EU and International AID when we are unable to afford a decent old age for able bodied people , never mind your good self ?”

We get a huge amount out of being in the EU due to trade benefits alone. Given how unpopular it is, it would be odd for all three main parties to be pro-EU if they didn’t think it was worth the cost.

As for international aid… well, the issue there is that it’s often not what it claims to be. But in the case of aid that is actually meant to help the vulnerable (like our recent funding of vaccines), I don’t see what the problem is.

pagar, newman, bgb (etc):

You apparently didn’t like the safety net. So you campaigned against it. Your favourite newspapers waged a relentless campaign to convince the population that basically pretty much all the occupants of the safety net were feckless shit, malevolently running rings around hard-working Britons.

Newsflash: You’ve won. The benefits have been cut. To achieve this, the politicians you elected have implemented a system designed to indiscriminately deny as many people benefits as possible, regardless of need, in the hope that the weaker will give up and fuck off (much like Labour did with asylum seekers). The benefits which do get awarded will no longer cover the housing costs or the care costs completely, inevitably forcing ill people to work, live in illegal slums or beg on the streets. I don’t know if that’s what you really wanted, but sure as hell your leaders thought that was what you wanted, because that’s what they’ve just done.

Claiming there is still a “world class” safety net is damaging fantasy, when we have judges ruling on cases of totally blameless disabled people being required to sleep every night in soiled incontinence nappies because the Council can’t/won’t fund someone to help them use the toilet.

You did know the stuff in the papers about basically all the claimants being fraudulent feckless scroungers was actually propaganda by your own side to justify cutting the benefits for other reasons (i.e. reducing their taxes, and their donors’ taxes), didn’t you?

(addendum: Having read Paul Newman’s subsequent posts in more detail I want to say my criticism doesn’t really apply to him, apologies…)

@ 40 Sue Marsh + @25 Jim

I will only qualify if I regularly and “completely evacuate my bowels without control”

According to the The National Association for
Colitis and Crohn’s Disease, you can be found incapable of work if you suffer from a ‘severe uncontrolled or uncontrollable disease’ and Doctors are specifically advised in their Handbook that ‘severe inflammatory bowel disease (such as Crohn’s disease) which is poorly controlled medically’ falls into this category.”

Maybe you should press for that assessment…..?

Jim

Your portrayal of Tories and what motivates them is something I do not recognize.

I have been a Tory activist for many years and know personally around a third of the present cabinet. None of them (and particularly not IDS) want vulnerable people to suffer. Nor would they countenance the cynical approach you ascribe to them.

In any case…. as has been pointed out above…. the ATOS assessment scheme used up til now was designed by the last Labour government.

There are people in receipt of disability benefits who shouldn’t be.

Sue Marsh is clearly NOT one of them.

There are legitimate differences to be aired about how best to ensure a fair distribution of benefit money. But ranting about Tories all being evil really doesn’t help anyone.

Flowerpower is right on several counts. Labour DID put ESA and the ridiculous assessments in place and IDS (don’t thrown things at me lefties) probably does get it more than most. I still have hope that he is a reasonable man who gets these issues and will listen.

Also many thanks for checking with NACC – I’m touched.

(the problem is the assessors have no discretion, but it’s certainly something I’ll look into )

“You live in one of the most advanced states on the planet offering a free health service and one of the best safety nets for people unable to earn sufficient income to provide for themselves.”

The NHS is in the process of being privatised – with GP consortia being given the right to pick and choose patients and recategorise what constitutes NHS care, eligibility for prescriptions, etc.

The Employment and Support Allowance – the replacement for Incapacity Benefit – is to be time-limited to 12 months, irrespective of the level of disability. If you are paralysed from the neck down you will be ineligible after 12 months if your partner works. Of course, if your partner doesn’t work, you will be destitute anyway (a neat Catch-22).

As we have just seen, local authorities no longer have an obligation to provide care, even if it means the disabled person has to spend the night sitting in their own faeces.

By no stretch of the imagination could this be said to be ‘one of the best safety nets’.

The way this comment thread has been polarized as if there are two distinct groups of people – those born or destined to be disabled, and the able-bodied is ludicrous.
Chronic illness and disability can and will hit any of us at any time, and unless you are very wealthy, will wipe you out in a matter years if not months. It’s not a case of ‘them’ and ‘us’. As Melanie Reid, the Times journalist paralysed in a riding accident recently commented: “A year ago, as your average tolerant but ignorant able-bodied person, if you’d asked me whether enough was done for the disabled, I’d have said I thought society bent over backwards to help them. How naive was I.”

In introducing the welfare bill, Ian Duncan-Smith stated that genuinely disabled people had ‘nothing to fear’. He lied. Disabled people are justly fearful of these changes – which promise to deny many any chance of living outside of institutional care – ironically implemented by a Prime Minister who made political capital out of understanding the problems associated with living with severe disability.

@1 pagar

I am sorry you are unwell, but this is hysterical nonsense.

You live in one of the most advanced states on the planet offering a free health service and one of the best safety nets for people unable to earn sufficient income to provide for themselves. Despite this, you have the impertinence to describe government policies as akin to eugenics!!!!!

What arrogance dictates that your “human rights” are more important than those of the children currently starving in Ethiopia

Perhaps if you engaged your brain before deciding to commit you drivel to the comments section. You would have noted that the point she is making is that ‘safety net’ of which you speak is currently being dismantled, and possibly tens if not hundreds of thousands of ill or disabled people face having their support from the state withdrawn.

Oh is there any point trying to explain to them? Some of the comments, particularly Flowerpower’s @21 show such a vast ignorance of disability, sickness and benefits that they will probably have forgotten everything by the time the next Sue Marsh post comes along.

People have lost shelter, they have gone without food and without medical treatment as a result of welfare reform over the last decade which the Coalition has decided to accelerate. It’s an obscenity that no one will take responsibility for, embracing their ignorance as a shield from the harsh reality of it. It deserves punishment, not understanding or explanation.

Flowerpower @ 54

Your portrayal of Tories and what motivates them is something I do not recognize.

That says more about you than it does about the rest of them. You really need to look at what your own side are saying.

I have been a Tory activist for many years and know personally around a third of the present cabinet. None of them (and particularly not IDS) want vulnerable people to suffer. Nor would they countenance the cynical approach you ascribe to them.

Is it possible that you have become desensitised to them by now?

Fuck me! You seriously don’t believe this full frontal attack on the weakest members of society is going to help them, do you? You are not suggesting that frogmarching people out of homes they have lived in for twenty years will be a boon to them, or driving hopeless people onto already swollen job queues is helping them, do you? So what are we saying that sitting round the cabinet, some of the richest bastards in the Country think that ‘reclassifying’ a severely disabled person as ‘fit for work’ will cure him of his disease?

In any case…. as has been pointed out above…. the ATOS assessment scheme used up til now was designed by the last Labour government.

The Parliamentary Labour Party have their share of scum too, that goes without saying. However, I have NEVER heard either a voter or an activist condone this type of thing.

Sue Marsh is clearly NOT one of them.

Yes, I know that and so do you, but still it goes on. Your people are STILL kicking the lungs out of the weakest members of our society and taking great delight at it.

IDS merely has to say ‘this is wrong, clearly there are people who are getting shafted by these rules. Rules that Labour introduced, BTW and the Tory Party will now call a halt to a broken system’.

He could stand up and wave it under ED Millband’s nose and say, ‘this is ANOTHER one of your crap decisions’ and rip up in front of his face to the cheers of his backbenchers and an open mouthed Labour benches.

Not going to happen is it? Here is why. Labour introduced this policy in order to appeal to the vilest scum this Country has to offer, it didn’t work, but given that they vote Tory anyway, you could do it with a lot of screaming, but no loss of long term support.

Sue @ 39

From your description of your illness you should have no problem passing an assessment. Your friend, though, like my former workmate, proves that often quite badly disabled people can work.

As I understand it, the Labour government employed Atos to re-assess everyone on disability benefits because the UK has twice the percentage of people on these various benefits than any other EU country. Obviously it’s unlikely that we have twice as many but we might have fifty per cent spoiling it for genuine cases. So it seems entirely fair that cases are re-assessed and I can’t see why you would have a problem passing.

I can’t see why this is a political problem if Labour started it and The Coagulation is finishing it.

NW @ 61

Obviously it’s unlikely that we have twice as many but we might have fifty per cent spoiling it for genuine cases

In what way are they spoiling it? Surely if the system has passed them unfit work they are not fit? It is not a self certificate system, you do not simply announce you are unfit for work and away you go.

Jim @ 61

Oh come on! There are loads of people out there working the system. There are places with four times the UK national average on disability benefit. No way that they are all disabled and totally unable to work. If my old workmate (@ 23) and Sue’s friend can work with such massive problems there are a lot of people swinging the lead – especially in some areas of the UK.

But if you don’t mind paying taxes so some skivvers can watch daytime TV and give genuinely disabled people a bad name, that’s up to you. Me, I’m fed up with all these deadbeats taking my taxes while I’m working my arse off to make ends meet. Because that’s what it’s all about – our money. it’s not the government’s money; it’s our money.

