THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO

Forty thousand badgers risk being killed in the latest slaughter intended to clear out TB in cattle. Shooters will take aim at the animals in 32 areas across 11 English counties, including two where the programme will take place for the first time.

A total of 40,892 face the death sentence under proposals drafted by the Environment Department, which awarded 11 new permits for executing the creatures. The scheme has already been in operation in Dorset, Cornwall, Devon, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Cheshire, Somerset and Wiltshire.

Staffordshire and Cumbria have been added to this year’s slaughter, and a total of 19,724 badgers were slaughtered last year, indicating a doubling of the death toll if all the animals designated for slaughter are destroyed.

By supporting 11 new cull permits which now brings the number in England to 32 over 40,000 more badgers could be destroyed this autumn bringing the total destroyed since 2013 to over 75,000, and by 2020 over 150,000 are expected to have been destroyed as a consequence of the badger slaughter, driving this preserved species to the brink of extinction in parts of Britain where it has been occupied since the Ice Age.

Experts have condemned the badgers for stoking the spread of TB in cattle, and last year, more than 33,000 cows were killed in England to regulate the disease.

Farming Minister George Eustice high pointed figures noting that in the two counties where culling first took place, outbreaks of TB in cattle had halved, and in Gloucestershire, the percentage rate has decreased from 10.4 per cent before culling started to 5.6 per cent in the 12 months following the fourth cull. While in Somerset it has fallen from 24 per cent to 12 per cent.

Taking widespread action to stop bovine TB disease of cattle from the pool of infection in local badger communities is a vital part of the government’s 25-year plan to exterminate the disease in England.

Backed by stronger cattle checks including those areas seeing a decrease in cattle-badger-cattle disease, improved biosecurity and vaccination, and the commissioning of additional areas is important to understand infection control benefits across England.

It’s a sad day when our animals have to be culled and reports that it’s already failed is pretty frustrating, and this unfortunate development is born of a perversion of the true facts, backed by fake promises and propaganda dumped onto the farming community.

So much for Gove being a new man, feeling compassion for all breathing things, but that was always a stretch of the imagination and the reality that they don’t listen to the experts, and that’s only part of the reason. They disregard the fact that not only is it heartless it’s also ineffective and not cost-effective.

The Tories appear to be masters in creating destruction, devastation and misery because there is mounting proof that badgers have little to do with the spread of bovine tuberculosis. And there are no grounds whatsoever for thinking that badger slaughter has made the smallest impact on the epidemic, but the government are apparently pushing forward, supported by the National Farmers Union.

Vaccination was pointed out at being much cheaper and more humane and more effective, but like all reports that the media do, once all the badgers are gone they’ll publish that vaccination is the safest way to go, and the government are like a rancid stench because no consideration whatsoever is given to the suffering of the badgers, and an expert panel presented a finding that the cull was neither humane nor effective.

In fact, from David Cameron’s government, there was a shocking acknowledgement from his government to ensure that there was no independent panel for the next round of culls.

It now seems that bovine TB is spread to badgers from infected cattle, which the Badgers then go on to spread to other herds, and it certainly isn’t the badger’s crime as they’ve been tainted by mismanagement of cattle farmers and a failure to execute a wide vaccination programme.

It’s not only badgers that can spread bovine TB, but deer can also, so what are we going to do, wipe out all the indigenous wild animal population of the country to protect the cattle farmers?

The contribution of badgers to bovine TB may only be 6 per cent. That suggests that at least 94 per cent of the problem rests with the cattle herd itself. The overriding evidence is that the method of skin testing and elimination of individual reactive cows leaves infected and contagious animals in the herd, and so, of course, the problem returns time after time.

Save money, destroy a badger. That’s the Tory opinion, even if it suggests our entire wildlife’s been wiped out, and there’s no social conscience, and no concern for the natural environment either, and condemning reinfection on wildlife is a suave piece of manipulation, but it’s not backed by any proof.

Quite the opposite, and it’s worth mentioning also that even inside the so-called hotspot zones for bovine TB, numerous farms have never harboured the disease.

Cattle could easily be vaccinated against bovine TB but it’s too expensive and it’s cheaper to destroy the poor animals, and we should be concerned it doesn’t rub off onto humans because someday our government will be announcing that it’s too costly to vaccinate human beings and more cost-effective to exterminate us!

OR IS THAT WHAT THEY’RE TRYING TO DO ALREADY!

Culling badgers is a pill that is being given as a consolation prize to farmers who are desperate for something to be done. It’s a placebo. What the farmers need is a proper testing regime that really does clean up their herds.

A grandad of 62 was attacked by a muscle-bound security watchdog after he took his disabled wife for a benefits assessment. Keith Langham was left with blood pouring from a head injury after helping his wife Karen, 61, with the interview for her Personal Independence Payments.

She was told that people like her ‘needed to learn to help themselves’ amid ugly scenes at her first appointment which was carried out on behalf of Independent Assessment Services, formally known as Atos, in Carlisle, Cumbria.

At the second interview, Keith, who is 5ft 5in tall and 10-and-a-half stone, had to be taken to hospital after he was grabbed by powerfully-built six-footer Chris Bryan, then aged 30. He shoved him into a door then held Keith in a headlock where he fought for breath.

The episode was recorded on Keith’s phone before police were summoned to the centre in Newcastle Business Park. Keith a Grandfather of two had to have seven stitches in his head, and his wife then faced the ordeal of having to give evidence against Bryan, a ‘Boxercise’ personal trainer who was found guilty of assault by beating in May this year.

Bryan who is a pretty big guy and about 6ft 4inch tall and 16 stone, heavily built, with a shaven head was a security guard at the centre and said that Keith had to vacate the building, but Bryan was not bearing any identification. Keith questioned who Bryan was and he said that he didn’t have to tell Keith and that they had to leave.

As Keith and his wife were heading towards the reception one of the nurses said ‘get them out through the fire doors.’ Keith could feel Bryan’s breath on the back of his neck, as he put one hand between Keith’s shoulder blades, the other in the small of his back and propelled into him, launching Keith into the door frame.

He then had Keith in a choke hold and Keith said, which was recorded by audio, ‘I’m calm, can you let me go?.’

This sort of response by Bryan was random, cowardly, and excessive.

Keith’s wife Karen who suffered a string of strokes in 2002 and walks with a cane went into meltdown. She was yelling at Bryan to let her husband go, but Bryan had Keith in a choke hold for approximately two minutes.

The couple, of Haltwhistle, Northumberland, now understand the second appointment had been flagged by the assessors owing to difficulties with their workers at the first interview, and the security guard was brought in as a consequence.

The whole process was callous, to put it mildly, and these assessments are especially harsh and it was shameful what occurred.

Northumbria Police was called to the incident on Aug 18, 2017, and Keith was taken to the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle, where he received seven stitches in the head wound.

Bryan, of Birtley, Co Durham, was found guilty of his crime at North Tyneside Magistrates court following a hearing. He was given a 12-month community order, with 150 hours of unpaid work. He was further ordered to pay £620 in court costs, a £85 victim surcharge, and £150 compensation to Keith.

Bryan has appealed against the conviction, and that is expected to be heard before Newcastle crown court on Sept 28. He refused to comment, and the Independent Assessment Services emphasised their delivery partner running the site had promptly discharged Bryan from service and a thorough investigation was conducted.

Complete co-operation was given to the police in their own investigation, and Bryan then left the contracted security firm with whom he was hired soon after the event and before any additional disciplinary action could be taken.

The DWP paid Independent Assessment Services and Capita almost £255 million last year for PIP assessments, and a cancer-stricken father died days before he was set to appeal against his benefits being removed. Joseph MacMillan, of Glasgow, was considered fit to work while further suffering from Diabetes, Pancreatitis, Heart problems, and Depression.

Mr MacMillan, who had to have his nose removed owing to Cancer, had £8 in his bank account when he died aged just 56 on August 9, only 15 days before he proposed to appeal against his PIP being cancelled.

Security services are supposed to screen all their security personnel before hiring them, and they’re supposed to have complete police checks, but you’ll always get the cowboy services that other companies will not dispense with, and the cheapest ones are the ones they use.

This security guard was over 6 ft tall, and Keith was 5 ft 5 inches tall, Bryan did not have to use force to get him out of the building, and this sort of behaviour was simply out and out bullying. Most doormen pride themselves on never having to beat anyone, and had this security guard not been so brain dead, he could have easily have escorted him out of the building without any injury.

Atos and Capita do not own the premises that they do the assessments in, the hubs are rented and the workers are employed by private companies, which are not all registered to work by the General Medical Council (GMC), some are foreign with no UK qualifications or certification.

Some are retirees, some are physiotherapists, paramedics and school nurses et cetera, but how would you feel being assessed by such incompetents who get approximately £300 per case, as well as a gratuity if they fail enough people to save the DWP money?

But actually it’s never been about saving money, it’s about exploiting the most defenceless people in society because filthy wealthy toffs feel they should be the only ones to get bonuses, not people who they deem to be the most putrid scumbags on the planet.

This is what happens when a country is governed by the excretions of society, backed by clueless imbeciles.

These are defenceless people who are genuinely sick and are being denied benefits and Atos and Capita are using people who haven’t got a clue about their illness that affects their everyday life. They assess how you look and if you say you can lift your arms, then they deem you fit to work, these are barbarian times and it needs to stop NOW!

The problem with this is that the Tories debate is that there are fraudsters, but that is so tiny compared to the rest that are genuinely sick and who are handled like felons by the state, but the true offenders are the wealthy tax dodgers with offshore accounts who pay nothing into our society.

The security guard has no authority to attack anyone, and if he was actually a true instructor then he should have had the discipline to not use force, it was not in his job description to attack anyone, and if there was a problem the police should have been summoned.

Assessment centres use CCTV, but the CCTV is largely used to observe people roaming about the building and observing you in the waiting area to conclude if your claims are bogus.

I frequently question how the powers that be actually sleep at night knowing that people are destitute and sick with worry and stressed and the only income they have is so limited, that they don’t have enough money to pay their rent because in the mind of the Government everyone is a liar.

I truly hope that they appreciate their nice warm homes because they don’t have to agonise over money, the money that they’re taking from innocent sick people. The point is the Government tar everyone with the same brush, and that’s the problem and they should be ashamed of themselves, and not everyone is a liar like they believe they are.

Keith is a 62-year-old man, and I would imagine isn’t as physically fit as the security guard who harmed him, so he was helpless against Bryan. Keith may have been identified as a troublemaker, but that’s not a criminal offence unless you can prove criminal grounds, but then the assessment centre who was dealing with his wife, if they were actually that worried, should have communicated with the police beforehand, and obviously they didn’t, they simply set their Gorilla onto him instead.

