The Potter Blogger

Please could you help?

2012-03-07T22:44:00.001Z

This blogpost is me asking for help.

The reason I'm asking for help is because I've failed. I've been unable to gather enough support to get an emergency motion on the Welfare Reform Bill (WRB) submitted to conference. This is entirely my fault - I should have started gathering support for the motion well before the crucial vote in the Commons on the Lords' amendments to the bill. But instead I was too optimistic and failed to start trying to gather support until all hope of parliament stopping it was gone. And that meant that there simply wasn't enough time to gather the required number of signatures from voting representatives - certainly not for someone with my limited connections. And this is my failure and I am deeply sorry for it.

So now I need to ask other people for help and I hope that everyone reading this will forward it on to everyone they know who might be able to help.

I am desperately looking for a Lib Dem voting rep who is going to be at Lib Dem spring conference this weekend who objects to the WRB and who's willing to do something about it.

Basically, I think that the WRB is such a mammoth issue that, at the very least, conference should have the opportunity to show how it feels on the issue. The best opportunity for this is for the report by the parliamentary to be subjected to a vote on whether to accept it or not and the mini-debate that goes with it. This requires a voting rep to request, by 5pm on saturday, that the PLDP report be rejected. I'd do it myself but I'm not a voting rep and, because the deadline for emergency substitutions is the 31st of Jan (before the crucial commons vote on the WRB) there's no way I'll be able to do it.

So what I'm asking is for a voting rep to request the rejection of the section of the PLDP report dealing with the WRB and to read out a pre-written statement setting forth the arguments why it should be rejected - this would also require being in the conference hall by 9am on Sunday.

Please, is there anyone willing to do this? In all probability the vote will be lost anyway but I just can't think it right that a bill with such a large impact should be passed into law without even a token vote for conference to show what it thinks. If you have any doubt about the importance of this then I suggest that all you need to do is to read this moving account of the impact it will have to appreciate the devastation that this bill will inflict on thousands of vulnerable people.

So please, if you're a voting rep who'd be willing to do this then please send me a facebook message. My facebook profile can be found here.Thank you.

EDIT: To clarify, there are two PLDP reports, one from the Commons, one from the Lords. What I'm hoping to get rejected are one section of the Lords report and the entirety of the Commons. This is because the Lords give a dedicated section to the WRB while the Commons report doesn't even mention it at all.

Lib Dem computer virus

2012-03-06T07:55:00.000Z

I need a (brief) break from blogging about the misery of the Welfare Reform Bill all the time. So I am proud to present the Lib Dem Computer Virus (patent pending). If you click on that link you'll be able to download it. If you double click it, and ignore the security warning, you'll be able to see exactly what it does - but don't worry, it won't damage your computer and you can close it by clicking the exit button in the top right hand corner box that pops up (this "virus" only works on Windows computers by the way).

And, to be honest, technically it's not a virus at all. Let me explain.

I'm studying (what is essentially) electronic engineering at university. This involves learning programming. I'm currently on a placement year working in industry as part of my degree and my job also involves quite a bit of programming.

And it was at work that I learn about something called "scripts". Basically, back in the old days, computers were a lot more basic - there wasn't Windows or Mac OS or anything like that. Instead people had to tell computers what to do by directly typing commands into it - nowadays we just click on buttons. That legacy of typing in commands directly still exists in modern computers in the form of something called the Command Prompt. This is a little screen you can open up to type in commands directly, just as people used to do in the old days.

A script is a type of file which sends what's written in it directly to the Command Prompt. So this way you can write a whole sequence of commands in a script and then double click on the file to run them all at once.

Scripts were used to write the very first major computer virus - it was a script which looked like a text file entitled "LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.txt" sent to people in emails. When people opened it then emailed itself to random email contacts of the people who opened it. Of course, other script based viruses can be a lot more sophisticated - for example, they can tell your computer to delete all the files you've got saved on it.

Fortunately nowadays computer security is much better and email companies block script files and computers warn people about what they are before running them. Unfortunately, the people who write viruses have also become a lot more sophisticated in their techniques. In fact, the kind of people who use scripts in computer hacking nowadays are rather looked down upon within the hacking community and referred to as "script kiddies" - which is a derogatory term. They're looked down upon because they use scripts and other fairly simple to use hacking tools which have been put together by other people. In short, they're looked down upon because they don't have any particular skill of their own and also because they usually haven't got a clue about what they're doing or how what they're doing works - they just do it for the thrill of vandalism and the reputation it gives them among their peers.

That's the stereotype of course. Hackers, incidentally, are a lot different from the standard media stereotype - most people think of criminal hackers as the kind of people who break into things and steal money or destroy things via computers. But a lot of hackers are the kind of people normally viewed as the "good guys" - such as computer security experts. And there are also the hackers who simply hack computer systems for the challenge of pitting themselves against the systems - of getting behind the simple interface that most people see and into the bare bones of the computers behind them. And a lot of the people who were non-malicious, non-law breaking hackers are the same people who laid the foundation of modern computer technology - Bill Gates is one such example.

Then there are the people who hack hardware or software, such as their own computers, to push them to the limit - to go beyond the built in restrictions and see exactly how far the hardware or software can be pushed before it breaks and gives up. For example, there are some people who've managed to turn a standard computer mouse into a barcode scanner - and the only reason they did it was for the fun of it. It's a subculture basically and hopefully I've given you a bit of an insight into it.

But back to the Lib Dem computer virus. What it is is one of the scripts I talked about. When you run it it should pop up a window and spout Lib Dem propaganda at you and ask you to press any key to continue. After you've done that twice then it loops back to the beginning. It's fairly basic and fairly simple and really isn't a virus at all as it depends on you choosing to run it. I do think it's pretty cool though - which gives you an idea as to how much of a nerd I am.

Pictured: Unashamed nerdery

If I wanted to I could also alter it to do more irritating things - such as asking you if you're a Lib Dem and shutting down your computer if you say no. And there are also things that can be done to prevent you from closing the script and hiding it so that you've got no idea that it's there. I've got no interest in finding out how to do that though - my only interest in scripts is to use them as an occasional cludge or temporary fix in programming.

And, as thanks for making it this far, here's another script I've written that you can download - this is an equally harmless script but hopefully it might make you smile a little :)

Also, I'll thank you not to ask just how geeky I have to be to a) be interested in writing scripts and b) decide to give those scripts a political theme.

Meeting with Jenny Willot: Communication

2012-03-03T12:46:00.000Z

This is the fourth and final update on my meeting with Jenny Willott MP. In this last post I want to focus on the communication (or lack of it) with the public and party members over the Welfare Reform Bill.

To be fair, I think disability campaigners and myself may have misjudged Lib Dem MPs at times.

For example, one thing that really annoyed me was that Jenny Willott has said publicly, on multiple occasions, that the choice facing Lib Dem MPS was a choice between two arbitrary time limits. I and other campaigners have said that this was a completely false claim as MPs were voting to choose between the government’s one year time limit and the Lords’ amendment to raise it to “no less than 720 days”. I thought that meant that 720 days would be the minimum that the time limit would be.

But, according to Jenny, the original wording of the bill was “no less than 365 days”. I haven’t had a chance to check whether that’s correct but, assuming that Jenny was telling the truth (and I have no reason to believe otherwise), then it does sound like it really was a choice between two arbitrary limits where one was an arbitrary limit of one year and the other was an arbitrary limit of two years.

Of course, the thing is that even a time limit of two years is a bit better than the government’s original proposal – especially when the fact is that most of those affected by the one year time limit will take over a year to be able to return to work. So a time limit of two years would at least have made sure that slightly less people were caught out by this.

I also feel somewhat concerned that a lot of Lib Dem MPs seem to have spent so long working with the tories that they’ve forgotten what they’re really like. I mean, Jenny told me that Chris Grayling and Lord Freud and IDS are much nicer in private than they appear publicly and that they’re actually genuinely concerned about making the disability benefits system fairer and that they’ve even been asked by Lib Dems, and have agreed, to stop using “scrounger” rhetoric and misleading press releases (I’ll believe that one when I see it) - NOTE: since I wrote this, but before posting it, there's been a lovely article by Chris Grayling in the Sun which proves that any agreement or assurance the tories gave was absolutely worthless.

But what they seem to have forgotten is that tories are always perfectly nice people in private – they’re friendly and sociable and often quite charming. But when it comes to their political objectives they are utterly ruthless and without hesitation in doing whatever it takes to achieve them. Any Lib Dem council group in an area where the tories are active can tell you that. Tories are invariably pleasant people outside of political matters and are the kind of people who are happy to go to the pub with political opponents. But while they might be perfectly friendly in those kind of social settings they’ll stab you in the back and fight the dirtiest, nastier campaigns imaginable, without compunction, as soon as election season comes back round again. We’ve seen that first hand in this parliament with the AV campaign.

So I’m afraid that I can’t help that worry that our MPs have spent so long seeing the tories as work colleagues that they’ve forgotten that – though we might be forced to work together for the national interest – they are still, fundamentally, the enemy and are utterly opposed to everything we stand for.

I also think that this whole sorry saga over the Welfare Reform Bill illustrates perfectly how dire our party is at communication. Because there are things Lib Dems have achieved behind the scenes on this. I’m convinced that Jenny and co have actually won significant concessions on lots of disability benefit issues even if the headline, and awful, time limit is still going ahead. And I’m convinced that, reading between the lines, that they’d have done a lot, lot more if the tories hadn’t blocked them from doing so.