@60-62 Norther Worker

As I understand it, the Labour government employed Atos to re-assess everyone on disability benefits because the UK has twice the percentage of people on these various benefits than any other EU country. Obviously it’s unlikely that we have twice as many but we might have fifty per cent spoiling it for genuine cases.

Actually the UK is only slightly above the OECD average in terms of people claiming disabillity benefits.

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/20/61/46462479.pdf

Oh come on! There are loads of people out there working the system.

Actually, according to the governments own estimates levels of fraud in the benefits system are actually quite low. About 1%.

http://liberalconspiracy.org/2010/08/10/1-the-real-extent-of-benefit-fraud/
http://liberalconspiracy.org/2010/10/23/the-dwp-suggests-osborne-is-exaggerating-benefit-fraud/

Northern Worker @ 62

There are places with four times the UK national average on disability benefit. No way that they are all disabled and totally unable to work.

So, unless you are working as a doctor, in what way are you able to assess whether or not the people in these places are totally unable to work.

If my old workmate (@ 23) and Sue’s friend can work with such massive problems

Yeah, well Stephen Hawkins has got motor Neurone disease as well, but I doubt that tells us about much in the way of most sufferers of that disease, does it. I mean if he can calculate the speed that a black hole expands, then surely stacking tins of beans on a shelf must be a piece of piss? No, it is difficult to draw sensible conclusions from a couple of anecdotes regarding a couple of individuals who happen to get jobs with whatever skill sets they have. Sue’s friend has became a CEO with a large charity, well good on him, but is it a sensible conclusion to draw from her story that everyone in a wheelchair could become the CEO of a charity? I will stick my neck out a second and say, no, not everyone can become the CEO of a charity, or anywhere like it either.

give genuinely disabled people a bad name

How so? We are not all mindless fuckwits who do not understand that disability can stop people working. They only people who think the disabled have a bad are pretty nasty people in my book.

Interesting stuff in the OECD paper like for the UK:

* Lately, the number of people of working age in the United Kingdom who receive disability benefitis slightly above the OECD average, at 7% compared to 5.7%
* Young people aged 20-34 are more than twice as likely to be on disability benefit, at 4% compared to an OECD average of 1.5%.

It also notes that our rate is nearly twice that of Portugal, Austria, Canda, Germany, New Zealand, Spain, France – and nearly three times that of Japan and Korea.

Yes there are 9 coutries worse than us but 21 better and some like those above with half the percentage of people of working age.

Do we really have such a large number of people (2.5 million, is it?) who are totally incapable of doing any kind of work? Forever? Do we really have such a large number of 20-34 year-olds totally incapable of doing any kind of job?

I’m going for a beer!

NW @ 66

Do we really have such a large number of people (2.5 million, is it?) who are totally incapable of doing any kind of work? Forever? Do we really have such a large number of 20-34 year-olds totally incapable of doing any kind of job?

Why is that surprising? What is the problem with that?

I know a youngish man, well my mother knows him better but I know him vaguely. He is a fit as a fiddle, built like the proverbial brickshithouse, as strong as an ox. Yet he has a learning disability and is totally incapable of following the most basic of tasks. Completely unable to kind his mind on anything. He has been sent on any number of placements and training schemes but he gets confused and when he is spoken to he gets upset and violent.

No one would give him a job because he is mentality incapable of doing anything. Nothing. I wouldn’t put him charge of goldfish. Now because he has ‘passed’ Atos he now ‘capable of work’. Nothing has changed he lacks the mental capacity to retain any information for longer than a few seconds. When his mother dies there will be no-one to look after him. He will either die of starvation, set himself on fire or end in jail. Passing him fit for work has not improved his mental capacity, so apart from benefits, what is he supposed to do?

I would love to work but sadly I’ve failed to find a single job offer.

OK I’m paraplegic or so they say, I have no bowel or bladder function, I use a catheter to pass water , I use drug to empty my bowel, but that only moves it down I have to then use a finger to actually empty the contents.

I have a large piece of mental in my spine 66 screws hold the plate and keep the two sections of bone together. I have two large plates in my legs, both of them.

I have had three disc removed, but the worse damage was to the nerves in my spine leaving me with never ending chronic pain, the pain is so severe it can cause fits, and I’ve had numerous fits over the years the last was was so severe I ended up with short and medium term memory loss.

I have damage to my neck and have three disc’s fused.

I have a small morphine pump implanted under the skin which delivers a dose of morphine to my spinal cord.

I’ve been deemed fit to work……but for ten years I have been part of the New deal, Pathways to work, and now workfare because I really do want to work, sadly whom ever takes me on it will not because I can do a job better then somebody who has no disability, it will be due to the employer feeling sorry for me, please do not say that’s rubbish I know my limitations and you sitting next to me for an hour you’d soon move as my bowel will leak a fluid which stinks hence I wear a nappy.

Disability is not nice when it’s serious , and a lot of people I know who have spinal cord injury are even worse then me.

problem for Sue she is political.

She loved to tell you this is the Tories, but in fact all of it is down to Labour Work capability assessment, it’s removed all mention of pain, all mention of walking or using walking aids, if you shit your self so long as you do it in your nappy then fine.

But sadly this is all about cutting benefits, I’ve been deemed fit to work, but I have not been asked to attend an interview, reason the job center knows already what I have done to find work.

In post 62, Norther Worker says ” Me, I’m fed up with all these deadbeats taking my taxes [...] Because that’s what it’s all about – our money. it’s not the government’s money; it’s our money.”

a fantasy idea is that if the govt makes “savings” on welfare expenditure, on behalf of “the taxpayer”, that this money will be released to ordinary taxpayers at some future time.

No, not a chance!
The Conservatives have commitments to reduce the tax paid by the richest, and therefore aim to make reductions in Inheritance Tax, 50p top-rate Income Tax, Corporation Tax and Capital Gains Tax.

Not all taxpayers are the same.
Not all taxpayers are in it together.

Conservative politicians are very careful to say that the “most disabled” and “most vulnerable” will be protected.
They mean literally the most vulnerable of the vulnerable and the most disabled of the disabled.
How small a percentage they have in mind, i do not know. But they surely know they are aiming to remove benefits from genuine claimants of welfare, in large numbers.

I’m half German in Germany my family have two people who are disabled both are working but both were given a job they did not look for it. My Uncle lost both his legs in the war when he stepped on a mine he is retired now but only just. His job was working for the local council, he was asked if he like to cut the grass on the playing fields parks and verges. He was given a machine which had hand controls that’s all he does he goes all over the area cutting Grass he has a chap that goes with him as his helper or carer, they have worked together for years.

My other cousin lost an arm and a leg in a motor bike accident, he now works 20 hours a week as a teacher , teaching people about disability in schools, he also works in the council offices as the disability officer.

But German has about the same number of disabled as we do, it also has a law in which any company that employs 2o people must employ two who are registered disabled, and it goes up 200 employee’s would mean twenty disabled people otherwise your fined 20 times the wages.

But when I spoke to my Uncle he said it’s almost impossible to get work if your disabled , because they have eight million disabled people. France has about the same regulation and again it’s problems are the same to many disabled people far to few jobs.

You can see in the other comment whats wrong with me, and the job center suggested I work for Avon selling perfumes door to door and they felt this was brilliant for me, then it was suggested I drive a tax, but hand controls for me cost about £9,000 and that’s to much for the government.

Also we were promised by labour that if you found a job and you needed money for special equipment or you needed a carer to work with you, or you needed help, oh yes it started out great after two years it was all removed.

Why the fuck would anyone want to employ me knowing the problems I have and the drugs I take when they can employ somebody who is fit and healthy thats the question

@65

It also notes that our rate is nearly twice that of Portugal, Austria, Canda, Germany, New Zealand, Spain, France – and nearly three times that of Japan and Korea.

What that actually means is that we have 3% more of our working population on disabillity benefits than Germany does. Hardy an outrageous difference.

Comparing with a radically different culture such as Japan is possibly not very illuminating. But you could also note that our rate is roughly the same, give or take a few percent as culurally/economically similar countries such as Ireland, Australia and the US.

In that case Rook why are people with cancer being told they are fit to work, the problem is the WCA work capability test anyone who goes through that would be deemed fit to work even if they died during the assessment

@68 rook

a fantasy idea is that if the govt makes “savings” on welfare expenditure, on behalf of “the taxpayer”,

No certainly not, I predict that one of the effects of these “reforms” will be a huge increase in the number of homeless among the newly “fit for work” especially among the mentally ill who cannot cope with the brutal terms required for claiming Jobseekers Allowance.

Any “savings” achieved from this will be swallowed up by massive increases in demand for other services, especially mental health and homelessness services.

And doubtlessly, knowing the tories and their scum friends they will then have a new helpless minority group to demonise, and will use this as an excuse for a ‘tough crackdown’ on the homeless.