Keith was launched in the back by the security guard, what was Keith doing, reversing into the security guard? So, the old man answered the security guard back and might have offended his pubescent brain, so Bryan waited until Keith’s back was turned and pushed him into the door head first which makes the security guard a spineless bully.

But the fact is if Tory government simply trusted doctors opinions like we have done for decades upon decades we wouldn’t have this mayhem now, along with an unbelievable so-called assessments being overthrown in court, and the Government could save the taxpayers hundreds of millions if we only put such decisions back the way that they were.

The Tory government are really to blame for putting innocent people in this situation by using anti-social villains to implement their degradation, and when involved in a job with the public a person should be adequately qualified in all regards of public performance as no one has the right to attack or injure you.

The only people who are lawfully allowed to restrain you are the police, and to even touch a person is intimidation, but obviously, this security guard thought that he was above and beyond the law.

As for the DWP saying they’re completely committed to the disabled, it’s only a statement and it means nothing. The main problem is that too many face to face assessors and DWP decision makers are gravely inadequate, and it’s a travesty.

It seems to be that only a limited number of people are being given benefits at the first hurdle in the hope that it scares the claimant enough to give up or die waiting, and the DWP is managing a brutal and faulty policy, and rather than targeting the malingerers they throw everyone in the same bracket and put many thousands of people through needless stress when their lives are hard enough.

Apparently, we have the Royalty of Cruelty here with Iain Duncan Smith and Ester McVile. You know when you’re young and you have those daisies and you pick off each petal, “He loves me, he loves me not.” Well, here’s Smith and McVile, “They live, nah, they die.”

The policy of putting disabled people through assessments has been made extremely traumatic for them under this Government and it’s consequently reasonable if people get discouraged and maybe elevate their voice, but unless the husband of the disabled woman was actually assaulting a member of staff, there really was no justification for this sort of brutality from a very poorly trained security guard.

Claimants are being rejected by Atos and Capita only to drop dead a day later. The system is defective, and if it wasn’t then people wouldn’t need to raise their voices and get annoyed.

The system clearly needs fixing, and these private firms who most of the time don’t even have medical experience need to be abandoned, and this entire mayhem is because of the pathetic Tory party who handles everyone who is somewhat different as a threat to their profits.

No matter what the old man did, there’s no justification at all for brutality, the guard was clearly extremely badly qualified, not to mention, totally abandoned his duty of care as evidenced by the man’s injuries.

Force should only ever be used as an absolute last resort, and if this incompetent lump couldn’t control a 62-year-old man, then obviously he’s in the wrong job. Not to mention he had Keith in a choke hold which is forbidden and totally banned within the security industry, not to mention super dangerous.

Those people that are sick are being slandered and treated worse than trash, not because it saves the public pocket any actual money but because the Tories are ideologically predisposed to it. The trouble is, there are terrible dangerous people out there that let them get away with it, and those people will swallow anything the Government tells them.

These people will convene on the sidelines and tell you that people on benefits and sickness and those who are disabled are affecting our budget, but you should be far more worried about the Government misleading you. The Tories will say anything to distract attention away from tax breaks for capitalists and corporations, and Theresa May and her forerunners have brainwashed the public to shun the poor.

And even if this couple were a tad bad-tempered at her earlier assessment, I’ve been to some of these assessments where the workers are ignorant, appalling and incredibly uncaring, enough to dishevel the wings of a saint, and there’s definitely no justification for mistreating an elderly gentleman and wounding him.

The security guard is appealing, and obviously not so appealing from his mug shot, and on his appeal, his sentence should actually be extended because nobody has the authority, particularly if they’re in a job of power, to harm or maim another person.

The United Kingdom is getting a little like Hitler’s Germany. Hitler’s racial cleansing programme actually began with the euthanasia of the disabled, then moved on to Gipsies and Jews. Now we have the disabled and all classes of the unemployed.

Sofa-surfing and queuing for the food bank are not where a generation of women who are now in their 60s ever predicted after a lifetime of active work and child-rearing. But since the Government shifted the goalposts, twice, adjusting the age at which women born in the 1950s could claim their state pension, more and more are finding themselves homeless and poverty-stricken.

Without exception, they’re resentful and furious at what they define as daylight robbery with each one, on average, short-changed by well over £40,000 by the time they reach pensionable age, and there have been widespread reports lately of women in pension limbo-land who are scraping by on only £3 a week.

The 1995 Pensions Act to equalise the age of entitlement of the state pension for men and women to 65 was expected to be phased over ten years, totalling four-and-a-half working years for women. But in 2011 this change was ratcheted up by an added 18 months, leaving countless women having to wait until they’re 66 to claim their state pension.

For millions, it came as a blow, and globally, they profess to never have received a notification telling them what was going to happen, and now as coach-loads of them plan to gather in London next month, cutting a purple drape across the capital in their trademark colour, the Gloucestershire group will be heralding the campaign call, loud and clear.

Following 2015 there has been an increasing campaign around the country of WASPI (Women Against State Pension Inequality) advocates. The government has stolen money that is rightfully theirs and it didn’t even tell them until it was far too late for most of them to make plans.

Maud Lomberg, coordinator for Cirencester hasn’t however met anyone who has been in receipt of a letter from the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) setting out the Government’s plans. Some women in demanding jobs took early retirement, entirely assuming they could survive until their pension kicked in at 60, and abruptly they discovered they had an additional six years to wait, and there are women out there who are still oblivious of the changes.

It was all forced through without fuss with the overall opinion that a group of old women wouldn’t be able to do anything about it anyhow, and if that was the reasoning behind it, the decision-makers seriously underestimated this generation of women.

And now women resent that they’ve been cheated of their retirement plans, and who are the Government to turn their lives upside down like this? These women paid their contributions and they had a contract that they would go to work and pay in and retire at 60, and now the Government has taken what is legitimately theirs, and the Government simply assume they can simply get away with it.

And some women who were born in 1955 have been told by the DWP that because of the delay, they will not even break even on their state pension until they reach their 86th birthday. Most women don’t even reach their 86th birthday, but that’s the whole intent. You work all your life, you pay into your state pension, but you won’t even get it if you’re dead so they would have paid all that money for absolutely nothing.

And presently pensions are a complex trail of correspondence, which leaves them baffled and discouraged and makes them feel like they’ve worked for nothing, and all of them feel greatly let down by the Government.

Some have resigned themselves to the fact that they will have to work until they’re 66 but what they find especially discouraging is that despite having 48 qualifying years of National Insurance contributions they have been told that they will need to continue paying as long as they’re working, no surprise most young people don’t want to go to work because they’re not crazy enough to let the government take advantage of them.

In 2016 the amount of qualifying years of paying National Insurance was also changed, increasing from 30 to 35, and numerous women of that generation didn’t have salaries as high as men’s and weren’t permitted to pay into pensions and certainly couldn’t afford private pensions, and to be handled like this is contemptible.

How on earth are our children now supposed to have faith in a system that has failed us so terribly?

Most women in the 1955 bracket have worked laboriously since they were 15 years old, they have brought up a family and now want to use what years they have left enjoying their grandchildren and supporting their children, and should be able to do so on the pension they were guaranteed they would get at 60.

In the last year, food has been given out to women at food banks, but the food bank was only supposed to be for short-term emergency relief, but these women will require relief for years in some circumstances, and the Government maintains it’s delivering balance by shifting the pension age for women and then they have the temerity to say it’s long overdue.

The Government are now telling women in their 60s to retrain or take on apprenticeships, which leaves me as a woman boiling with rage. Even if they did retrain or take on apprenticeships they wouldn’t get work afterwards because most businesses want young blood, people who are in it for the long haul and aren’t going to keel over and die on them.

The Government are simply fleecing everyone, making them think that they will get work afterwards but of course they won’t. The Government primarily want you to work until they bleed you dry, it’s all about accumulating money and hoping that they will work you into the ground so they don’t have to pay you any state pension at all.

These women are morally and contractually entitled to their pensions, and there’s been a clear rise in poverty amongst 60-62-year-old women, and the number of women aged over 60 are now claiming benefits, and that has more than increased since 2013, and there’s been a five-fold rise in the number of women over 60 made to claim Employment and Support Allowance (ESA).

Women have been pressured to sell their homes because of the fiscal cliff edge they face, but it’s not that women want to be treated differently, but women born in the 1950s are bearing the brunt of a change that’s been introduced too fast.

The chairman of the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) has presented a Private Member’s Bill on this matter which is currently awaiting a debating opening and also currently waiting is the Government’s coming Pensions Bill, which would be a fitting vehicle to execute the campaign demands on in the form of amendments.

But according to the Government, this is all being done in the interest of fairness! There is nothing fair about this at all, everyone pays National Insurance contribution for their state pension, and I emphasise PAID. Many work laboriously all their life, and the single thing they have to look forward to is that pension, so they can then decompress with their families, their grandchildren, and their children.

Now it’s a work till you drop shop because the Government want to conserve cash, which suggests they twisted the facts to everyone by moving the goal posts, but they’re more than prepared to allow asylum seekers into the United Kingdom and give them what they want at the drop of a hat.

And the Prime Minister Theresa May should intercede and address the potential solutions of recompense because the Governments reforms were executed quicker than agreed and left women with no time to make alternative arrangements, which have reached overwhelming consequences, and now the Government should be pulling towards a suitable solution.

A remarkable 3.8 million women have been affected by the state pension rise, and every day there are women who are struggling to make ends meet, women who can’t afford to pay their bills, women who have had to sell their homes to get by, women who are now reliant on their families for their income, women who are no longer able to provide care to loved ones and are forced to return to work, women who are sofa surfing or sleeping in cars.

Women were given little to no notification of the exceedingly significant increase in their retirement age, and all have experienced a loss of income, with some losing as much as £45,000 as a consequence, and now the aim is to get the government to reconsider pension arrangements for women born in the 1950s who have or will be financially deprived by the variations to balance the state pension age between men and women, and acknowledge the costings for three solutions.

Countless women have worked laboriously for 49 years full time on low pay and have never claimed benefits in their life but were informed when they were 59 that they had to work another 6 years. These women believed they would be safe after paying National Insurance contributions for 49 years but now they’re still having to work which is pretty distressing for them.

These women paid into a system called National Insurance contributions, they paid and it should be theirs and if they had been paying into a private pension and that occurred, the company would have been taken to court and been made to pay what they were in debt to at the age that they said they would get their money, but the Government appear to be unmindful of this reality, and they appear to believe that they’re beyond any crime, and it’s simply a bullying strategy by our Government.

The state pension was recognised by Parliament, but Parliament appears to have the power to shift state benefits when they like, but this is what equality looks like folks.

