THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO

Council Abandons Sister

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The family of a woman who can hardly walk unaided claims she has been abandoned by Basildon Council.

Emma Avis, 37, has lived in a first floor flat in Landermere, Basildon, Essex for the past 20 years. She suffers from heart disease, lung disease, arthritis and systemic sclerosis, meaning she can barely walk unaided and suffers unrelenting fatigue.

Despite this, she still has to climb the stairs to her flat each day, resulting in her family having to take time off work to care for her and help her move around, and her sister, Marie Avis, said that despite being on Basildon Council’s letter scheme to get her into a new home, she’s been continually let down and abandoned.

Her sister’s condition means she can barely take a few steps before nearly collapsing, and she’s been in the same flat for 20 years and her health has really declined over the past six years, and she’s so desperate to be moved into a new home but the council simply don’t want to know.

And every time they contact the council, they simply brush them off, and there is never anywhere suitable for her when they put places on offer, and it’s a total disgrace, and when Emma goes into hospital, the family never know for sure if she’s going to make it, and the council have done nothing to support them whatsoever.

A Basildon Council spokesperson said: “Ms Avis has been assessed by our medical officer and awarded extra priority to find a suitable property to meet her needs.

“We operate a choice-based lettings scheme to give our residents the opportunity to choose which properties they are interested in.

“Ms Avis has an active housing application which means she is able to bid on advertised properties that would meet her needs each week.

“A further option available is a mutual exchange where our tenancy and resettlement team can offer help and advice and free membership at homeswapper.co.uk or houseexchange.org.uk.”

Sadly the reality is that with the majority of council properties now sold off, there are precious few properties still in council ownership, and those people with differing levels of need just have to wait.

Of course, it’s not fair if people buy council properties and new ones aren’t built, and because of this, availability is going to be seriously limited, and what was good for one set of people has left future generations needing social housing, and that has made things a lot worse off.

Of course, the answer is that council houses should have never been sold off, and more homes need to be built and to never let them be sold off again, but unfortunately councillors are more interested in vainglorious pie in the sky projects, selling off as much green space as they can to their best buddies Redrow and Bellway, and too preoccupied with calling each other names on social media, and backstabbing and trying to undermine whichever party have control of the council at any one time to actually get off their backsides and do something beneficial for people like this poor woman.

Golden Visa Scandal

Cunning brokers are helping wealthy foreigners to get British residency without exposing the complete source of their wealth, as two men in open shirts and business jackets were in sober conversation at a corner table of a Savoy hotel’s American bar talking about a somewhat delicate matter.

Alexander Wade, the founder of Knightsbridge Wealth, was listening closely to the Hong Kong executive who was soliciting his help to get a tier 1 investor visa, known as a golden visa, that would allow his wealthy Russian uncle to gain residency in Britain.

There was a catch, however: the uncle had a chequered history, with powerful connections to the Kremlin that might trigger an alarm in the Home Office if it became known.

“I’m telling you this in confidence,” said the Hong Kong executive. “ My uncle has close ties with [Vladimir] Putin’s inner circle, helped them move their assets overseas years ago . . . They don’t want the history to come out. Could you manage to get them across the line?”

The uncle also had business deals with his country’s government which was subject to international penalties and had been accused of corruption and killing political opponents. So the money the uncle would have to invest in the United Kingdom for his golden visa might be tainted.

Home Office rules require applicants for golden visas to flag up anything that calls into question their moral integrity and requires them to disclose whether they have been involved in activities on behalf of a foreign government that might harm Britain’s interests or safety.

But the Kremlin connection did not daunt Wade, and over the course of many discussions, Wade revealed that a fundamental part of the process would be a letter from his firm regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority explaining the uncle’s source of wealth.

It would further require proof that the uncle had opened a bank account in the United Kingdom, and Wade knew a good guy at a small financial firm who could help, and he warned the Hong Kong executive not to talk too much about the Moscow connections and would assist him to produce a description of the uncle’s business history that would circumvent awkward Kremlin connections.

His comments about the Home Office’s carelessness would be repeated in another meeting between the Hong Kong executive and another golden visa specialist, Houman Mehr of the immigration firm Westkin Associates, who was also recommending a small firm he knew to handle the bank account.

Once the account had been opened, he said, the Home Office would not turn down the application. “If you get past these guys [the investment funds], then getting past the government is easy-peasy . . . There’s not a financial team at the Home Office. These guys are like they’ve just finished school like they might have got a couple of A-levels.”

What Wade or Mehr didn’t know was that the Hong Kong executive was an undercover reporter working for The Sunday Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches programme as part of an investigation into how foreign millionaires are able to buy UK citizenship while concealing their dubious sources of wealth.

Investigations discovered that the Home Office relied on a group of immigration middlemen who were able to advise the fictional golden visa applicants on how they could evade disclosing delicate information about their wealth.

They bragged about helping a parade of foreign tycoons enter the country, and on occasion ridiculed the Home Office for its ineptitude in policing the system, and some claimed to have a faultless record in getting visas for clients, even though a few had been from rogue regimes with colourful pasts.

More than 11,000 people have entered the United Kingdom since the golden visa scheme was launched in 2008, and current rules state applicants have to demonstrate that they’re worth at least £2 million and promise to invest that amount in British businesses, amongst other checks.

If they keep their money invested for five years, they get an indefinite leave to remain and can apply for a UK passport as a citizen a year later, but campaign groups such as Transparency International UK and Global Witness have long been critics of the scheme, claiming that it has allowed fraudulent people to obtain residency with tainted money and to launder their ill-gotten gain.

The system has been reprimanded for allowing Russian oligarchs close to the Putin regime to gain citizenship, particularly following the Salisbury poisoning attack by the country’s agents, and during the three-month investigation, firms were approached with years of expertise in investors visas. Knightsbridge Wealth, Westkin Associates, Quastels and Fragomen, and posing as a Hong Kong-based executive called Qihua Huang who was trying to obtain residency in the United Kingdom for members of his family in both Russia and China.

In each case, the undercover reporter made it clear that his family had sensitive political and business connections and therefore sought to suppress the full picture underlying their wealth, contrary to what is expected under the investor visa scheme.

In an initial call to Wade, the latter made clear that it would not be necessary to give a full description of the undercover reporter’s family member’s financial history. “I’m used to working with people who can’t divulge everything and we’ll find a way around it,” he said.

He had got visas for many controversial clients, including a member of the Gadaffi family and one from Eritrea whose case took only three days, despite the red flags about his background. “I don’t know much about Eritrea, but if you google it, it’s probably the highest corruption in the world,” said Wade.

“But it was actually worse than that: it’s an Eritrean living in Dubai . . . the British are very suspicious of Dubai as a country that helps money-laundering. So there was an Eritrean living in Dubai, but all the business, all the money, comes from their business interests in Angola. So that was a really interesting one. And Angola, it’s just arms.”