Hi Sue,

What can I say. I completely support you and your brave efforts, You are incredibly brave to stand up and say something in the way that you do and I hope you are proud of yourself. There seems to be some assumption that because someone is disabled or ill and dependent on welfare it means that they should not speak out. Everyone’s voice whether they are dependent on welfare or not needs to be heard. The behaviour of many in these comments, of trying to get you to justify yourself to them, to disqualify you from having a voice is outrageous unless you can prove to them you are the deserving needy. You should be able to express your views without having to list your private personal needs, disability or illnesses for public viewing to be dissected. This is an attempt to silence you by intimidation and bullying.

Kevin

Some really naive/nasty people out there, you all need help. To the naive, flowerpower, you really need to spend more time with real people. You say you know around a third of the cabinet, would they be family friends, perhaps. I’m guessing you come from a nice family, very middle class and decent, but oblivious to the harshness of life on the other side of the tracks, also to the depths which ‘nice people in power’ will sink to, in order to keep that power. To Northern Worker and the rest of the ignorant, mean spirited troll community, please, keep those vile, ill-informed comments flying, I feel so good about myself everytime I read them, comfortable with the knowledge that, unlike you, I’ll never look in the mirror and see the empty shell of a human being that you see. Hate is a powerful emotion, use sparingly you sad, desperate fuckers.

19. Zoe

We are all fortunate not to be living in Ethiopa. But you and I are also fortunate not to have to rely on Government benefits due to our ill health and we should listen carefully to those who do without dismissing what they say with such ignorant arrogance.

No one is dismissing what anyone else is saying (except people like Jim of course) with anything much less arrogance. But to put a case sensibly means dropping the references to eugenics and other violations of Godwin’s law. It just does not make any sort of sense to do so. It invalidates SM’s case before she has even posted it.

That Sue can write of eugenics is symptomatic of how threatened many people with disabilities feel not just by the cuts, but by the invective of politicians and newspapers attacking scroungers on benefits and by the rise in attacks (verbal and physical) on disabled people that these have provoked.

Evidence of a rise in attacks on the disabled? That Sue can engage in such language has nothing to do with reality. If she is feeling threatened, it is because of the sort of language that she herself is bandying about – creating a climate of fear and panic. She, and everyone else, needs to dial it back a little. What invective? What is more an attack on cheats, even though such things do not happen in the British media, is not an attack on people with real medical issues. Any discussion must start with the recognition that the system is being massively abused. There is no sensible alternative.

Yes there are scroungers, but Sue isn’t one of them. And nor are the huge majority of benefit claimants.

The huge majority? I am not sure that is justified. But if it is so, there is nothing to worry about. The system is designed to weed out those who are not genuine. And given Britain has about twice the EU average for young people on Disability – a third of them claiming for mental health issues – there is clearly a lot of weeding to do. However there are appeals and processes. There is just no reason to think that the genuinely sick will be forced off benefits.

I am a taxpayer but do not consider myself to be as you put it “a benefactor” of the disabled nor do I consider “a few words of gratitude” necessary. I pay it because in a rich civilised society it is the duty of those that are fortunate to support those who are not. I also have a selfish reason – because one day my good fortune may fail and it might be me who needs help.

Sure. But it is also the duty of those that can work and get by without benefits to do so. This is a mutual set of obligations. We have an obligation to help those that need it, they have an obligation not only to work but to prepare themselves for work if they can’t work. Simply asking them to have a routine medical test every now and then to make sure they are still unable to work is not the end of the world and it does not deserve the sort of language used around here.

75. oxkev

You are incredibly brave to stand up and say something in the way that you do

I am curious – can you please explain to me what is brave about standing up and speaking out for the genuinely disabled? If you call that brave what would you call speaking out for the fakers? Or even for cutting benefits to anyone?

There seems to be some assumption that because someone is disabled or ill and dependent on welfare it means that they should not speak out. Everyone’s voice whether they are dependent on welfare or not needs to be heard.

Really? Where? Who? Who is questioning Sue’s right to speak? The fact that she is using emotional blackmail to demand money from the rest of us is a basic fact. It is not attacking her right to speak to point out that she is arguing for her own personal benefit – or that she would be much better off using more temperate language.

You should be able to express your views without having to list your private personal needs, disability or illnesses for public viewing to be dissected. This is an attempt to silence you by intimidation and bullying.

The only intimidation and bullying around here comes from people who throw terms like “fucking Tory scum” around. The point is that if the personal is political then the personal is political. If anyone argues they deserve my money because they are sick, then they open themselves up to a discussion of how sick they are. Just as any Tory who is photographed with his family, prattling on about Family Values who is then busted with a prostitute. She cannot make a claim about her needs and disability and then refuse to allow anyone to comment on it. If she does not want people to go there, she must not go there first.

76. blackwillow1

but oblivious to the harshness of life on the other side of the tracks, also to the depths which ‘nice people in power’ will sink to, in order to keep that power.

That seems an utter non sequitur. What has what people in power will do (and all evidence suggests next to nothing) got to do with it?

Hate is a powerful emotion, use sparingly you sad, desperate fuckers.

Yep. No hate there. Again we see the only bullying and intimidation here comes from your side of the argument.

71. Graham

What that actually means is that we have 3% more of our working population on disabillity benefits than Germany does. Hardy an outrageous difference.

Sorry but when it means that we have 6% of people on Disability and they have 3% it is an entirely outrageous difference. It is twice their rate. That suggests massive fraud. And it amounts to millions of people.

Comparing with a radically different culture such as Japan is possibly not very illuminating. But you could also note that our rate is roughly the same, give or take a few percent as culurally/economically similar countries such as Ireland, Australia and the US.

Possibly, or possibly not. It depends if you think there are cultural causes for things like depression. As, obviously, I do. In Britain if you don’t want to work, you find a compliant doctor and claim to be depressed. In Japan you can’t. A clear cultural difference. I am not sure there are cultural differences in the chances of losing a leg in an industrial accident, or even in getting schizophrenia. But you never know.

Sure. They have weak welfare policies. So do we. They have an underclass. So do we. This does not prove people are sick but that if we pay people to be sick, they will be sick.

@77 – Except for the clear evidence that genuinely needy people are being forced off benefits by the WCA, sure. Pesky evidence thingy!

Moreover, there are in-work benefits which apply to the disabled, your sick-bashing language of “get out there and work” is tabloid nonsense.

Too right Sue. However the Tories, because they are socially superior and/or born rule believe that if you are poor you deserve to be.

80. Leon Wolfson

Except for the clear evidence that genuinely needy people are being forced off benefits by the WCA, sure. Pesky evidence thingy!

If there is evidence, bring it forward. Notice that Sue has not been forced off anything yet. In fact the only thing there is evidence for is (1) massive numbers of people being removed from the welfare rolls or dropping their claims and (2) a relatively small number of people appealling and a smaller number of those winning.

Moreover, there are in-work benefits which apply to the disabled, your sick-bashing language of “get out there and work” is tabloid nonsense.

What sick-bashing language? Again we see the only intimidation and bullying is coming from the other side of this argument. Why are you all so threatened by the simple concept that people who are not genuinely sick ought to work?

Flowerpower

Hey look your little Nazi mate has joined the debate and look he has splashed his little Nazi propaganda around.

He is the real face of the scum that infest the Tory Party. Tell me what you agree and disagree with here? My guess that you people mostly agree with it, but you not evil, eh?

79
You appear to know the same about maths as you do about disability. Graham@71 stated that we have 3% more on disability than Germany, not that we have 50% more as you have inferred.

phew actually your all looking at people who get IB the 2.5 million, but this is only the group that gets the top benefits because they worked and paid NI.

The UK has ten million disabled people 8 million being be;low working age, these people have never worked and get paid income support.

Germany in total we are told if you use the same criteria of working and not working has the same number of disabled.

I’d love to see the ten million new jobs which will be made or in fact the 1.5 million jobs for people who are disabled.

they only take the data ever five to six years

According to this data in December 2005 there were 6,765 million persons living in Germany who were registered as severely disabled. They formed roughly 8,2% of the German resident population. Of this officially counted group 3,527 million (52,1%) were male, and 3,237 million (47,9%) were female (Statistisches Bundesamt 2007).
In contrast, in 2005 the already named household survey Microcensus counted the number of 8,6 million people with disabilities of which 1,9 million people were considered as mildly disabled (Pfaff/et al. 2005, p. 1268). The group of disabled people formed roughly 10% of the German resident population. More than half were male (54%). This survey also reveals that in 2005 the vast majority (6,4 million) of disabled persons in Germany did not participate in the working life. The participation quota of disabled men reached about 30% and the rate of disabled women amounted to 23% (Pfaff/et al. 2005, p. 1270). For a comparison a look at the performance of non-disabled people is helpful:

84. jojo

You appear to know the same about maths as you do about disability. Graham@71 stated that we have 3% more on disability than Germany, not that we have 50% more as you have inferred.

3% more of what? Not 3% more disabled people. What he said is:

71. Graham – “What that actually means is that we have 3% more of our working population on disabillity benefits than Germany does. Hardy an outrageous difference.”

3% of the total population. We have 3% more of the entire British people on Disability. How many people in Germany on Disability? About 3%. So we have about 6%. Twice as many. The problem with mathematics here is not mine.