Of course, the Government will tell you that they don’t have the reserves to do that, not unless they’re on the set of “Back to the future.”, and they have some kind of DeLorean machine…

Most women that we’re talking about are in their fifties or sixties, most of the men will be younger and won’t remember an era when women didn’t work full time but stayed at home and cared for their family.

Many women were frowned upon if they returned to work, therefore the opportunity to pay the small stamp duty so that they could use their husband’s contributions to claim their state pension.

Women had limited worth in the working environment, this is the environment that women from that era knew, and very few women had any aspirations or a working career.

The reforms to state pension were induced stealthily and the large preponderance of women really didn’t know what the switches meant for them, and the odds were actually stacked against women born in the fifties, and reading the Financial Times was just not considered for most women except if they worked in finance, but the Government wants to punish women for neglecting to read government pamphlets et cetera.

Our Government is unable to confirm that they notified women, and the Government failed fifties women, and two former ministers acknowledged that and the Government through the former chancellor said that to increase the ages of women’s state pension was the simplest way to save money he knew, so where’s the equality in that comment?.

These women paid into their National Insurance contributions towards their state pension regardless of their financial stature. They entered into what should have been recognised a promise to pay those contributions until their 60th birthday, and then receive a reimbursement founded on those contributions.

To amend the terms and conditions so harshly for some is totally insufferable to any decent person, and if you had taken an endowment or a pension out with an end date and the Insurance company said you’re going to have to wait another 6 years to get your money because we haven’t got the money now to pay you, I think that person would get really upset, but only our Government would expect to get away with it.

But to add insult to injury, after all these women have paid towards the NHS and pensions all their lives, the Government is now saying they want them to voluntarily pay more to help with the cost of the elderly as the elderly now have the audacity to live longer!

I’m not sure if people are really living longer like the Government have stated, in fact, if anything its flatlined a little, so the mystery is, why is the Government telling us they need to raise the pension age?

Furthermore, where is all that National Insurance money going to, that people have paid in? Maybe pensions shouldn’t be under the authority of the Government and should be controlled by an autonomous body who make sure that the money is put in the proper pension pot.

This Government isn’t for the people, it’s immoral and unfair, and we must petition to change this, not just for ourselves but for our future generations.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has contravened the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) in an apparent effort to block the release of secret reports, and in 2017, the DWP began recruiting community partners to work in jobcentres. It endeavoured to recruit around 200 of them, represented by the DWP as people with personal and professional experience of disability.

Their purpose would be to work with Jobcentre staff, to:

build their capability and provide valuable first-hand insight into the issues individuals with a health condition or disability face in securing and sustaining employment… Community Partners will also engage with local employers to help improve the recruitment and retention of disabled people and people with health conditions.

According to the Disability News Service (DNS), community partners submit regular reports on their work, often based on their experiences of visiting jobcentres. It states these reports are secret.

The DNS submitted a Freedom of Information request to the DWP, asking to view the reports written by community partners in London jobcentres in 2017 and 2018. Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, authorities are expected to reply to requests for information inside 20 working days.

The DWP did not reply inside that time, so the DNS contacted them twice more to ask for the information. The DNS reports that a staff member from the DWP’s FOI department told the service:

I chased it again this morning and I don’t know why it has taken so long. I have reminded them of their duty to reply in time and that is where I am with it…

I have tried. I don’t know why they are digging their heels. I am sorry.

In a statement, the DWP asked the DNS not to quote what the staff member stated in its reporting. The DWP further stated:

If you are unhappy with the handling of an FOI request please contact the Information Commissioner’s Office. The latest statistics show that DWP answered 95 per cent of FOI requests within 20 working days, exceeding the information commissioner’s compliance threshold of 90 per cent.

The DWP is a lot tougher on claimants than it appears to be on itself. People can be sanctioned for countless reasons, including being late for appointments or failing to update their CV. In its guidance to claimants on how to keep their benefits, the DWP recommends:

Provide as much information as you can, as quickly as possible.

The Guardian reported on the case of a disabled woman who lost her benefits after she failed to send in a form on time because of her sickness. And a former jobcentre staff member maintains they were supposed to sanction people if they were five minutes late for an interview.

So the DWP can be late, but others can’t. Welcome to the department’s double standards.

Not only that, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has been conspiring with Sainsbury’s to spy on welfare claimants and disabled people.

In its CCTV use and requests privacy policy, Sainsbury’s states:

Occasionally we share CCTV with public or regulatory authorities such as the police or the DWP or in response to requests from individuals seeking to protect their rights or the rights of others.

A Sainsbury’s spokesperson reported to The Canary:

As will be the case with other businesses and public organisations, from time to time we will receive requests to share CCTV with the police or regulatory authorities. We will consider each request on its own legal merits and only share where appropriate.

A DWP spokesperson told The Canary:

Surveillance helps us to prevent and detect crime and is only used in strict accordance with the law. The DWP uncovers thousands of benefit fraud cases every year and recovered a record £1.1bn in overpaid benefits last year.

The DWP collects information when it examines suspected benefit fraud is nothing new. As it said in response to a Freedom of Information request (FOI):

Fraud investigators can where appropriate access publicly available information, such as on Facebook, Twitter etc., to gather evidence. Investigators cannot create fake social media profiles to engage with suspects in order to obtain evidence about that individual and again these activities are carefully managed and controlled.

Fraud investigators can request CCTV footage as part of a specific investigation or operation under and in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998 and the CCTV Code of Practice 2008, issued by the Information Commissioner’s Office.

There has been anecdotal evidence that the DWP has been asking leisure companies, like theme parks, for CCTV footage of claimants using their facilities. But further, this big brother approach to welfare claimants and particularly disabled people has been growing for years.

And the UN denounced successive Conservative-led governments of having some responsibility for society seeing disabled people as parasites, living on social benefits, and living on the taxes of other people. It previously stated that successive governments had built a public perception where disabled people:

have been negatively portrayed as being dependent or making a living out of benefits; perpetrating deception as benefit claimants; being idle and putting a strain on taxpayers, who are paying money for nothing.

The evidence verifies the UN’s claims, and between 2010 and 2015 the public reported over 1.6 million cases of alleged benefit fraud to the DWP. But of these, 85 per cent were incorrect. Furthermore, as The Canary previously reported, actual benefit fraud is comparatively rare totalling 1.1per cent of the tax credits bill. For the DWP, benefit fraud and error accounted for 1.9 per cent of its total bill.

Meanwhile, according to a group of experts, disability hate crime increased by 213 per cent under the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition government. This has all happened while the people have been served a TV diet of ‘poverty porn‘ on shows like The Great British Benefits Handout.

The United Kingdom has a hostile environment where welfare claimants and disabled people live under a veil of doubt and unworthiness. It’s this which makes Sainsbury’s plotting with the DWP all the more concerning, if we have reached the point where welfare beneficiaries can’t even do their shopping without fear of being ‘shopped’ to the DWP, then the policy is even more damaged than we imagined.

Especially when a woman with mental health problems was asked by DWP disability benefit assessors why she had not killed herself.

Alice Kirby, who also has physical disabilities, accused the Department of Work and Pensions of institutional abuse as she talked about her experience attempting to claim Personal Independence Payment (PIP).

The claim comes as new figures reveal private companies that manage the assessments on behalf of the DWP and rake in more than £700 million from their five-year agreements, but Labour denounced the Government of rewarding failure by contractors Capita and Atos, who had originally been expected to take just over £500 million from the contracts.

The DWP says the PIP assessment balances support for the most vulnerable with value for money for the taxpayer, but Labour promised to revise the laws for all private contractors to hold them to a higher standard.

Phrased competently and sensitively, questions about suicide and questioning a person why they haven’t killed themselves could be relevant in a psychiatric evaluation, but it should not be addressed in a benefits evaluation.

In this setting, it’s not safe to ask questions like these because assessors have not the experience or abilities to assist people with mental health problems, and there’s no consideration of the repercussions it could have on a person’s mental health.

This kind of questioning is completely unnecessary and would have no impact on that person’s award

Alice Kirby was horrified to learn how many other people had been asked comparable questions as part of assessments, and some people answered saying they felt suicidal or had attempted suicide, assessors said things such as ‘that’s understandable’, but some other people had been asked in detail precisely how they would carry out suicide if they were to kill themselves.

After Alice’s payments were reduced she believed that her health had deteriorated.

The payouts to the firms by the DWP were calculated at £198 million in 2015, £91 million in 2014 and £7 million in 2013, the year PIP started. Maybe if they stopped giving out to these wretched companies, there would be more in the kitty for people like Alice Kirby, and figures released in January and February 2017 show the firms have been given an extra £25 million.

Atos won two of the three original tenders, a £206.7 million agreement to carry out evaluations in the North and Scotland, and a £183.9 million settlement for London and the South. The other £121.6 million settlement for evaluations in Central England and Wales was gained by Capita.

More than 160,000 people originally refused PIP have had this ruling overthrown since the benefit started in 2013, and according to DWP figures, Atos and Capita have been hounded by allegations of callous evaluations, and it’s beyond belief that this Tory Government is rewarding incompetence.

The PIP process is in chaos and these private firms are getting enormous payouts in a time of severe austerity, and it’s obvious that these costs are spiralling out of control.

The Government must get an urgent grip on these extravagant salaries to private firms, particularly at a time when they’re getting more and more assessments overthrown in the courts, and the DWP maintains that all workers giving out PIP assessments get training on mental health conditions, including concerns around self-destructive thoughts, which have to be investigated further given their duty of care to claimants.

The DWP has stated that helping people with mental health conditions is their priority, and that’s why the government are giving a record amount on mental health support, over £11 billion a year, and they said that there are presently more people with mental health conditions receiving the higher rates of both PIP components than the former DLA equivalents.

They further stated that PIP assessors get training on mental health conditions, so that they’re able to examine the claimant’s circumstances, accurately and sensitively.

A spokesperson for Atos, which carried out Ms Kirby’s evaluation, stated: “The professional and compassionate service we provide to claimants is our primary consideration.

The specific question is inappropriate and if asked would not meet the high standards and training in place which enable the sensitive and appropriate handling of assessments by our professional assessors for those with mental health conditions.

They maintain value for money for the taxpayer, yet a small amount of searching reveals that the DWP wasted pretty nearly £1.4 billion pounds of taxpayers money in 2015 berating disabled people, and it’s hard enough speaking to a counsellor who’s there to help you about their illness, let alone someone who is looking for a reason to weaken their claim.

