Tag: DWP

Department for Work and Pensions officials admit to using fake claimant’s comments to justify benefit sanctions

August 19, 2015November 25, 2021 · 17 Comments ·

A DWP leaflet included pictures of ‘Sarah’ and ‘Zac’, who were presented as sickness benefits claimants – except neither existed. The DWP now says they were for ‘illustrative’ purposes only.
Government officials have admitted that claimant’s comments used in an official benefit sanctions information leaflet were “for illustrative purposes only”.

The revelation comes in response to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request from Welfare Weekly, in which the site authors questioned whether the comments used in the leaflet were of a genuine or fake nature.

Welfare Weekly asked the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) to provide any evidence or information to prove that the comments used in the publication were from “genuine” claimants.

Within days of submitting their request to the DWP, the original information leaflet suddenly disappeared from the government’s website without explanation.

However, we at Welfare Weekly had already downloaded a copy of the leaflet (pdf) in anticipation of the response to our FOI request.

That leaflet included comments from two sickness benefit claimants who had supposedly been affected by benefit sanctions, Zac and Sarah.

According to the leaflet, Zac had said:

“I let my work coach know in advance that I couldn’t go to our meeting because I had a hospital appointment.

I had a good reason for not going to the meeting and proof of the appointment. My benefit payment hasn’t changed and we booked another meeting I could get to.”

While Susan had allegedly said:

“I didn’t think a CV would help me but my work coach told me that all employers need one. I didn’t have a good reason for not doing it and I was told I’d lose some of my payment. I decided to complete the CV and told my work coach.

I got a letter to say my benefit would go down for two weeks. I was told it was longer than a week because I missed a meeting with my work coach back in March.

My benefit is back to normal now and I’m really pleased with how my CV looks. It’s going to help me when I’m ready to go back to work.”

However, Welfare Weekly have revealed that neither of these comments came from genuine Employment and Support Allowance claimants.

Both comment’s were completely made up and included to “help people understand when sanctions can be applied and how they can avoid them by taking certain actions”, according to the DWP.

The response to Welfare Weekly’s Freedom of Information request reads:

“The photos used are stock photos and along with the names do not belong to real claimants.

The stories are for illustrative purposes only.

We want to help people understand when sanctions can be applied and how they can avoid them by taking certain actions. Using practical examples can help us achieve this.

We have temporarily changed the pictures to silhouettes and added a note to make it more clear that these are illustrative examples only.

We will test both versions of the factsheet with claimants and external stakeholders to further improve it in the future. This will include working with external organisations.”

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The DWP have used comments and accounts that are categorically untrue in a blatant attempt to justify the use of cruel and punitive welfare sanctions, and to invalidate the experiences of genuine claimants in distress and material hardship because of sanctions. The revelation is particularly controversial because the sanctions system is causing extreme hardship, extreme psychological distress and sometimes, death, it is being operated in an unfair and arbitrary way.

Mark Serwotka, the general secretary of the PCS union, said:

“It’s disgraceful and sinister that the DWP has been trying to trick people into believing claimants are happy to have their benefits stopped or threatened. Sanctions are unnecessarily punitive and counterproductive, and should be scrapped.”

The institute that is responsible for regulating the behaviour of organisations producing public relations material – the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) – has launched an investigation into whether any of its members were involved in producing the document of lies.

CIPR president Sarah Pinch said:

“Falsely creating the impression of independent, popular support is a naive and opaque technique which blatantly disregards the CIPR’s standards of ethical conduct. It is deeply disappointing if public relations professionals allowed it to be published.”

I’ve written at length about the adverse consequences of increased benefit conditionality and sanctioning elsewhere on this site. See Despotic paternalism and punishing the poor. Can this really be England? This is a blatant attempt to normalise an exceptionally punitive political approach to “supporting people into work”, inappropriately using social norming – one of several nudge techniques. Another name for the psychological technique used here is frank ‘gaslighting’.

I’ve also written about the fact that we have a government formulating policy that does not address economic, structural and political causes of poverty, instead the aim is to bring about “behavioural changes” within the population – particularly amongst the poorest and the most vulnerable social groups – to suit the anti-welfare ideology of New Right Conservatism, ministers seem to have forgotten that democratically elected governments are meant to address the needs of a population, rather than the converse being true. This despicable tactic was aimed at hiding the truth: sanctions have a devastating impact on people’s lives, as the benefit being removed is calculated at a rate to meet only basic needs, such as food, fuel and shelter in the first place.

In a democratic, rights-based society, we ought to expect that the public are not stigmatised and “acted upon,” by a government using techniques of persuasion ordinarily reserved for the seedy end of advertising and marketing industry, and by the deployment of propaganda and outright lies by the powers-that-be, in order to fulfil purely ideological directives. Governments serve the public, in first-world Liberal democracies. This government serves the government.

We call a political system where the public are expected and directed to accommodate the government’s needs and wants “totalitarianism.”

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Are you willing to share your experience of benefit sanctions? 38 Degrees are asking people to share their sanction stories, if you would be happy for it to be used publicly. 38 degrees will ensure all contributions are published using first names only. Please click here to participate in the Speak Out survey and campaign.

Many thanks to Robert Livingstone for the image.

Government fitness for work test is making disabled people more sick

March 4, 2015March 28, 2016 · 7 Comments ·

In January, 2012, I wrote an article: The ESA ‘Revolving Door’ Process, and its Correlation with a Significant Increase in Deaths amongst the Disabled and I discussed the distress and harm that the current government work capability assessment is causing disabled people. I said:

Many claimants have described a “revolving door” process of endless assessment, ceased Employment Support Allowance (ESA) claim, (based on an outcome of almost invariably being wrongly “assessed” as fit for work), appeal, successful appeal outcome, benefit reinstated, only to find just 3 months later another assessment is required. The uncertainty and loss of even basic security that this process creates, leading to constant fear and anxiety, is having a damaging, negative impact on the health and well-being of so many.

A significant proportion of those required to have endless assessments have very obviously serious illnesses such as cancer, kidney failure, lung disease, heart disease, severe and life threatening chronic conditions such as multiple sclerosis, lupus, myalgic encephalomyelitis, rheumatoid arthritis, brain tumours, severe heart conditions, and severe mental health illness, for example. To qualify for ESA, the claimant must provide a note from a doctor stating that the person is unfit for work. There can be no justification for subjecting people who are so ill to further endless assessments, and to treating us as if we have done something wrong.