But party members and the public hear none of that. Over this entire saga the only communication we’ve received are three articles on LibDemVoice by Jenny Willott – an excellent website but one which has a relatively small and niche audience. Meanwhile, members have been left with no explanation for the way in which our MPs and peers were voting until well after the final and most significant vote in the Commons had taken place. That silence, that lack of engagement by the leadership is the reason that so many of us have felt let down and betrayed – especially when we went to the trouble of getting a motion passed at conference on the issue without anyone in the leadership apparently paying a blind bit of notice to it.

But we’re just the membership – we’re used to getting ignored and kept out of the loop over vitally important issues. Tuition fees, for example.

The public, on the other hand, are far more important. They’re not paid up members, they aren’t loyal party supporters who read every blog and website to find the justifications of what we’re doing. And what they’ve seen, especially the disabled community, is the Lib Dems -who many disabled people thought were the only party on their side – apparently unflinchingly backing to the hilt brutal and terrifying tory cuts to disability benefits. The fear that these changes have caused and the stress that they have inflicted on vulnerable people is immense. And at least part of that fear and stress might have been mitigated if Lib Dem parliamentarians had bothered to talk to people about this – to communicate properly, in a two-way fashion, with the public and with party members.

As it is, we will be absolutely hammered about this at the next election. Labour will be able to whitewash their own despicable past over welfare and be able to claim to be the great defender of the sick and disabled – even though most of their leadership have made it clear that they couldn’t care less. And we will lose votes. And we will be seen as no different from the tories on a fundamental issue of fairness which should have been one of our strongest areas. And every single tragic case caused by these cuts to disability benefits will be laid squarely at our door without our activists having a single argument at their disposal to say that our MPs do care and that they did try to make things better.

Yet our MPs really did do this but they did it in ridiculous secrecy and without giving any public sign of it. And, because they never gave any evidence of their achievements and mitigations publicly, no one will believe it when we tell them about it.

This was a glorious chance for the “differentiation” beloved by our leadership and yet it was completely wasted. If half the things Jenny told me in the meeting about what had been done, and how she would do things differently if the tories weren’t refusing to budge on certain issues, had been said in public or to party members then I’d have spent much of the past six months without being quite so uncertain or ashamed about our MPs. We could have done another NHS reforms on this and won a lot of credit for doing our best to mitigate proposals that the tories were determined to force through – even if we were unable to block them completely.

In fairness, when I told Jenny some of this she did agree that communication was poor and could have been handled a lot better. And it does sound like our MPs are getting better at this and will be doing things very differently following the budget when the policy programme for the rest of the parliament is up for negotiation – then we might actually get proper consultation and involvement of the grassroots of the party. But this should have been happening months ago.

We might be short on money and short on communication staff but that’s no excuse. Within the membership we have a vast pool of experienced, skilled and resourceful people – many of whom would have been happy to volunteer. Many of whom have, in fact, tried to volunteer but whose emailed offers of help have gone completely unanswered.

I really hope that our MPs get a lot of bad publicity over the Welfare Reform Bill and a rough conference over it as well – because it seems like it might be the only thing that will finally get through to them the vital urgency of getting communication right. Because, to put it bluntly, if things don’t improve drastically and quickly, then we might as well return to our constituencies and prepare for oblivion in every local election from here to 2015.

Meeting with Jenny Willott: the political dimension

2012-03-01T08:09:00.000Z

This is the third update on how my meeting with Jenny Willott went and, given that the meeting took place over a week ago, I’m sorry for the delay in getting this up. This was meant to be the last update but it’s grown so long that I’m going to have to do a fourth update covering what I see as the failure by Lib Dem MPs to communicate properly with the public and with members over the Welfare Reform Bill.

But in this post I just want to focus on the political dimension of what’s happening and my impression of it which I took away from the meeting.

The fundamental thing I took away from the meeting is that parliamentarians live in a completely different reality.

Now, something that I can’t emphasise enough is that the meeting did convince me that Jenny, and her researcher Giles, and the other Lib Dem MPs are still decent people at heart – they’re not supporting the welfare reform bill out of spite or callousness or disregard for the impact it’ll have. They’re trying their hardest to ameliorate the effects of the bill wherever possible but are trapped by the fact that it’s simply not possible to do that much to change the welfare reform bill.

When Jenny and Giles told me that they simply couldn’t get any more money out of the treasury to protect disability benefits – that it’s not possible to make any radical changes without fatally destabilising the coalition and doing more harm than good –they weren’t lying. They genuinely believe that and have tried their hardest but haven’t been able to get anywhere. Jenny and Giles certainly seems to have spent months looking at ways to find the money from elsewhere in the DWP but haven’t been able to and have thus come to the conclusion that it’s better to take support from those disabled people with an alternative household income than it would be to top-slice Job Seekers Allowance, for example.

But.

But the thing to remember is that they say that because they genuinely live in a different reality to the one I live in. For them the political realities are rock solid – the Treasury refuses to give up any more money, and there’s no force on earth that can persuade the Treasury to do otherwise, and it’s simply not possible to take money from other departments – and even if it was it would only mean sacrificing money from other important projects and would also hit vulnerable people – and so the best that Lib Dems can do is to make the saving of money within each department as fair as possible while taking the opportunity to make things actively better in the areas that the coalition agreement allows us to do so in. And, in fairness, if you are forced to take money either from a severely disabled, completely crippled person, and one who is very poorly but who is possibly going to be able to re-enter work in the future and who has a partner earning at least a little money, then taking it from the latter is the least worst option – which is the position Jenny seems to find herself in.

But I don’t really believe the reality is actually like that. I mean, okay, when Jenny said that it’s not possible to find the £1.6 billion to prevent time limiting from anywhere else in the government’s budget - because it would mean tearing up the comprehensive spending review, and making the tories dig their heels in - then she’s probably right. Even if that does beg the question of why such large cuts were allowed to be made to the DWP budget in the first place. And yes, the Lib Dems are the party with less MPs and therefore will be forced, at times, to tolerate the tories being their despicable selves in some areas because the only alternative is to bring down the coalition, causing economic instability and even more misery than will be caused by the bad things the Lib Dems are forced to let through.

But that doesn’t explain why our MPs couldn’t have tried – for example, to put forwards a compromise on the time limit. To have found perhaps some of the money needed from the other departments where there are Lib Dem ministers, taking it from projects and policies which, while important, aren’t as vital as protecting the disabled and where some money can be taken without causing too much money in the long term.

I pointed out that Nick Clegg has publicly called for the abolition of higher rate tax relief for wealthy pensioners in order to pay for tax cuts for the poorest and I asked why we couldn’t have been calling for this saving to be made months ago in order to pay for preventing the time limit instead. Jenny’s response was that this wasn’t possible because pensions and tax were all within the Treasury department rather than the DWP and it wasn’t possible to take money out of one department to pay for another when the budgets for all the departments were agreed in the comprehensive spending review. But why not?

Just because that’s the convention doesn’t mean that we should abide by it. Our MPs or leadership could at least have publicly asked for it to be considered – even if the tories refused to countenance it then at least we could have held our heads up high and said we’d tried.

And if £1.6 billion is too huge a sum for that to be worth contemplating then how about something smaller? For the sake of saving the insignificant (in overall budgetary terms) sum of £11 million a year, this government is going to stop treating severely disabled children whose conditions will prevent them from ever working as having made NI contributions – a practice which originated in order to allow them to receive contributory ESA which they otherwise wouldn’t be eligible for.

Jenny said this would cause an unfair situation where disabled children could receive the higher rate from the age of 18 and would therefore receive it longer than those who became unable to work later on in life, and she apparently didn’t see anything wrong with making them rely on income-related ESA - despite the fact that this has a cut off threshold as low as a partner earning £7,500 a year and that this will financially penalise those few who are lucky enough to find a partner instead of being dependent on their parents all their lives.

But I’m afraid that I can’t see her arguments as a sufficient justification when Jenny had been saying that if they’d had the money to avoid the time limit then they would have. The fact is that stopping treating severely disabled children as having made NI contributions is just as much about saving money as the time limit is. And, while I can reluctantly accept that £1.6 billion might be impossible for the Lib Dems to find, £11 million a year over five years isn’t.

If Eric Pickles can find £250 million in his department to bring back weekly bin collections then there’s no reason that a Lib Dem minister – or Lib Dem ministers working together – couldn’t have found £55 million from their own departments in order to pay for this over the next five years until the government finances have improved. Both Jenny and Giles told me separately (Giles when he was helping me find my way to the exit after the meeting and I asked him about it again) that this simply wasn’t possible.

And that’s why I’m convinced that Jenny and other Lib Dem MPs aren’t living in the same reality as the rest of us. Because the fact is that a sum as small as £55 million could be found if the political will was there to do it. Which means that they are choosing not to put the political effort in. But these aren’t cruel or callous people, they’re MPs who entered politics to make the world a better place, who see the impact of disability and illness in their own constituencies, who might well have relatives affected by this. So they’re doing this because they genuinely believe they have no other choice.