Mehr was also accommodating when the reporter told him he wanted discretion, and as head of Westkin’s business immigration department, he has completed 15 to 20 investor visa applications and charges £10,000 for the service.

When they met in a private room at the Savoy, the reporter explained that his Russian uncle had a property business but had made his money moving the wealth of Putin’s inner circle overseas. “He doesn’t want to divulge the source of his funding,” said the reporter.

Mehr was quick to suggest an easy way around the problem. All the uncle had to do was sell a property and the sale could be used to show the Home Office that the source of the £2 million investment for the visa had been legitimate. “We send the government the bare minimum, which is the sale of the asset,” he said.

He later agreed that the reporter could create documentation around the sale of a property or a piece of art to make it look as if the £2 million had come from that, and he cautioned the reporter that he would probably not want to disclose that information to whoever was processing the case, but said it would be fine if the documents suggested it had been bought and sold for a reasonable price.

It was a common theme in the meetings that the advisers didn’t expect the Home Office to carry out meticulous checks on the information they were given, and the single most important act in getting the visa, said the advisers, was to set up a bank account in the United Kingdom, as financial institutions are lawfully required to do due diligence on new clients.

The Home Office had tightened up the rules in 2015 to make it necessary that all investor visa applicants have a UK bank account. The scheme then effectively assigns the responsibility for carrying out due diligence to those who stood to gain financially from taking on clients.

Admittedly, the investigation found the checks were usually done by small investment firms that had a vested stake in giving a bank account to new millionaire clients.

The advisers appeared to favour these firms to bigger, high street banks because they were more understanding of clients with questionable credentials or didn’t require such a big financial commitment, and in a preliminary meeting with Tanya Laidlaw, the head of the immigration department at the law firm Quastels, the undercover reporter was told she had dealt with numerous instances where banks said that they would not touch it and that smaller companies would be more creative.

She said that the larger banks would not deal with people with Russian or Chinese links, but that the more modest ones that still had an appetite would look, and she stated that it wasn’t a problem that the reporter’s Russian uncle had helped Putin’s associates take their money offshore, and that if there was no unfavourable publicity, it wasn’t a problem.

Many people who applied in the past didn’t have such a clean past, and once they’d opened a bank account, that was it, they were in, and the little known immigration arrangement gave British residency in exchange for a £2 million investment, and now around 3,000 rich people have entered the United Kingdom under this scheme, with no Home Office Checks.

Well, it now appears that most things can be sold off for a price, and if you’ve got enough cash, even if your character might be a little crooked, it doesn’t matter because anything now seems to be buyable, and it now appears that we’re selling the foundations of our country.

It’s citizenship for the world’s wealthy, while the British poor don’t have the right to family life, and this has become a warped country.

Labour MP leaves son at Number 10

Labour MP Jess Phillips left her son on the steps of 10 Downing Street because his school was set to close early on Fridays thanks to Tory cuts.

Danny, 10, goes to King’s Heath primary in Birmingham which is now having to shut early because of tight budgets, and campaigners announced that more than 250 schools across the nation are now either part-time or going to be part-time because of funding cuts, and they warn that countless more schools will have to follow suit.

Save Our Schools, who headed the demonstration, maintain funding cuts are already harming our children’s education, with numerous schools cutting back on the number of teachers, support staff and teaching assistants.

This will also mean that working parents will have to arrange additional childcare.

The Birmingham Yardley MP had earlier led a short protest march from Parliament Square to the Downing Street gates where pupils, parents, teachers and Save Our Schools campaigners burst into a mantra of “save our schools”, “five days a week” and “no ifs, no buts, no education cuts.”

Education cuts mean that lots of kids will not be able to go to school five days a week, and it’s the government’s duty to look after our children because the government has a responsibility to give universal education five days a week, and they’re degrading that.

We are one of the wealthiest countries in the world and yet, for some reason, we can’t manage to educate and have children in school, and the fact that the government can’t afford to keep schools open five days a week is appalling.

And cutting school hours means that children are missing out, with governors quibbling over how to spend £50.

The government is cutting to the bone, but those with money won’t miss out, they will get the best education, and there will be plenty of working parents who will have a really serious issue getting childcare, which means many will have to leave work to look after their kids.

Will the government pay for their childcare, no, of course, they won’t, which means that many of these parents will then have to go onto Universal Credit, and yet the government are stating that they’re getting more people into work, what a load of rubbish.

Cuts to school hours might not have touched everywhere yet, but it’s said that it’s on the cards for many schools, and budgets are simply getting pushed and pushed, and it should make us question what else the government have plans to cut.

There are so many messages that are put out there about kids and their attendance in schools. So, if your child doesn’t attend school, the parent will get fined by the authorities, so, if this is the case, shouldn’t local authorities be fined for cutting school hours?

Yet there are loads of kids set to miss 20 days a year which the authorities will go ahead and fine the parents £60 per day if their child doesn’t go to school, doesn’t make any sense at all. Really? So the government cut funding, cutting school days and they’re punishing the parents, the parents should be penalising them! And it’s totally double standards and hypocritical.

In fact, these kids could probably do a better job of managing the country than the now and next incumbent of 10 Downing Street, but it won’t be long before our schools are privatised by the despicable Tories, and the same with the police, fire and ambulance.

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Jess Phillips should be ashamed of herself, using her child as a Political Pawn, and those who sell their own flesh and blood regardless of their political persuasion are the lowest of the low, and they should hang their heads in shame.

But Jess Phillips does have a point, the cuts to public services have gone too far, and the problem is that billions are wasted before any taxpayer money is used on services the money was meant for.

Maybe Theresa May should have let the child in, he might have learnt far more there than in school, but the Tories have made the UK into a backward country that can’t even educate its kids sufficiently, even though there appears to be enough money for tax cuts at the top of the food chain, but not enough to educate children.

Evidently, now our children don’t need so much education. Schools are on a 4 day week and social care is screwed. There aren’t enough police and now our streets aren’t safe.

The NHS is in continuing crisis with patients dying on trolleys, and fire deaths have gone up by 40 per cent after they made cuts to the fire service.

Then there is the food banks and social destruction, and supposedly the Tories are doing away with their sick and elderly under the guise of Universal Credit, and this is deemed to be the fifth wealthiest nation in the world.

Then we had to endure the governments Brexit pantomime, just so they can use it to cling onto power, knowing full well either that we’ll seemingly never leave or re-join in just a few years. Meanwhile, the pound is now worthless and our economy is struggling, and the Tories are truly a disgrace.

And before someone says what about Labour, half of them are just as bad, and they should all be working together to end this foolishness. We need an election, rather than assuming that the Brexit party will fix everything, they won’t.

The state of education in this country has plummeted under the Tories, and we should be troubled about the thousands of kids across England and Wales that are between school and not being provided with minimal educational provision.

Although I’m totally puzzled where the money is being saved by closing schools and are teachers being docked money because the school is only open 90 per cent of the time?