Marginalising and stigmatising sick and disabled people, amongst whom are some of our most vulnerable citizens, via propaganda in the media, using despiteful and malicious terms such as “workshy” and “feckless” is a major part of the Government’s malevolent “justification” to the public for removing the lifeline of support from the sick and disabled. We are climbing Allport’s Ladder…

In addition to very justified anxieties regarding the marked increase in disability hate crime that the Tory-led propaganda campaign has resulted in, many sick and disabled people have also stated that they feel harassed and bullied by the Department of Work and Pensions and Atos. Many talk of the dread they feel when they see the brown Atos envelope containing the ESA50 form arrive through the letter box.

The strain of constantly fighting for ESA entitlement and perpetually having to prove that we are a “deserving” and “genuine” sick and disabled person is clearly taking a toll on so many people’s health and well being. Many families of those who have died have said that the constant strain, anxiety and stress of this revolving door process has contributed significantly to their loved ones’ decline in health and subsequent death. The figures from the DWP, and the marked contrast between the ESA and IB death statistics certainly substantiate these claims.

Leonard Cheshire, a charity that works with disabled people, surveyed 350 people who had been through the workplace capability assessment, which is used to establish whether benefit claimants are well enough to return to work.

More than six in 10 (65 per cent) of those who had gone through the process said they had ended up with more pain afterwards. Almost three quarters (72 per cent) said they found the assessment had a negative impact on their mental or physical health, or both. The same number described the face to face appointment as very stressful.

A teacher who was medically retired in 2011 due to progressive rheumatoid arthritis, said she left her appointment “feeling absolutely awful and suffered a lot of pain in the following days”. She went on to suffer a stroke a few weeks later, and believes the experience of undertaking a work fitness assessment was a contributing factor.

Andy Cole, campaigns director for Leonard Cheshire, said:

“This isn’t acceptable and no test should put someone through something that makes their condition worse.

We have known for a long time that this is an important issue. We had anecdotally hear this information but, [getting] it quantified in this way in quite such significant numbers, we were really surprised to see that it was this sort of figures.”

Harm may be caused by assessors because they did not have sufficient information about patients’ conditions. Less than half (42 per cent) said their assessor had evidence of their condition prior to the meeting. Only 21 per cent agreed with the statement:

“The assessor let me explain how my condition [or] disability affects me differently on different days or at different points during the day.”

Two thirds disagreed with the outcome of their assessment.

Mr Cole added:

“Some of the conditions are well documented through medical data going back decades. If that was used better there wouldn’t be a need for a test in the first place. It’s worth remembering that the test was fundamentally supposed to be about a benefit that helped people back into work. There are lots of issues around the test about whether it’s been able to achieve that.”

The research relates to the period during which the private company Atos was responsible for carrying out the assessments. Its work has ended after it pulled out of a government contract to manage disability claims early, and the American company Maximus has taken over delivery of the assessments from 1 March 2015.

The charity is calling on Maximus to take the findings of its survey into account when redesigning the fitness for work assessment process. It wants to see staff trained in specific medical conditions, (as most Atos assessors are non-specialised nurses or occupational therapists,) physical examinations restricted to cases of absolute necessity and for claimants to be aware they can say no to an examination if it will cause them pain.

However, a spokesman for the Department of Work and Pensions said:

“Healthcare professionals always take consent for any physical examination and ask claimants to tell them if any movement is uncomfortable. Examinations are not completed if they cause pain. Sufficient information is usually obtained through discussion, observation and a limited physical examination to assess the effects of disability.”

We know this to be untrue because of the high numbers of people needing to challenge wrong decisions.

One such person is Sharon Majek, 57, from Rugby, who has been unable to work since her mid-thirties after suffering a serious injury at work. She stopped an elderly patient from falling out of bed badly hurting her back. She was diagnosed with osteoarthritis, degenerative disk disease and fibromyalgia, leaving her in constant joint pain and with limited sensation in her hands.

She described her assessment as “traumatic”. She said:

“The doctor never made eye contact with me once, and that made me feel very uncomfortable. I was awaiting a knee replacement. He asked me to bend my knees. When I said I couldn’t he pushed it back. I was sweating with the pain. It swelled up later that day.”

Ms Majek was found fit for work so she asked to see a copy of her report, which she and her husband described as unrecognisable from the meeting they had attended. The decision was overturned at appeal. This is a very common and unacceptable experience amongst people claiming ESA.

Further reading:

What you need to know about Atos assessments.

Black Propaganda

Essential information for ESA claims, assessments and appeals

Clause 99, Catch 22 – State sadism and silencing the vulnerable

Thanks to Robert Livingstone for the memes

Labour demand big improvements to Work Capability Assessments – by Kate Green

October 31, 2014April 8, 2015 · 12 Comments ·

Today the government has announced the new provider for the ailing Work Capability Assessment (WCA). Maximus are replacing Atos, who quit the process after repeated concerns, raised by Labour and disabled people, about the operation of the test.

The government has spent months seeking an alternative provider.

While we’ve always said that simply changing the provider isn’t enough to deal with the underlying problems, Labour hope the new start under Maximus will lead to improved results.

Disabled people have every right to feel wary. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) are agreeing a new contract that will last years. With a general election looming, and Labour already having outlined a series of reforms we’d make to the Work Capability Assessment, it is unclear how the new provider will be expected to deliver improvements – or what penalties they’ll face if they don’t.

That’s why I have written to the Minister for Disabled People to ensure that any change of policy direction under a future Labour government can be accommodated within the contract, and that action can be taken swiftly to address poor performance.

We have also said that the new provider should be made responsible for ensuring that the Work Capability Assessment is better connected to work support to increase the number of disabled people in work. It’s essential that the new provider gains credibility quickly by providing more accurate results about assessments.

And crucially, the new provider must ensure the huge backlog of Work Capability Assessments is tackled swiftly.

We also expect Maximus to make significant improvements in the day to day delivery of Work Capability Assessments. Labour will insist that:

Every assessment centre must be accessible; that information about the Work Capability Assessment process must be available in accessible formats; and that disabled people who cannot reasonably be expected to attend a face to face interview should be assessed at home or another convenient and accessible location.
Claimants are advised that they are able to bring a companion to the assessment, who can assist them as appropriate.
Information sharing must be improved, including between Department for Work and Pensions, Maximus and Work Programme contractors.
Recordings of assessments must be provided on request.
Reports from assessors must include information on how an impairment or health condition affects someone’s ability to work.