I, and quite a few people like me, disagree. We think that it is possible to do something to at least make things a little bit better even if it might not be possible to make things completely better. That Lib Dem MPs don’t think that indicates that both us and them are living in different worlds. It might be because they live in the Westminster Bubble, with an entire culture and fundamental belief all around them that certain things can’t be done – in turn convincing people like our MPs that it’s impossible to even try. Or it could be that they’re the ones living in the real world and people like me are just naïve dreamers who keep on asking for the impossible out of a misguided belief in what the world should be like rather than what it is like. Or it could be a combination of the two.

So that’s why I’ve come to the conclusion that, though I’m sure our MPs are genuinely doing the best they can, and that they’re fundamentally decent people, I’m going to do all I can to fight them on the cuts to disability benefits.

Because, fundamentally, what is happening is just plain wrong. It is not justifiable, it is not excusable, it is not absolutely necessary, and it is not what we entered government to do.

Meeting with Jenny Willott: Some small wins

2012-02-26T15:28:00.000Z

Judging by the comments on my first update on the meeting with Jenny Willott (boy am I starting to get tired of typing that phrase now) I just want to clarify that what I'm trying to do is to give an account of how the meeting went and the arguments that were made - but that doesn't mean I agree with everything Jenny said or that I think that everything's magically okay even when I do agree with something.

So, despite the meeting revealing precisely what I feared - that the government won't budge an inch on the time limit - I'm hopeful that the meeting did do some good. This is because I took the opportunity to raise a few, relatively minor (compared to the time limit anyway) issues that have been causing difficulties to disabled people for ages but that would be relatively easy to fix.

Here's the list of what I raised:

1) The DWP publishes documents on its website - such as press briefings, guides to the different types of benefits, policy proposals and, crucially, consultations on welfare reform - in downloadable pdf file formats. Now obviously some people affected by the welfare reforms aren't necessarily able to read - due to severe dyslexia or being partially sighted, for example. So, these people use special software which reads web pages and documents out to them. But this software can't read pdf files. And this means that a significant number of people are dependent on somebody converting consultation documents and the like into Word files (which the software can handle) so that they can access them. Which means that these people are effectively excluded from government consultations on changes that will effect their lives.

So all I did was ask Jenny whether she might be able to get the DWP to make documents available on its website in accessible formats. Judging by her reaction she had no idea that this was a problem (as I imagine no one within the DWP had either) and she seemed to be very happy to get something done about it - either by speaking to the DWP herself, or getting Steve Webb to do it or getting the new Lib Dem disability spokesman to do it (I can't remember which one she said she'd do but she did definitely say she'd try and do something about it). As this is such an easy and simple change to make, I can't see any reason why it should be a problem so hopefully within a very short period of time we'll start to see the DWP publishing documents in an accessible format. Not particularly a big win but, as forced labour using Tesco likes to say: every little helps.

2) One of the minor but significant changes the government has made is to give disabled people going to Atos interviews (as part of the Work Capability Assessment) the right to have the interview recorded and to be given a copy of the recording. Previously Atos refused to allow recording unless it was performed by a qualified sound engineer and recorded to a standard of quality which, as an electronic engineer I can guarantee you, would be impossible to achieve and would cost tens of thousands of pounds just to attempt it. So basically, Atos didn't want people to be able to record what was happening in interviews and catch them out if they misrepresented what claimants had said (as has been documented as happening on several occasions) and this change will overturn that and give claimants a bit of a fairer chance if they have to go to appeal.

But the problem is that this isn't a well publicised change and a lot of people going to interviews probably won't know that they now have the right to have a recording made of the interview. So I asked Jenny if the new Lib Dem disability spokesman could make sure that this was properly publicised to make sure that everyone going to interview knew about this. And, again, I felt confident from Jenny's reply that she would do her best to make sure that that happens.

3) Similarly, disabled people now have the right to take "advocates" into interviews with them. These can be friends or family members or carers or anybody at all really. And, when you get vulnerable people confronted with a monolithic system where many of the people dealing with them (such as interviewers) seem to view every claimant as a criminal or a fraudster, it's all for the better that they don't have to go into interviews alone. Plus, psychologically speaking, the interviewers are more likely to be more careful to get the assessment right if they know there's a third party watching.

Again though, this is something which needs to be publicised so that people know that they have this right. And, just as with interview recordings, I'm convinced Jenny will do her best to make sure that this is properly publicised.

4) A lot of the Atos assessment centres where people have to go for interviews actually lack disabled access. Let me just repeat that: some of the assessment centres, where disabled people have to go to in order to be able to receive benefits, aren't actually accessible to them. And a lot of the assessment centres are also located away from public transport and don't have disabled parking bays. And, on top of that, most assessment centres have waiting areas which only have the bog-standard hard plastic chairs for people to sit on. Now, my school had them in the assembly hall and, I can tell you, after half an hour of sitting on them as a healthy person I always ended up with a back ache. So imagine how uncomfortable they are for people with muscular or spinal problems.

I raised all of this with Jenny and she turned out to be already aware of it and told me that she's already been working for months on a report about all these problems and ways to resolve them which (reading between the lines of what she said) she expects the DWP to accept and implement without opposition. The report is apparently something which will now have to be published under the name of the new Lib Dem disability spokesman but it sounded like it's fairly close to completion so, again, we should see some improvement on this soon. She also promised to feed in the other issues I'd raised (i.e. accessible documents, advocates and recordings) into this report.

Now, I know that all of these are't particularly earth shattering or make up for the massive damage the government is doing. Indeed, as I said earlier, even if Jenny was right and only tens of thousands will lose ESA without support to make up for it, as opposed to hundreds of thousands, then that still doesn't mean it's acceptable or, for that matter, any less devastating to those who are affected. But, nonetheless, hopefully at least some of these things I raised will be dealt with and, as a result, the lives of some vulnerable people will be a little less hard. So I'm kind of hoping that, even if I haven't managed to accomplish anything else, I might at least have those few scraps to hang onto as me being able to have made the world an ever so slightly better place.

The next and final update will hopefully be up tomorrow. It'll cover the politics of it and will also contain my actual opinion of the entire situation as a result of the meeting. I'm afraid that in that update I'll be saying some rather unpleasant things about Lib Dem parliamentary party - in case any of you thought I'd gone native following the meeting ;)

I'm back

2012-02-26T14:05:00.000Z

Right, I'm back after a hiatus of a few days. To be honest, I suddenly found myself feeling completely drained and not up to facing anything related to blogging or the Welfare Reform Bill. Not writing anything, not reading anything, not debating about anything, not anything about it at all. Partly this is because of the meeting with Jenny Willott. To be honest, I'm used to seeing things in black and white terms and, as a result of the meeting I've suddenly found a lot of shades of grey in what I'm doing. Which in turn means that I've been confronted with uncertainty and with having to wonder if I might not be wrong.

Well, as a friend of mine told me: I need to get over myself and get back campaigning because this is important and there's not enough time for me to be self indulgent. Well, hopefully I'm ready to do that now - especially since I've finally caught up on my sleep after several nights of not enough.

So. The final two updates on the meeting with Jenny Willott are coming later today. And then I'm going to see about getting sponsorship for the emergency motion.

Meeting with Jenny Willot: ESA and the WCA

2012-02-22T20:00:00.000Z

As promised, here is what happened at my meeting with Jenny Willott MP. Because so much was discussed, I’m going to be splitting up my account of it into different blogposts each dealing with a particular topic as well as a summary blogpost at the end.

This blogpost covers the time limiting of contributory ESA and the Work Capability Assessments.

I met Jenny Willott in her office in Portcullis House. Also present was her young son (who spent the duration of the meeting fidgeting on Jenny’s lap) and Giles Derrington, Jenny’s Parliamentary Researcher, who knows the details of the Welfare Reform Bill inside and out.

The first thing I did at the meeting was to give Jenny a draft copy of the emergency motion which I intend to submit to Spring Conference (really need to sought out getting the signatories for it). After that I started asking various questions about the impact of the Welfare Reform Bill to make sure that there was no confusion and that I’d got all my facts right.

This was where I got the first bit of good-ish news. The DWP’s impact assessment of the impact of time limiting contributory ESA said that 280,000 sick and disabled people in the Work Related Activity Group would lose ESA entirely by 2015 as a result of the time limit. This is something that I’ve felt is probably one of the worst and least justifiable elements of the bill.

However, according to Jenny and Giles, this impact assessment was done without taking into effect the impact of the introduction of Universal Credit in October 2013. I (and I think a lot of other campaigners as well) was under the impression that Universal Credit wouldn’t be introduced until 2015 which would mean that, while Universal Credit will offset a lot of the impact of the time limit, there’d be a three year gap between it being introduced and the impact of the time limit – meaning that 280,000 vulnerable people would be left without support. But, if Universal Credit is introduced in October 2013 then that means that the gap shrinks to one year and seven months.

Taking the DWP impact assessment of 200,000 people being affected by the time limit by 2012/13, and 400,000 by 2013/14, of whom 30% will lose ESA entirely, and doing some rough calculations (assuming that the number effected will only be 300,000 with Universal Credit coming in halfway through 2013/14) then that means the number who will lose ESA entirely because of the time limit drops down to about 90,000 people. These 90,000 will be the ones who have household savings of £16,000+ or a household income above a minimum of £7,500. However, because the threshold is so low, some of those affected will be earning considerably more than £7,500 which means that the number whose lives will be genuinely damaged by the time limit will be at least a bit less than 90,000.