It appears that dinner time staff aren’t being cut, the schools are still open for five dinner times regardless, and this is just the same for caretaking and cleaning staff, which suggests there are no savings on heating and virtually none on lighting.

Teaching Assistants might have had their times cut, but then again, that was always the only option in schools anyhow because of their contracts. So, where are the savings?

Teachers may have taken a pay cut, but that’s leaving schools that are run down by neglecting things like maintenance and squeezing resources, so then the headteacher’s job was to become an authority on boosting cash one way or another for their pupils.

Who Is a Jew?

When a Dad is Jewish and the Mother is not, are the children Jewish? It depends on who you ask.

On March 15, 1983, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), the Reform movement’s body of rabbis, declared a declaration prepared by a committee on patrilineal descent called “The Status of Children of Mixed Marriages.”

The CCAR decision declared that “we face, today, a unique position due to the changed circumstances in which resolutions concerning the status of the offspring of a mixed marriage are to be made.”

Contrary to almost 2,000 years of tradition, the decision accepted the Jewish status of children of Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers under specific conditions.

There was a great deal of debate about this decision, both before and after its approval. Some saw it as a progressive and unfair departure from tradition, wherein one must have a Jewish mother or undergo a conversion to be recognised as Jewish.

Others praised it as a fruitful and comprehensive approach to the rising predominance of interfaith families, and even though the Hebrew Bible determines Jewish status in patrilineal terms, defined by the status of the father, the Mishnah says that the children of a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father are identified as a Jew, while the children of a non-Jewish mother and a Jewish father is deemed a non-Jew.

This Talmudic attitude became normative in Jewish doctrine.

But the 1983 decision was not the first effort to review patrilineality. Previously in the 19th century, various Reform rabbis unobtrusively integrated the children of Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers into their religious establishments and validated them into the Jewish religion along with their peer group in lieu of conversion.

In 1947, the CCAR approved a resolution that said that if a Jewish father and a gentile mother wanted to raise their children as Jewish, the declaration of the parents to raise them as Jews shall be deemed sufficient for conversion.

This proposal had a somewhat different connotation than the 1983 decision in that the parents were converting their children, but the social influence was essentially indistinguishable.

The emphasis on conversion was abandoned completely in the 1961 CCAR Rabbi’s Manual. “Reform Judaism accepts a child… as Jewish without a formal conversion if he attends a Jewish school and follows a course of study leading to confirmation.” However, the manual simply offered guidance to rabbis and did not carry the weight of full-fledged resolution.

By 1983, the CCAR was willing to spell out the patrilineal lineage decision in more comprehensive detail. By this time there was a broad-based responsibility to egalitarianism.

To many, it seemed unnecessarily biased to accept the child of a Jewish mother and a gentile father as Jewish while rejecting the child of a Jewish father and a gentile mother. It seemed unfair that children who had no Jewish education were being given automatic recognition if they had a Jewish mother while children who received intense Jewish upbringings but had only a Jewish father were not. Even more importantly, the rising intermarriage rate made it imperative that the net of Jewish identity be cast as widely as possible.

Rabbi Alexander Schindler, the president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC), determined that the Reform movement needed to act, and he urged his fellow Reform rabbis to reach a decision accepting patrilineal children as Jewish, and he thought this would preserve Jewish continuity in the light of escalating intermarriage relationships.

Schindler claimed that most Jews wanted their children and grandchildren to be Jewish, but that if they were told that of this requisite conversion, large numbers would give up and raise their children as non-Jewish.

Schindler began a method that ultimately led to the CCAR voting in favour of what became known as the Patrilineal Descent Resolution. The resolution stated that “the child of one Jewish parent is under the presumption of Jewish descent. This presumption of the Jewish status of the offspring of any mixed marriage is to be established through appropriate and timely public and formal acts of identification with the Jewish faith and people.”

What this meant was that if a child was born of either a Jewish father or a Jewish mother, and was raised as Jewish, that child would be considered by the Reform movement as Jewish. They were, nevertheless, required to engage in the many Jewish life-cycle customs which normally mark the life stages of a Jewish person.

Interestingly, this produced the probability that someone who had a Jewish mother, but had not been raised Jewish and had not had any public religious acts of identification such as a Jewish baby-naming ceremony, a bar or bat mitzvah, or a Jewish confirmation service could theoretically be considered as a non-Jew despite his or her genealogy. Still, numerous rabbis identify lineage alone.

Although the overall view of the decision was broadly received within the Reform movement, there was significant discontent with the expression of the decision and uncertainty over its implications, and in 1996, the CCAR devised an 11-member task force to translate and promote guidelines for the successful implementation of the patrilineal descent policy.

The task force recommended that the decision be applied to as “equilateral descent” or simply “Jewish descent” rather than patrilineal descent since the decision allowed lineage from either the mother or the father.

The patrilineal descent decision gave a viable resolution for couples who felt content with their individual religious diversity but wanted to raise their children with a single religious belief.

Moreover, Jewish status was now something one chooses rather than something that simply “was”, and children with one Jewish parent were being invited to freely undergo notable religious acts of identification as a way of determining their dedication to Judaism and to the Jewish people.

While Jewish children had always been asked to prepare for their bar and bat mitzvahs, their Jewishness was never contingent upon successful achievement of that ceremony or any other, and the Patrilineal Descent Resolution shifted the emphasis from birth to conscious choice.

Tens of thousands of people have been raised as Jews because of the legitimacy awarded them as a result of this decision. Nevertheless, patrilineal Jews are likely to face difficulties later in life if they choose to become more traditional in their observance.

A problem further arises if Reform Jews who are Jewish by patrilineal descent choose to engage in ritual or celebrations at more observant synagogues. Can they be called up for an aliyah? Can they help to form a minyan (the quorum of 10 Jews required for many prayers)? In most instances, the answer would be no.

Conservative and Orthodox Jews do not accept patrilineal descent as a legitimate means of passing on Judaism. “Who is a Jew?” has been a debatable issue for many decades, and the Patrilineal Descent Resolution deepened the division between the conflicting perspectives.

There previously existed a division between American and Israeli Jews as only particular Orthodox conversions were acknowledged in Israel by the (Orthodox) Chief Rabbinate, and the eventual sociological implications of patrilineal descent are still unknown.

And as the first generation of Jews recognized under this resolution starts to have children, Jewish identification and status will only become more complex, with the continued acceptance of intermarriage and the many new approaches being experimented with to make Judaism more welcoming added to the matter.

Nevertheless, as with any extreme variation in Jewish law, it’s obvious that the discussion of patrilineal descent is far from over.

So, according to traditional Jewish law, if someone is born of a Jewish mother or converted to Judaism, then that child is Jewish, but a child born to a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother is not Jewish even if raised with a Jewish identity.