It’s not rocket science if a doctor and a hospital say that the patient is ill, then obviously they’ve had tests done to confirm that’s the case. If a patient has mental health, the doctor doesn’t simply glance at them and assume, “Oh yeah, they’ve got mental health problems. If a person has been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, certain tests have to be done to reach that conclusion. If a person has been diagnosed with Cancer, multiple tests have been done to determine that fact and the list goes on.

This can’t be done by a tick box exercise, they’re real illnesses that have been checked and determined by tests, probably over and over again. These sick people don’t then need to be assessed and examined again, considering many of these ill people have been through enough already.

There are people out there that fake it, but they’re pretty limited related to the number of people that are genuinely ill.

Many people have a physical disability that you can see, others don’t have any obvious manifestations at all, such as a patient that suffers from mental health, but they don’t need to be questioned why they haven’t killed themselves because obviously as far as the assessor is concerned they have nothing to look forward to. Not only is it distressing, it makes that person feel inadequate, which is presumably why it’s done.

This is beyond shameful.

A person might be suffering from Anorexia because they were abused at school and further had families struggles, which made them go down a horrendous spiral of depression, henceforth no life and actually never went out the house except if it was to hospital appointments and then they had to go with somebody else.

Atos would find them fit for work, and then they would lie over and over stating that they enjoyed normal social activities despite never leaving the house or having a single friend because they had no social life. This would be founded on the basis that the person went to hospital appointments to see their shrink, but not on their own because they wouldn’t have been able to go out on their own, but clearly going to see your shrink is classified as social dexterity.

There are assessors out there telling people that they’re getting old and that their life is slipping away, it’s no surprise people want to kill themselves after they’ve been to see an Atos assessor.

Firms like Atos and Capita haven’t been put there for any other purpose other than to make sure people don’t claim sickness because the plan is that once the information gets out there on how tough it is to get PIP many people will feel crushed and not bother because after all, all those sick people are going to bankrupt the country. No, I think Atos and Capita are going to bankrupt the country with all the money their making, it’s not like their doing much aside from reprimanding honest people and checking off a tick list.

Being unemployed can often mean being treated as if you are less than human, and there’s the antagonistic attitude of a rather substantial abundance of people in this country towards those who aren’t healthy, rich and white is a public scandal frequently immortalised by the far-Right tabloids, and frequently by the Tory party, and usually by diehard loyal taxpayers.

But for this repugnant stance to be frequently used by the state to victimise people for what they’ve now undergone is a public scandal.

And even though suicide was sanctioned in 1961, this kind of burden is being put on a person by the government, and it appears that the government is implying that people should commit suicide rather than be a strain on the country, which is a shocking thought.

This government has endorsed the ill-treatment of people, and it should be unlawful to harry people with a disability or mental health difficulties, and it’s essentially influencing or urging people to commit suicide, and humiliating them for trying to stay alive.

It’s utterly shameful misconduct, and whoever in the government deems this is acceptable should be ousted, but how do we go about ending this abuse? Because we’re all accountable for this degradation if we look the other way.

The problem is, this is not new, and it’s been going on for years, with ludicrous sums of money going to private firms simply to make decisions they’re not equipped to make, and the number of victorious appeals is evidence of that, and it would definitely be more tangible to listen to doctor’s and psychiatrists et cetera that are actually treating the patient day to day.

That way they would know how likely the patient is able of specific tasks and whether they simply need a little push or help to be able to achieve a better life, or if it’s the worst thing for them at that present time, because there’s no way an assessor going through a checklist for 45 minutes could possibly evaluate an often extremely complex mental health condition, but then I doubt that reasoning and concern has no part to play in this brave new world of the demonised disabled formulated by our government.

The DWP are nothing more than nasty, malicious money taking savage cruel reprobates who tell us that they’re professional and compassionate and that they provide their claimants with primary consideration… more hogwash!

The very fact that the government has persecuted the disabled to the degree that it has, and including the outrageous reality that they’ve wasted more taxpayers money than they have saved.

Never judge a book by its cover, each disability or illness is complex, and simply because a person with a mental illness might be able to climb a ladder, that doesn’t mean they’d be able to get work because mental illness is highly diverse, and if your assessment was carried out by a nurse working for Atos or Capita and you felt that they’d failed to do their job correctly, you could report them, but you don’t appear to be able to report anyone from Atos or Capita, as well as, the fact that you’re in the room alone with them and they could freely abuse you physically but instead they abuse you mentally.

Not only that, we should be allowed to know the requisites of the assessor, and they should be able to show you their ability to dispense with your disability or your mental health, and anyone below the level of a psychiatrist is not equipped to diagnose or recognise a mental illness because there are many other physical causes that can prompt comparable manifestations.

If you went in with Cerebral Palsy, you wouldn’t expect to be seen by a Physiotherapist, if you went in with Cancer, you wouldn’t expect to be seen by an eye doctor, but this frequently happens.

If a person is at the end stages of having Alzheimer’s, clearly incontinent, wheelchair-bound and on a fluid intake, would the DWP demand that person to come for an assessment, of course, they would. They would stop all payments save pension because that said person couldn’t get to the assessment centre.

Eventually, they would agree to visit at that said persons home and then label that person uncooperative, totally missing the point that the person couldn’t, in fact, talk because the system is utterly idiotic, and it’s amazing how quickly the disabled have been stigmatised.

Did our country as a nation lose that amount of compassion for each other that fast? And I fail to understand how asking a person who is or has been suicidal why they haven’t killed themselves, and there’s no justification for this cruel way that people are being treated.

And even though we’re aware that fraud does go on, ironically it would be more economical to simply pay each person that is fraudulently claiming disability than it is to pay these private companies to try and stop these fraudulent claims.

The fraud percentage is 0.7, which is lower than anything else related to the government, and it seems like we now have teenagers in the bodies of adults who are governing the world, and if the DWP insist you have to have an assessment, they say that everything you say will be written down and used in evidence, what are they the Gestapo police?

There’s a daft volume of money being paid to Atos and Capita, then you need to figure in all the costs being incurred by the DWP. They’ve spent £22 million hiring additional staff to deal with appeals, each appeal costs at least £3,000.

In 20016 over 51,000 PIP or ESA appeals were lodged and statistically about two-thirds of them were victorious, so that’s at least another £10 million down the drain, and as stated by Penny Mordaunt, the Minister accountable for the disaster, if the service providers fail to deliver, DWP can implement “agreed financial remedies” but we don’t see any indication of that.

Many of these assessors have absolutely no knowledge of mental health past looking at other peoples claim forms, and then they have the boldness to ask if you’ve attempted suicide because it’s on your form, then they ask if you’re suicidal now, while the claimant is sobbing into a piece of tissue paper, and then when you tell them that you have attempted suicide, they have the temerity to ask what method you used, or do you have scars from a previous suicide attempt. The assessor is barely 22 years old who’s a nurse and who has only been qualified for 12 months but is now working for Capita doing medical assessments.

This appears to be intentional and well practised by our government. How does a political leader obtain control? Divide and control, there can be no inside without an outside to scorn or hate, by creating or pointing to an adversary, demonising them, dehumanising them, and then you can get the people to elect you and destroy those people less able.

The difficulty arises from outsourcing to private companies. The scope of the contract suggests there are so few firms competent of running it, let alone implementing. Atos and Capita are only in it to make money, integrity doesn’t come into it. It would make interesting reading to have sight of their Service-level Agreement (SLA) and how fees are structured in as £198 million in 2015 appears extreme and the expression ‘creaming fees’ comes to mind.

Please remember that some of these people are Old Age Pensioners (OAP’s), the people who played as children amongst unexploded bombs, some even exploded them! People who worked with Health and Safety Protection, not to mention the chemicals like Asbestos, and then they got sick, this is why the amount of unhealthy people is bigger than you can imagine.

The policy is based solely on the need to deal with the harassment of a few which punishes everyone because it mistrusts everyone. This comes from competitively franchising out these obscure assessments to widespread corporations with fingers in various pies, who use ill-trained and ill-paid workers who pressure them to maximise their profit.

But who should we be condemning, the sheeple who voted for Tony Blair, or the government as a whole? Because I’m still confused as to why people still continue to choose Tory when they whine about them so much, people you can’t have your cake and eat it.

Tory policies are intended to serve the wealthy minority and poop on the majority. Empathy has been lost in the United Kingdom, and austerity is a philosophy, not a necessity, and seemingly prejudice and resentment are deliberately fuelled by the powers that be.

And it appears to be from where the Tories are standing, is that a dead claimant is one less claimant for the country to support, and Atos and Capita are the freaks that have resulted from this privatisation. They’re not even British firms, and why is Jeremy Corbyn not vilifying and demonising these hideous outfits which toady money from the taxpayer through a Tory government?

And now we’re witnessing the abuse and destruction of our institution’s and the decimation of our Civil Service, which was once capable for making choices.

We have Sodexho, a French company, managing hospital catering and car parks, raking money in that should go to patient care rather than shareholders who profit from misery. The Labour government should terminate the agreements of all these firms and return to the practice of public service staffed by equipped segments of the public with a sense of responsibility, rather than silly automated models that are ruthless and unfair.

Our government are criminals, they’re knowledgeable of early mortality created by their policies, and still, they do nothing, and then they use the 30 per cent of people who voted for them as a justification of their cruel destructive policies, and they don’t have to account for anything.

Once you pay your tax, it’s no longer yours, and money raised from taxation, you don’t get to ring-fence it or track it, or choose what is done with it by the government. Therefore, if people aren’t happy about what their taxes are being used on, then just don’t pay it, yeah, like that’s going to happen!

We live in a cosmos of people who are rather idiotic, and we have crazy people that are running our motherland, and if you were a regular person doing the stuff that the government are doing, you’d have been sectioned by now.

The government are determinedly treating the most defenceless constituents of our society as vermin, and it’s shocking that disabled and chronically sick people are being intentionally withheld money they require to simply survive, whilst fat cats are being overcompensated, and then fraudulently refuse them money.

It’s very important for Jews to go out on the streets of London. There were loads of Jews who were refugees, some came on the kinder transport and most Jews for most of their life have lived with European antisemitism and its consequences.

Many of them thanked Britain for letting them in and aspired to give something back, and some became local political activists in London where some have worked really closely with Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott and have dealt with a huge array of dilemmas in London as colleagues and friends in the 1980s.

The notion that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-semite is quite honestly thick-witted, so then we have to consider what’s going on, and there are profound problems around anti-semitism, not so much in Britain, but in Europe and elsewhere, and we must focus on the serious stuff, and this is a manipulation by an Israeli propaganda outfit, of the right-wing Labour party, and lord knows what else, to ferment an issue that has no spine.

With members of the Jewish Defence League (JDL), they come from constituencies from around the country and there’s nothing to report about anti-semitism, and Britain continues to be one of the safest countries to live as a Jew on the whole planet.