I’m still convinced it’s utterly immoral and wrong to penalise people just because their partner works, especially after they’ve been paying in National Insurance contributions all their lives, but less than 90,000 being hurt is at least a little bit less awful than 280,000 being hurt. Why the government couldn’t have let the public know about this, and possibly reduced the number of people being terrified that they might be one of those caught out, I don’t know. Not to mention that campaigners, like myself, would probably have welcomed finding out that the situation wasn’t quite as bad as we’d feared if only someone from government had bothered to tell us. And, for the record, vague assurances by Lord Freud that everything will be fine do not count.

Anyway, I pointed out to Jenny that the time limit would (and will) still mean that at least some people would be forced into poverty because of the time limit but she objected rather strongly to this by asserting that housing benefit and tax credits would prevent anyone affected from being forced into actual poverty. I’m sure that that’s the theory but, to be honest, I highly doubt that things will work out nice and cleanly like that in real life. And I still don’t see that as any kind of justification for what is, at the end of the day, financially penalising people for a) being too sick or disabled to work and b) having a partner working more than 24 hours a week at the minimum wage.

I did also ask whether the government would be doing a revised impact assessment to which the answer was no due to the government preferring to see the impact of the changes as they are implemented. I think this is utterly stupid as MPs and peers should know what the impact of legislation will be before they vote on it but this way of doing things is apparently standard government practice.

The next point I made was that a lot of these people affected by this shouldn’t be in the Work Related Activity Group in the first place but are in it because of the broken nature of the Work Capability Assessment which, in turn, is being fixed by the annual Harrington reports. But, because the Harrington Reports aren’t due to be completed until 2015, the WCA won’t be fixed until then at the earliest – despite the time limit coming in (as I already said) from April this year, meaning that people will be deprived of support on the basis of an assessment system that isn’t working.

Jenny’s response was that the DWP has now changed the nature of the Harrington reports so that any recommendations made by Professor Harrington are implemented as soon as physically possible after he proposes them. In fact, according to Jenny, he’s now actually got an office at the DWP so that he can hand recommendations to the DWP without any delay as soon as he’s written them. At the moment he’s meant to be looking at the descriptors which determine whether someone passes the Atos assessment or not and is looking at ways to make the whole Atos assessment much more flexible. And, believe it or not, apparently IDS and Grayling genuinely want to improve the WCA (probably because of the PR nightmare it is) so the recommendations should all be implemented.

Again, however, it seems that the public and campaigners have been left in the dark about the shift in the workings of the Harrington reports. God knows why as I imagine that most campaigners and disabled people would be very happy to engage more and sooner if they knew that recommendations they help contribute to will be implemented as soon as Harrington makes them.

Also, according to Jenny, some of the changes made to the WCA have already made a difference in the sense that the number of successful appeals against decisions is falling (which hopefully means that the decisions are more accurate.

Three changes that have been made so far are that the WCA as a whole doesn’t depend pretty much entirely on the Atos assessment, that people going for assessments have the right to demand a recording is made of the interview and to bring an advocate (who can be anyone they want) into an interview with them. On the other hand, quite a few Atos staff have been saying to people this isn’t allowed so, if you ask to bring an advocate in with you and they refuse you then you shouldn’t tolerate it as they’ve got no right to do so. Another change is that people whose condition has deteriorated by the time they’ve reached the end of the contributory ESA will be able to reapply for it. As I said to Jenny, that’s not much good to people whose condition has remained stable but still prevents them from work but, unfortunately, this isn’t something that the DWP is going to budge on.

And, of course, people using these new rights is heavily dependent on them knowing that they have the rights in the first place – something which I pointed out at the meeting. And, in fairness to Jenny, she did acknowledge this and does hope to do something about it – what precisely she intends to do is something I’ll cover in a separate update.

So that’s the good news, such as it is, in this update. Now for the bad news.

Basically, the time limit in its current form is here to stay. This is because the treasury worked out exactly how much each department should spend in the Comprehensive Spending Review and won’t budge any further. And, since the DWP has already had to accept some amendments to the Welfare Reform Bill which reduce the depth of cuts (though not by much) they’ve already forced the treasury to give them some more money. But, as a result, the Treasury now apparently won’t give a penny extra to the DWP. The only way it could do so is, in my opinion, if there was enough political will to force it to do so. But, unless a substantial chunk of tories decide to side with Lib Dems on this, then that’s not going to be possible.

Because of that, the only way to prevent the time limiting is to find the £1.6 billion it will save from elsewhere in the DWP. And that then leads us onto the political dimension of all this which is something I’ll cover in another update given how long this one has already become.

Report on my meeting with Jenny Willott

2012-02-22T08:32:00.001Z

I met with Jenny Willott MP (and her research assistant Giles, and her toddler who she was babysitting at the same time) on Monday evening to discuss the Welfare Reform Bill. Unfortunately I haven't had a chance to write up what happened until now.

Because quite a lot was discussed, and because I was busy yesterday and will be again today, I'm probably not going to be able to publish a full account until this evening.

However, just to summarise very briefly, the good news that things aren't quite as bad as we thought but the bad news is that the government doesn't seem likely to be able to be forced to give in on anything else - mainly because the Treasury has shut, bolted and barricaded its doors and won't give the DWP a penny more. Which, of course, means that the only way that stuff like time limiting could be reversed is if the DWP took the money from elsewhere in its department which of course means that other vulnerable people would be penalised instead. That or if the Treasury doors were forced open with a battering ram - something that seems unlikely given reality as reality as perceived within the Westminster Bubble.

A few good things came of the meeting though - it looks like IDS and Freud and Grayling and co have been yelled at to the extent that they won't be coming out with any more deliberately misleading "scrounger" press releases again, for example. And I did manage to mention the issue of DWP consultation documents not being available in accessible format for disabled people and it looks like that's something which Jenny Willott should be able to get fixed soon (either by herself or by her successor).

But I'll go into the detail properly this evening. Like I said, there is some good news - not that that will make the bad news any more acceptable.

Complaint to the BBC

2012-02-20T12:18:00.001Z

Here's a complaint I sent to the BBC last night (not that I expect it to do much good):

Complaint title:
Biased coverage of tax allowance increase

Complaint description:
I am astounded by this article on the BBC news website:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-17087726 - 22:57,19/02/2012

In it you discuss Ed Balls and his decision to support a range of measures including increasing the income tax threshold to £10,000. In it you use the word "conservatives" four times and "labour" six times. The Lib Dems are mentioned precisely once in the context of:

'As well as Mr Balls' proposed VAT cut, "in an attempt to put pressure on the chancellor ahead of next month's Budget, he also sets out an alternative menu of options which he thinks might appeal to some Conservative and Lib Dem backbenchers", says BBC political correspondent Iain Watson.'

Not once do you mention that raising the income tax threshold to £10,000 was a key Lib Dem 2010 manifesto pledge (mentioned on the front page of their manifesto) and one of the headline Lib Dem policies being implemented. Nor do you mention Nick Clegg's speech earlier this week outlining ways to increase the tax threshold to £10,000.

I think that this article shows shocking anti-Lib Dem bias by omission and also deprives those reading BBC News online of the full story. I'd very much like to see how you claim to justify this.

A collection of articles on the Welfare Reform Bill

2012-02-19T20:18:00.001Z

One of the things that frustrates me is that, whenever I say anything about the Welfare Reform Bill in the Lib Dems, I run smack bang into people who, for whatever reason, think I'm being disloyal, or that I'm exaggerating or that I don't know what I'm talking about.

And the problem is that I've explained the issue so many times now that I get tired and snappy whenever I'm confronted with someone, out of ignorance, expressing an opinion that everything is fine with the result that I lose my temper. And that's really not good for trying to persuade people. And I know it isn't which is why it's even more frustrating when it happens.

So, to save both myself and others the unpleasantness of me yelling at them online, here is a collection of links to things I've already written about the Welfare Reform Bill. There's a lot of writing here so apologies to anyone who tries to read it all but, when 750,000 vulnerable people are going to be affected by this, I'm afraid that this volume of material is necessary to explain it all. However, for those in the hurry, just read the first three please as those are the most comprehensive and important.

What Lib Dem MPs did yesterday
Concise disability benefits fact sheet
Opinion: What's happened to democracy in the Liberal Democrats?

Feeling angry with Jenny Willott again
Opinion: Welfare reform – LibDems must stand up for the vulnerable
Opinion: Why you must lobby parliament over the Welfare Reform Bill
Opinion: Our Parliamentarians must fight for our benefits policies
Response to Jenny Willott on the Welfare Reform Bill

The disabled: slave labour for Tesco?

2012-02-19T13:17:00.001Z

This week news leaked out about the government's plans on how the long term sick and disabled should be "helped" back into work:

Some long-term sick and disabled people face being forced to work unpaid for an unlimited amount of time or have their benefits cut under plans being drawn up by the Department for Work and Pensions.

From the Guardian article which broke the story. It continues:

The new policy, outlined by DWP officials in meetings with disabilities groups, is due to be announced after legal changes contained in clause 54 of the welfare reform bill have made their way through parliament.