72. Robert

In that case Rook why are people with cancer being told they are fit to work, the problem is the WCA work capability test anyone who goes through that would be deemed fit to work even if they died during the assessment

Some people with cancer are fit to work. I work with at least two people that to my knowledge have cancer. They don’t want to quit and they can still work. Do you have a single example of a dead person being deemed fit to work?

73. Graham

No certainly not, I predict that one of the effects of these “reforms” will be a huge increase in the number of homeless among the newly “fit for work” especially among the mentally ill who cannot cope with the brutal terms required for claiming Jobseekers Allowance.

Well let’s wait and see shall we? Because it is worth trying.

Any “savings” achieved from this will be swallowed up by massive increases in demand for other services, especially mental health and homelessness services.

Then we will need further reforms.

83. Jim

Hey look your little Nazi mate has joined the debate and look he has splashed his little Nazi propaganda around. He is the real face of the scum that infest the Tory Party. Tell me what you agree and disagree with here? My guess that you people mostly agree with it, but you not evil, eh?

Again Jim proves that the people who support these reforms are not the source of the hatred, the intimidation and the bullying around this issue. You all have a problem with rhetoric and argument as long as you sit passively and allow not merely the inflated rhetoric of the OP but also this sort of spittle-flecked rant in the comments to pass.

I’m actually shocked SMFS is still coming here after he jumped the shark in the last Sue Marsh thread. According to SMFS, treating the disabled with respect is well on the way to being an apologist for suicide bombers.
He should change his screen name to either Captain Troll or Massive Bellend, so we are fully warned as to the content of his posts prior to reading them.

I think it was honour killings, Cylux.

If we treat the disabled with dignity, then… “The next step is justifying honour killings because they offended someone’s dignity.” – So Much For Subtlety

What a cock.

@88 Aye, think ure right

People like SMFS are the only commentors who I think are genuinely threatening. The rest may be ignorant or genuinely wish to be informed or downright nasty. Actually that’s all fine, we all have our right to our opinion.

No, SMFS is far more sinister. He’s read many articles about the sick and disabled and he does not turn a blind eye or stick to his ignorance, he wilfully tries to lie, twist facts, ignore evidence and discredit me.

That is not fine. It is also exactly what the government do. I don’t mind people looking at the evidence and deciding they don’t care. But to lie about something so significant, to come back with counter-arguments that are inaccurate and not factual – well that is where the real danger lies for the sick and disabled at the moment.

It allows the undecided to think “Oh well, it’s OK, that guy on the comment thread explained it all, I can keep my blind eye turned.” They don’t know that he misleads them and has his own agenda (just as he accuses me of)

I don’t know if it’s political – is he really so desperate to support the coalition? Or is it idealogical? Ie he knows exactly what politicians are doing and doesn’t want me to expose it?

I’ve supported a party in government, so I know the temptation to try to be reassured when one ought not be, but when my party were disgustingly, totally, utterly wrong, I hope I allowed evidence to sway me.

No matter how many times SMFS is corrected, he persists. He’s now started following the Maria Miller line of accusing US of scare-mongering for accurately pointing out the consequences of policy. It reeks of passive-aggressiveness in an onslaught that is both persistent whilst denying it is happening and acting as if it is he and the government who have been wronged.

I re-iterate my point: this does not need explanation, it does not need understanding. I needs punishment.

Don’t sweat it Sue. There’s plenty to worry about, but nobbers like SMFS really aren’t worth your time.

He (I guess it’s a he but might be wrong) is just one of those dull-witted monomiacs whose only passion in life is Hating The The Left, and therefore reacts with spluttering outrage to anything and everything which sounds remotely left-wing. Such as “Hey let’s try to treat the sick with a little dignity”.

The only thing which marks SMFS out from a bog-standard internet troll is his appallingly tedious verbosity. Why limit yourself to a couple of ignorant, hateful sentences, when you can flood comment threads with paragraphs and paragraphs of shite?

So much for Subtley is a sadist.

He continuously lies about the sick (even though he’s been corrected time and time again and presented with the evidence that proves his lies to be false), with absoultely no credible evidence to back up his rhetoric, because he gets pleasure from causing other people pain, he enjoys the misery of the sick.

Because he enjoys the pain of others so much, he will be back again the next time there is a post on the sick and disabled reiterating the same rhetoric that he has been shown is untrue many times, and the same hate speech that has been comprehensively proven false, because his appetite for the pain of others is insatiable.

He’s the kind of individual who would have enjoyed working in a Nazi concentration camp.

87. Cylux

I’m actually shocked SMFS is still coming here after he jumped the shark in the last Sue Marsh thread. According to SMFS, treating the disabled with respect is well on the way to being an apologist for suicide bombers.

Umm, no I didn’t. Why are you so threatened by a civil discussion you need to lie about what I said??

88. Larry T

I think it was honour killings, Cylux. If we treat the disabled with dignity, then… “The next step is justifying honour killings because they offended someone’s dignity.” – So Much For Subtlety

So it was. You’re half right. It is not treating the disabled with dignity that is the problem. We should do that. It is asserting they have a right to be treated with dignity that is the problem. They do not have such a right. Nor should we grant anyone such a right. Or, as I said, pretty soon we will have to explain why that right is not extended to honour killers, who kill precisely because their dignity is offended and besmirched. We used to take dignity seriously. So much so that we ignored the fact that dueling is murder.

90. Sue Marsh

People like SMFS are the only commentors who I think are genuinely threatening. … No, SMFS is far more sinister. He’s read many articles about the sick and disabled and he does not turn a blind eye or stick to his ignorance, he wilfully tries to lie, twist facts, ignore evidence and discredit me.

I would ask where I have ever done this – or even tried to discredit you. But there is no point. Because we all know I have not done any of this. Otherwise you would have evidence and an argument. You don’t have either and so you’re forced to play the man and smear me. It is not very grown up. But it is an improvement on asserting that everyone is trying to send you up the chimney.

They don’t know that he misleads them and has his own agenda (just as he accuses me of)

What agenda would that be?

I don’t know if it’s political – is he really so desperate to support the coalition? Or is it idealogical? Ie he knows exactly what politicians are doing and doesn’t want me to expose it?

Ahh, I see. You don’t know I have an agenda. You just don’t want to deal with the actual arguments and so are forced to dream up some fantasy.

Again we see that the bullying and hatred and willful misrepresentation does not come from my side of the argument.

SMFS – If this were one thread I’d ignore you. If you ever made reasonable points, I’d agree with you. If you ever engaged in any real debate, I’d be happy to take part. If you hadn’t spread your misinformation many, many times before on many articles I would give you the benefit of the doubt, but anyone reading this one article won’t know that we’ve been here many times before.

Taking evidence and twisting it is not debating – you do that in every comment.
You try to discredit my arguments AND me not just here but on every article

Of course, just in this case, I can’t be specific as I am taking about your insidious desire to lie on all of the threads, about every comment. To distort, to discredit. Why, that was the question I asked you? Why do you feel the need to do it? Why would you devote so much time and energy to this? Can you not bear to think real wrong-doing is taking place? Is that the problem? Do you suffer from some kind of learning disability which means you cannot disseminate and digest information and hold it in your mind for more than a day or two? If that’s the case, then rest assured, I’m fighting for your disability to be treated with respect.

Is it like a Lab voter trying to defend Iraq in 1995? Is it just too painful to you to admit that the coalition are causing great suffering over this?

What makes you – someone who is clearly not a natural Libcon reader – pop up on every comment thread about sick and disabled people and spend hours trying to prove that every point we make is wrong when clearly that is not the case?

Ironic really. You criticise me for mentioning eugenics. Without the SS the Nazis would never have been able to carry out their terrible, terrible plans. Are you just the SS version of today’s government? Are you prepared to carry out any order to support your “tribe”?

Turn a blind eye my dear, turn a blind eye.

SMFS – I see you ask for a single example of someone dead found fit for work – although taht is clearly a sick and facetious question actually, yes in a way I do.

A man asked to go through all manner of degrading exercises dropped dead of a heart attack just after his assessment from the heart failure he was there for.

A letter arrived to the dead person’s relatives a few days later declaring him fit for work….

So SMFS thinks it important to repeatedly hammer home the point that The Sick Absolutely Have No Right Whatsoever To Be Treated With Dignity – as unpleasant an opinion as it is possible to imagine, and one he can only support with lobotomised and irrelevant comparisons to honour killings and duelling. FFS.

Yes, SMFS, because treating the sick with compassion is identical to murdering innocent people in cold blood! I see it now! Why has no-one had the insight to realise this before! Please may I express my deep gratitude to you, So Much For Subtlety, for opening my eyes to this realisation! Treating the sick with kindness and Murdering anyone who offends you… why, they’re practically the same thing!

Sue, other decent people on this thread.

Let us agree on one thing, whatever SMFS is, he is not unique in his beliefs. The difference is that he says what every Tory is thinking, albeit most are too astute to say it. Flowerpower and Tim J complain that we are always painting the Right as ‘evil’, yet here is a prime example of why we all think they are evil, but these mythical ‘decent’ Tories are posted missing and never challenge the cunt. Why?

Why does the Right never challenge this prick? The Tories normally rise as one when a fellow Tory mentions stronger ties with Europe or cuts in sentencing, yet here we have someone who describes the disabled as mostly scroungers, and silence abounds from these people?