That doesn’t imply there’s no anti-Jewish hatred here, it’s simply that there’s a vast deal less of it than some people want you to believe, and that’s true for now, but how long will it last?

Thanks to a Jewish communal leadership and a Jewish press which have united Jewish interests in Britain with the need to defend the interests of the State of Israel, we’re set on a path that endangers turning false anti-semitism into actual anti-semitism.

What we’re seeing could be an on-coming, self-inflicted disaster for the Jewish population in Britain, and shouting it out now is the best way to prevent it from occurring.

Dame Margaret Hodge, a former minister braved Jeremy Corbyn behind the Speaker’s chair following crunch votes on Brexit, and called him a “f****** racist and an anti-semite”

The Labour leader is supposed to have responded: “I’m sorry you feel like that.”

Senior Labour sources didn’t argue reports of the exchange and suggested Jeremy Corbyn would seek a meeting with Dame Margaret Hodge to address the subject. She’s was also expected to be reported to Labour whips for the harangue.

It came following Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) approved a controversial code of conduct that only partially uses the internationally-recognised International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-semitism.

The party has agreed to use the definition but has not directly fostered four of the IHRA examples of anti-semitism. They are: accusing Jewish people of being more loyal to Israel than their home country, claiming the existence of Israel is a racist endeavour, holding Israel to higher standards than other countries, and comparing Israeli policies to those of the Nazis.

Labour has insisted the examples are incorporated elsewhere in the code of conduct, but Jewish community groups denounced the document.

Facing a burgeoning backlash, the NEC acknowledged “serious concerns” had been raised and proposed continuing consultation with Jewish groups.

Anti-semitism is a strange kind of discrimination, and rather than disparaging Jews as inferior, it casts them as maliciously superior, and it’s a prejudice that’s as popular on the left as it is on the right, and whereas leftist politics dictates that something is offensive if the oppressed group maintains it is, those who otherwise profess to be progressive have an annoying inclination to maintain that, actually, anti-semitism isn’t actually a problem at all.

This pattern has been recently illustrated by the UK Labour Party and its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and Spectator magazine assembled a roster of 50 recent anti-semitic occurrences connected with the party, and hardly a month goes by without someone in Labour making yet another biased criticism.

Many of the wrongdoers are still party members, and former London mayor Ken Livingstone stated that a Jewish journalist was “just like a concentration camp guard” and that Adolf Hitler advocated Zionism.

Jackie Walker, the former vice-chair of Corbyn-supporting organization Momentum, questioned why Jewish schools require security and complained that Holocaust Memorial Day wasn’t inclusive enough, and under Jeremy Corbyn’s administration, both got deferments but were not expelled from the party.

In the meantime, according to Jackie Walker, concerns about anti-semitism inside Labour are driven by Israel, the Tory party, and the right-wing newspapers as a method to attack Jeremy Corbyn.

Following on from this series of transgressions and denials, the Labour party saw it fitting to form a new meaning of anti-semitism. Their resulting recommendations were immediately denounced by 68 rabbis, making it the first time ultra-orthodox rabbis and progressive female rabbis have co-signed the same letter.

In answer, secular Jewish MP Margaret Hodge called Jeremy Corbyn a racist and anti-semite, and the Labour Party, in turn, started a disciplinary hearing into Margaret Hodge, so obviously, Jeremy Corbyn thinks he’s been unjustly accused.

But at what point does an easygoing approach towards anti-semitism become itself a manifestation of discrimination? In other words, when can Jeremy Corbyn or anyone be deemed a real anti-semite?

The key to this enigma rests in recognising the nature of anti-semitism.

Normally, biases are discourses of mediocrity: women are less able than men, sexual minorities are perverted and immoral, ethnic minorities are less intelligent, but the most dominant patterns of anti-semitism, including those used by the Nazis and the Soviet Union, are quite the reverse. It’s that Jews are too smart by half, too powerful, and historically, anti-semitism is the very first conspiracy theory.

Jewish people present a convenient scapegoat for the world’s evils, and so anti-semitism persecutes Jews by maintaining that Jewish people are the persecutors, and if the Jew did not exist, the anti-semite would invent him.

The fact that Jewish people are frequently indistinguishable from a majority-white society further feeds conspiracy theories: Anti-semitism is the fear of the stranger passing as an insider, the suspicion and hostility of an unseen network pulling the strings.

This theory also encompasses any foreigner, including people of the Muslim belief, and this dynamic is evident in comparisons about Jewish people dominating capitalism, the media, and Hollywood, and feeds into attempts to condemn all Jews for the actions of the Israeli government.

The narrative, which sees Jews as oppressors to be overthrown, also makes it a more suitable fit for left-wing politics than most other modes of bias. Hence anti-semitism has been called the fool’s socialism.

Because anti-semitism is established on the notion that Jewish people are uniquely powerful, the discrimination is frequently visible in claims that anti-semitism isn’t a concern or doesn’t exist, and the anti-semite sees Jewish people as powerful brutes, and so can’t acknowledge that it’s possible for Jews to be victimised.

How does this apply to Jeremy Corbyn? In one striking instance, the Labour leader faced objection for supporting an overtly anti-semitic mural in 2012. It’s probably likely, though unlikely, that Jeremy Corbyn didn’t realize the mural was anti-semitic at the time.

But, earlier this year, he had a distinctly unemotional response to the upset and outrage prompted by his remarks. Though the initial transgression was outrageous enough, his absence of care presented a distinct indifference towards Jewish people.

But Jeremy Corbyn has stated that he can’t be anti-semitic because he loathes all discrimination. But the idea that people can be biased even without conscious, malicious intent is a fundamental left-wing dogma, and progressive politics supports that discrimination is systemic and that everyone has a duty to consider how they contribute to prejudice.

Is Jeremy Corbyn anti-semitic, or is he anti-semitic according to the left’s own perception of what constitutes prejudice and discrimination? And denials, mean little to Jewish people when they’re regularly faced with anti-semitic comments and response.

And even the most genuine, heartfelt claims to egalitarianism don’t protect against the decaying influence of anti-semitism.

Anti-semitism is a politics of hostility against the wrong things. It’s a politics of deflection and untruth, and it will never be able to resolve the real and present pressures and dilemmas of society. That’s why it’s really dangerous, and it will always destroy its users.

Experiences of anti-semitism these days in England are rare, so it’s important that we take each and every accusation of anti-semitism really seriously and with the highest level of concern, not slothful indifference.

Political parties are by definition places of tribalism: organisations that cultivate a feeling of opposition between distinguished and polarised sides. Our electoral policy generates space for merely two important parties, and the official opposition’s job is to scrutinise the actions of government and holding them to account.

It doesn’t take a Westminster staff member to see that inside party structures there are comparable pressures, and Brexit has created a virulent rift within the Conservatives that seems far from healing, while the split in Labour over Jeremy Corbyn’s premiership, while gradually diminishing, preponderates anyway.

But as these Labour encampments have been developed in this municipal war, so too has anti-semitism’s position within it, and what has become self-evident since the most recent story surfaced is that we’ve lost the vision of a simple truth: some Jewish segments have stated they sometimes feel uncomfortable, and that the party isn’t always a safe place for them.

Furthermore, some Jewish people who have reprimanded Jeremy Corbyn have received anti-semitic persecution, and all sides of the Labour Party must now take stock of their positions because there have been some harsh realities that many others, had wished were not there.

It’s true that for years now Jeremy Corbyn and his followers have been unfairly characterised as raging anti-semites, and critics have told Labour members that their behaviour can be equated to facilitating anti-semitism, that they’re an army of racists who deserve to be shunned.

At times, this was done by organisations with people who have rightly been kicked out for their repugnant views, at other times it was nothing more than defamation, but in fact now Labour is the home of people committed to fighting prejudice.

The left has an abundant and impressive history of standing up for oppressed and marginalised people, and a swift flick through your history books will reinforce that this is the case. Yet just because many of the allegations against Labour and Jeremy Corbyn have been groundless, it doesn’t imply Jeremy Corbyn is beyond judgment.

He does screw up, and five years ago that’s precisely what he did.

It was back in 2012 when Jeremy Corbyn, then an unknown back-bencher, posted a comment on social media which has now brought massive critique, and a large amount of media consideration.

Why Jeremy Corbyn wrote on the underneath of an image of a mural on Facebook with a heading that revealed that the next day it would be taken down from a wall in London, “You are in good company,” the Labour leader continued, “Rockefeller destroyed Diego Viera’s mural because it includes a picture of Lenin.”

The mural in question portrayed anti-semitic tropes that have no place in society, and it’s right that Jeremy Corbyn apologised and revealed how his remarks came about, and this appears to have been more like an error rather than being motivated by the loathing of Jews, and there’s no doubt the man is an active anti-racist campaigner.

Of course, anti-semitism exists in Britain, and it displays itself in a diversity of forms. The neo-Nazis and the racialists who attack and denounce us are a menace to our safety, but so too are the more indirect manifestations of prejudice that pop up in our everyday life.

There are the conspiracy theories and the hooked-nose illustrations, those who use the word Jew as a synonym for stingy, and those who say Jews run the world, and for those who continue to indiscriminately support Jeremy Corbyn on this issue, claiming that this is simply another attempt to weaken his leadership in a long-running smear campaign shows a clear absence of judgement and rightly offends Jewish people and we must always hold our leaders to account.

It doesn’t matter that the issue today is being weaponised by some. Jeremy Corbyn gave them the ammunition, and it doesn’t even matter that some of those continuing to reprimand Jeremy Corbyn today do so with ambitions to remove him from the Labour leadership. What matters is that it happened, and can never be allowed to happen again.

The broad preponderance of those racing to support Jeremy Corbyn today is doing so because it’s now second nature. They’ve become accustomed to the media unjustly criticising him. On this occasion though, there’s merit in the turmoil.

Listen to the concerns being raised, and view the reply Jeremy Corbyn wrote. These bold replies are, while not excusable, or justifiable, they’re a consequence of a never-ending smear campaign. If Labour is going to be a truly anti-racist party, it has to adhere to this fundamental policy of anti-racism: you listen to people from minority ethnic communities, you consider their backgrounds, and you don’t tell them it’s all in their head.

There’s also a fair amount of fear-mongering from those looking to whip up anxieties that don’t need to be there. “The reality is that there are no safe spaces online or in meetings for Jewish people within the Labour Party,” reads a letter written to Jeremy Corbyn by the Board of Deputies and Jewish Leadership Council.

Many Labour members are the most committed opposers of prejudice, and making such all-embracing and bogus generalisations are not helpful, but as Jewish people who define themselves in light of their progressive values, they’re compelled to hold themselves to higher standards when it comes to anti-semitism, as with all forms of discrimination.