The policy could mean that those on employment and support allowance who have been placed in the work-related activity group (Wrag) could be compelled to undertake work experience for charities, public bodies and high-street retailers. The Wrag group includes those who have been diagnosed with terminal cancer but have more than six months to live; accident and stroke victims; and some of those with mental health issues.

In official notes from a meeting on 1 December last year, DWP advisers revealed they were not intending to put a time limit on the work experience placements.

So yeah, this is one of the nasty little details that Lib Dem MPs voted for. I wonder what Jenny Willott MP will have to say about it when I meet her on Monday?

And. for the record, this is nasty. I object to the principle of forcing people to work unpaid at all (it's called "workfare" and has been tried, tested and failed in the US) but it's even worse when you're talking about disabled people. Especially given that the current assessment system for disability benefits is so broken that it has been known to class terminally ill cancer patients as belonging in the Work Related Activity Group which would place them in the position of being forced to undertake work such as unpaid night shift jobs at Tesco.

Tesco are currently furiously back pedalling after the bad publicity hit but, had it not been for the bad PR, they would almost certainly have continued with the scheme which would have given them unpaid labour and saved them from having to actually go through the hassle of properly employing new workers. This isn't a specific judgement on Tesco by the way - all big companies (and plenty of small ones) are more than happy to save money wherever possible, regardless of the human cost, as long as the public doesn't find out about it.

And of course, it's not like there are any historical examples of government ministers coming out with statements and press releases encouraging the depiction of the disabled as "fakers and scroungers, while forcing them to work without pay are there?

(That's sarcasm by the way, click on the links - especially the second one.)

Still, at least no government spokesman has yet come out with saying something like "arbeit macht frei". So we can be thankful for small mercies. Except of course that the DWP believes in the "bio-psycho-social" model of disability which basically states that the only thing stopping the sick and disabled from working is that they're not working hard enough at overcoming their disability.

Meanwhile of course, we have such jollies as Atos, the company which carries out the assessments to determine whether disabled people should be forced to work or not (and which has benefited from a lucrative government contract to provide IT for the London Olympics later this year), offering help to employers in managing the impact of heart disease and how best to support employees returning to work whilst simultaneously telling people with heart disease that there's nothing to stop them from working despite, in one tragic case, the condition being so severe that the poor man died just three weeks after being deemed fit to work.

Still, Atos now are about to get a shiny new director who might change things. Well, apart from the fact that he used to be a director of Unum - a nice big health insurance company that has been described in the US as "an outlaw company", which refuses to recognise that illnesses like ME even exist and that has (along with Atos) a long record of trying to manipulate and influence DWP policy. So maybe things won't change then.

If you're interested in the incestuous, corrupt and unhealthy relationship between Unum, Atos and the DWP then all you need to do is go and read this Private Eye article which does a good job of exposing the whole sorry tale.

Cowardly excuses

2012-02-14T12:58:00.001Z

I read a comment on one of my blogposts this lunchtime and it's sent me off into something of a rant. Such a rant, in fact, that it won't fit in a comment box. So instead I'm going to post both the comment and my reply here:

Original comment:

Ben Feb 14, 2012 03:00 AM

"Preserve your party, no matter the cost"

Well, when the cost is being unable to influence government policy because of the navel gazing noise generated by stories of splits, then yes party unity matters.

As for morality and conscience, I think you need to get off your high horse. Politics is about making very difficult decisions. Spending £2bn on ESA may seem 'moral' to you, but that money has to come from somewhere in the DWP budget. Would you rather it came from poor children perhaps, or disabled people able to work, or impoverished pensioners on Pension Credit? Which is the 'moral' answer?

Of course you can dodge the question and argue about HS2 (deferred expense, generating investment) and so on. But that wasn't a question which our parliamentarians could tackle in the WRB. They had to make £12bn of cuts. I actually think that those on contributory ESA who have another source of income or savings are better able to bear this than other places where £2bn might be saved from a Department which spends a huge amount of money on sick, disabled, poor and old people.

We can agree to disagree, but it's those kinds of decisions which define politics.

My reply:

Ben, there wouldn't be even a potential of stories of splits if our MPs had listened to conference in the first place. To be blunt, when conference unanimously supports one policy and principle, and 46 of our MPs vote exactly opposite to that without any attempt to find a compromise, then we definitely have a split in what the party thinks acceptable and what our MPs think acceptable.

This isn't about spending extra money, it's about not cutting support to vulnerable disabled people. And yes, there are more vulnerable people - if I show you 100 terminally ill cancer patients then some of them will be in a worse situation than the others. But that doesn't for one moment make it right to keep following the lowest denominator and taking support away from people who need it while using the utterly pathetic excuse that otherwise you'd have to take it away from people who need it more. Quite frankly, that's bullshit.

Enshrined in our constitution, and on your own membership card, is a committment to building a fairer society where none are enslaved by poverty.

Well many of the 280,000 people who are going to lose support (and, please note, despite being ineligible for ESA they will still be ineligible for stuff like JSA) genuinely need it. And support to the sick and the disabled, to these ESA claimants who have been found unable to work, should be based on need and not on cost cutting.

Have you ever tried supporting an entire household on an income of just £7,500 a year? One with a disabled parent and two young children? One where the other parent has to work a job to bring home a meagre income and then act as carer for their partner and their children? Where they've already suffered two mental breakdowns? Because, let me tell you, this is what this means. I know families in exactly that situation.

This is taking support away from people already living with debilitating conditions, people who are already disproportionately likely to be living in poverty.

This is a question of priorities. We entered government on the claim that we would bring fairness and protect the vulnerable. That claim will be a total lie if we push ahead with these cuts to disability benefits. Because we can afford it if we want to. Quite frankly it was utter idiocy to insist on forcing the same proportion of cuts on every department when the impact of those cuts will differ enmormously between departments. Yes, if we kept the cuts to the DWP the same then we'd have to take the money elsewhere - from wealthy pensioners perhaps, or by means testing stuff like free bus passes and the winter fuel allowance.

But that's a fool's game because the simple fact is that £2 billion over five years is incredibly easy to find in the context of the overall budget. If we actually put some effort in on this then our MPs could find the money. After all, when the Olympics budget keeps on overrunning we don't see the government say "oh, we'll have to cancel them, there's no money left" do we? Instead the government finds the money to pay for it because it deems it a high enough priority.

And that is what this is about. Priorities. Fucking priorities and fucking principles. If we think it's acceptable to take support away completely from 280,000 people, whilst also cutting disability benefits for people in work by 20% and whilst halving support for disabled children living in poverty then we have failed utterly.

Because make no mistake, people will die because of this. Sometimes it will be through subtle things like stress, or pneumonia due to being unable to afford to heat their house (costs which are higher for people who are forced to stay at home all day due to their disability). And some will be the very direct cases of suicide due to people deciding that death is actually a better prospect than the misery they're living in. I know that because it's already happened on several occasions. Disability campaigners are very noble and decent people who are determined to campaign on the facts rather than heart sting tugging but I'm less scrupulous than they are because I know that this policy will mean blood is on our hands.

So, please, don't give me a load of bollocks about our parliamentarians having no choice because they did. If they'd put the effort in, if our leadership had given the slighest damn about the vulnerable and about conference then they could have done something at least. And, even if they found themselves unable to do anything, then at least they'd have tried their best. But they didn't do that. They didn't even fucking try.

And yes, you are absolutely 100% right. These kind of decisions do define politics. And I believe that deciding to take support away from 280,000 long term sick and disabled people, people who are unable to work, people who are already likely to be living in poverty, just because their partner has the temerity to earn £7,500+ a year, is wrong. We're a rich country, we can afford to protect the vulnerable, even in times of austerity. And I believe that we have a duty, as human beings, to look after those who are unable to look after themselves. Like it or not, those are fundamental liberal principles which are enshrined in our constitution. And, whilst I'm perfectly happy to compromise on policy, we should never, never, never, ever compromise on our principles. Especially when lives are at stake.

So, go on, support this policy if you feel like it. Support it because you think it's politically expedient (despite the fact that we've just permanently alienated 3 million sick and disabled voters). But if you do so then you are not a liberal and you clearly don't believe in liberal values. And you are in the wrong party.

Accuse me of being on a high horse all you like. But if you do then I'm proud of it. I'm proud of it because I still have enough integrity to be furious when small minded idiots in power decide to penalise disabled people for a financial crisis that they had no part in creating simply because it would be slightly harder to do the right thing and protect them. And if you don't like that then I'd say that that reflects badly on your own character and integrity rather than mine.

(Apologies for the swearing as you might not particularly deserve being sworn at but I am completely and totally fed up with the kind of cowardly, feeble, immoral excuses that what our MPs have done is in some way acceptable.)

Greece should default

2012-02-13T19:40:00.001Z

Yesterday we saw the Greek parliament pass yet another round of crippling spending cuts amidst rioting in Athens. In return for more and more austerity, they will be loaned yet more money to add to their national debt, in order to pay off, for a few more months, the creditors hammering at the door.

And, whilst billions of money are being added to Greece's national debt, millions of Greeks are without jobs, and even many of those with jobs aren't getting paid enough to live off of. The situation is so desperate that there is a small but significant number of children being given up for adoption or left at orphanages simply because their parents literally can't afford to look after them. In short, the Greek people are suffering terribly for a crisis not of their own making. Because, let's fact it, Greece went into the eurozone, before it was economically ready, due to richer countries, such as Germany, giving them cheap credit and other incentives so that their own economies could benefit by gaining new export markets. After all, the German economy made billions through exporting to uncompetitive markets like Greece.