Flowerpower says he knows a third of the current cabinet and things them to de ‘decent’ people, yet he cannot manage to condemn the crass statements. Doesn’t that tell us about the level of ‘morals’ you need to be considered decent among the vermin?

I think it’s important to address one piece of inadvertently skewed information here:

Flowerpot asked: “It strikes me that something has gone awry with her assessment ….. whether undertaken by the clowns at Atos or someone else.

Is ESA the appropriate benefit for her anyway?

Seems to me the new PIP thing would be more apt.”

It is entirely appropriate that Sue is on ESA, as that is the current out-of-work benefit for disabled people, with IB claimants being moved across by the reassessment process. The reassessment process, the WCA, has three potential outcomes, the first option is a decision that you are fit for work and should move on to JSA (which doesn’t mean you were swinging the lead, it means that society — in the person of the Labour Party under the Svengali-like influence of James Purnell –has decided to force a lot more disabled people to work), the second two outcomes accept your entitlement to ESA, but can decide that you are in no condition even to think about work and place you into the Support Group (where Sue really should be), or it can decide that you should be able to move back into the workforce at some point in the future and place you into the Work Related Activity Group, where you will be expected to do some agreed activity aimed at improving the hope of an eventual return to work (where the WCA criteria put Sue, no matter the severity of her illness — also where I am, in my case appropriately). To complicate the issue, time-limiting of ESA to 12 months will be imposed from next April, so if you get Contributions Related ESA (the one we all paid in for) and aren’t eligible for Income Related ESA due to a working partner (Sue’s situation) or savings (my situation) then you will get nothing at all after 12 months of benefit, even if any hope of return to the workforce is years in the future (as is likely the case for Sue and potentially the case for me).

Notice that I haven’t mentioned PIP yet, that’s because it is completely unrelated to work. PIP is the replacement for DLA, the benefit some disabled people receive to counter the extra costs of care or mobility caused by their disability, and which can run as little as £19.55 a week. DLA can be received if you are in work, out of work, or a child. DLA largely works, but the Tories propose to replace it en masse with PIP, because a complete replacement allows them to rule (by fiat, not by any medical or scientific assessment) that only 3 out of 4 DLA recipients will still get PIP.

And then there is Dilnot, or rather there isn’t. Dilnot may potentially address the care needs of some very disabled people who need full-time care, but for most of us it won’t have any significance, and even if it did preserve our savings, ESA time-limiting will simply swallow them anyway. There was a Dilnot graphic saying his proposals would mean someone with £40K in savings would pay only £9,000, a disabled person facing ESA time-limiting with the same amount of savings would be expected to pay £34,000, with a working partner they will never stop paying.

Why are you so threatened by a civil discussion you need to lie about what I said??

Why on earth would I wish to engage in a civil discussion with a massive chaffinch’s clunge? I suppose I should also have a nice chat with tea and biscuits with my local BNP candidate and the Blackpool Casuals as well? ffs

Sue brings up an excellent point and the more I think about it the more chilling it is. the history that has been taught for decades is that the Jews were the people most affected by the Nazis, that the Jews were the first people to suffer under than Nazis. But thats not true, I don’t want to take away what happened to the Jews however for decades disabled history has been ignored, brushed under the carpet. Its a false history. At school no one is told that “First they came for the disabled”. Its a denial, its chilling how history has been changed to ignore the plight of the disabled. Its why now governments are attacking us with impunity in a way they wouldn’t dare with another minority, its because the horrors visited upon us in the past have been airbrushed out of history. If history isn’t remembered, then its repeated.

@Peter Lockhart: ‘At school no one is told that “First they came for the disabled”.’

I think that it’s important we be accurate on this. Aktion T4, the extermination campaign against German disabled people did indeed start before the better known campaigns against Jews and gypsies etc (Aktion T4 dates to 1939 with some preliminary activity in 1938, while the Wannsee Conference systematizing the extermination of European Jews in Die Endoslosung was not until 1942, with less centralized atrocities starting after the invasion of Russia in 1941). However as disabled people we cannot claim to have been first because the systematic destruction of the German Left, communists, anarchists, socialists, began as soon as the Nazis were established in power in 1933/4.

While he did reference disabled people in early versions of his speech in 1946, which ultimately became the poem/prayer it is today, Niemoller identified us as second after the Communists:

“als das Konzentrationslager aufgemacht wurde, da schrieben wir 1933, und die damals in die Konzentrationslager kamen, waren Kommunisten. Wer hat sich darum gekümmert?[snip] Dann hat man die Kranken, die sogenannten Unheilbaren beseitigt. [snip]”

(When the Concentration Camps were opened we wrote 1933, and first in the camps were the Communists. Who cared about them? [snip] Then they got rid of the sick, the so-called incurables.[snip])

See http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/niem.htm#order

@ Pagar…..

Firstly, who are you to demand people tell YOU what is wrong with them?

Secondly, and sorry Sue, this is going away from your problem, but imagine Pagar if you can…living with ALL the following at once but getting denied any help from the government…..Though I doubt you can….

Hypophosphatemia (you’ll need to look up this life threatening condition because I doubt you’ll have heard of it, and no I dont drink either)!

Menieres Disease which causes constant and recurring vertigo and sickness attacks which last well over a day at a time and by the time one is settling down, another attack starts. Also throw into that mix a stomach problem which means that when you start beimng sick, you cannot stop, thus end up in hospital on drips because it’s so severe that you vomit blood up all the time. This lot usually happens at least once a week btw. Inbetween you are dizzy and can collapse due to bright lights, loud noises, bending down etc all making you unstable.

Osteo arthritis (the wear and tear kind that means no, I’m not lazy as many may state), deformed bones, ligamentous, fallen arches, tendon and muscular issues in BOTH legs AND feet!

Hypoglyceamia (low blood sugar attacks which make me collapse)!

HYPOtension (low blood pressure which again makes me collapse and go dizzier than usual).

ADHD (not that you’ll probably believe this one exists)
OCD
Sensory Processing Disorder
TS (the ticcy thing you probably also doubt)

Complete deafness in one ear.
Fibromyalgia (and is it any wonder?)
ME
Aspergers
and of course all of these cause immense Depression. Afterall if I was an animal I’d have been put down long ago.

Anyway, I’ve all the documents from my GP to back this up, and so do the nice? people at the DWP who of course dont think I am entitled to any kind of disability allowance at all.

A question to you…. Exactly HOW is this supporting me and enabling me to live a decent life?

IT’S NOT!

And to think….we are in a Country which is supposedly kind and supportive of it’s disabled and sick people!!!

It’s fucking sick to compare anything that is being done to try and balance the budget to nazism. This kind of delusional rubbish does more to hurt the left then any murdochite newspaper ever could.

@105. wrongmiliband

No Sir/Madame. what is sick is a government which has decided to systematically withdraw essential support to the sick, disabled and vunerable, and then publically demonise the said sick, disabled and vunerable to whip up public hatred against them.

@105

It’s fucking sick to compare anything that is being done to try and balance the budget to nazism.

Wasn’t balancing the books one of the major driving forces behind the rise of the Nazi party? It’s not like Germany was doing all that well economically during the Nazis rise to power.

Economic troubles were the main plank of the NAZI propoganda, “You are poor, because the jews have all the money, the streets are dirty because the gypsies and the slavs live on them. The jews will not pay their taxes, so we are unable to clean the streets”. That was the kind of message they pushed, tying the poverty of German nationals to the existence of non-Germans. The coalition are using the same tactic, substituting Jews, Slavs and Gypsies for benefit claimants, unemployed, disabled and the poor in general. The politics of hate are alive and well, nurtured by the detatched cabinet, promoted by the right wing media. History repeating itself, yet again.

As Adolf wrote in Mein Kampf: The great mass of people are more likely to fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.

@Wrongmiliband:

“It’s fucking sick to compare anything that is being done to try and balance the budget to nazism.”

Then can you name us another political initiative that has set out to systematically demonize disabled people in the name of saving the public purse, and then gone on to question whether disabled people are worthy of benefits at all? I can name precisely two examples, the first in Nazi Germany, the second in the UK starting under Labour and continuing under the Condems. If you can find another example, then please tell us, because then we can potentially use that and save ourselves from having to fight through reactions like yours that seek to deride us as ‘delusional’ because they lack the historical perspective to understand that the comparison is perfectly justified.

Here’s a couple of hints to help you in debating the matter: the first is that disabled people tend to be better informed about the history of their oppression than non-disabled (most of whom insist in never happens), so you might want to check facts before debating it with them; the second is that disabled people don’t find being ‘delusional’ any less worthy than being blind, paralysed, or whatever, but we are very good at spotting people who think that implying someone is disabled is some kind of put-down, and treating them with the contempt they deserve.

110. David G

I am not disabled, and hence obviously a very ignorant person as you point out, but even I can work out that comparing an admittedly harmful government benefit policy to the Nazis is shaky to say the least. It’s got something to do with whether you try to conquer the world and slaughter and enslave millions of human beings in the process, y’see.