Today, however, more than one-third of Jews inter-marry, and more often than not, it’s Jewish men who marry non-Jewish women and as a result, there are an estimated 220,000 children in the United States born to non-Jewish women who are married to Jewish men.

But in March 1983, the Reform movement broke with the Orthodox and Conservative Jewish sects, and with Jewish law, and stated that a child born of one Jewish parent, whether it’s the mother or the father, is under the presumption of being Jewish.

This patrilineal lineage resolution went onto state that a person’s Jewishness was not automatic and that it must be activated by proper and appropriate Jewish performances, and that it wasn’t enough to just be born to a Jewish parent.

The Reform movement further noted that in the Bible the descent always followed the father, including the cases of Joseph and Moses, who married into non-Israelite priestly families.

There are countless Jews out there that are born Jewish by birthright because both parents are Jewish or their mother is Jewish, but sometimes that doesn’t make them anymore Jewish than a person that was born of a Jewish father, and a non-Jewish mother, and there are many Jews out there that were born of Jewish descent, yet haven’t been to a Synagogue a day in their life, and will willingly sit down to eat a Bacon sandwich!

Not only that, life today makes it very difficult for Jewish people to be Jewish, and our Jewishness has declined simply because in this day and age many people marry out of their faith. Not that it’s a bad thing, it just means that because a child is born of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother that said child is not allowed to be Jewish, which means that we as Jews are becoming a dying race, and it would make more sense to change the Jewish laws, after all, the bible does say that descent was to be followed by the father, so why not either mother or father?

The problem is many Jews want to conceal their faith now because of oppression, and some Jews exist in areas where there are extremely few Jewish people and no Synagogue, and too far away to attend. I live in a town where there was once 900 Jewish families, now there are only 9 Jewish families and no Synagogue, and certainly, no Jewish food places to keep Kosher.

So, it’s certainly not easy to be Jewish even if you wanted to be!

Demand The Government Builds More Social Housing

The housing crisis is becoming more inadequate every year, with numerous private renters saying they struggle to meet housing costs and pay their bills.

The amount of social homes being built is at its lowest for 70 years, and we suffer a persistent shortage of housing that people can afford, and millions of people are being failed by the housing market and live with the worry and fear of not being able to afford to pay the rent.

Even worse, they’re usually at the mercy of private landlords who can oust them with practically no warning, but quality, social housing could make a tremendous difference to people’s lives, meaning families could put down roots, and live without the fear of being forced to move home.

Social housing gives the security of a permanent home and the opportunity for millions of families to lead lives where their children are secure and content. But the latest report on the fate of social housing makes plain, that with 1.1 million households on the social housing waiting list, and countless more in need of it, that there isn’t nearly enough to go round.

And this year, the government will undertake its comprehensive spending review. This is one of the most important opportunities for decades and will conclude whether funding is made accessible for new social homes.

The Government has released figures unveiling that the amount of people sleeping on the streets has decreased by 2 per cent. But, some municipalities such as London and Manchester have witnessed an increase and while numbers have gone down nationwide, they’re still 165 per cent greater than in 2010.

Newham continues to be one of the top ten boroughs in the country for rough sleeping, having risen by 4 per cent since the count last year, and just one person sleeping rough is one too many and more must be done to ensure people are not endangering their lives simply by bedding down for the night.

The newly launched Rough Sleepers Hub is serving to give a home and support to people sleeping rough in the area, but as the numbers grow and the government’s overall spending review is emerging, they must reflect earnestly about investment in social housing.

The amount of social homes being built is at its lowest for 70 years, and we face a continuing shortage of housing that people can afford, but the government’s spending review is one of the biggest opportunities for decades and will decide whether funding is going to be made accessible for new social homes.

But as the housing market crashes down, it appears that it’s more effective to build less than needed, driving house and rent prices up, leaving those that can’t afford to buy or rent to go without, and homelessness should not be acceptable in our society.

Building homes is a long term investment, yet the government supports the enterprise of private landlords, and only sees today’s cash flow, and not the advantages of such an expenditure.

Furthermore, now the government has started the totally unfair Landlord Tax, which means a lot of private landlords will end up selling their rental properties, which will mean less rental properties and so more expensive rents.

Theresa May Wrongly Takes Credit

“We are seeing many more people — over 900,000 more disabled people — in work as a result of what this government have done”

That was the claim from Theresa May at what was supposed to be her penultimate Prime Minister’s Questions.

We guess she’s referring to the Office for National Statistics’ Labour Force Survey, which shows the number of disabled people in employment that increased by 930,000 in the five years to 2018.

But she neglected to mention the findings of March 2019 report on disabled people in work by the National Audit Office (NAO), which monitors government spending.

The watchdog says even the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) acknowledges that the increase (in the number of disabled people in work) can’t be attributed to a particular cause, including its policies or programmes and that it has limited evidence of what works.

In other words, the DWP accepts that the increase has not come about as a consequence of the government’s actions despite Theresa May’s claim.

So what’s the actual cause? Evidence shows that the increase in the number of disabled people in work is expected to be due to more numerous people already in work reporting a disability rather than more disabled people who were out of work, moving into work.

It’s also apparent that the current increases in the number of disabled people in work have not been balanced by a reduction in the number of disabled people who are out of work, and watchdog determined that this second figure had remained broadly the same at about 3.7 million in the past five years.

“We’re one of the most generous countries in our support for disabled people”

That was the claim from Conservative Esther McVey on a Victoria Derbyshire programme. So is she right?

And she was asked to show the source for her assertion that the United Kingdom is one of the most generous countries in our support for disabled people, but her office failed to give international comparisons to back it up, but a spokesperson said: “we’re very happy for you to fact check and see where the UK ranks in the world for this”.

The Department for Work and Pensions was approached and were told that they spend £55 billion on benefits to support disabled people and those with health conditions, and that was more than ever before.

So UK spending on disability benefits has risen in the last decade. But that wasn’t Esther McVey’s claim: she was making a comparison with other countries.

And citing 2015 data from the OECD club of large economies, the DWP said that as a share of GDP, the UK’s public spending on disability and incapacity is higher than all other G7 countries bar Germany. The G7 group comprises Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US.

But then when you look across the entire expanse of OECD members, the picture’s more complex.

The United Kingdom may be second amongst the G7, but we rank 24th out of 36 in the OECD as a whole. Spending just below 1.9 per cent of GDP on sickness, disability and occupational injury, and the United Kingdom is somewhat under the OECD average.

Theresa May said 900,000 more disabled people were in work as a result of what this government has done, and it’s true that in 2018, there were 930,000 more disabled people in jobs than in 2013, but she didn’t mention that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) had declared that it can’t assign this increase to government policies.

And the government spending watchdog, the National Audit Office, said the increase was presumably prompted by more people already in work reporting themselves as disabled rather than out-of-work disabled people moving into jobs, and she further neglected to add that the number of disabled people out of work had not diminished in that time but remained static at about 3.7 million.