And now the Greek people are being forced to pay a horrible price for the mess dumped on their heads by a wealthy elite - many of whom spent the good years lining their own pockets.

So it's not surprising the Greeks are angry. But the massive, monumental pressure being placed on Greek politicians to make further cuts in exchange for further bailouts (e.g. more debt) means that any government the Greeks elect will end up following exactly the same economic policy.

And, given that the German public seem determined not to put their hands into their own wallets to back eurobonds (which would end most of the eurozone crisis almost instantly) but still want the benefits of a currency union with uncompetitive economies, this means that for Greece all that will happen is more austerity meaning more money being sucked out of the economy, less consumer confidence and an even greater fall in Greek GDP. And, at the end of it, after all that penury, Greece will still be saddled with a monstrous debt that it'll never be able to pay off.

So, if I were the Greeks, I'd simply say "up yours" to the eurozone and default on their debt. Yes, their country would be bankrupt but they wouldn't be in much worse a situation than the one they're already in and at least they'll be able to start rebuilding their country and their economy free from what is, effectively, dictatorship by eurozone economists and bureaucrats and politicians. If I were in their position I'd definitely much prefer being slightly poorer and in charge of my own destiny than poor and with my fate in the hands of foreign governments without any interest in my own well-being.

And, I should point out, I'm not a eurosceptic or someone who's a left-wing socialist - I support both the principle of the EU and the coalition government's economic priorities. But Greece is not the UK and, the way I see it, they're in a very deep hole and all the rest of the world is doing is giving them drilling equipment. And, from my (admittedly very) limited knowledge of economics, I'd say it's time for them to stop digging.

Plan of action for #WRB Lib Dem fightback

2012-02-13T13:07:00.001Z

I'm still, ahem, not best pleased about Lib Dem MPs voting overwhelmingly (46 to 6) in favour of the Welfare Reform Bill and its devastating cuts to disability benefits.

And I really don't think that many grassroots members are happy either.

So, here's the plan for Liberal Democrat Spring Conference (9-11 March).

The first step is to submit the following emergency motion to conference. This is the draft version and I'm currently about to begin work on getting sufficient support for it for it to be able to go forwards (the rules mean that either ten reps or one statutory associated organisation have to sponsor it):

Emergency Motion to Censure the Parliamentary Party

Conference notes:

1. That policy motion F6, including a call for “Liberal Democrats in Government to oppose an arbitrary time limit on how long claimants can claim contributory ESA [Employment and Support Allowance]”, was passed unanimously by Autumn 2011 Federal Conference.
2. That, on 01/02/2012, Lib Dem MPs voted, by a margin of 46 to 6, to reject a House of Lords amendment to the Welfare Reform Bill (WRB), which raised the contributory ESA time limit to a minimum of 730 days.
3. That, as a result receipt of contributory ESA will now be time limited to a maximum of 365 days.
4. That the DWP Final Impact Assessment (16/02/11) of this time limit shows that 280,000 of those removed from contributory ESA will be ineligible for income-related ESA.

Conference believes:

1. That, by voting against Lords amendment 17, Liberal Democrat MPs were voting for an arbitrary time limit.
2. That this contravenes the spirit, as well as the letter, of policy motion F6 which stated that “It is the duty of a compassionate society and government to provide the necessary support for those who are unable to support themselves.
3. That the collective impact of the PLDP’s voting on the WRB is to show disregard for the will of conference and its role as the democratic and sovereign policy making body of the party.

And, therefore conference resolves to:

1. Censure the PLDP for their collective voting record on the elements of the Welfare Reform Bill relating to disability and sickness benefits.
2. Expresses its dismay at the continued inclusion within the Welfare Reform Bill of an arbitrary time limit that will penalise long term sick and disabled people for having a partner who works.
3. Criticise the PLDP for ignoring the will, and undermining the constitutional position of, conference.

Unfortunately, there's only enough time at conference for one emergency motion to be debated and the one that gets debated is determined by a vote of the reps in the conference hall. Given that opponents to the NHS reforms are more organised than those of us opposed to the WRB, in all probability it will be an emergency motion on the NHS reforms that gets debated. I still hope that my emergency motion will be chosen for the debate but we have to be realistic. On the bright side, the presence of the emergency motion in the conference papers will hopefully bring the issue to the attention of a few more party members.

But the real area where I'm hoping to kick up a fuss is on the official report by the parliamentary party. This includes a question and answer session at 9am on the last day of conference.

Here I intend to get in contact with like minded people and follow a three stage plan:

1. Get a formal question submitted to the report (submission deadline in early March) which will have to be replied to by the parliamentary party.
2. Get conference attendees to ask questions about the cuts to disability benefits during the Q&A session.
3. Move for the report by the parliamentary party to be rejected by conference - this will, if nothing else, ensure a brief, public debate about the Welfare Reform Bill and give the issue some much needed media attention.

Quite frankly, I can't think of anyone who can genuinely justify taking all support away from 280,000 long term sick and disabled people just because their partner earns more than £7,500 a year and I'm sure that most conference reps would be vehemently against our parliamentarians on this if given the chance of a proper debate.

Unfortunately, a proper debate is going to be very hard to get at this conference. This is because a) the vote in the House of Commons happened after the deadline for submission of non-emergency motions to conference and b) because the constitution has a rule that any subject can't be debated at conference if it's been debated in the past two years. This rule is utterly incompatible with the nature of being in government and it's something that can hopefully be changed at autumn conference - but in the meantime I've got to work with the methods that are available.

P.S.

If you want to help right now then the Welfare Bill is back in Lords tomorro, meaning that it's the last chance for the Lords to help disabled children and ESA claimants.

So please sign Pat's Petition http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/20968 by Tuesday to tell the Lords to keep fighting for disabled people and carers.

Pat herself has said "As a severely blind person, I am sick of the way this government is treating disabled people, going against everything the Lords, and campaigners, have fought for by hiding behind financial privileges. I hope that on Tuesday the Lords will continue to fight on our behalf."

Biggles!

2012-02-09T19:20:00.001Z

Wow. Okay, I just got home from work, logged onto facebook and saw this:

For those of you that don't know, Biggles is my nickname (Biggles being a fictional RAF pilot from the world wars and me being someone who apparently sounds like him: "tally ho" and all that, etc.).

The picture is a truly brilliant piece of, out of the blue, photoshopping by one Paul Wild - a member of a Lib Dem facebook group that I'm also a member of, and a true master at the art of coming up with billboard designs, leaflet graphics and generally anything political that involves the use of images. Why the national party haven't got him on board to work for them I really don't know - he's an absolute genius at this stuff and it's criminal his talent isn't being put to good use for the party

Anyway, I was so impressed by this picture that I had to stick it up here. I had intended to blog about the trade deficit shrinking to the lowest level since 2003 but I think this takes priority as far as I'm concerned ;)

Article on LibDemVoice #wrb

2012-02-08T12:31:00.000Z

I had hoped to do a blogpost this lunchtime but I've found myself (once again) without enough time to do so.

So instead please go and read my article over on LibDemVoice and perhaps consider engaging in the debate in the comment thread underneath :)

A reply from Jenny Willott MP

2012-02-06T20:21:00.000Z

Earlier today I blogged about how Jenny Willott's article on LibDemVoice had got my blood up. But, in fairness to her, following the vote on Wednesday I emailed her expressing my disappointment at the vote and asking to meet with her prior to my submitting an emergency motion to Liberal Democrat Spring Conference.

And today she's replied - not bad timing I suppose for someone who's just been shifted from one job to another. I won't post her email but in it she says that she'd be happy to meet me to discuss the matter and that I should contact her parliamentary researcher in order to organise a meeting - something which I've just done.

Out of respect for confidentiality (she does at least have the courage to justify her voting record, unlike many tory MPs) when I find out the timing of the meeting I won't make it public and I won't make the details of what's said public either but I'll certainly be blogging the gist of it for those who are interested.

Throughout this, I've always wished I could have a chance to meet the people supporting the disability cuts face to face so that I could convince them of what seems obvious to everyone outside of the Westminster bubble. And, even though I fundamentally disagree with what Jenny's done on ESA, I'm grateful that she's at least giving me the opportunity to do that.

That being said, I will still be submitting an emergency motion to spring conference - details of which should be blogged in the next week or so.

Feeling angry with Jenny Willott again

2012-02-06T12:45:00.000Z

Another day, another article by Jenny Willott MP on LDV attempting to justify the government's cuts to disability benefits.

A lot of the arguments she's made are so transparent that I'm surprised she even bothered. For example, when she says:

"6 out of 10 people will continue to receive some or all of their ESA after the end of their year on contributory benefit"

What that actually means is that 4 in 10 (which is about 280,000 sick and disabled people) won't get anything at the end of the year and will lose ESA entirely. Given that there's no other support that they, as an individual, will be eligible for this amounts to pulling the rug out from under the feet of over a quarter of a million people - the majority of whom, according to the government's own figures, will still be unable to work at the time that they lose support.

And that's not even mentioning cutting Disability Living Allowance by 20% when the fraud rate is less than 0.5%.

I think Jenny's article is fully debunked in the comments thread and I hope to have an article on LDV replying to her article. My comment on her article itself can be found here.