Chaise,

I’m not comparing the Condems to the Nazis, I’m comparing one policy clearly operated by the Condems to one policy clearly operated by the Nazis and there are clear parallels that cannot be denied. No one is saying things will proceed to the horrors of Aktion T4* and the wider horrors of the Holocaust, but that there are clear parallels between what happened to disabled people before that, and what is happening now.

* Though current policies are already responsible for a handful of deaths, through the stress and neglect they inflict.

“I am not disabled, and hence obviously a very ignorant person as you point out”

There is no shame in being ignorant, only in refusing to learn. Note the way that disabled people have been attacked throughout this thread, accused of being ‘hysterical’ or ‘delusional’, all without the courtesy of first asking for a clarification or debating whether the parallels are valid. If the first resort of the other side in the debate is ad hominem attacks, then isn’t some education required?

What is the point in learning history if we don’t use what we have learnt.

The point is that the attacks on the disabled by the Nazi’s was a precursor to what they did later (and no I’m not saying that necessarily one will lead to the other). By responding now to the current unacceptable attacks on the disabled we are demonstrating that we can learn from history. We need to recognize that the attacks on the disabled is part of the creation of a harsher, meaner society where we are all atomized, pitted against each other for the crumbs off the table of the rich. Only by rejecting these attacks on our social safety net do we demonstrate that we learn from history, because if we do not, if we don’t put up a fight then everything will be taken, and every minority will be blamed for the consequences.

Kevin

“I’m not comparing the Condems to the Nazis, I’m comparing one policy clearly operated by the Condems to one policy clearly operated by the Nazis and there are clear parallels that cannot be denied. No one is saying things will proceed to the horrors of Aktion T4* and the wider horrors of the Holocaust, but that there are clear parallels between what happened to disabled people before that, and what is happening now.”

Comparing like for like is fine, of course. But when people just say that the Condems are acting “like the Nazis” or whatever, they’re making a completely unreasonable and frankly rather tasteless attack. Wrongmilliband said “It’s fucking sick to compare anything that is being done to try and balance the budget to nazism”… “nazism”, that is, not “a nazi policy”. And he/she is right as far as that goes.

“There is no shame in being ignorant, only in refusing to learn. Note the way that disabled people have been attacked throughout this thread, accused of being ‘hysterical’ or ‘delusional’, all without the courtesy of first asking for a clarification or debating whether the parallels are valid.”

I see people arguing, not disabled people being attacked. “Hysterical” and “delusional” are both common enough terms in conversations like these. I know that there are people who find the use of either of them as an insult to be offensive, but there’s absolutely no sign here that anyone is using them as a specific attack on the disabled.

To be honest – and I’m happy to be corrected on this – it does seem a bit like you’re claiming special debating rights by interpreting opinions you disagree with as “attacks on the disabled”.

“If the first resort of the other side in the debate is ad hominem attacks, then isn’t some education required?”

You ad hommed wrongmilliband, by implying heavily that he/she must be ignorant due to his/her demographic. He/she didn’t ad hom you or anyone else, at least at post 105 (“delusional” isn’t an ad hom when it’s used to describe a belief that is clearly detached from reality, e.g. “ConDems = Nazis”). It was you that resorted to these attacks.

“Comparing like for like is fine, of course. But when people just say that the Condems are acting “like the Nazis” or whatever, they’re making a completely unreasonable and frankly rather tasteless attack.”

But you’ve just accepted that this is an appropriate comparison! The only groups to have deliberately demonized disabled people in this way are the Nazis, the previous Labour Government and the current Condem one. And if they find being compared with the Nazis uncomfortable, then tough, because the comparison is factually valid.

“Wrongmilliband said “It’s fucking sick to compare anything that is being done to try and balance the budget to nazism”… “nazism”, that is, not “a nazi policy”. And he/she is right as far as that goes.”

I don’t agree that distinction is valid, or with Wrongmiliband’s point. The policy that Labour previously and now the Condems are following is deliberately disablist. Think about that, the government of our country is engaged in consciously scapegoating a minority. That’s morally equivalent to apartheid, to a government participating in active racism, homophobia or religious hatred. David Cameron, the prime minister of the country, stated on national news that he was sure right thinking people didn’t want benefits going to certain groups of disabled people – effectively he declared them 2nd class citizens, or to borrow another term, untermensch. The danger of Nazism, which was clearly demonstrated in its approach to disabled people, was that it deliberately set out to undermine the perception of the majority population that minority groups had equal rights to state support, by 1) active demonization, then 2) labelling them as untermensch and ultimately to 3) declaring them as outright enemies of the state, and the populace were sucked into that hatred by the gradual escalation. Disabled people have been fighting an identical progression in the UK under first Labour and now the Condems, and I would argue that Cameron’s tirade against people with disabilities causing addiction or obesity represented the transition into the second of those phases, and just as I forecast (http://wheresthebenefit.blogspot.com/2011/05/that-proverbial-bad-back.html and http://wheresthebenefit.blogspot.com/2011/06/another-poison-pen-letter-from-ids.html) it was rapidly followed by attacks singling out other groups of disabled people such as those with spinal problems (me for one), those who drive Motability vehicles, or those who happen to be Scottish.

“I see people arguing, not disabled people being attacked. “Hysterical” and “delusional” are both common enough terms in conversations like these. I know that there are people who find the use of either of them as an insult to be offensive, but there’s absolutely no sign here that anyone is using them as a specific attack on the disabled.”

I think they were both very much used with the intent of being offensive, and if they weren’t a specific attack on the disabled, then they were still an attack, and the second used a disablist insult. Most people might not recognise it as one, but calling attention to it is a deliberate strategy to make people think about the words they are using and the way society, whether consciously or unconsciously, regards disability as being somehow less, and uses that as an insult. Think of all of the racist or homophobic terms that used to be openly acceptable, but now aren’t, yet society still openly uses disablist terms as insults. Shouldn’t people be asked to think about that?

“To be honest – and I’m happy to be corrected on this – it does seem a bit like you’re claiming special debating rights by interpreting opinions you disagree with as “attacks on the disabled”.”

Try looking at the debate from our prespective. We are under weekly attack by the Tory rags, at the behest of the DWP, as scroungers and fraudsters, the benefits many of us depend on to survive are being slashed (ILF gone entirely, 1 in 4 DLA claimants to lose their benefits in the transition to PIP, worst affected group under housing benefit reform and benefit caps, and so on in the seemingly never-ending assault), we’re being shoved through a benefit reassessment process that is demonstrably designed to classify hundreds of thousands of disabled people as less disabled than they really are, and when we try and draw attention to it, we’re dismissed as ‘hysterical’, ‘delusional’, or (though it hasn’t cropped up here I know it’s been directed at both Sue, I and others in the past), the old classic of ‘bitter about our disability’. There’s a historical term I’d ask you to consider for an minute, ‘uppity n*gger’; that phrase was historically used to dismiss the rights of non-whites to have an opinion about their treatment by those whose interests were served by keeping them an oppressed minority, and when someone dismisses us as ‘bitter about our disability’, or ‘hysterical’, or ‘delusional’, then aren’t we seeing precisely the same process at work?

“You ad hommed wrongmilliband, by implying heavily that he/she must be ignorant due to his/her demographic. He/she didn’t ad hom you or anyone else, at least at post 105 (“delusional” isn’t an ad hom when it’s used to describe a belief that is clearly detached from reality, e.g. “ConDems = Nazis”). It was you that resorted to these attacks.”

As I and others have made clear, the comparison from Nazism is not detached from reality, the comparison is one that is accepted by very many disabled people, who in many cases are downright terrified by it, and the parallels in behaviour and progression are easily shown (see above), which means that I was being factually accurate in describing the views being expressed by wrongmiliband as ignorant of the historical facts. You’ll notice that they haven’t been able to answer my request for an example of a government other than the Nazis and the current and immediately past UK governments who have engaged in similar policies of calculated demonization of disabled people.

@ David

“But you’ve just accepted that this is an appropriate comparison!”

No, I used the very distinction you drew: the difference between comparing a current policy to a particular Nazi policy, and saying someone or something is like the Nazis. Hitler favoured a smoking ban, apparently, so you could compare our ban to his, but calling ASH and so on “Nazis” on that basis would be ridiculous. A callous attitude towards the disabled is closer, but it’s still unreasonable to use that to equivocate the ConDems with a group that murdered millions of people.

“The only groups to have deliberately demonized disabled people in this way are the Nazis, the previous Labour Government and the current Condem one.”

You’re kidding. The disabled have been treated like shit through huge parts of recorded history. Didn’t the Victorians used to throw disabled people into madhouses and laugh at them? And people with certain disabilities would definitely have been singled out, demonised and possibly killed by puritanical groups – how long do you think a schizophrenic would last if a witchfinder came to town?

“And if they find being compared with the Nazis uncomfortable, then tough, because the comparison is factually valid.”

I like sugar. Most Nazis liked sugar. So it’s factually valid to compare me to the Nazis. It’s just also unreasonable and insulting.

“I don’t agree that distinction is valid, or with Wrongmiliband’s point. The policy that Labour previously and now the Condems are following is deliberately disablist. [Cut to save space]”

Agreed.