But there is a broader need for reforming the Work Capability Assessment. Assessments must be part of the support to help disabled people back to work. Currently, the Work Capability Assessment is seen as entirely separate to the Work Programme – contributing to the appalling failure rate of the government’s flagship employment scheme.

Iain Duncan Smith’s DWP set a target of a 15 per cent employment rate for people on the Work Programme after two years. But after three years only 7 per cent of Employment Support Allowance (ESA) claimants who have accessed the programme have found work.

Our new approach would provide information about the support that is available in the local area to help individuals. Improving this element of the assessment and decision-making process is a crucial step towards a more integrated system of support.

Disabled people should also have a central role in monitoring the tests. A Labour government would ensure that for the first time disabled people would get a real say in how the assessments are delivered.

The independent reviewer of the Work Capability Assessment would work alongside a scrutiny group of disabled people supported by the Office for Disability Issues. We would also require the DWP to respond to Work Capability Assessment reviews and end the practice of ‘accepting’ recommendations that are then kicked into the long grass.

Accuracy of Work Capability Assessments must be dramatically improved under Maximus. Thousands of disabled people appealing inaccurate decisions have had to wait months for decisions, wasting millions of pounds in appeals and tribunals.

The DWP must deliver a better service for disabled people and better value for money for taxpayers. The Public Accounts Committee has already reported that targets set for the quality of the assessment were not challenging enough.

Labour would ensure a new system would impose penalties for poor performance, measured both on the number of times decisions are overturned by the DWP or through appeals. Clear financial penalties will ensure assessors improve the quality of assessments.

This means collecting all the medical evidence needed to make a decision and ensuring they listen to what claimants tell them to ensure decisions are based on the full facts.

The new provider of Work Capability Assessments takes over at a difficult time. Maximus will be judged very quickly on whether its performance is an improvement on years of failure and chaos in the DWP.

Ministers and the new provider need to urgently get a grip of Work Capability Assessments.

Kate Green MP is shadow minister for disabled people

The Labour Party introduced a host of measures to strengthen the rights of disabled people. They passed the Disability Discrimination Act 2005, introduced the Equality Act 2010, and formed the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and, in 2009, the Labour government signed the United Nations convention on the rights of persons with disabilities.

It’s worth noting that without the Equality Act in particular, it would have been difficult to win the cases that have been presented to court against the government, concerning the unprecedented level of discrimination embedded in their policies.

Kate Green and Anne McGuire have pointed out that the original intentions when Labour introduced the Employment Support Allowance pilot and an assessment of people’s capacity for work, have been distorted – that the original aim was to be a supportive and facilitative process, with Disability Living Allowance (DLA), and other supportive measures in place to help people with disability lead a dignified life, fulfilling their potential, but, as Anne McGuire has pointed out, the renegotiation of the Atos contract by the current Government, (along with the addition of targets to remove people’s benefits, and sanctions,) has rebalanced the system to be punitive, rather than facilitative.

Of course the Tories have been very quick to blame Labour for the current situation, however, following a review of their pilot, Labour warned the government of problems with the Work Capability Assessment, which Iain Duncan Smith duly ignored, passing the ESA system into law, making the WCA even more problematic, and as stated, re-contracting Atos “in line with the welfare reforms” in 2011, including targets to take people’s lifeline benefits away, despite the claims made by the Tories. The targets were exposed by Dr Steven Bicks, a GP that applied for job with Atos, assessing whether benefit applicants were fit for work, and secretly filmed his training, which was broadcast by channel 4 – on their Dispatches programme, on Monday 30 July, 2012.

I was very pleased to hear of Labour’s proposal to introduce a new Disability Hate Crime Prevention Law, particularly in light of what has happened this past four years regarding right wing and media portrayals of sick and disabled people, using fake statistics, vicious stigmatising and scapegoating rhetoric to justify the punitive cuts, which have been aimed disproportionately at disabled people.

Comparing policies indicates clearly the stark differences between the parties, and given the briefing from Labour from their ESA review that was blatantly disregarded, and the refusal of the Coalition to undertake a cumulative impact assessment of the “reforms”, it’s clear that the Tories do not regard the poorest and most vulnerable worthy of government diligence, accountability, support and fair treatment.

KittySJones.

Related

“By the general election in May 2010, it was becoming clear that the WCA was getting too many decisions wrong. Unfortunately, the new Conservative-led government was so unmoved by these failings that Iain Duncan Smith ordered that the number of assessments be increased. So while assessments had previously been restricted to new applications for ESA, in November 2010 Atos started to put all 2.2 million existing incapacity benefit claimants through the WCA.

Unsurprisingly things did not improve – many people who were genuinely unable to work were still being declared as fit to do so, and there is now a backlog of more than 700,000 claimants awaiting an assessment. These delays not only cause financial hardship – they also often exacerbate people’s existing physical and mental health conditions.”Sheila Gilmore.

New ‘fit for work’ contract will not be fit for purpose

With thanks to Robert Livingstone for his brilliant art work

Once you hear the jackboots, it’s too late.

May 20, 2014December 1, 2019 · 34 Comments ·

Dr. Lawrence Britt examined the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to overlook some of the parallels with increasingly authoritarian characteristics of our own right wing government here in the UK.

Controlled mass media is one example of such a defining feature of fascism, with “news” being directly controlled and manipulated by the government, by regulation, or via sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship is very common. And then there is an obsession with “National Security” – with fear being used as a “motivational tool” by the government on the public.

In June 2013, a visit by Government national security agents to smash computer hard drives at the Guardian newspaper offices hit the news surprisingly quietly, when Edward Snowden exposed a gross abuse of power and revealed mass surveillance programmes by American and British secret policing agencies (NSA and GCHQ) last year. (More detailed information here).

David Miranda, partner of Glenn Greenwald, Guardian interviewer of the whistleblower Edward Snowden, was held for 9 hours at Heathrow Airport and questioned under the Terrorism Act. Officials confiscated electronics equipment including his mobile phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and games consoles.