But even then, we're just looking at the narrow picture of the direct impact of the cuts. But the wider impact is also an increase in the hardening of attitudes to disabled people, something that leads to vulnerable people being subjected to verbal and physical abuse on a regular basis by morons to stupid to think that maybe, just maybe, disability isn't always apparent from a glance at someone and that, just because a small minority cheat, it's not right to attack random strangers because of it.

In fact, here's a quote from a case study in the Guardian today. The woman in question works at my university and has never claimed disability benefits but is still subjected to abuse by complete strangers on a regular basis:

Ferrie says she is most likely to be insulted or abused on the street after a media article on supposed welfare abuse by the disabled. On a recent occasion, a group of students refused to share a taxi with her, she recounts. "After the next articles came out I tweeted, 'I wonder how long it's going to be this time before someone says or does something to me?'"

It took five days. On another occasion, she was rushing for a bus about to depart from a bus garage when her way was blocked by a staff member standing in the vehicle's doorway. "I said to her, 'Excuse me, can I get on the bus please?'. She looked down at my stick, looked up at my face and said, 'No. You should have walked faster.'"

Ferrie explained why she could not move more quickly, and met a response dripping with more scepticism: "Oh, really?"
"In the end I had to push past her," Ferrie said. "I burst into tears on the bus. I couldn't believe someone would say that to me."

And then, after I've read something like that, people criticise me for getting angry about this stuff.

Losing my temper

2012-02-03T20:15:00.000Z

Ahem. As my regular readers will know, I'm renowned for my considered, well-tempered and cautious approach to events.

Okay, so that's a lie.

But I do try not to lose my temper in debates as it just undermines the argument. And I also try, despite how passionate I feel, not to come across as too abrasive or insulting.

Unfortunately, given the number of times I've seen people been told lately, or been told myself, that concerns and dismay about the impact of the Welfare Reform Bill (passed thanks to Lib Dem MPs) is actually nothing more than "hyperbole" or "exaggeration" or "falling for Labour propaganda", I'm actually feeling rather fed up with it.

So that's why, earlier this evening, I said this in a comment thread in a Lib Dem facebook group. I've removed the names from it as I think it would be unfair to spread them around without the permission of the people in question.

[Name deleted], I've been researching and campaigning on this for well over half a year. Without wishing to be insulting, I probably know a damn sight more about this than you do. I doubt I'm the most knowledgeable about this within the party but I'm probably within the top fifty or less when it comes to the issue of the WRB's impact on disabled people. I'm not falling for Labour propaganda, I'm reaching a conclusion based on evidence and hundreds of hours of research.

I'd suggest you listen to people like [name deleted], who is on the exec of the Lib Dem Disability Association. The people in he LDDA know what they're talking about - especially as they're directly affected by this. They're not being led astray by opposition rhetoric - they know damn well what's facing them. If this was the LGBT+ Lib Dems talking about an issue affecting them then I highly doubt there'd be so much sneering and claims that they don't know what they're talking about.

Get your head out of the clouds. Our party is not perfect, and our MPs are perfectly capable of doing the wrong thing so stop acting like the sun shines out their arses.
But, to sum up, quite frankly, unless you have any actual FACTS to back up your assertions, I suggest you stop making sweeping claims about something which you seem to know very little about.

The reason I'm blogging what I said is because I think that, aside from the obvious irritation in my tone, the points I made are fairly valid.

And, because I was already asked what I meant about the comment about LGBT+ Lib Dems, here's my reply to that question:

[Name deleted], what I mean is that, when LGBT+ Lib Dems experience, for example, a legislative measure that discriminates against them and makes life harder or unfairer, such as the blood ban, if they raise their voices about it then their word usually seems to be taken at face value and they don't encounter anywhere near the same level of vitriol as disabled people are experiencing.

In short, I suspect that there is, at least in part, an undercurrent of disability discrimination when you look at the way they are being treated when they complain about this. When LGBT Lib Dems complained about section 28 I highly doubt that they got people within the party telling them that they were "falling for propaganda", or being hysterical, or using hyperbole.

Basically, while I'm not saying for one moment that racial, sexual or gender equality have been reached, people campaigning for them seem now able to do so with far less vitriol than the disabled encounter.

You wouldn't for example, get a columnist for the Sun saying nowadays that homosexuality is a "choice" and that people decide to be gay just in order to get sympathy and because it's "trendy". It's simply unthinkable because, if they did, then they'd be immediately sacked following the public furore.

Yet only last week we got Rod Liddle saying [in the Sun] that several severe, debilitating conditions, such as ME, were "made up" and "trendy". That's what I mean.

One quick question about Chris Huhne

2012-02-03T12:18:00.000Z

I'm on a short lunchbreak today so I don't have time for a proper blogpost but the resignation of Lib Dem Chris Huhne from the cabinet today, due to being charged with perverting the course of justice, makes me want to ask this one question:

Chris Huhne must know whether he's guilty or not. I'm not going to pre-judge someone who has yet to be found guilty in a court of law but, if he really is guilty, then why the hell did he wait until now to resign when he could have stepped down months ago and saved everyone, including himself, the bad publicity in the event he is actually foudnd guilty?

Tim Farron's reply to my questions on the #WRB

2012-02-02T17:45:00.004Z

Yesterday I spoke to Tim Farron MP, the party president, on twitter and asked him why he had voted the way he did on the Welfare Reform Bill. He told me to email him as 140 characters was not enough to explain and so I did. Here is his email back and here is my reply to his email. I publish them only because they are the only explanation from the leadership so far that I have been able to find:

Hi George,

Thanks for sending your email and for giving me a chance to explain why I voted the way I did yesterday.

My four main concerns about the Welfare Reform Bill, which we were voting on through Lords’ amendments yesterday, were to do with the exemption of cancer patients from Means-Tested ESA; the withdrawal of contributory ESA for young disabled people; under-occupancy penalties for social tenants; and the time-limit on contributory ESA.

I’ll go through these one by one to try and explain my decision.

The exemption of cancer patients from Means-Tested ESA:

- As you may be aware, my mother died of ovarian cancer some years ago – so I fully understand the impacts cancer can have both of the sufferer and their family. However, while this is a difficult time for all those affected, I do not feel that it is fair to single out cancer, as in effect this relegates other very serious illnesses to some ‘lower rank’ of consideration. Additionally, as is the current status quo, those with cancer who are struggling financially will obviously still receive the benefit.

Withdrawal of contributory ESA for young disabled people:

- Having spoken to many people about this issue, my understanding is that 90% of the young disabled people will still qualify for income-related ESA, which importantly will be paid at the same rate as contributory ESA. The only people who will no longer be eligible for this ESA are those who have received either a medical payment or a large inheritance.

Under-occupancy penalties for social tenants:

- This was one of my biggest concerns when deciding how I would be voting yesterday as I was unsure whether it would unfairly penalise, for example, those who are disabled and need additional rooms to store large pieces of equipment or potentially divorced fathers who only have their children living with them on weekends. However, I have been reassured that one third of savings generated through this measure will be passed directly back to local authorities for their discretionary use in alleviating the problems of those most affected such as the examples I gave above.

Time-limited contributory ESA:

- The sad fact of the matter is that having no cap on contributory ESA would be so extraordinarily expensive that even Labour has admitted that they would instigate one. Their cap would be at 24 months, however this is still extremely unaffordable and would cost the Government an additional £1.6bn each year. Instead, what we are trying to ensure is that there are measures in place to improve the quality of the Work Capability Assessment to ensure that those who are genuinely unable to work are not placed in the wrong group.

I also want to reemphasise that the changes to contributory ESA only apply to those in the Work Related Activity Group, those who are currently unable to work but whose condition is likely to change in the future. They do not apply to those in the Support Group, who are the sickest and most disabled. These people will not see any change to their benefit.

The changes will also not apply to the poorest. After 12 months those with no other source of income and less than £16,000 in savings will still be entitled to Income Related ESA for as long as they are unable to work. Around 6 in 10 of those affected will receive some Income Related ESA after 12 months. We absolutely must protect these groups from these changes – and we are.

Like many people who have written to me, I am extremely concerned that any assessments made are appropriate and sensitive and it’s blindingly obvious that one of the most important things to get right is that people are put into the appropriate group of ESA, ensuring that those in need of the most help go into the Support Group. Thanks to the hard work of our Lib Dems in Government, people with deteriorating conditions such as MS or Motor Neurone Disease can enter the Support Group if their condition has got worse, even after the twelve months has passed. This will help around 4,000 people by 2016/17.

We realise that this is an absolute priority, which is why we are continuing to improve the Work Capability Assessment so that people are more accurately assessed when they first make an ESA claim. In particular, I am very pleased that the Government has accepted Professor Harrington’s recommendation to make sure that the assessment takes better account of chronic pain and fatigue. This will help ensure that people with hidden or fluctuating conditions, such as Crohn’s disease or Parkinson’s disease, are given the proper level of support.

Finally, the clincher for me was the promise that there will be a one-year review of the measures, and that £0.5bn is being made available to plug any unforeseen gaps and ensure that no-one in dire need goes unaided.

I have been on benefits myself in the past. I was raised by a single mum and I have family members who are disabled. So I understand how these issues are likely to impact people. However, I believe that the negative effects have been overstated and that the review in a year’s time will readdress any imbalances.