“I think they were both very much used with the intent of being offensive, and if they weren’t a specific attack on the disabled, then they were still an attack, and the second used a disablist insult.”

I’m really not sure “delusional” counts as disablist, y’know. “Delusion” has meanings beyond the strict medical one; it also refers to a belief that is detached from reality. In that sense, it was used quite fairly. The fact that some people declare a word is bigoted does not automatically make everyone who uses it into a bigot. You don’t get to cancel out all the other meanings of the word, you simply don’t have that authority over the English language.

“Think of all of the racist or homophobic terms that used to be openly acceptable, but now aren’t, yet society still openly uses disablist terms as insults. Shouldn’t people be asked to think about that?”

Difference being that these were either used as direct attacks on people in that group, or were coined as attacks on that group.

“Try looking at the debate from our prespective….”

I sympathise with the shit disabled people are going through at the moment, but that doesn’t actually justify making unfair accusations against other people.

“There’s a historical term I’d ask you to consider for an minute, ‘uppity n*gger’; that phrase was historically used to dismiss the rights of non-whites to have an opinion about their treatment by those whose interests were served by keeping them an oppressed minority, and when someone dismisses us as ‘bitter about our disability’, or ‘hysterical’, or ‘delusional’, then aren’t we seeing precisely the same process at work?”

The one about being bitter, yes. The other ones, no. I’m not disabled, and I sometimes get called “hysterical” or “delusional”. This is what I mean by claiming special debating rights – you seem to think that normal insults become bigoted the moment they’re pointed at a disabled person (after all, it would be a real stretch to claim that “hysterical” was inherently disablist).

The resulting logic being that you can’t insult (or even criticise) a disabled person without being a bigot. Which is ridiculous. It’s a cheap trick that seeks to mark yourself as part of a group that is beyond reproach – and demonise as “bigoted” anyone who argues with you.

“As I and others have made clear…”

None of that (the last part of your post) addresses my point that you’re throwing ad homs around.

I know a disabled man, he struggles to walk.
He drags his left foot and he ca’nt really talk.
I once felt sympathy for this man, ’til I found out,
He’s a Stoke Citry fan! TWAT!

“No, I used the very distinction you drew: the difference between comparing a current policy to a particular Nazi policy, and saying someone or something is like the Nazis.”

Let me try a different tack. The policy we’re looking at is deliberate demonization of disabled people at the national level in order to justify slashing state support. To my knowledge there are three groups who have done this, 1) the Nazi party, 2) the previous Labour government, 3) the current Condem government. 2) and 3) have operated a policy like that of 1) in a similar fashion to 1) therefore they have behaved like the Nazis. That is not the same as saying that they have behaved identically to the Nazis in all respects, simply that they have behaved identically to the Nazis in this one very specific respect. And if the only parallel for your behaviour is the Nazis, then that may be unpleasant and reflect badly on you, but it doesn’t stop it being a parallel.

“You’re kidding. The disabled have been treated like shit through huge parts of recorded history.”

Indeed, but I wasn’t talking about generalised discrimination against disabled people, I was talking about the very specific mechanism of a policy of deliberate demonisation of disabled people operating at the national level, that was why I very deliberately said “in this way”. As I said to wrongmiliband, if you can find another example of that then please tell me, because I would really like to be able to talk about the fact that there are historical parallels to current policy, and how bad they are, without people losing track because they are horrified by the idea that something might be best compared to Nazism.

“The one about being bitter, yes. The other ones, no.”

You’re ignoring context, the statements were specifically made to contemptuously dismiss a disabled person’s argument about the situation she finds herself in as a result of her disability, from my perspective that’s a direct equivalent of dismissing Sue as an ‘uppity n*gger’. No one is trying to claim that all criticism of a disabled person is disablist, but some clearly is, and the view of a disabled person may legitimately be different to the view of a non-disabled person. There was a time I wasn’t disabled and some of the things I said or thought about disability back then, without ever conciously intending to be disablist, now make me cringe in horror and embarrassment.

@ 118 David G

“Let me try a different tack. The policy we’re looking at is deliberate demonization of disabled people at the national level in order to justify slashing state support. To my knowledge there are three groups who have done this, 1) the Nazi party, 2) the previous Labour government, 3) the current Condem government.”

This is irrelevant: if it was fair to say that the ConDems are like the Nazis based on their policies, that would be true regardless whether zero or 1,000,000 other groups had used similar policies.

“2) and 3) have operated a policy like that of 1) in a similar fashion to 1) therefore they have behaved like the Nazis. That is not the same as saying that they have behaved identically to the Nazis in all respects, simply that they have behaved identically to the Nazis in this one very specific respect. And if the only parallel for your behaviour is the Nazis, then that may be unpleasant and reflect badly on you, but it doesn’t stop it being a parallel.”

The problem is that calling someone a Nazi, or even saying that they’re “like the Nazis”, carries a lot of baggage: racism and homophobia alongside disablism, not to mention genocide.

People who call other people Nazis are aware of this, which is why they use technicalities to justify using the term – like you’re doing now. If you didn’t want to smear the ConDems with that baggage, you wouldn’t call them Nazis – and if calling them Nazis didn’t smear them with that baggage, nobody would object.

As I said before, I don’t mind the factual comparisons, it’s the name-calling that I find unreasonable. Do you see anyone, yourself aside, saying “the ConDems are like Nazis in one specific respect!”? No, they’re saying “the ConDems are like Nazis!” That’s the problem.

“Indeed, but I wasn’t talking about generalised discrimination against disabled people, I was talking about the very specific mechanism of a policy of deliberate demonisation of disabled people operating at the national level, that was why I very deliberately said “in this way”. As I said to wrongmiliband, if you can find another example of that then please tell me”

I just did – witchfinding, which I believe was authorized by Cromwell when he was Lord Protector. Witchfinders demonized people with physical or mental disabilities, and had them executed. I imagine the Spanish and Italian inquisition were similar, although my knowledge of those is scanty.

“because I would really like to be able to talk about the fact that there are historical parallels to current policy, and how bad they are, without people losing track because they are horrified by the idea that something might be best compared to Nazism.”

If you don’t want people to be sidetracked, don’t go calling them Nazis at the drop of a hat. Sorry, but if you insist on shit-stirring you can’t then complain about how stirred up the shit is.

“You’re ignoring context, the statements were specifically made to contemptuously dismiss a disabled person’s argument about the situation she finds herself in as a result of her disability, from my perspective that’s a direct equivalent of dismissing Sue as an ‘uppity n*gger’. No one is trying to claim that all criticism of a disabled person is disablist, but some clearly is, and the view of a disabled person may legitimately be different to the view of a non-disabled person.”

So… wrongmilliband’s disablist for arguing with a disabled person, but you don’t claim all criticism of disabled people is disablist? I think you’re trying to have your cake and eat it.

The “context” of which you speak is exactly what I was talking about – you’re labelling him disablist for arguing with a disablist person. That’s bigotry on your behalf, frankly, not wrongmilliband’s. And as I said before, it’s a bullying tactic that’s contrary to a sensible debate.

“There was a time I wasn’t disabled and some of the things I said or thought about disability back then, without ever conciously intending to be disablist, now make me cringe in horror and embarrassment.”

Are we to judge all non-disabled people by the standards of your former self? And if not, why is this relevant? Of course a disabled person might have a different POV from a non-disabled person, but that doesn’t make them right by default, or give you the right to stick unpleasant and unfair labels on anyone who dares disagree with them.

I imagine the Spanish and Italian inquisition were similar, although my knowledge of those is scanty.

Not really – they were concerned with doctrinal purity (or Judaism) so they would actually ignore those who were just odd and focus on those who harboured heretical views.

Witchhunting at an organised level is pretty well a Protestant thing in European history (at local levels it has always been a problem). The reformation hardly led to lovely benign churches.

>> This is irrelevant: <> People who call other people Nazis are aware of this, which is why they use technicalities to justify using the term <> If you didn’t want to smear the ConDems with that baggage, you wouldn’t call them Nazis <> As I said before, I don’t mind the factual comparisons, it’s the name-calling that I find unreasonable. <<

There is precisely one historic parallel for currently policies that I can find, and that was a policy of the NSDAP. Who else can I compare them to but the Nazis?

"I just did – witchfinding, which I believe was authorized by Cromwell when he was Lord Protector. Witchfinders demonized people with physical or mental disabilities, and had them executed. I imagine the Spanish and Italian inquisition were similar, although my knowledge of those is scanty."

You're suggesting that people are going to react better if I compare government policies to the Spanish Inquisition than to the Nazis? (Never mind the inevitable descent into sub-Pythonesque 'humour').