Britain’s Poverty Crisis

Where people are just left to rot, and Britain is in a poverty crisis where people aren’t getting the basic human right to live and to be safe and secure, and there are numerous people out there that don’t feel safe and secure.

England is the fifth richest country in the world but approximately 40 million people are living in relative poverty with employment falling and hunger soaring but the government are saying that they’re working to stop the causes of the poverty but approximately two hundred miles from the angering Westminster, people in the western town of Rhyl feel like they’ve been left behind.

These are the people on the front line of the poverty crisis, and on the beach town of Rhyl is one of the most deprived towns in the country, but in the 1960s hotels in Rhyl would have been crammed with holidaymakers from across Britain, and it was a town with a bustling beach resort for more than a 100 years but now a huge deficit of social housing in the region means the hotels are being utilised as makeshift dwellings.

Living without basic facilities is difficult for families and their children, and the worse thing of all is for parents not be able to give their children what they need, and it’s the basic things, like being able to close your own front door, and being able to cook them what they want when they need it, and that’s the basic human rights for anybody, simply to be safe and secure, but these children don’t feel safe and secure and neither do their parents because parents feel like their letting their children down.

A hundred and thirty-seven households living across Denbighshire are living in temporary accommodation or emergency accommodation, but over the past year 265 households in the region have faced homelessness, but poverty is an issue for the entire country, and across Wales, about a quarter of people live in widespread poverty, and being poor usually means, worse health and dying younger.

People from deprived regions are likely to die about eight years ahead of those from more affluent areas, and poverty often means a lack of food, and Wales like the rest of the United Kingdom has witnessed an increase in the use of food banks in recent years.

The government states this could be linked to problems in rolling out the governments new welfare system (Universal Credit) which critics maintain have made life on benefits even more precarious and it’s certainly apparent that there were hurdles in the initial rollout of Universal Credit and the main problem that led to an uptick in food bank use was the fact that people had trouble obtaining their money quick enough.

And the welfare system has caused huge problems in the area of Rhyl, and there’s a really big crisis in Rhyl at the moment with people just struggling on the breadline, and with the new switch over to Universal Credit there are people that are just without food for long periods of time without money and that can be up to between 8 and twelve weeks.

They can be working families, they could be individual people on benefits, it’s literally hit everyone, and food parcels might last a week, but the situation the following week is unquestionably the same.

These people can’t afford heating and food, so they’re constantly stuck in that predicament and it’s a scary situation that they’re living in and people are just left to rot basically, and for those in poverty the food bank isn’t the only place to go for meals, and only a few metres from the beach is the “Bodfor”, a pub that’s run by a woman called Jane Dunham.

She always puts seafood on to cook on a Monday and a Wednesday for karaoke. People are struggling to try and make ends meet and they can’t get out a lot, and they feel down sometimes, so when the pub has the karaoke days they can have a bite to eat and have a pleasant day, instead of sitting, maybe worrying and getting depressed on the face of how they’re existing.

But despite the town’s struggles, the government say that unemployment is at its lowest rate since the 1970s.

Paul Walters is an ex-soldier and he lived on the streets for 18 months but now he’s got housing and a job at a local warehouse but before that, he was waking up in the morning and wishing he hadn’t woken up and going to sleep at night and hoping that he didn’t wake up, but now he’s got a job, he’s waking up and he’s happy going off to work every day.

Paul Walter’s may be working but he’s still struggling, and he’s one of the estimated 4 million people across the United Kingdom who are considered working poor, and the gap between starting work and getting his wages means Paul has to borrow money to get through the month, and he hopes that everything’s going to be great but it doesn’t work out that way.

He has bills coming in, everywhere, it’s quite staggering, and it makes him believe that it would be easier to go back on the dole, because when the Jobcentre got him the job Paul had to do four weeks as a trial period and he wasn’t being compensated for that, and once that trial period was over, he had to work another month in advance for his new company before he got paid, so that’s two months with nothing to live on.

Paul was working every day but he wasn’t eating, he couldn’t afford it and he doesn’t want to go back into that.

Paul Walter’s did everything that everyone wanted him to do, what the government wanted him to do. Get off the dole, get work, do this, do that. He’s done all of that, but he doesn’t feel like he’s getting anywhere now. He feels like he’s got up the ladder, stopped and everything’s forcing him back down now, and that’s extremely troubling to him, but what can he do?

Paul Walter’s worked for two months before getting a penny, and then the world exhibits sheer disdain for that person, and this is completely shameful, and legislation needs to deal with such a situation, and while there are people who do care, as a combined group, the government doesn’t care about the regular person, they just care about themselves and their own wants and desires while our monarchy parades its jewels, gold and furs.

And it’s shocking that a person has to graft and still be on the bones of their behind, and it’s absolutely disgraceful that employers are getting away with paying such little money, and the government are saying that they’re working to tackle and improve the situation, but it’s the government that has deliberately designed this situation.

People are working their backsides off for hardly any money for food, and most don’t make through to payday, and with unemployment high, these people feel like they’ve been neglected, and it’s tragic and we shouldn’t be looking the other way.

The Toxic Pollutants Coming Off Electric Cars

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So, we’re now breathing in, inhaling plastic.

Dispatches put an air filter in a classroom in a polluted London school, to find out what kind of emissions the children were breathing in. The filter was then taken to the Dyson laboratory for examination. They found that the metalicide rubber, most possibly to have come from car tyres, and they allegedly found bits of brake dust.

This is coming from tyres and brakes, not exhausts. There are no regulations for emissions from brakes or tyres in the United Kingdom.

The modern car tyre is over 50 per cent plastic, so we’re now breathing in, inhaling plastic, which should have us all really worried, and we know how dangerous it is in the ocean, and now it’s going into our lungs. Which means that some of the components from brake wear and the plastics together, these will be irritating and cause a reaction in the lung, which would over time not be great for our well-being.

This is a new finding, so who’s failed here? The car manufacturers, the EU, the government, well, seemingly all of them. When we go to electric cars, there’ll be no tailpipe emissions but we’re going to get plastic emissions from road wear, plastic emissions from tyres, so we need to do more research into the likely health effects of these plastics which we’re seeing for the first time. So, are they telling us that scientists didn’t realise carcinogenic brake dust was in the air?

It’s well known that brake dust is detrimental to your health, with millions of cars on the road braking every day, the dust weighs nothing, so it’s common sense that it’s in the air.

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The drive to replace polluting petrol and diesel cars with a new breed of electric vehicles has garnered momentum, but there’s another pending environmental question at the heart of the electric car movement, what on earth do we do with half tonne lithium-ion batteries when they wear out?

British and French governments last month pledged to outlaw the sale of petrol- and diesel-powered cars by 2040, and carmaker Volvo promised to only sell electric or hybrid vehicles from 2019. The number of electric cars in the world passed the 2 million mark last year and the International Energy Agency predicts there will be 140 million electric cars globally by 2030 if countries meet Paris climate agreement targets.