This was a profound attack on press freedoms and the news gathering process, and as Greenwald said: “To detain my partner for a full nine hours while denying him a lawyer, and then seize large amounts of his possessions, is clearly intended to send a message of intimidation.”

Absolutely. Since when was investigative journalism a crime?

Even the Telegraph columnist Janet Daley remarked that these events were like something out of East Germany in the 1970s.

This certainly raised critically important legal and ethical issues, for those involved in journalism, especially if some kinds of journalism can be so easily placed at risk of being politically conflated with terrorism.

Once again, the mild and left wing/liberal Guardian is under attack by our Tory-led government. In an extraordinary and vicious attack on The Guardian newspaper, Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) communications chief and senior government spin doctor, Richard Caseby, has called for the newspaper to be “blackballed” and prevented from joining the new press regulatory body, because “day after day it gets its facts wrong.” Remarkably, “ineptitude or ideology” were to blame for what he deemed “mistakes” in the paper’s coverage of the DWP’s cuts to benefits. He called for the broadsheet to be kept out of the new Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), set up after the Leveson Inquiry into media standards.

As a former journalist at the Sun and The Sunday Times, Caseby certainly has an axe to grind against the paper that revealed how those right wing papers’ stablemate, the News Of The World, had hacked the voicemail of murdered teenager Millie Dowler, sparking the phone hacking scandal that prompted Rupert Murdoch to close the tabloid down.

richard caseby

Richard Caseby, pictured when giving evidence to MPs as managing editor of The Sun.

In July 2011 it emerged that Cameron met key executives of Murdoch’s News Corporation 26 times during the 14 months that Cameron had served as Prime Minister. It was also reported that Murdoch had given Cameron a personal guarantee that there would be no risk attached to hiring Andy Coulson, the former editor of News of the World, as the Conservative Party’s communication director in 2007. This was in spite of Coulson having resigned as editor over phone hacking by a reporter. Cameron chose to take Murdoch’s advice, despite warnings from Nick Clegg, Lord Ashdown and the Guardian. Coulson resigned his post in 2011 and was later arrested and questioned on allegations of further criminal activity at the News of the World, specifically regarding the News International phone hacking scandal.

The Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the House of Commons served a summons on Murdoch, his son James, and his former CEO Rebekah Brooks to testify before a committee on 19 July. After an initial refusal, the Murdochs confirmed they would attend after the committee issued them a summons to Parliament. The day before the committee, the website of the News Corporation publication the Sun was “hacked”, and a false story was posted on the front page claiming that Murdoch had died. Murdoch described the day of the committee “the most humble day of my life.” He argued that since he ran a global business of 53,000 employees and that the News of the World was “just 1%” of this, he was not ultimately responsible for what went on at the tabloid.

On 1 May 2012, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee issued a report stating that Murdoch was “not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company.”

On 3 July 2013 Exaro and Channel 4 news broke the story of a secretly recorded tape. It had been recorded by Sun journalists, and in it Murdoch can be heard telling them that the whole investigation was “one big fuss over nothing”, and that he, or his successors, would “take care” of any journalists who went to prison.

He said: “Why are the police behaving in this way? It’s the biggest inquiry ever, over next to nothing.” Murdoch believes that he doesn’t have to be accountable. His initial refusal to testify, despite being summonsed, is extraordinarily indifferent and arrogant.

In connection with Murdoch’s testimony to the Leveson Inquiry “into the ethics of the British press,” editor of Newsweek International, Tunku Varadarajan, referred to him as “the man whose name is synonymous with unethical newspapers.”

Not a shred of concern raised about any of this or Murdoch’s nasty and corrupt myth industry, and right wing scapegoating empire, coming from our government, a point worth reflecting on for a moment. Miliband said the phone-hacking was not just a media scandal, but it was a symbol of what was wrong with British politics. He called for cross-party agreement on new media ownership laws that would cut Murdoch’s current market share, arguing that he has “too much power over British public life.” He said: “If you want to minimise the abuses of power, then that kind of concentration of power is frankly quite dangerous.”

Meanwhile, Iain Duncan Smith is “monitoring” the BBC for any “left wing bias”. Gosh, I just bet that took the jolly well-known ardent commie Chris Patten by complete surprise…

The BBC Trust said that a programme called the “Future of Welfare”, written and presented by John Humphrys, breached its rules on impartiality and accuracy. It found that the programme had failed to back up with statistics claims that there was a “healthy supply of jobs”.

Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, defended Humphrys as a “robust broadcaster” and said the documentary was “thoughtful and intelligent”. And perhaps most importantly, it endorsed the Governments’ punitive and callous welfare “reforms.”

Duncan Smith was infuriated by the BBC’s coverage of the ruling, which he felt gave “too much airtime to campaigners.” Too much for what, exactly, we have to wonder. Perish the thought that anyone may dare to poke at the half-timbered facade of Tory ideology – Duncan Smiths’ rhetoric is a painful parody of fact that loudly dismisses – and intentionally obscures – the private despair and ruined lives of so many of those least able to speak up for themselves.

He said: “I have just watched reporting on the BBC about the Government winning a High Court judgement on the Spare Room Subsidy (that’s the Bedroom Tax to you and I) that once again has left me absolutely staggered at the blatant Left-wing bias within the coverage. And yet the BBC Trust criticise John Humphrys’s programme, which was thoughtful, intelligent and born out of the “real” life experience of individuals.” The same Duncan Smith, who chooses to deny the all too painful and impoverished real life experiences his policies have inflicted on many. He prefers to lie them away from public attention. Or dismiss them as merely “anecdotal”.

Duncan Smith’s credibility doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny here, as someone attempting to verify “accuracy” and er… statistical claims. Ah, yes. The Department of Work and Pensions – Iain Duncan Smiths’ Department – has a long track record of misusing statistics, making unsubstantiated inferences and stigmatising claimants, and it’s clear these are tactics used to attempt to vindicate further welfare cuts. In fact several minsters, including Cameron, have been officially rebuked by the Office of National Statistics for telling lies, and in Duncan Smith’s case – on at least 3 occasions this past 12 months despite warnings regarding his dishonest claims in the media, as well as in parliament.

So considering all of this, it was with some incredulity that I read Caseby’s comments in the Huff Post earlier: “Should the new IPSO members accept (editor Alan Rusbridger) as a johnny-come-lately? No, rather he should be blackballed. Sorry, but the Guardian isn’t fit to become a member of IPSO until it starts valuing accuracy.”