Two separate groups assembled outside Parliament, one was in support of Jeremy Corbyn, the other was critical of him, the fact both were united in abhorring anti-semitism has been wasted in hysteria, and we’ve let an in-house battle over the Labour Party and its future deflect us from the real and immediate dangers that anti-semitism presents us with.

In January 2018, figures released by the Community Security Trust revealed that anti-semitic incidents had reached an all-time high in Britain, with a 34 per cent rise in the amount of violent anti-semitic attacks. The situation is even murkier in America.

When the level of anti-semitic assaults on our streets is rising, why are all the op-eds, leader columns, news accounts and TV discussions about a Facebook post by Jeremy Corbyn?

Tackling anti-semitism doesn’t simply mean Labour throwing someone out of the party. What should be obvious is that is just the start. It implies taking a hard look at our culture which tolerates prejudice and discrimination to flourish and ensuring that we strive to make sure prejudice is eradicated today and for generations to come.

This means taking on the far-right but further making it clear conspiracy theories aren’t left-wing, and there’s no place for apologists in progressive movements. It’s Labour’s duty, as the country’s most progressive party, to take on that responsibility.

We know that Jeremy Corbyn is no anti-semite just as well as he does, but there’s no harm in rising to the occasion and proving your doubters wrong.

A mum who lost her son to a genetic condition when he was only two-years-old has set up a charity to support others. Nikke Hewitt depended on Disability Living Allowance and Carers’ Allowance to survive while giving round the clock care for Edward ‘Teddy’ Hewitt.

When he tragically died the allowances also stopped, leaving her grief-stricken and needing to find a source of income.

Nikke, of Eastwood, Essex had given up her job to care for him, but many parents or families don’t have the strength to get a job right after losing a child. It takes them longer to get a job or harder to keep the job they already had.

This, in turn, increases the pressure which is put upon them and as a result, they slip into a darker kind of depression, and then it’s an unending downward spiral.

If a company forced a grieving parent back to work after two weeks, there would be an uproar, but because it’s a Government department, there’s no sympathy, no compassion for that person who’s just lost a child, they do as they want and simply toss them back into the lions den, and more awareness of this has to be raised.

Nikke was able to find work inside two weeks of Teddy passing away but she shouldn’t have had to because this mother lost her son, and there are many other families that have lost their child that are forced back to work by the relentless Department of Work and Pensions (DWP).

How do they sleep at night, I’d be having nightmares for that family that had just lost their child, and shame on our government.

Spurred by her own experience, and that of others, she chose to set up the Teddy Hewitt Foundation. The foundation will aim to lobby Government to alter its policy about removing benefits after a loved one dies.

Teddy’s father and Nikki’s partner, Richard Hewitt, is also taking part in a charity cycle ride from Little Havens in Benfleet, Essex to Amsterdam to raise money for the children’s hospice. They gave Teddy astounding care and love throughout their stays at the hospice in Benfleet, Essex, and they were incredible through Teddy’s final days with and the aftercare and help that was received will never be forgotten by the family.

Donate at: gofundme.com/little-havens-to-amsterdam-ride

Nikke Hewitt gave up full-time work to look after her son, and when he died, the money stopped spontaneously, there was no leeway what so ever. Nikke was required to return to work straight away. It takes a long time to grieve when somebody dies, it doesn’t matter who it is, but when it’s child the adjustment can take a long time, and those that have never lost a child could never possibly understand, it’s not like your pet dying and your sad for a few weeks and then you get over it, the loss of a child never leaves you, and when you do feel a little relief from it, you then end up feeling guilty that you did something for yourself.

There needs to be a period of help for parents to adjust back to a normal life before returning to work, and also some kind of bereavement counselling for parents that’s free to the point of need.

A parent that has given up their job to look after a child that has been ill for a long time and then dies is really difficult, they not only have to learn to deal with the death of that child but then has to fill that vacuum because that void has been filled for years with looking after that child. Just going back to work is not always the answer, and everybody copes in varying ways, but whatever way they cope, they also need support.

As I said anybody that’s never lost a child would have no idea whatsoever, it’s not like losing your dog because that child is your flesh and blood, the parent has looked after the child who has bee poorly for years, all day, every day, giving round the clock care, medications, and they might also have other children to look after as well.

Anybody that has lost a child needs a certain amount of grieving period, there’s the funeral to sort out, and also the money to find for that, it’s all part of that grieving period. Not only that, she gave up a perfectly decent job to look after her son and depending on how long a person is out of work, it might be pretty difficult to get back into the workplace because of the amount of time they’ve been out of work.

When someone loses a spouse they become a widow, when a child loses a parent they become an orphan, but when a parent loses a child they get nothing to help with that. Both a widow or orphan would get support from our government, so why not a parent?

Boris Johnson is a very funny man at times, sadly, he frequently puts his foot in his mouth which gets media and public attention. Clearly, he’s a supporter of free speech, and you’ve got to love his repartee, and it tells you a lot when Rowan Atkinson seems compelled to ride to his defence.

But while Rowan Atkinson was seeking to dress Boris up in fairy lights of comedy, there is the fact that Boris Johnson did, in fact, offend letterboxes, comparing them to Burkas. Should Boris Johnson be made to apologise, well, possibly to those poor letterboxes, after all, they’ve been a traditional component of our culture for a pretty long time, and the Burka has been here in England comparatively less time.

Boris, however, said that he had an out-and-out aversion to the Burka, so obviously it wasn’t a joke, and now we’re not laughing, and there wasn’t any punchline, and Boris Johnson has an abundant and magnificent history of disparaging and undermining women, regardless and sometimes because of their attire.

He wrote about his “Tottymeter” at a Labour conference, making women feel embarrassed, and then advised his successor that when dispensing with the publisher Kimberley Quinn, he stated, “Just pat her on the bottom and send her on her way.” He’s also written about female drivers, and taking them from behind, and spoke of Volleyball players in London 2012, about them glistening like wet otters.

He further said that female students only frequented university because they had to find a man to marry, and lastly stated that Hillary Clinton resembled a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital.

You could dismiss this as mere banter, but while he was the Mayor of London he axed the position of Women’s Advisor, and cut £90,000 and five jobs from the Domestic Violence task force, and fought over funds used to tackle rape, and abolished a childcare unit for single parents – no wonder he can’t find a woman to love him, after all, who would want to be with a man with narcissistic tendencies.

More recently, he has spent two years undermining Britain’s second female Prime Minister and further made his situation worse after a British mum sat languishing in an Iranian prison, and he had to atone for his careless chauvinistic comments.

And in his private life he’s not managed to be faithful to a single woman he’s been publicly and romantically linked with, give it up Boris, no one wants you. In brief, he displays no sign of being a feminist, clearly, his mother never breastfed him.

No woman in a Burka has yet robbed a bank, although men have put on Burkas to cover up their identities while carrying out crimes or retreating them, and as far as I know no woman who usually prefers to conceal her face has not blown anybody up in Britain, but the people that have done so are male, and in many instances are born to Christian families. A point that’s worth bearing in mind when someone declares it’s the women in Niqabs we need to worry about.

Political correctness has gone mad because political correctness demands us to be considerate of other people, but isn’t that simply the habit of good manners anyhow?

Clearly, not everybody has good manners, and some people are simply inbred narcissistic neanderthals, step up to the rostrum Boris Johnson, and don’t get that microphone stuck in your mouth…

Calling people names is allowed, and disparaging attire preferences is somewhat prevalent, but it’s also pretty rude, and while we all have the autonomy to be rude to people we all, usually, don’t display most of this rudeness because we have either courtesy or compassion towards other people.

So, even though I may very well think that Boris Johnson is fat, obnoxious and piggish, I might think about it but I wouldn’t relate it to his face because I have empathy and compassion, and I’m guessing that if I did say it to his face, and I have the right to do so, I choose not to because they’re offensive and rude and might injure his feelings, if he even has any.

I guess covering yourself with a Burka could imply that they’re not prepared to blend into British society, and is a security issue, and if they’re allowed to wear a Burka then why do British people donning hoodies have to have their hoods down when going into any store?

But there’s no legislation on assimilation into British culture, in fact, I’m not sure there’s any legislation in any country that declares that people have to integrate. The fact is, kids are going hungry in the school holidays, the NHS is falling around our heads, and we’re worried about Burkas, really?

There’s a rational and well-intentioned drive to contain offensive factors in society which has produced a culture of exceptional dogmatic and testing strength, it’s what you might call the new narrow-mindedness. It’s a distinct, and powerful want to suppress the uncomfortable voice of descent.

Many people say they’re not narrow-minded, say the softly spoken man, profoundly educated, liberal-minded people, and people appear to respond shrewdly and say they’re really wise words, and yet if you think about this seemingly inarguable observation for longer than five seconds, you’ll understand that all that it’s advocating is the replacement of one kind of intolerance with another.

The latent unfairness of free speech is not addressed by arresting people, they’re addressed by the problems being expressed and dealt with preferably outside the judicial process.

The best way to build societies resistance to free speech is to acknowledge much more of it.

We’re not slaves, nor should we have to bend to our employees and everyone in government is a public servant and they’re our servants because they work for the people, and they should have to answer to us, and we’re entitled to tell them off if we have to.

Rowan Atkinson was not totally right, free speech should not be offensive, but it should be there so that we can have our opinion that we need to get across to the government, and without it, we’re nothing more than cattle.
What happened to our freedom of speech, now if you say what you think you get arrested for it but everybody should be empowered to free speech so long as it’s done in a dignified way.

Rowan Atkinson’s views were neither philosophically new or particularly well thought out because hate speech usually results in humiliating behaviour and lots of injuries. Look at Brexit, that ended up with lots of hysteria over immigration which led to an increase in racialist crimes.

Boris Johnson made a remark that women bearing Burkas resembled letterbox’s, and that ended up in Islamaphobic attacks, and that sort of free speech ends up pissing people off.

Rowan Atkinson appears to be living in a vested, white male, Western bubble, saying that free speech doesn’t necessarily have to be inside contextual boundaries, but some free speech can create more prejudice, harm and brutality.

Insults are rude and some people would like to see a lot less of them, but who determines whether the words on billboards or opinions that people have are insulting? People themselves, the police or judges? Or should it ever be a criminal matter at all?

But under Section 5 of the Public Order Act, the police and the courts can determine if you or someone else might feel offended.

Do we actually require the police and the courts to dispense with insults? Should we not simply accept that the risk of insult is a fair price to pay for living in a society which values free speech?

