I know a few of you have started to discuss this in the Tories thread, but when I heard about this I was in utter disbelief. What a big eared self-entitled multi-millionaire stuck up *****. Sorry for the language but this bloke is on another planet. If your unwell on long term sick "Let's get you into work!" Rishi, have you seen or met anyone who has crippling depression, psychosis, schizophrenia, anxiety or the other many countless psychological disorders many, many people face? Do you expect somebody who is generally, very afraid of leaving their home every day due to agoraphobia to just walk into a job and start answering the telephone or speaking to the general pubic? Who then in turn return home and probably feel like or have a mental breakdown due to the stress of it all? Have you ever seen or met a person (like my sister) who has crippling Schizophrenia who hears voices, deep depression and has feelings of worthlessness? Have you spent time with any of these people and sat down with them and discovered just how hard their lives are? Have you thought about how "forcing" them to take a job, or you cut their benefits forever is going to make them feel? You utter moron. Removing a GP's ability to sign somebody off sick for work? What planet do you live on? A GP is a personal aid to anyone who is in need of help, who has access to very private and confidential information. What are you going to do? Send this information to some nobody who works for a private firm who has no interest in said individual's case to try to see "what they can do" to get back into work? Get your head out of your @rse and perhaps try HELPING these people? Offer more support to them maybe? Try to shorten the waiting time to see a mental health professional who is the idea candidate to look at how a person who struggles on a day-to-day cycle and perhaps put an ongoing programme in place for them for general care and support? What about you stop defunding the NHS and stop getting pay rises for sitting on your @rse and arguing like bloody kids in a school playground and getting paid thousands of pounds to do so? HELP THESE PEOPLE - STOP FINDING WAYS TO PUNISH THEM JUST TO COVER UP WHAT AN UTTER FAILURE OF AN UNELECTED PM YOU ARE! Sorry for the rant, but I cannot stand this man right now. He's such a rich mommy's boy who has never had to live like a normal person his entire life. It's not easy Rishi, when you step out of your little bubble at #10. You want to help people who you say are "clogging up the DWP?" Make a stand to make changes to the way things are done. Don't blame people for being ill, mentally or psychically, which is exactly what you mean behind all the grins and lies. Get this clown out of government before he causes more harm than good.
Let’s not talk about the effects of 14 years of continual per capita cuts in funding of all the institutions designed to maintain the general health of the nation…the impact of the 2008 financial crash was always going to be worrying even if efforts were made to invest sufficiently to alleviate the worst of it. The resulting 14 years of ‘austerity’ have guaranteed all those fears have been delivered in spades. But no, it’s the fault of the ‘work-shy’.
The work required to get physically knackered or mentally unwell people back into employment requires sensitivity and investment. It also requires NHS waiting lists to come right down. It can be done in many circumstances but there is no sense that this is genuine effort to address the huge deficit’s compassionately. It’s simply a cynical headline for votes and as usual, someone else to blame.
The whole blaming the poor and the sick for needing benefits should to be addressed imho. You can't just cut spending on health and allow employers to pay below subsistence wages and then complain that the benefits bill is going up. Not sure if Danny Dyer is necessarily everyone's idea of a wise man but he is spot on here....
Britain is an expensive poor country that knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. The idea of a healthy, happy, productive society made up of people who all have access to good healthcare, a decent job that pays enough money to be a functioning member of that society, access to good food, nice outdoor spaces, places to socialise, adequate leisure time, the means to take decent holidays in places that broaden horizons is alien to so many. They want it for themselves but are not convinced that it should be something for everyone. We have a political class that fetishises work. Work, work, work, as if this is the only thing to life. The idea that work can improve people's lives only holds water if it actually does. Corporate capitalists have decided that pay should be low so that their profits can be high and the side-effect of that is an unwell nation. Ask most people what they want to do with their lives and work is a necessary part of it but it is not the reason to draw breath. I have been incredibly lucky to work in a field I love, doing something that interests and stimulates me, but I don't work for the reasons Sunak wants me to work. He really is the dregs. Rich beyond belief telling the rest of us it's our fault the country is grinding to a halt because we won't slave away for their benefit. And for what? A country that has been driven into the dirt by them and their ideas? No thanks, pal. We have a political class that punches down and encourages just enough people to do the same to ensure there's a permanent cycle of outrage. A significant minority of the population is envious people obsessed with the idea that someone else is getting something they're not. None of this is accidental. It's all engineered to create a fearful, angry mob mentality, blaming people who don't fit the cookie-cutter idea of what's 'normal' And it manifests itself in a weird sense of materialism, selfishness, a sense that it's up to someone else to pay for stuff that benefit everyone. There's a sad lack of imagination too – people can't visualise what it must be like to have next to nothing, or be ill, or injured. Instead, people are seen as economic units that either generate money for someone richer than them or are a drain on resources. If there's anything that defines mental illness it's Sunak's world view. Dreadful.
Danny Dyer put it a lot more succinctly! I remember 10-12 years ago reading a piece in The Guardian by Zoe Williams about how a major supermarket's wages were basically topped up by benefits. A corporation that's richer than God sucking money out of the taxpayers to top up already grotesque profits. The fact that there's no white-hot rage about this says a lot but I guess a lot of people aren't aware of how things work which in itself is all part of the great deception.