And: “In the end, of course, it’s IPSO’s decision. But should the new standards body be so gracious as to invite him in, I guess I’ll be waiting to lodge the first complaint.” He said an MP had complained to the Office for National Statistics over The Guardian’s reporting of its data. I bet that was said without a trace of irony, too.

So, if alleged (and improbable) benefits inaccuracies “should get [The] Guardian blackballed,” what is this spin doctor’s recommendation for the perpetual propagandarising, lying, right wing media and a lying government minister’s serial offensive “benefits inaccuracies”?

Oh … of course, this is Iain Duncan Smiths’ relatively new pet guard dog.

An interesting choice of word from Caseby – “blackballing”, which is a rejection in a traditional form of secret ballot, where a white ball ballot constitutes a vote in support and a black ball signifies opposition. This system is typically used where a club (or Lodge) rules provide that, rather than a majority of the votes, one or two objections are sufficient to defeat a proposition. Since the seventeenth century, these rules have commonly applied to elections to membership of many gentlemen’s clubs and similar institutions such as in Freemasonry. It’s an apt term because of its association with conservatism, tradition and secrecy.

In contrast, and unlike many whistleblowers who remain anonymous, Edward Snowden chose to be open and go public. Snowdens’ sole motive for leaking the documents was, in his words, “to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.” He believes that the global public is due an explanation of the motives of those who act outside of the democratic process.

To “protect democracy” we have governments that are subverting the law. This is a fundamental paradox, of course and Snowden saw this could lead to the collapse of democracy and critically endanger our freedom. And Snowden reminds us that what no individual conscience can change, a free press can. It has to be one that is free enough to allow a diverse range of political commentaries, rather than a stranglehold of right wing propaganda from the Murdoch empire and its ideological stablemates.

I think that the process of dismantling democracy started in May 2010 here in the UK, and has been advancing incrementally ever since, almost undetected at first, because of pervasive government secrecy and a partly complicit, dominant right wing media.

But once you hear the jackboots, it’s far too late.

With big thanks to Robert Livingstone

Related

The Transparency of Lobbying, non-Party Campaigning, and Trade Union Administration Bill is a calculated and partisan move to insulate Tory policies and records from public and political scrutiny, and to stifle democracy. The Government’s Lobbying Bill has been criticised by bloggers and campaigners from right across the political spectrum, with the likes of Owen Jones and Guido Fawkes united in agreement over this issue: that the Bill is a “Gagging Act”. Five Conservatives – Douglas Carswell, Philip Davies, David Davis, Zac Goldsmith and David Nuttall – voted against the Bill, whilst others also expressed concerns.

The Bill will treat charities, think tanks, community groups and activists of every hue as “political parties”. From small groups addressing local matters to big national organisations, all equally risk being silenced in the year before a general election, to avoid falling under electoral law. Any organisation spending £5,000 a year and expressing an opinion on anything remotely political must register with the Electoral Commission. Since most aspects of our public life are political, (and a substantial proportion of our private life has been increasingly politicised under this authoritarian government) this stifles much essential debate in election years when voters should be hearing and evaluating policy choices.

The ‘Let Lynton Lobby Bill’: Grubby Partisan Politics and a Trojan Horse

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Iain Duncan Smith used false statistics again to justify disability benefit cuts

May 15, 2014November 1, 2017 · 33 Comments ·

The Department of Work and Pensions has a long track record of misusing statistics, making unsubstantiated inferences and stigmatising claimants, and it’s clear these are tactics used to vindicate further welfare cuts.

The Tories have peddled the lie that he UK was “on the brink bankruptcy” and claimed the solution to is to cut government spending with a painful programme of austerity cuts. Of course, the UK economy was growing in 2010 when the Tories took over and was subsequently plunged back into recession by Osborne’s austerity policies, which have meant that the economy has not grown at all under the coalition; and for much of their tenure has been contracting. Despite the fact that Osborne was officially rebuked for this lie, the Goebbels-styled repetition propaganda technique employed by the conservatives has embedded this lie in the minds of the public. However, our current problems are the result of a global financial crisis that we and not the banks that caused it, continue to pay for.

Austerity is a smokescreen – the Coalition has used the deficit as an excuse to do what they have always wanted to do: shrink the state, privatise the NHS, and hand out our money to the wealthy minority. We cannot trust them.

It’s become clear that the Tories have seized an opportunity to dismantle the institutions they have always hated since the post-war social democratic settlement – institutions of health, welfare, education, culture and human rights which should be provided for all citizens. The Tories also attempt to destroy fundamental public support for the health, education and welfare of its people by a divisive scapegoating of vulnerable groups, perpetuated via the media, and by offering and inflicting only regressive, punitive policies and devastating cuts.

The Official statistics watchdog (UKSA) has found that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) have repeatedly made false claims about the numbers of people living on disability benefits.

Ministers claim that the majority of people claiming disability living allowance (DLA) were given benefits for life, and without any supporting medical evidence. This is untrue.

According to DWP press releases:

“More than 50% of decisions on entitlement are made on the basis of the claim form alone, without any additional corroborating medical evidence.”

However, the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA) found that the real percentage of claims passed without supporting medical evidence was just 10%.

The DWP also claimed that “Under the current system of Disability Living Allowance, 71% of claimants get indefinite awards without systematic reassessments.” However the UKSA found that in the last two years, just 23% and 24% of claimants were given indefinite awards of DLA.

The DWP accept that their claims were “ambiguous” and “had not been re-checked by the Department’s analysts, as is the usual practice.”

The findings were uncovered by an investigation by Channel Four News following complaint by the charity Parkinson’s UK.

Parkinson’s UK policy advisor Donna O’Brien said:

“People with Parkinson’s who claimed DLA have told us supporting medical evidence was crucial due to a woeful knowledge of the condition amongst assessors, and it is absurd that the Government was trying to imply that anyone going through the system had an easy ride.”

This is the third time in the past year that Iain Duncan Smith has come under fire for the use of false statistics to justify cuts to benefits.

Last year Duncan Smith was rebuked by UKSA for misuse of benefit statistics. He claimed that 8000 people who had been affected by the benefits cap had “moved back into work.”