This electric transportation boom could leave 11 million tonnes of spent lithium-ion batteries in need of recycling between now and 2030. However, in the EU, as few as 5 per cent of lithium-ion batteries are recycled.

This has an environmental cost, and not only do the batteries carry a danger of giving off poisonous vapours if damaged, but core ingredients such as lithium and cobalt are finite and extraction can lead to water contamination and depletion amongst other environmental consequences. There are, however, grounds for optimism.

Thus far, the poor standards of lithium-ion battery recycling can be demonstrated by the fact that most are contained within consumer electronics, which usually end up forgotten in a drawer or thrown into a landfill. This won’t happen with electric vehicles because car producers will be responsible for the gathering and recycling of spent lithium-ion batteries, and given their sheer dimension, batteries can’t be stored at home and landfilling is not an alternative.

EU Regulations, which require the producers of batteries to fund the costs of gathering, treating and recovering all collected batteries, are already encouraging tie-ups between carmakers and recyclers. Umicore, which has invested €25m (£22.6m) into an industrial pilot plant in Antwerp to recycle lithium-ion batteries, and has deals in Europe with both Tesla and Toyota to use smelting to recover precious metals such as cobalt and nickel.

Problem resolved? Not exactly.

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While commercial smelting methods such as Umicore’s can easily recover many metals, they can’t directly recover the vital lithium, which ends up in a mixed byproduct, and Umicore says it can recover lithium from the byproduct, but each additional process adds expense. This means that while electric vehicle batteries might be taken to recycling plants, there’s no guarantee the lithium itself will be recovered if it doesn’t pay to do so.

Investment bank Morgan Stanley in June said it forecast no recycling of lithium at all over the decade ahead, and that there risked being inadequate recycling infrastructure in place when the current stream of batteries die, and the fundamental dilemma is that while the cost of completely recycling a battery is plunging toward €1 per kilo, the value of the raw materials that can be reclaimed is only a third of that.

Nissan has partnered with power management firm Eaton for its car batteries to be re-used for home energy storage, sooner than be recycled, and this economic problem is a huge reason why the cost of recycling is the barrier because it has to be lower than the value of the recovered materials for this to work.

The lack of recycling capacity is a tragedy. It takes so much energy to remove these materials from the ground, and if we don’t re-use them we could be making our environmental problems worse, and Aceleron, like Nissan, believes the answer lies in re-using rather than recycling car batteries, for which the company has patented a process.

Car batteries can still have up to 70 per cent of their capacity when they cease being good enough to power electric vehicles, making them ideal, when broken down, tested and re-packaged, for uses such as home energy storage.

Fresh from recognition by Forbes as one of the 30 most impressive hi-tech startups in Europe, Aceleron is looking for investors to help it roll out pilot projects because there’s going to be a storm of electric vehicle batteries that will reach the end of their life in a few years, and they’re positioning themselves to be ready for it.

This is not the only option though. Li-Cycle is pioneering a new recycling technology using a chemical method to recover all of the valuable metals from batteries, and Kochhar is looking to create the first industrial plant to put 5,000 tonnes of batteries a year through a wet chemistry process.

Lithium-based medication is used to manage bipolar disorder. We could turn those discarded batteries into billions of tablets for patients of this condition the world over.

There is nothing clean or green about electric cars.

Their CO2 saving is minimal and the pollution from their production is horrendous, and it’s time to bust this thing wide open, and electric cars have higher manufacturing emissions than normal cars.

Electric cars also use electricity that has its own footprint, and put together these two factors are a dirty little secret that cancels any climate benefit of electric cars, and one of the most bothersome things about articles discussing electric car emissions is the way it’s always pretty black and white.

In one corner you have the zero-emissions brigade and in the other the worse than combustion engine crew. But as ever, real life comes in shades of grey. The truth is that even after you account for the bigger manufacturing footprint of an electric car it’s all about the fuel mix of the power you use, the ‘juice’ if you will.

Using coal-powered electricity electric cars does nothing to lower emissions, using natural gas electricity they’re like a top hybrid and using low carbon power they result in less than half the total emissions of the best combustion vehicle, manufacturing included.

Dieselgate has numerous people switching to electric vehicles as a more environmentally friendly option, but in some respects, e-cars can be just as dangerous for the environment as conventional vehicles.

E-cars don’t release climate-damaging greenhouse gases or health-harming nitrogen oxide. They’re quiet and simple to operate, and electric vehicles appear to have a number of benefits over cars that operate on petrol or diesel. Indeed, with revelations about auto industry cheating on emissions tests, numerous consumers feel cheated and are looking for ways to avoid becoming a victim of hypocrisy, and it seems that one way to do so would be to change to electric transportation.

And in many instances, governments are encouraging this transformation because it seems that e-cars are a quick solution to two societal needs. Reaching national targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and tackling air pollution in city centres.

Germany, which has promised to decrease carbon emissions by 40 per cent by 2020 compared to 1994 levels, intends to have 1 million electric cars on the road by then, but it’s not expected that they will attain their goal, and beyond that, electric cars aren’t the ideal solution, for many reasons.

If e-cars are running on electricity generated by burning nasty fossil fuels, climate benefits are restricted because the complex batteries they use, currently takes more energy to produce an electric car than a traditional one, and disposing of those batteries generates an environmental risk.

So, how can consumers be certain they’re making the right decision?

Under existing conditions, the overall carbon footprint of a battery-powered car is similar to that of a conventional car with a combustion engine, regardless of its size, and while fewer emissions are generated by the vehicles themselves while driving on the roads, CO2 is still being released by power plants to charge the electric cars.

In Germany for example, more than half of Germany’s electricity is generated from coal and gas, and a person charging an electric car with what usually comes out of a German power socket would need to drive 100,000 kilometres (62,000 miles) in order to pay off this eco-debt, and generate overall less CO2 than driving a gasoline driven vehicle.

The production of electric carriers currently poses the most significant environmental problem, and according to research by the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics, it takes more than twice the amount of energy to produce an electric car as a conventional one. The main reason for that is the battery.

The institute estimates that each kilowatt hour of battery capacity involves 125 kilograms (276 pounds) of CO2 emissions. For a 22 kilowatt-hour battery for a BMW i3, this translates into approximately 3 tons of CO2, and a study by the IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute discovered that the greenhouse gas burden of current battery production is 150 to 200 kilograms CO2 per kWh.

Battery production with contemporary technology needs 350 to 650 Megajoule of energy per kWh. Batteries further need to be made from minerals such as copper and cobalt, and rare earths like neodymium.

Mining ventures in countries like China or the Democratic Republic of Congo frequently create human rights breaches and widespread ecological destruction: deforestation, contaminated rivers, and contaminated soil.