The Tories have really hit the ground running with this one: Help for disabled people in England and Wales to get jobs is axed amid benefits crackdown Closure of Work and Health Programme comes hard on heels of Rishi Sunak’s bid to end the UK’s supposed ‘sicknote’ culture I mean, shirley, there must be some votes in hounding the most desperate members of our society?
My sister is long term disabled and doesn't work at all. Sje has been more than happy to go along with the scapegoat of the week in the last decade or so. This has been a rude awakening for her. I am hoping she'll learn a lesson from it.
That makes no sense at all. It's a programme designed to help people with a disability find work or help them along that path, and he wants to close it down? What absolute joker this man is. What does he expect the people who are currently on this programme to do? Go to one of his "fake" DWP doctors so they can illegally access them with no medical backgrounds and force them back into work? The more I hear about this the angrier it makes me feel about how clueless this bloke is in getting people off the NHS waiting lists and the opportunity to see people who can actually help them out. What did he used to do? Chancellor of England wasn't it? Carry around that little brief case and smile to camera when a budget was announced? Ok I might be wrong there but I don't really care and it makes even more less sense that this idiot has the final say on things that affect everyone in this country. I do see one upside to this, which is it will stop some people who are either faking it or frauds, but that's a very small upside to a massive downside. I hope to god he's voted out of office sooner rather than later. Call a general election please. Your a fake man in the shoes of power that nobody wanted in the first place and your lapping it up.
Ooof, that comment really hits hard. There's a bit of a cliche isn't there... the one that goes, "they came for so-and-so and I said nothing." But actually this is the real-word consequence of horrible, mean-spirited policies and a society that punches down while thinking they are exceptional enough to be immune to being on the receiving end themselves. Always makes me laugh (not laugh) when people who are three pay cheques away from oblivion punch down on the people who are two pay cheques away, and so on. And it really tests my resolve not to engage in a bit of schadenfreude when people who vote for the Leopards To Eat My Face Party end up with their face being eaten by a leopard. I have to take a deep breath not to think, "well, you wanted it like this." The further we go down this road, the further up into lower mid-table and mid-table the consequences are going to bite.
This government is just a meme at this point, not long until we can wave them goodbye quite brutally. Mega corp will still be in control though. The scariest and quite ironic part is that they are the most mentally ill and they dont even know it. I imagine every voter knows someone else who has mental health or other disabilities so I cant see how anyone would think this would be a vote winner no matter how the media twist it so why do it? To think that this government does not know they are at the core of a lot of mental health issues though their poilicies and culture war bs is laughable, add in the controlled press and it is quite obvious. This isnt the only country with these issues, what the **** is going on? Real politics have been replaced by psychological warfare. You see online how people get dragged into their own little cults of thought. I am done with listening to a single word anyone that claims to have authority over me says.
A friend's sister has to be assessed annually by the benefits people. They just want to make sure that her Downs syndrome hasn't cleared up. Who the f**k is running this sh1t show?
There is no right answer to this. I know a gentleman who is wheel chair bound because he lost his legs due to polio, he though has made a great career as an accountant. One of my son's has quite severe ADHD, ASD and suffers horrendously with Anxiety, where he can't go to school and we have to have a mix of private tutors and parental home education. As such my wife has given up work to look after him full time, with minimal financial support available. At the moment i would say that there is very very little chance of him ever holding down a consistent full time job. His quite clever and more than physically capable. Could he do a physical job? yes. As long as he only has to follow one maybe two instructions at a time. He wants to go to work, but suspect that he'll only hold down a job for 4 or 5 months at a time. We all know others who simply can't work because of either physical or mental disabilities. All of those need to be supported and so should their carer's, who are abysmally looked after. https://www.carersuk.org/help-and-a...text=Known as the main benefit,week (2024/25). But we have also all seen the TV documentaries and reports of those who claim to have a bad back, but go out jogging or are seen lifting heavy goods, who are claiming benefits. These are the people that should be targeted. Not all jobs include doing something physical. Unfortunately there are always going to be dodgers and scroungers out there, who give those in real need a bad name. Is moving it from the GP a good idea? I suppose it depends on how many GP appointments it currently uses. If it free's up 200,000 then happy days, but if it only free's up 10,000 then its a waste of money that could be used elsewhere in the system.
No worries. After their base is split by racists going to reform, the remoaners staying with Lib Dem, the usual swing voters to labour, the incredible PR by the US Democrats over the last 20 years in destroying the stable core brand of 'I vote for conservatism as a status symbol as somebody who made it', and Truss completely demolishing their reputation as the 'party of economic stability' there is a non-zero probability the Conservative Party will cease to exist in its entirety (and probably replaced by Reform long-term). The brand is so toxic conservative mayors have stopped using blue in their marketing materials for those upcoming elections. If they are totally erased in the council elections, Farage will smell blood and step up his game for the one not about bin colours. The smart rats are already jumping ship. It's over. You know it, they know it, I know it, and pretty much, the whole world knows it.