A man stood up in the middle of London and crooned a tune about a guy who killed his girlfriend in a resentful rage, the lyrics appeared to accuse it largely on the girl. Watching the vocalist from a nearby spectator stand was the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury and much of the Royal family.

They waved and even hummed along with the song, “Why, why, why, Delilah?” Some of them also shook tiny Union Jack flags to support this delightful little song of death, “I felt the knife in my hand and she laughed no more”.

But one question arises, why did the police not immediately arrest them all, the Royal family, the Prime Minister and the Archbishop under section 5 of the Public Order Act?

Don’t be silly, you say, but it would be any more stupid than a student being detained under section 5 for saying to a mounted policeman that his horse is gay, or somebody being charged and convicted, then cleared on appeal for delivering what was reported as a daft little growl and a woof at two labradors or someone holding up a sign outside the Church of Scientology in central London saying, Scientology is not a religion, and that it’s a dangerous cult.

Then there was the gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, arrested and charged for roaring slogans and illustrating posters denouncing the oppression of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual people by Islamic governments, throughout a demonstration at a Hizb ut-Tahrir rally.

And an evangelical Christian preacher who was convicted and penalised for holding up a home-made sign that, with the slogan “Jesus is Lord”, blazoned: “Stop immorality, stop homosexuality, stop lesbianism.”

All these are actual cases of British police exploitation of a law so loosely worded that it invites such abuse. That is why a campaign to amend section 5 was recently launched by an unusual alliance of Christians, atheists, gay rights activists and politicians of all stripes.

But if we want a clear, protected stand for freedom of expression in Britain, we need to go further.

Section 5 of the 1986 Public Order Act states a person “is guilty of an offence if he (a) uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or (b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting, within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby”.

There are two points wrong with this catch-all wording. First, unlike section 4 of the same act, and Britain’s law on provocation to hatred on grounds of faith or sexual orientation, it does not need proof of an intention to create harassment, alarm or distress.

The standard is very “likely to”. Who determines what is “likely to” be caused harassment, alarm or distress? On the street, the police do. Then, the Crown Prosecution Service may then decide not to prosecute, or the court may toss the case out.

Then there is the word “insulting”. The government has denied its extraction partially on the grounds that the courts would have the odious business of identifying between the merely insulting and the abusive or threatening, but why shouldn’t we be allowed to insult so long as it doesn’t end up in threatening or injurious behaviour?

The reason we shouldn’t be allowed to insult is because as grown-ups and being more mature than a child, we can take the various insulting behaviour, but as children, it’s deemed as bullying, and that’s solely what insulting behaviour is, and there are specific aspects of this behaviour that is tolerable and some that’s not, and we should be able to differentiate between the two.

To make this country’s free speech laws fair, benevolent and harmonious, we should not only remove the word “insulting” from section 5, we should abolish section 5 in its entirety. Maybe, we should further remove the word “insulting” from section 4, although that quite rightly dispense with genuine menaces of violence.

We should be able to identify what is a wrong intention, and what someone might see as insulting, another person might not, and we have to identify what is said in malice and what is said as a joke.

Four eyes, big nose and ginger minger are frequently said as a joke, and many people don’t find it offensive, on the other hand, there are those people out there that might, depending what context it’s been said.

Ethnic prejudice is not acceptable and we’re supposed to be living in a mature multicultural society and we should be accepting of those that live in it, after all, we’re all human beings, but that doesn’t imply that we aren’t allowed to have an opinion, so long as it’s not done in an ugly way, but as I said before, what some people might feel is offensive another might not.

Times have changed, people have changed and our culture has changed. Ethnic prejudice is at its pinnacle, along with sexual orientation, and there are various human diversities that appear to be a problem now, but pain and distress to another person is not acceptable, particularly if it’s done with hatred.

There are various ways that we can still have free speech as long as it’s done in a dignified way, and to not cause infliction to others. Sadly, standing up for free speech usually means supporting those people who say unacceptable things, and free speech is good, but it doesn’t give license for people to post insulting stuff on their websites.

Prejudice, sexism, and homophobia remarks are not acceptable forms of free speech, along with slanderous smears, and if I spoke poorly of someone’s children, I would expect to get punched. You can’t provoke, you can’t mock somebody else’s religion, racial background or sexual orientation.

Numerous people will disagree with me and that’s their choice, everybody is allowed their opinion, but there are some things that clearly shouldn’t be mocked, and there is an abyss between reprimanding someone’s religious and political views, and inciting hatred of people because of some innate trait such as race, colour, sexuality and so on is not fair.

Many people might make a poor pun or a slip of the tongue, but sometimes as human beings, we tend to engage our mouth before we engage our brains. That doesn’t make us bad people, it simply makes us foolish, and usually after reflecting about what we’ve said we realise we made a really bad mistake.

We should treat others the same way that we would want to be treated ourselves, but many of us don’t because most of us are the sheeple of society and we follow everybody else and focus on what they’re doing because most of us wander around with their brains permanently attached to their arse.

Oops, did I say that out loud…

We live in a new society now, and whether we like it or not, we need to work it out before we destroy each other, but of course, that’s exactly what our government want. They put the fabrications out there, and we believe what the media tells us instead of investigating it for ourselves, then the seed of poison is there… there’s that apple again from that Garden of Eden, and the more we’re told we can’t do it or we can’t have it the more we want to do it or the more we want to have it.

The trouble is we don’t live in no Garden of Eden, this is not Utopia, and the more autonomy that we have the more damage we will do, we want to eat that forbidden fruit and we are encouraged to say those forbidden words.

Then you have Snow White’s stepmother who is really wicked and vain (our government). You can picture them all assembling there in parliament with their mirrors, asking who’s the fairest of the land, and of course, that mirror never lies!

We’re a magnificent country of great people that our government are really jealous of, and they’ve turned against the people, and now they’re turning us against each other with that poisoned apple, and we all love a little candy, and if it smells sweet and tastes sweet we assume that it is sweet.

If you shout fire we all believe there is one, but that doesn’t inevitably mean there is a fire, and that’s what we all do, we run like demented twats with everybody else, and that’s precisely what our government are doing, they shout fire and we all believe it.

Some people tend to believe what they’re told, you get cartoons of Jews with enormous snouts and coloured people swaying from trees, and Scottish people depicted as robbers and drunks, and we all chuckle and make fun of it, but not all Jews have big long noses and I don’t ever remember seeing anybody swaying from a tree, unless you’re Tarzan, and I know some very charming Scottish people that have never had a drink in their lives, but we accept this because we’re told this is so, it’s called conditioning, and with this happening, what could possibly go wrong?

Because this only has traction when there’s a broader social support for it, and Jews having prominent beaks encourages resentment against people, it’s like someone saying that a gay person should be thrown off a building, and everyone goes along with it.

Saying that Islam is satanic is the same as saying that Jew’s eat babies or that they have horns growing out of their heads which is simply bullshit and pretty offensive to people, and even though it’s not inciting hatred, it’s really mean-spirited and gets up people’s noses, and I guess if you’re a Jew that wouldn’t be really hard to do, that was a joke by the way, and I am a Jew, and I’m entitled to make fun of myself! As for babies, I couldn’t eat a whole one.

The problem with free speech is that its impact is much controlled by the media, who pick stories that bolster their own beliefs, or is questionable enough to sell more newspapers, but of course, the output of the media is ultimately defined by the readership and viewership, the lower the output ultimately reflects on the population’s beliefs, prurience and shallowness.

Sadly, newspapers are simply toilet paper that you can clean your behind with, which once upon a time was precisely what it was used for after inspection… not your behind, the newspaper!

Now the internet is a public forum and some newspapers support free speech with a comments box, which I really think is a great idea, at least they can slag each other in writing and not in person where there would end up being fisty cuffs, or handbags at ten paces, after all, there’s nothing more demeaning that somebody brawling in the street over some political agenda, racism or somebody being gay.

A fragile 96-year-old grandad was dumped at his home by a hospital driver with no-one to care for him, and it was Cliff Schofield’s horrified daughter Jane who found him slumped in a chair still wearing his hospital clothes.

It’s utterly sickening, surely this hospital driver had a duty of care for this person he was taking home?

Retired steelworker Cliff had been taken to the hospital and kept in after he fell, hurting his back and cutting his hand. The following day hospital workers told Jane he was going to be released so she hurried to the hospital with clothes for him.

When she got to the hospital her father was gone and the nurse that she’d talked to wasn’t there and none of the other staff appeared to know anything about it, and when she got back to his house he was inside, curled up in a chair far too small for him.

A few feet away was a bigger armchair with a cushion but they had appeared to have simply dumped in the first chair they came across without any consideration for his well-being.

He had been left there for 30 minutes before his daughter Jane got there, and had that been somebody who had no relatives to care for them, they would have been dumped there and nobody would have ever realised it.

Jane and her husband Brian, of Rotherham, South Yorks, were so angry they took a photograph of Cliff slumped in the chair and sent it to the hospital. Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust apologised for the inadequate care and said it was investigating the incident.

The NHS doesn’t stand for the National Health Service. It stands for the NO HEALTH SERVICE. This is an absolute scandal and it’s not the first time an ageing person has been discharged with no-one to look after them. What was the hospital driver thinking to leave him like that and what was the hospital staff thinking to discharge him in his hospital gown? Has no one got any brains these days?

Sadly this is yet another illustration of how the frail and elderly are handled in this country, and these hospitals are what makes Victorian workhouses look like a heavenly paradise, and the probability of an inquiry into this poor mans care will be composed of a brief meeting, a couple of finger-wagging letters and a gritty mouth excuse from an army of administrators who don’t really care.

Valuable lessons need to be learnt here, but next time this happens they’ll wiggle out of these situations better than before and before the media gets hold of it, and our sympathies should be with the people who deserve far better than the bungling and inept NHS they’re lumbered with.

Of course, all of this will get swept under the rug as their spreadsheets are considerably more valuable than some old person, but one day they will also get old and then they’ll actually see how their practices harm people if we even have the NHS by then.

When you consider all the things these vulnerable people went through for us, the war and all of the other deprivations, and yet money is spent without a thought for them, and then there are those people who are old and disabled and are discharged from hospital and sent home, left on their own, waiting for home care for hours on end, arranged by the hospital, but they still have to wait for the home care to arrive, so they can’t get out of bed or go to the toilet, then they try to get out of bed, fall and end up being rushed back into hospital.

And then you have the carers who believe that fixing an elderly person a boiled egg or a slice of toast is adequate for their meal because when you reach a particular age and have no funds the NHS simply drops you because you’re too much time and trouble for them, and it’s easier for you to go away and die.

My mother who has sadly passed away now became an amputee. When she came out of hospital she was really depressed and although she had been seen by a Social Worker to be assessed, the lady stayed for an hour and did her assessment and left.