The UKSA found that this figure was “unsupported by the official statistics.”

Another statement by Duncan Smith later in the month also drew criticism and a reprimand. The minister said around 1 million people have been stuck on benefits for at least three of the last four years “despite being judged capable of preparing or looking for work”.

However, the figures cited also included single mothers, people who were seriously ill, and people awaiting their assessment.

Grant Shapps was also rebuked by UK Statistics Authority for misrepresenting benefit figures – Shapps joined his fellow Conservatives in the data hall of shame. In March, the Tory chairman claimed that “nearly a million people” (878,300) on incapacity benefit had dropped their claims, rather than face a new medical assessment for its successor, the employment and support allowance (ESA).

The figures, he said, “demonstrate how the welfare system was broken under Labour and why our reforms are so important”. The claim was faithfully reported by the Sunday Telegraph but as the UK Statistics Authority has now confirmed in its response to Labour MP Sheila Gilmore (the complainant), it was entirely and intentionally fabricated.

In his letter to Shapps and Iain Duncan Smith, UKSA chair Andrew Dilnot writes that the figure conflated “official statistics relating to new claimants of the ESA with official statistics on recipients of the incapacity benefit (IB) who are being migrated across to the ESA”.

Of the 603,600 incapacity benefit claimants referred for reassessment as part of the introduction of the ESA between March 2011 and May 2012, just 19,700 (somewhat short of Shapps’s “nearly a million) abandoned their claims prior to a work capability assessment in the period up to May 2012. The figure of 878,300 refers to the total of new claims for the ESA closed before medical assessment from October 2008 to May 2012.

Thus, Shapps’s suggestion that the 878,300 were pre-existing claimants, who would rather lose their benefits than be exposed as “scroungers”, was entirely wrong. As significantly, there is no evidence that those who abandoned their claims did so for the reasons ascribed by Shapps. However, he did at least honestly reveal his own prejudices regarding disabled people, at least. But he did so without a trace of shame and remorse.

At the time Iain Duncan Smith dismissed the findings, saying that he “believed” that he was “right”, anyway. It seems that Iain Duncan Smith has some disdain for evidence-based policy.

“I believe this to be right, I believe that we are already seeing people going back to work who were not going to go back to work,” he said.

This is a remarkable claim, given that the Department for Work and Pensions does not track the destination of people no longer entitled to benefits. Simply measuring how many people no longer claim benefits does not accurately reflect the numbers of those actually moving into employment. The DWP off-flow figures will inevitably include many having their claim ended for reasons other than securing employment, including sanctions, awaiting mandatory review, appeal, death, hospitalisation, imprisonment, or on a government “training scheme” (workfare).

In 2011, the Work and Pensions Select Committee warned the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) needed to take more care when releasing and commenting on benefit statistics, to make sure media stories were “accurate.”

It seems unlikely, however, that accuracy will replace Duncan Smith’s “gut feelings” and ideologically-driven rhetoric – which is aimed at presenting excuses for the steady reduction of support for the most vulnerable citizens – any time soon.

Pictures courtesy of Robert Livingstone

Cameron’s ‘divine inspiration’ came from Max Weber, not God

April 12, 2014June 20, 2022 · 19 Comments ·

The Department of Work and Pensions announce that they are to be re-named the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith”. The government have released a statement that although they favoured the strappado, a variety of other methods of trial by ordeal will be used in addition to replace the Work Capability Assessment. Iain Duncan Smith has called for the introduction of dunking – a form of water ordeal and divination – to determine who is disabled enough to build the HS2.

Conservatives have reassured the appalled public by explaining that really, the old English word “ordǣl,” simply means a “judgement or verdict”, so not to worry, as pretending that a word means something else is a magick formula used for ensuring public compliance and conformity. Lynton Crosby has been announced as the new Pontifex Maximus of such formulae. Previous successes include the words “fair”, “reform” and the phrase “making work pay” in the context of the Tory’s neoliberal cunning stunts known collectively as the misnamed “welfare reforms.”

I can see where Cameron thinks he’s coming from with his recent claims of “divine inspiration”. Cameron’s social policies may certainly be regarded as a codified version of the Malleus Malificarum (The Hammer of the Witches).

His ideology is founded on principles similar to those found in Commentarius de Maleficius. There are some uncanny similarities between such legal treatises on witchcraft and the Tory Welfare “Reform” Act, especially regarding the establishing of entitlement to benefits.

“Christians are now the most persecuted religion around the world. We should stand up against persecution of Christians and other faith groups wherever and whenever we can,” says the Prime Minister.

Contrary to what you said, Christians have often been the persecutors, rather than the persecuted, Mr Cameron.

A witch-hunt is a search for witches or evidence of witchcraft, often involving carefully manufactured public moral panics. This is a manipulated intense feeling expressed in a population about an issue that appears to threaten the social order. Or in this case, that mythical beast of burden – the right-wing tax payer. Tories are moral entrepreneurs, who have despicably used the media to transform the poorest and most vulnerable social groups into folk devils. Conservatives have always created social tension and ensured that criticism and disagreement are difficult because the matter at the centre of such controversies are taboo.

The right-wing media have aided and abetted the Tories, who have long operated as agents of moral indignation. I can see a very clear, common framework of reference for prejudice and persecution here, Mr Cameron.

Proofs of practising witchcraft in Commentarius de Maleficius read a lot like Techniques of Neutralisation, (Sykes and Matza). The first “proof” is the identification of the “diabolical mark”. Usually, this was a mole or a birthmark. If no such mark was visible, the examiner would claim to have found an invisible mark. Or invent statistics. It seems using physical characteristics as an opportunity and excuse to persecute a social group is no new thing then, in the name of “God”, Mr Cameron. As you know.

The “diabolical pact” was an alleged pact with Satan to perform evil acts in return for rewards. Benefit “Fraud” is the new diabolical pact. Thus spake the grand inquisitor Iain “de Torquemáda” Duncan Smith.

Mr Duncan Smith claims to know of many invisible families with generations of witches, and feels the need produce imaginary statistics and to take measures to “prevent” this invisible culture of entitlement. To be afraid during the interrogatories is a sure sign of guilt.

This is called being Condemned by the condemners – it’s a formula ensuring an abdication of all responsibility for behaviour, and instead the condemned point to the people condemning them: they are the problem, not us. What they have done “wrong” excuses persecution, appalling and unforgivable political behaviour and policies.