In addition, numerous automakers use aluminium to build the chassis of e-cars, and a huge volume of power is needed to prepare bauxite ore into the lightweight metal. Yoann Le Petit, an e-mobility specialist with the Brussels-based campaign group Transport and Environment, says there is a wrong way to go electric – and a right one, and producing electric transportation is more energy-intensive than producing a conventionally fuelled automobile.

Once in use, though, electric transportations are much cleaner and energy-efficient. In terms of the environment, the electric vehicles of today are already performing better than internal combustion engines, and this production is estimated to improve as more renewables provide clean electricity to the grid.

But then there are further factors, indicating that more electric cars could generate more traffic in general with Norway being the foremost country in Europe for electric vehicle sales, and as the sales of electric cars have gone up, the use of public transport to get to work dropped by 80 per cent.

The environmental organization carbon footprint has warned that the benefits of a conversion to e-cars would be restricted if it resulted in more personal car ownership and that instead, governments should concentrate on electrifying public transport.

However, the German government and the country’s car industry are still encouraging private transport, offering buyers an incentive of up to 4,000 Euros to buy an electric car as part of a scheme to promote electromobility, but because of their indirect emissions, there’s been debate over whether electric cars can be called zero-emission vehicles, and it’s a question with far-reaching consequences.

The EU’s new CO2 limits only need to be met on an average that takes account of all the various vehicles a manufacturer produces, and by producing zero-emission vehicles, car makers can also continue to sell gas guzzlers like SUVs that transcend those limits.

And a battery-powered electric vehicle that uses electricity generated by fossil fuels will release slightly more emissions over its lifetime than a diesel-powered car, which is still less than a petrol car, but e-cars that use electricity generated from renewable sources will provide up to six times less carbon over their lifetime than a petrol car. This means that in order for the switch to e-mobility to be most effective, countries will have to transition their energy production in similarity, and renewables made up about 34 per cent of Germany’s energy mix in 2016, and by 2035, Germany wants 55 to 60 per cent of its electricity to come from wind, solar and biomass.

Concerns have further been raised about what happens to the complex batteries, which also contain toxic chemicals, at the end of an electric vehicle’s life, so would this create a new environmental crisis? Not if new solutions being developed to give the batteries a second life are successful.

A battery can be used for other purposes rather efficiently but we need to ascertain what ‘whole life’ is for a battery, and there are a number of universities, and scientists that are developing ways to recycle and reuse electric vehicle batteries, for industrial processes, for example.

The longer the battery can be utilised after the life of the vehicle, the lower that vehicle’s environmental impact will be over its lifespan. There’s also continuing research into making the batteries more productive while they’re in the vehicle, and engineers are also looking into how to use electric vehicles as storage devices in the overall energy grid.

A car plugged in overnight could, therefore, feedback into the grid at times of lower renewable energy generation, for example when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing, and there is this broad consensus that while electric vehicles may not be truly zero emission vehicles, they’re still on the whole better for the environment and for the climate than traditional vehicles.

The key in the coming years will be solving how to make sure these new vehicles can become even more eco-friendly. Although the Tesla gigafactory has a battery recycling centre, and I’m sure that eventually there will be a lot more of these.

But there does seem to be a problem and this problem needs to be thought out before we embark on making everything electrical, and cars are going to be a major part of transport for some time to come, and electric transportation alone isn’t going to resolve every problem we have. Sooner or later, reality has a cruel way of encroaching on inventions of the future, and it’s just a pity that real thinking doesn’t come first, and the dilemma of recycling will be resolved when the problem of refuelling is solved.

Rather than recharging your own battery, it would make a lot more sense to go to a station and exchange the battery for a fully charged one. The cost of a swap would cover the cost, battery rental and charges for recycling, and recycling would become considerably more manageable with a restricted number of pick up locations.

It would further improve the uptake of new battery technologies as the battery stations would have an interest in continually expediting boundaries to improve their competitiveness. I guess there are many pluses and minuses to this, and it appears that a little has been thought through but not all of it, but politicians have made the decision and industry is expected to make all the changes to conform, but how will the electricity for this be produced, and will it apply to trucks, and if so, will that work?

Traffic will have increased, so will traffic management change? Especially to truck trains and vehicle trains, and will there be the same spontaneity of driving that there is today, or will it be much more superintended?

Straight Women and Gay Men

In 2015 a new matchmaking site connecting straight women with gay male best friends was being rolled out, and it was asked if this was a joke, no joke it was real. The Every Girl Needs A Gay matchmaking site was the real deal, and it had a forum called the Rainbow Room, and a post on the matchmaking site claimed that new research from the journal Evolutionary Psychology suggested that what creates a special bond between gay men and straight women was their unique ability to provide clear-headed counsel regarding romantic relationships.

Do I believe it’s a great idea, I think it’s a fabulous idea because there are many women out there that would love to have a man as a friend, but most heterosexual men can’t do that with a woman because they’re always thinking about their penis.

Do you remember “When Harry Met Sally”:

“Harry Burns: You realize of course that we could never be friends. Sally Albright: Why not? Harry Burns: What I’m saying is – and this is not a come-on in any way, shape or form – is that men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way. Sally Albright: That’s not true. I have a number of men friends and there is no sex involved. Harry Burns: No you don’t. Sally Albright: Yes I do. Harry Burns: No you don’t. Sally Albright: Yes I do. Harry Burns: You only think you do. Sally Albright: You say I’m having sex with these men without my knowledge? Harry Burns: No, what I’m saying is they all WANT to have sex with you. Sally Albright: They do not. Harry Burns: Do too. Sally Albright: They do not. Harry Burns: Do too. Sally Albright: How do you know? Harry Burns: Because no man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her. Sally Albright: So, you’re saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive? Harry Burns: No. You pretty much want to nail ’em too. Sally Albright: What if THEY don’t want to have sex with YOU? Harry Burns: Doesn’t matter because the sex thing is already out there so the friendship is ultimately doomed and that is the end of the story. Sally Albright: Well, I guess we’re not going to be friends then. Harry Burns: I guess not. Sally Albright: That’s too bad. You were the only person I knew in New York.”

Gender is essentially a social construction, and there are things in life that just naturally go together, whether it’s cake and frosting, or dogs and tennis balls, these things just spontaneously fit together because we’ve been socially constructed to accept that like gender. But over the years I’ve come to learn several things, and the most significant thing in a girls life is that she needs a best friend, and that friend can come in a diversity of shapes, colour and gender, but regardless, there’s only one out there for every lonely girl.

They say that a dog is a man’s best friend, so why can’t gays be strictly reserved for the woman as a friend? After all, they give the best advice on clothes, and they’ll always tell you the truth. And girls when you want to galavant around overpriced clothing stores and try everything on in the fitting room, when you know you’re not going to buy a damn thing, you know that your gay best friend will sit on the couch while you try everything on in the store and still laugh and joke about it. Gay men have a real affection for bubbly retorts and the overall wellbeing of their ladies, and diamonds might be forever, but it turns out that a gay boy is truly a girl’s best friend, and your gay man will truly make you feel like a princess, as they inspire you to buy clothes, and tell you that you look perfect, while holding your bags more elegantly than you do.