Some weeks later my mother threatened to kill herself because she was so depressed, so the first thing I did was call her doctor out and then phoned the Social Worker, her response was, “What do you want me to do about it, my jobs done.”

I obviously complained about the Social Worker and asked her to give my mother an apology. I was told that would never happen, but I was adamant she was going to get one, it took weeks of threatening them with legal proceedings and finally, my mother did get an apology, in writing.

Because of bed blocking in hospitals, NHS beds cost more so they want people out as soon as possible, it’s almost like a human food chain. The NHS and councils speed the placements through and normally don’t do it correctly and with little care. Then the council and NHS refuse to accept responsibility to fund the care provider, so it’s about time someone examined this side of things as well.

Some elderly patients are being discharged from hospital but on the day of their discharge end up having a fall before they leave the hospital, they get checked over and still end up getting shipped off home, usually in pain and distress but are given pain medication and are sent on their way, only to find out that they were sent home with a busted hip.

If you strip away the layers of this disgusting act, it all boils down to the fact that there are no funds in the pot, and something needs to be done at a greater level and fast because the system is failing us, but really, it doesn’t matter how many layers you strip away, this idiot hospital driver, if he had a brain would have known not to leave such a frail man on his own in a chair.

For hospital workers, communication appears to be a genuine problem. When my mother had her leg removed, many weeks later I was notified that my mother was being transported to a rehabilitation hospital. I don’t drive and I’m disabled so I had to rely on friends to take me.

Once I got to the hospital I then realised that they’d sent my mother to the wrong hospital and in fact, the hospital was not for rehabilitation. I went to the nurse’s station and spoke to a rather haughty nurse, who told me that my mother was being sent home in a few days.

I explained that my mother had not been evaluated, no one had been to her home to assess it to see what she would require, her attitude was that she actually didn’t care and it had nothing to do with her. I went back to my mother’s ward, I took her front door and back door keys off her and then went back to the nurse again.

I stood in front of the desk and raised my voice slightly because I didn’t want to get booted out and told her, “So, how will you get my mother into her home?.”

“With her keys.” She responded.

I showed her the keys and told her that my mother doesn’t have her keys on her, so unless they’re prepared to break in and create havoc to her home which is unlawful and an offence she would not be going back home and they were going to transport to the correct hospital, I also flashed my Press pass at her in which her attitude improved a little.

By the following day, my mother was on her way to the right hospital, but there are countless elderly people out there that don’t have families and simply get put in an ambulance car and sent home, some with no care put in place at all.

This is disgraceful, our elderly should not be handled like they are a nuisance, they should be treated with decency and reverence, we all get old.

Of course, I might get called a troll for writing this article because in some countries there’s no health care at all, and some might say that we should be grateful for what we’ve got, but we’re not in another country, we live in the United Kingdom, where once the NHS was considered the greatest in the world, in fact, it was talked about all over the globe because it was celebrated, now it’s no better than the third world, particularly when we couldn’t care less about our elderly.

Third world nations might not have good health care, that’s really an understatement, they have little or no health care, but they do have families that will care for them in times of need, not that I’m saying that families in England don’t care for their loved ones but we don’t always get the time or have the time to help out because of work commitments, and some don’t have any family at all, but in a third world country, if there is no family, then somebody else in the community will look after an elder person, we don’t appear to have those kinds of morals anymore.

Now, an elderly person would seemingly be better off in jail, at least they would get fed, cared for, prioritised for medical treatments and you’d have a Social Worker to take care of your needs.

The NHS is shocking really, we know it’s free and we all bang on about how proud we are of it, but if you’ve actually needed it, you’ll know it can be a very frightful experience. The trouble is, the more we bang on about it, the more motivation it gives our government to make it private.

Of course, most people will tell you that the NHS is free, it’s not free we still pay for it through our taxes, and because we pay through our taxes, we expect a pretty damn good service, which is not what we’re getting. We were once proud of our NHS, so what happened to it, and this once proud country of ours?

Of course, people are living longer and there’s the demand for more medical intervention. I for one wouldn’t mind spending a few pounds more a week in taxes for my NHS so long as I knew it was going into the coffers for the NHS. The problem is it doesn’t, they jumble it around various services to make the money go around, although it doesn’t work that way because in the end one of those services ends up with less than it should do, i.e the NHS.

The problem is many of our nurses now are imported and are contracted by agencies, many of them don’t have particularly good language skills and therefore can’t understand instructions correctly, and that’s when we end up with serious problems, people being left in dirty bedding, being fed when they’re nill by mouth and then end up with pneumonia.

Neighbours informed the council after they noticed huge piles of raw meat being chopped up in the yard of a residential address in the London borough. There was no information as to whether the family had killed living animals at the property or were simply cutting up their remains, but a woman at the location affirmed meat had been cut as part of Eid celebrations.

One of the two most important holidays in the Islamic calendar, Eid al-Adha took place this year between August 21st and August 25th. The five-day Islamic celebration rotates around prayer and ritual animal sacrifice.

A Dagenham resident, whose flat looks onto the courtyard in which animal remains were seen being slaughtered, said: “It seems one of the least hygienic places to prepare meat, and they were using an old rag to wipe their tools.”

But Ramadhan Foundation chief Mohammed Shafiq insisted the family had done nothing wrong, and while Muslims in many countries purchase, keep, and kill their own animals before splitting it into portions for Eid al-Adha, this is typically done by butchers and in abattoirs in Britain, with halal industry advisors advising that failure to adequately abide by the stringent Qurbani guidelines would constitute a “crime against Islam”.

Animal carnage on the streets is normal in various Muslim nations, with the streets of Dhaka, Bangladesh turning red with blood earlier this month, but relatively secular regimes such as Egypt’s cracked down on the custom this year, citing concerns with public health and the spread of infection.

In Paris, there was the rescue of 32 sheep found in the garage of a pizzeria in one of the densely migrant-populated areas of Paris, France ahead of Eid al-Adha, and while ritual halal killing is totally legal in France, the law expects it to take place at a recognised slaughterhouse, so the sheep were taken and sent to an animal shelter.

 

 

 

 

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy condemned the phenomenon of people from migration-background communities “slaughtering sheep in the bathtub” as long ago as 2007, and it’s utterly sickening that in a country like the United Kingdom where we respect animals, and where we certainly don’t want them to be in excruciating pain.

What are the government and the RSPCA doing about this? Nothing as per usual, yet if you were to chain your dog up outside and leave it howling for a day or two and you would be thrown in prison for animal cruelty.

Double standards continue on apace in double standards Britain.

Our government must implement the Rule of Law, and people who are in England without legitimate documents, or anyone who believes the law does not pertain to them for whatever reason, then we’re on a really slippery slope.

This is the United Kingdom, and people that come to the United Kingdom have to live by our laws, not Sharia or any other non-indigenous customary law, and if they don’t like the way that we live, then they can always leave.

The government and our police force must start waking up to this fact pronto because with every day that passes and they don’t implement the law, then they’re closer to a savage revolution, and it’s going to get pretty nasty really quickly, and the first in the firing line will be our government, and its many agencies and PC Plod should start considering escape routes because they’re the ones that are going to observe the repercussions.

It appears that our government has long since tossed the law out of the window and have been Halalled into submission.

We used to have great fundamentals in place for animal brutality and the British people have had a long-standing for good animal management and animal rights, but now the worst people get for animal brutality is a written adult warning and an embargo for up to 5 years from keeping an animal.

Our government professes to care about the United Kingdom, but they’ll sell you out at every chance they get, and the government were much simpler to get at ages ago, but now they have their nice high railings and well-armed police, it’s almost as if they knew they’d seriously need them one day.

And they use terrorism as the ploy to get those railings installed, taking no notice of those high profile revolutionaries who only have death on their minds, while further encroaching on our freedoms, and they keep us preoccupied, so that we don’t open our eyes and look at the small details in the picture, because then far too many would notice that the panorama is dangerously distorted.

The Ramadhan Foundation chief Mohammed Shafiq insisted the family had done nothing wrong, but they acted like they were above the law, and they may have done nothing wrong in a Muslim country, but in Britain, they have violated the law and must be prosecuted.

To improve things all existing Members of Parliament should be removed because their sure as hell not going to leave on their own, not when there’s a position at the golden trough in the House of Lords or a gold plated pension.

This is why their own lands of origin are complete with third world infections and diseases, full of untaught barbarians that know no better, and when they come from an unsanitary country, they bring their shoddy life with them, along with their beliefs, and if you put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig.

This was brought into the United Kingdom and housed by a dangerous regime that endeavours to call itself our government. These people were brought to the United Kingdom by the courtesy of our government for cheap labour, and then they can’t wait to send us our ever-rising tax bills in order to house these people, not that we want to tar everyone with the same brush.

The very fact that this is occurring in our country can only be blamed on our government who was and still is complicit at what’s going on.

Some of these people are barbarians, not just to animals, but to human beings as well, and we’re getting pretty close to it being past twisted banter, and we shouldn’t actually be that horrified by our idiot government who let them in. What the hell did they expect?

Our government knew what would happen and they allowed it to for the sake of cheap labour, and now these people who were once poor are loving it because they can come over to the United Kingdom, work for less pay and endless hours and still be able to transfer funds over to their relatives.

It’s not really menial work anymore because they get twice the sum of money they would do in their mother country. They’re okay, they’re grinning all the way to the bank.

The difficulty is that when I write these columns, other people who read my articles have pretty similar beliefs, so I’m reporting to the converted, but how knowledgeable are the sheeple out there?

Our government is supposed to serve as the protectors of the people and our country, yet they’ve made idols of the wolves and allowed them a protected standing.

Some would say that it was blatantly apparent that these people never had any plan of blending into our modern western culture but I don’t believe that’s the case. Most of them did blend into our western society, they opened stores, and some even became extremely prosperous and have put back into our society.

Some realised they had a future here and fought really arduously to get it, and then the government decided that things were getting a tad too snug, and they threw the cat amongst the pigeons. The government don’t want unity in the United Kingdom because peace is counterproductive but conflict is prolific because it depopulates.

And our British laws are nothing, except when it can be used against the British people.

We understand that every religion has a different belief and code of conduct, and that’s great so long as it stays in their country of origin. Not all religions are peaceful, then there are many that are peaceful and if you want meat because you wish it to be Halal, then get it from a damn butcher like everybody else.

Your backyard is not an abattoir for murdering helpless animals whilst your next-door-neighbour looks out of their window and can see it. We’re not a nation at war (at the moment, any time soon though), and we’re not being put on rations, there’s loads to go round, but it has to be slaughtered humanely, and if you want to ritual, then damn well do it somewhere else.