Denying harm is another technique of neutralisation, which is evident in words like ‘support’, help’, which the Tories use to mask the fact that their blatantly punitive welfare policies are absolutely draconian, with sanctions, for example, involving the withdrawal of the means for citizens to meet their basic survival needs.

Mr Cameron, in 1540: Antonio Venegas de Figueroa, Bishop of Pamplona, sent a circular to the priests in his diocese, explaining that witchcraft was a false belief. He recommended medical treatment for those accused of witchcraft, and blamed the ignorance of the people for their confusion of witchcraft with medical conditions. Didn’t you get the memo?

…..For the extraordinarily evil and cruel are always with us.

Satirical swipes aside, Cameron’s deluded and quite alarming declaration that “divine inspiration was at work when it came to drafting a key concept for Conservative Party policy” is founded on the Tory affinity with hierarchies and social stratification – and this is reflected in the appeal to “higher authority”. Of course, much of our religious organisation is extremely hierarchical too. This is Cameron’s version of psychobabble, a warped and inverted idea of noblesse oblige, he’s clearly close to meltdown.

And what utter moral cowardice, Cameron’s claim is an attempt to endorse Tory policy by partially disowning responsibility for it himself. It’s obvious that Tory policies have not arisen from anything remotely resembling an “intelligent design”, from a Christian deity or otherwise.

Marx said that: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opiate of the people”. Yes, and for Cameron and his ilk, social control and moral codification is an attractive feature of religion. And aligning with a doctrine that makes a virtue of virtue, Cameron is attempting to add legitimacy to his unchristian and uncharitable “reforms”.

The Puritan work ethic has long considered indispensable for right wing political ideologues. Protestantism offers a concept of the worldly “calling,” and gives worldly activity and ruthless profiteering a religious character.

Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is a study of the relationship between the ethics of ascetic Protestantism, (which embodies values such as thrift, self help, and hard work) and the emergence of the spirit of modern capitalism.

Weber observed a correlation between being Protestant and being involved in business, and went on to explore religion as a potential cause of modern economic conditions. He concluded that the modern spirit of capitalism sees profit as an end in itself, and pursuing profit as virtuous.

Calvinism promoted the idea that profit and material success as signs and cues of God’s favour. Other religious groups, such as the Pietists, Methodists, and the Baptist sects had similar attitudes, but to a lesser degree. Weber proposed that that this new attitude broke down the traditional economic system, paving the way for modern capitalism, and once capitalism emerged, the ethic took on a life of its own. We are now locked into the spirit of capitalism.

Weber doesn’t exactly argue that Protestantism caused the capitalist spirit, but rather, that they are correlated. He also acknowledges the converse: that capitalism itself had an impact on the development of the religious ideas. It’s a teleology (a doctrine explaining phenomena by final causes) that would appeal to Cameron for obvious reasons.

Cameron clearly hasn’t spotted the gaping contradictions in what he claims. His cognitive dissonance arises from the fact that while he claims to hold true a predestination doctrine – that God has ordained all that will happen, especially with regard to the salvation of some and not others, (particularly associated with the teachings of St Augustine of Hippo and of Calvin), this contradicts Cameron’s beliefs that are evident in his “reforms” for the poor – which are based on the premise that the poor are responsible for their own circumstances, and may be “helped”, coerced, sanctioned and legislated into somehow different “choices” and circumstances.

Cameron fails to reconcile his apparent belief in predestiny with his punitive, welfare “reforms” apparently designed to coerce socially “responsible” citizens into work.

You can’t argue from a perspective of predetermination that only poor people are responsible for their actions and situations of poverty – that only poor people have a degree of free will – and then go on to formulate punitive policies based on notions of “deserving” and “undeserving” poor people, and a redistribution of wealth from the poorest to the wealthiest. AND claim you believe in God. With a straight face.

The stunning hypocrisy and incoherence of Cameron’s claim to “divine inspiration” for such uncharitable, unkind, inhumane, persecutory and malevolent deeds as the welfare “reforms”, when empathy and compassion are so widely regarded to be central to Christianity, amongst a diverse range of religions and world-views, demonstrates only too well that Cameron lacks the integrity, depth, basic empathy and regard for others that is crucially required of a leader. He has absolutely no conscience, compassion, remorse or shame.

Pictures courtesy of Robert Livingstone

The Tories are not simply “out of touch”, their policies are deliberate and malevolent

October 15, 2012January 18, 2023 · 53 Comments ·

It’s a common belief that inhumane Tory policies – which are directed at taking money and support from the most vulnerable citizens – have happened because of a kind of naivety, lack of experience, or a simple egocentricity of the privileged. Or general incompetence.

These certainly may well contribute to the obvious lack of joined-up thinking, apparent when we step back to consider that the most vulnerable citizens in our so-called civilised society are suffering and dying as a direct consequence of recent legislations and “reforms,” but it certainly doesn’t explain why the Tories persistently and historically CHOOSE to continue to ignore any other account of social reality but their own. That implies some intentionality, to me. Selective perception involves a certain degree of free will. And choice.

So we are now almost through the doorway to the “mad or bad” debate.

Tories also reduce every single human deed to an underlying motivation of greed for financial gain, no matter what the circumstances. They know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Some would argue that this is classic Freudian projection. But that doesn’t account for the fact that the Tories normalise and make a virtue of the financial gain principle, for the wealthy, big business and of course, the Tories themselves. That corrupts government policy and our democracy.

These motivations are held to be universal, and are translated into a vice when it comes to ordinary, everyday people, or in particular, poor and vulnerable people. That doesn’t hang together coherently at all, nor does it corroborate the view that the Tories are simply out of touch with everyday experience, since there is a deep and fundamental – and very apparent – contradiction here. It is a very significant flaw in their ideological grammar.

Human beings are not static when it comes to ideas and beliefs: we are capable of learning, and in a variety of ways: though experience, through the experience of others, through historical accounts, evidence and so on. The Tories simply choose to overlook the need. They prefer, instead, to stay put, or regress, and simply insist that they know best. Challenge a Tory, and they often believe that simply talking louder, and over the top of you will somehow make what they are saying “right.” They are not called “Conservative” for nothing – they do like to maintain a status quo and resist progressive change.