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Not only that but a trusted gay best friend can help to neutralise the frustration of navigating a world of backbiting girls and moronic boys, and of course, they sympathise with a girls raging, mood-swinging hormones as well, even though they don’t get them themselves. Gay men like us, girls, way more than they let on, they’re actually kind of envious of you. Not because we get all the great fashion, their envy comes from the fact that our feminine energy has a way of making the male species become putty in our hands. Of course, gay men can do that too, but just not as well as we can, and they watch us lots because they’re dying to learn all of our know-how for manipulating guys into doing anything they want, but of course, manipulation shouldn’t be something we’re proud of unless it means manipulating a more favourable deal on a pair of shoes.

Now, as for loving ourselves, we all go to the same school, the school of the Perpetual Inferiority Complex. Where you slink into school and sit in the back of the class, immersed in your own thoughts because you think you’re not good enough, well, your gay friend is sitting there right there with you because they also participate in the belief that they’re not good enough from time to time, the only thing is, as a gay best friend, they will make sure you feel good enough just as you are.

And if your parents haven’t taught you that, then shame on them. The point is that your gay best friend can relate to your insecurity, and they’re the ones that will hold up the mirror that reminds you how fabulous you are, and talking about what we’ve got, we shouldn’t forget that we have the most amazing gifts and we should showcase them proudly to the world. Gay men and gay culture tends to have a reputation of being suggestive, sexually active and over the top, which is really forcing stereotypes on people, which isn’t right, and stereotypes should be banned because people should be permitted to just be themselves, and that just doesn’t mean gay men and gay culture, but everyone.

And someone in your world has told you at some point that you can’t be this or you can’t be that, and I’m not proposing you rebel, I’m just inviting you to do as you want so long as it’s not harming someone else because everyone needs to pave their own way in the world. Yes, some gay men are racy, sexually active and over the top, but then some gay men are also quiet wallflowers, happily monogamous, dedicated parents, ambitious CEO’s and creatively gifted people without being ostentatious.

There is no way to be gay than there is to be a teenager or grown up, and whoever you are you have to embrace who you are, and a gay best friend is a pretty important thing to have because every girl or woman deserves to have a friend she can trust to love her unreservedly.

Man With Brain Tumour

A man left reeling following a brain tumour diagnosis says he was forced to fill out forms for six hours as he applied for Universal Credit because Neil MacVicar had to leave his bar manager job in London and move back into his parents home in Inverness as he battled cancer.

The 26-year-old said he went to a local Jobcentre to apply for Universal Credit and felt like he was being punished for being sick after it took so long to fill out the forms, and Neil MacVicar who was diagnosed two years ago said that the experience left him feeling broken and depressed, and he’s now calling for changes to the horrible system.

After his cancer treatment, he went to the Jobcentre to apply for Universal Credit and sat down in front of a computer for six hours to fill the form in, but he felt ashamed and felt like he was being punished for being ill, and he’s frightened that this might happen to someone who doesn’t have the help he has, and he’s especially annoyed with the shameful system, and the entire experience with Universal Credit has left him feeling broken, discouraged and anxious.

Cancer charity Macmillan Cancer Support estimates more than 2,600 cancer patients in Scotland including some with a terminal diagnosis are at substantial risk of hardship if the Universal Credit system is rolled out further.

And A, who also works for the CAB, has seen the impact of Universal Credit for the past few years, with people dying before they even get their benefits. The system doesn’t work!

The side effects of cancer and its treatment can affect someone’s ability to work, and as a result, four in five Scottish patients are hit with an average cost of £420 a month because of lost income and additional outgoings, such as increased household bills due to feeling the cold more.

More than a quarter of those diagnosed have no savings, and the current Universal Credit rules mean that cancer patients have to endure a five-week delay before they get any money.

This pertains to those with a terminal diagnosis because the “fast track” process for people with less than six months to live has been withdrawn, and under current policies, people with cancer already claiming benefits will have to apply for Universal Credit.

The system is failing people with cancer and the government needs to fix this before tens of thousands more vulnerable people are put in danger of hardship, although this actually doesn’t surprise me when there are people out there that have had to have emergency surgery for life-threatening conditions and the Universal Credit team are on the telephone demanding that they attend back to work interviews, to the point where they’re prepared to force an interview whilst a person is in the critical care unit, and this is the very reason that the Tories are frequently compared to the Nazi party for their treatment of the sick.

And there’s no point in having any savings anymore, not even a little saving because then you’ll get nothing, and then when those savings run out, if you own your own home you’ll have to sell that to meet your needs, and the Tories don’t care if you’ve worked all your life and paid your taxes and National Insurance, all they care about is satisfying their own pockets with as much money as they can before they get ousted, and then people wonder why this country is going under so fast.

Simply, the Tory government has declared war on the sick and disabled. People thought that Margaret Thatcher was ruthless and cruel, but David Cameron and Theresa May hammered them all, and the Nasty Party can’t push this Universal Credit through quick enough, no matter what suffering it causes people.

Plus it will put more pressure on the NHS due to more and more people becoming severely stressed and depressed, and make no mistake the government’s policies are extremely brutal towards the vulnerable of the United Kingdom, and they should all be ashamed of themselves.

Sadly, this is what happens in every type of government, they have these brilliant ideas and then vote for it, but they don’t discuss it with their voters, they simply say this or that is happening and we have to go along with it, but if something’s not broken why try to fix it? And it appears that these splendid ideas only work for the wealthy, the average working class and the poor person always gets punished for the government’s blunders.

And then there are the torture tactics of the DWP who have the vulnerable and the severely sick doing a large amount of form filling, knowing that one small mistake is enough to give the DWP the justification to decline payment, there is a method to their madness, and then there are those people with mental health problems, they just look at the forms and it sends them into a descent of emotions, and it’s utterly sickening what this government are doing to its own people.

And the DWP should be outed for their role in the Tories emotional and financial anguish that the government have inflicted on the vulnerable, and those who are severely sick with life-threatening symptoms and severe mental health problems.

It’s a political mafia that is effective for voting in these draconian measures while they stuff their pockets and perhaps they should be paid in the same way to see how they would cope for weeks without any means of support, and the system introduced under the last Labour government was in no way as rigid or unyielding as the deliberately destructive system the Tories turned it into.

The Labour government had doctors administering the medical assessments, and not nurses and sports therapists. Then the Tories got their fangs into the system and contracted ATOS to deliver the assessments, a contract that gave the assessors a cash bonus for every claimant they assessed as fit to work, so of course, the assessors were going to declare that person fit for work, they’re getting a bonus for it.

So, now disabled people have to fight every time they’re assessed because the assessors aren’t going to get their bonus if they find that said person not fit to work, in spite of their specialist with over 35 years of experience saying otherwise.

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