I don't think the witchfinding parallel works, the Burning Times in England was never really a systematic process and it is near universally seen as an assault on old women, rather than disabled people. The Spanish Inquisition as it's usually understood was more systematic in its approach to finding victims, but again it isn't perceived as an assault on disabled people, and it jumped straight to direct attacks on its victims; as if Germany had invoked Aktion T4 without any build-up, yet the comparison we're trying to make is to the period before that when disabled people were being demonised by the German state, but not actually directly assaulted by it. There is actually a more valid parallel tied into the Spanish Inquisition, related to the way that it systematically mistreated the Moriscos (Moors who had been forced to Christianise), but again it isn't an assault on disabled people and similar issues apply to the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars and the Northern Crusades against the Baltic Pagans. We need three things from a parallel, 1) that it be directed against disabled people, 2) that it set out to deliberately demonise them, and 3) that it be a policy of government and systematically applied on a national basis. None of your suggestions meet all three requirements. (And none of this will stop other disabled people introducing the parallel with Nazi Germany into the debate).

"If you don’t want people to be sidetracked, don’t go calling them Nazis at the drop of a hat"

I didn't, and I try not to, much as I would like to be able to use the parallel, because I recognise that other people have troubled understanding that the comparison is legitimate, but other disabled people frequently do introduce it, which is perfectly reasonable as it is a point of view widely held within the disabled community. Once the point is introduced, the sidetracking has already happened, and we have to defend it and demonstrate that we aren't being outrageous, or face _all_ of our points being dismissed by people who don't see the parallel.

"The “context” of which you speak is exactly what I was talking about – you’re labelling him disablist for arguing with a disablist person."

No, I'm labelling his expressed opinion disablist because of the way he dismissed the rights of several disabled people to hold an opinion about their situation that differs from his own, which in my opinion if one of the most egregious forms of disablism, and did it in a particularly offensive manner. If he'd disagreed and presented a reasoned argument about why he disagreed then I would have responded in kind – consider the discussion we're having. If he turned around and agreed that his point was expressed in a particularly unfortunate manner, then I would congratulate him on having the flexibility of mind to recognise when he was wrong.

"That’s bigotry on your behalf, frankly, not wrongmilliband’s. And as I said before, it’s a bullying tactic that’s contrary to a sensible debate"

Let's remind ourselves what wrongmiliband said: "It’s fucking sick to compare anything that is being done to try and balance the budget to nazism. This kind of delusional rubbish…" And I'm the bigot and the bully?

"Are we to judge all non-disabled people by the standards of your former self?"

Why not? As far as I can see DavidG-pre-disability was reasonably enlightened in comparison to most non-disabled people I encounter now, I've always tried not to offend people without cause, I just didn't understand disability very well and occasionally stuck my foot in my mouth without recognising it. Whereas a lot of people I encounter are actively disablist, or at best patronisingly dismissive (c.f. the near universal referrals to disabled people as 'brave').

"that doesn't give you the right to stick unpleasant and unfair labels on anyone who dares disagree with them."

So effectively you're saying I don't have the right to find someone else's behaviour objectionable? Or that you can decide what I am allowed to find objectionable, even if you don't understand why there might be a problem with it? I'm sure you will insist that isn't what you are saying at all and I don't even necessarily believe you think that, but I'm not sure you really appreciate the logical problem in what you're saying. What happens if my point of view is fair, and you simply lack the perspective to understand that? Am I being unreasonable? Or are you? How do we resolve that situation?

@ David

“There is precisely one historic parallel for currently policies that I can find, and that was a policy of the NSDAP. Who else can I compare them to but the Nazis?”

Jesus, man, I’ve made the same point about six times now and you keep ignoring it. It’s not the factual comparison I object to, it’s the use of that mild factual similarity to claim ones opponents are “like the Nazis”. It’s generalising unfairly from the specific. If you’re going to keep pretending I haven’t said that then we’re wasting our time here.

“You’re suggesting that people are going to react better if I compare government policies to the Spanish Inquisition than to the Nazis?”

Um, no. I don’t see why another example of instiutionalised disablism is relevant to this conversation at all. I only provided one because you thought it was important. Any implications of that are drawn by you, not me.

“I don’t think the witchfinding parallel works [...] the Burning Times in England was never really a systematic process and it is near universally seen as an assault on old women, rather than disabled people [...]”

The fact that literature tends to portray it along gender lines doesn’t change the fact that it was an attack on the disabled. The Holocaust is primarily seen as an attack on Jews; does that mean that the non-Jewish disabled victims don’t “count”?

“We need three things from a parallel, 1) that it be directed against disabled people, 2) that it set out to deliberately demonise them, and 3) that it be a policy of government and systematically applied on a national basis. None of your suggestions meet all three requirements. (And none of this will stop other disabled people introducing the parallel with Nazi Germany into the debate).”

That’s because you’ve changed your requirements from “the very specific mechanism of a policy of deliberate demonisation of disabled people operating at the national level”, which is what you originally asked for.

Like I said before, I don’t see why it matters whether or not other groups systematically demonised the disabled, but I do know when someone’s playing No True Scotsman.

“I didn’t, and I try not to”

You’re defending the people who do.

“much as I would like to be able to use the parallel, because I recognise that other people have troubled understanding that the comparison is legitimate”

Don’t insult the intelligence of people just because they disagree with you. The reason people have trouble ACCEPTING that the comparison is legitimate is that the comparison as usually presented (“You’re a bunch of Nazi scum!” or similar) isn’t legitimate. The people you are defending have presented a bad argument, other people have rightly condemned it, and now you’re patronising those people for allegedly failing to understand a totally different argument.

“but other disabled people frequently do introduce it, which is perfectly reasonable as it is a point of view widely held within the disabled community.”

Say what? “Black people are lazy” is a point of view widely held within the white racist community. Does that mean I have to accept it as “reasonable” if a racist says it? The fact that someone is accurately reporting their opinion does not give their opinion any extra weight.

“Once the point is introduced, the sidetracking has already happened, and we have to defend it and demonstrate that we aren’t being outrageous, or face _all_ of our points being dismissed by people who don’t see the parallel.”

In other words, you’re knowingly defending an argument regardless of whether it’s valid, because otherwise you feel you’ll “lose”?

“No, I’m labelling his expressed opinion disablist because of the way he dismissed the rights of several disabled people to hold an opinion about their situation that differs from his own, which in my opinion if one of the most egregious forms of disablism, and did it in a particularly offensive manner.”

Please show me where he said that these disabled people were not entitled to an opinion.

“If he’d disagreed and presented a reasoned argument about why he disagreed then I would have responded in kind – consider the discussion we’re having. If he turned around and agreed that his point was expressed in a particularly unfortunate manner, then I would congratulate him on having the flexibility of mind to recognise when he was wrong.”

I suspect he snapped because people are forever calling each other Nazis on the internet, and it’s extremely childish and annoying. And he doesn’t have to admit wrongdoing when he hasn’t done anything wrong.

“Let’s remind ourselves what wrongmiliband said: “It’s fucking sick to compare anything that is being done to try and balance the budget to nazism. This kind of delusional rubbish…” And I’m the bigot and the bully?”

You’re trying to unfairly shame someone into silence by falsely accusing them of disablism, and you’ve already insinuated that they are ignorant due to their demographic. So yes, you are the bigot and the bully within this conversation.

“Why not? As far as I can see DavidG-pre-disability was reasonably enlightened in comparison to most non-disabled people I encounter now, I’ve always tried not to offend people without cause, I just didn’t understand disability very well and occasionally stuck my foot in my mouth without recognising it.”

So what? Other people may be more enlightened. You don’t represent the entire human race, so I’m not prepared to accept an image of non-disabled people that is purely extrapolated from your non-disabled self.

“Whereas a lot of people I encounter are actively disablist, or at best patronisingly dismissive (c.f. the near universal referrals to disabled people as ‘brave’). ”

I agree about the patronising nature of “brave” etc, but I don’t trust your description of people as “disablist” when I’ve already seen you use the term as an unjustified attack on someone who you disagreed with.

“So effectively you’re saying I don’t have the right to find someone else’s behaviour objectionable? Or that you can decide what I am allowed to find objectionable, even if you don’t understand why there might be a problem with it? I’m sure you will insist that isn’t what you are saying at all and I don’t even necessarily believe you think that, but I’m not sure you really appreciate the logical problem in what you’re saying.”

Funny how you complain about people being patronising when you’re very happy to patronise other people! But no, the problem is that you took me out of context. My quote in full:

“Of course a disabled person might have a different POV from a non-disabled person, but that doesn’t make them right by default, or give you the right to stick unpleasant and unfair labels on anyone who dares disagree with them.”

If you hadn’t gone out of your way to misinterpret that in the worst possible light, you might have realised that what I was saying was that, when a disabled person disagrees with a non-disabled person on a subject that involves disability, that neither a) means the disabled person is automatically right or b) indicates that the non-disabled person is a bigot.

Basically, claiming that disabled people have some kind of special authority is an ad hom. If your opponent is wrong, prove him so with facts and logic, not by attempting to “pull rank”. Again, you complained about ad homs earlier, so it’s a bit weird that you’re now sticking up for them.

“What happens if my point of view is fair, and you simply lack the perspective to understand that? Am I being unreasonable? Or are you? How do we resolve that situation?”

For that matter, what if we’re living in the Matrix and “disabled” and “non-disabled” are just concepts invented by the Machines? It is EXTREMELY annoying when someone earnestly debates a point with you for ages, then suddenly tries to force a stalemate by pointing out that neither of you can absolutely prove that they are in the right.