Tory notions of change apply only to their idea of how a society ought to be, hence the proliferation of legislation these past couple of years. The Conservatives are unravelling the progress we have made as a society, because they prefer the simplicity of basic feudal relationships. I’m not really joking here, unfortunately. The Tories are re-privileging the privileged and reinforcing a traditional hierarchy.

It’s as if the clocks stopped the moment the Tory-led Coalition took Office, and now we are losing a decade a day.

The truth is that austerity is NOT about deficit-cutting. It’s just the cover for Tory ideology. It is actually about shrinking the State and squeezing the public sector until it becomes marginal, then non-existent, in an entirely market-driven society. The banking crisis-generated deficit has been a gift to the Tories in enabling them to launch the narrative that public expenditure has to be massively cut back, which they would never have been able to get away with without the deficit-reduction excuse in the first place.

Austerity won’t benefit the economy: it will damage it further, since the cuts will reduce the income of those that spend proportionally the most money and add to the economy – the poorest. Taking more money out of an already struggling economy and impacting local economies will simply exacerbate the problem. In the longer term, the Tories will destroy our prosperity as a nation, because they are disaster capitalists. Worse, they don’t care if citizens die as a consequence.

“We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had too much” – John Kenneth Galbraith

Nope, that hasn’t happened, the Tories are still taking money from the poor and handing it to the wealthy. Why? Is it because the Tories are phenomenologically impoverished and incapable of learning, ever? No, I don’t think so.

I think it’s much worse than that. I think that the Tories DO understand the consequences of their ideologically-driven policies, but they don’t care. Money for the wealthy has to come from somewhere, after all. The whole “out of touch/lack of experience” proposition overlooks the fact that the Tories refuse to listen, quite deliberately, they exercise authoritarian tactics to shut people up – such as excluding those people from debate who oppose their views – witnessed during the passage of the Health and Social Care Bill, for example. Then there is the “monitoring” of the media for alternative political “biases.”

That is a quite deliberate narrowing down of experience, not naivety, based on a lack of understanding. That’s deliberate, calculated and certainly bears all of the hallmarks of authoritarianism. That’s the wilful imposition of a pre-moulded, dystopic Tory version of reality onto a largely unwilling population.

The propaganda regarding unemployed, ill and disabled people is not based on naivety either: it is deliberate, and calculated, a horrible and wicked attempt to justify their small state ideology and punitive approach to stripping welfare provision from the poorest, and from vulnerable citizens to redistribute funds from the public purse to the already wealthy.

David Cameron, Iain Duncan Smith and Chris Grayling have all contributed a selection of propagandic pieces of work to the press – largely the Sun, Express and the Daily Mail. The language they use – words like “scrounger” “fraud” and “workshy” and the implied “burden on the state,” together with their knowledge that so-called benefit fraud was a mere 0.7% (and that includes DWP’s own errors, too) indicates clearly that the policies aimed at removing welfare provision, and the propaganda campaign that has led to an increase in hate crimes directed at sick and disabled people, are absolutely intentional.

10,600 chronically ill and disabled people died last year between January and November, many within six weeks of their ESA claim closing. It’s very telling that the Department for Work and Pensions do not monitor or account for just how many of those were passed as “fit for work” by Atos, or awaiting Appeal.

Furthermore, this Government introduced targets which were written into the Atos contract when they renewed it in 2010: 7 out of 8 sick and disabled people to lose their benefits.

Bearing in mind that those targets exist BEFORE those ill and disabled people are assessed (and the Government have also redesigned the work capability assessment to make sure that there is a heavy bias towards withdrawing people’s support) then we can reasonably infer that the Government see those deaths – that have happened as a result of absolute poverty and extreme distress, some of our most vulnerable citizens have had their means of meeting their basic survival needs removed – as an intended outcome.

That the Government have not acted upon the high number of deaths associated with their welfare “reforms” is truly outrageous, and also indicates quite plainly, to me, that this “outcome” is not simply a by-product of their legislation, or incompetence, or lack of experience: it is calculated and intentional. All policies are intentional.

This is much, much worse than a little “Tory egocentricity,” incompetence, phenomenological ineptitude, or naivety: this is the deliberate, calculated and wholesale destruction of every State mechanism of support for the most vulnerable citizens as well as for the “ordinary” person. If people cannot meet their basic needs – food, warmth, shelter and so on, they die. That is fact, it’s common sense, something that everyone knows.

Yet this Government are taking away people’s only means of support. Social security, the safety net paid for by the tax paying public to ensure no-one dies of starvation or exposure. This Government have stolen our collective funds for social security, and blamed those they have stolen it from for their deed.

They blame the poor for poverty. They blame the unemployed for unemployment. But we know that the Government are to blame. Have you ever noticed that, historically, whenever poverty grows and inequalities become wider and deeper, look to the helm and lo and behold, we have a Tory-led Government steering the way. We need to put this Government out of our misery.

Every single “reform” has been about taking money away from the poorest and some of the most vulnerable people. The fact that the Legal Aid Bill has been timed for implementation next year, when the horrific consequences of the welfare cuts, the bedroom tax and the new council tax will become very apparent, as well as the Health and Social Care reforms, indicates quite plainly that these policies have been planned and coordinated for a long time.

The Legal Aid Bill means that challenging the Government regarding the reforms will be very difficult. Indeed, the Coalition have been steadily removing the essential democratic processes that safeguard our human rights and enable us to challenge effectively.

This is certainly an authoritarian Government.

We should hang their heads in shame.

It’s truly despicable. How utterly horrifying that they are getting away with it. There is an increasingly discernible taint of eugenics embedded in Tory ideology. This, and the propaganda, smoke and mirrors, media scapegoating diversions and theft from the poorest to handout to the wealthiest – these actions are intentional, calculated and are being increasingly inflicted and administered, whilst the general population waits passively in the wings, shrugging off the blow by hammer blow accounts: more bad news of further Tory cuts, more devastating consequences. More preventable deaths.

Too many people are finding temporary distractions, watching the idiot box, hoping quietly that those things they can see from the corner of their eye are not real.

Oh, but they are.

Hanlon’s razor is an eponymous adage that allows the elimination of unlikely explanations for a phenomenon. It reads: “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

However, I always considered intentional malice and stupidity to be strongly correlated characteristics.

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