Given the extreme financial constraints in which we are currently operating, our choices are limited. These are not circumstances any of us would choose, but we have to act nonetheless. That being the case, I very much hope that these measures will address the urgent financial issues of the country whilst essentially safeguarding the most vulnerable to the greatest extent possible.

Thanks again for getting in touch, and I hope that this has gone some way to answer your concerns and hopefully help you on the doorstep.

Best wishes,

Tim

----------

Tim,

Thanks for your reply. Regardless of everything else, I do appreciate you taking the time to do so.

If you'll bear with me, I'd like to explain on each of the points why I think you made your decision based on incorrect information and I hope you will reply to this email as well.

The exemption of cancer patients from Means-Tested ESA:

My mother died of cancer when I was 7 so I know just as well as you the impact that cancer can have. I agree that it isn't fair to single out cancer patients for special treatment but I never thought I'd hear you, of all people, argue that, because we can't treat everyone fairly, we should treat no one fairly. Someone dying of cancer, not just being treated for it but dying should not be forced to jump through bureaucratic hoops, or be deprived of support simply because their partner earns more than £7,500 a year. So please could you explain to me, with regard to the points I've just raised, why you think it is in any way justified, or compatible with liberal principles, to have overturned that amendment when it would have cost so little in terms of the overall budget yet have been a huge relief to so many families facing bereavement.

Withdrawal of contributory ESA for young disabled people:

The problem with income related ESA is the level of the means test. If these young disabled people ever are lucky enough to find a partner who works, or if they ever save up more than £16,000 together, then they will lose ESA. They will never have the chance to experience the things that we take for granted. Maintaining the practice of treating them as being eligible for contributory ESA would have only meant that £10 million of savings a year would have to be found from somewhere else - yet the government found twenty five times that amount (£250 million) to bring back weekly bin collections. A medical payment or inheritance greater than £16,000 is not "large". If you really believe there was no alternative to this change, if you really believe, despite the reasons I've just given, that there wasn't even any scope to amend the proposals even slightly, then please tell me why you think so.

Under-occupancy penalties for social tenants:

The problem with your reasoning on this is that the government does not appear to have put in place any measures to require councils to spend this money on the purpose for which it is intended or, for that matter, measures to check how the money is being spent. I fear that, just like the social fund, this money will be diverted to other purposes and, with the government, as you must surely know, moving to have the Welfare Commons did not have time to scrutinise them on Wednesday.

Time-limited contributory ESA:

No one has argued against the principle of a time limit. However, you must know full well that the 12 month time limit is entirely arbitrary and based on no medical evidence whatsoever. In fact, the medical evidence is that most people effected by the time limit will take significantly longer than 12 months to be ready to return to work and therefore will be penalised by this cap purely for the sake of saving money. A two year time limit is also somewhat arbitrary but at least it would protect more people. A two year time limit would not "cost" money as this is not about spending extra money - it is about making lesser savings through cuts to disability benefits.

When people pay National Insurance, when you and I do so, we do so on the understanding that we do so in order to pay towards a system that will take care of us when things go wrong and we are unable to care for ourselves. If you were blinded in a car crash tomorrow then it would take you well over a year in order to be able to return to work. After paying into the system all your life, why should you be penalised after a year? Why should you lose all access to the benefit if your wife earns as little as £7,500 a year? For that is the really dmaging thing here - if the means test was higher then the situation would be far less severe but you voted in favour of the time limit knowing full well that people moved off of contributory ESA in April will be deprived of support if their partner works. How exactly can this penalty for families and for disabled people with working partners be justified? And why did you vote for it?
Above all, the simple fact is that the current Work Capability Assessment, which defines whether people are placed in the support group or are moved onto contributory ESA, is "not fit for purpose" - the words of the man who designed it. The governments attempts to reform it are excellent but they will not be fully implemented for five years and, in the meantime, many people who belong in the support group are being placed in the Work Related Activity Group. Have you ever read the descriptors for the WCA? You can find them here if you haven't: http://www.tameside.gov.uk/esa/wca

People with long term, degenerative illnesses are being placed in the contributory ESA group. And this will continue to happen for the next three years until the WCA is fixed. In the meantime, the DWP's figures show that 40% of people in receipt of contributory ESA will lose all ESA entirely after one year because their partner works. I heard you speak movingly once about how the birth of your daughter motivated you to return to politics, how you wanted to make the world a better place for your children. Imagine, god forbid, that it was one of your children who found themselves in this situation, of being forced to jump through bureaucratic hoops while coping with a debilitating condition. Imagine how it would feel for them to know that they will be penalised because their partner works. Imagine how they would wonder why they should be forced into poverty after a year because of the way you and other MPs voted.

That is the reality facing thousands of vulnerable sick and disabled people. Please, read what I've written and then tell me if you still think voting for the time limit was the right thing to do. Or, better yet, go and visit some fo the families in your constituency who will be affected by this and see the human cost for yourself. I believe you're a good, decent man, which is why I voted for you as party President. But, even after your email, I still can't see how you can justify your voting record on Wednesday.

If nothing else, you voted against the spirit and the letter of a motion passed by conference. I wrote that motion and I worked hard to get Liberal Youth to sponsor it and to get it passed. Last September, you spoke to us at Liberal Youth, you told us how the party would have died out in the seventies had it not been for our predecessor organisation. But why should young people like myself work for the party and stay as members when even you, a man who promised to listen to the membership during your election campaign, completely disregarded our wishes when you voted in parliament on Wednesday. Aside from anything else, this was a massively idiotic political mistake as far as I'm concerned. When people in your constituency start suffering, when people living in constant pain are forced into poverty, when people commit suicide rather than face a future without support (as has already happened on several dozen occasions under the existing system) then the media will start to pay attention.

Because of your hard work, you will probably be able to be confident of re election as an MP, should you seek it, but in many parts of the country this will be a devastating blow to our party and will wipe out decades of hard work amongst some of the poorest people in society. By voting the way you did you enabled Labour to get off the hook for their own appalling record on disability benefits and, if they have any sense, they will now use every single incidence of suffering because of the changes as a big political stick to beat us with. I was upset about tuition fees and I was upset about the NHS reforms. But I've got over them and I accept that some good will come of them. But I cannot get over or understand what you and our other MPs did yesterday. It breaks my heart. I cannot see any good at all in what you have done.

I'm begging you, please tell me that I'm wrong, please tell me that my fears are unjustified, show me that all the evidence I've seen to the contrary was wrong. Above all, tell me why, because you last email leaves me asking that same question again and again: Why?

George Potter

What Lib Dem MPs did yesterday

2012-02-02T13:14:00.000Z

This is something I wrote this morning for a Lib Dem facebook group and which should be published here later today automatically:

Okay, so I've taken several deep breaths and am going to do my best to stay calm and rational. I want to explain what happened with our MPs and the welfare reform bill last night and why I think it was wrong.

I've been campaigning on this for well over six months so it's easy for me to forget that not everyone knows as much about this as I do or feels about it as strongly as I do. I know that many of you know, like and respect our MPs. So did I until last night which is why I know how hard it might be to believe all this. So I'm asking you to just read this and to read all of it before coming to a conclusion on it all. I'm not going to lie, I'm not going to use hyperbole. I'm going to tell the whole truth and, if you doubt what I say, then you can easily verify it. I'm purposely not going to talk about the benefits cap here. I disagree with it for several reasons but the government did make some concessions on it and it's not something I've campaigned on so I'm going to avoid talking about it so that it doesn't muddy the waters when it comes to the issue of disability benefits. If you want to discuss it, please discuss it somewhere other than the debate on the cuts to disability benefits - otherwise the good arguments about both issues will be drowned out by the noise.

Yesterday the House of Commons voted on the House of Lords' amendments to the Welfare Reform Bill.

These amendments were as follows:

• Amendment 36a: Protects young disabled people's eligibility for contributory Employment Support Allowance (ESA)

The government wished to end the practice of treating children who were too severely disabled to work, and therefore unable to accumulate NI payments, as being treated as though they had made NI payments and therefore giving them access to the higher rate of support called contributory Employment Support Allowance. The government's plan would have instead meant them going on to the means tested version of ESA where the cut off point for receiving benefits is a household income of £7,500 or £16,000 in savings - this change would save £10 million a year. The arguments in favour of the government's plan was that otherwise disabled children could potentially inherit large amounts of money and yet still receive benefits and that a european court of human rights ruling meant that it might also allow people who could claim they had a link to Britain to receive the benefit even if they lived abroad.

The House of Lords collectively felt that these arguments and savings did not justify the blanket ending of the practice, especially as the human rights ruling was being challenged and had consequences far beyond this particular practice, and because the means test threshold was so low that it would effectively limit severely disabled children from being able to ever live with a partner or save for old age without being penalised and therefore the Lords passed this amendment to prevent this change.

• Amendment 38: Raises to 24 months the proposed 12-month limit on claiming contributory ESA.

Contributory ESA is a higher rate of benefit for those who have made sufficient National Insurance contributions. ESA itself is the successor to Incapacity Benefit. The people who receive it are those who are assessed as being potentially able to return to work at some point in the future as opposed to have a condition so severe that they can never work. The government wanted to limit the amount of time claimants could receive contributory ESA to a maximum of 12 months, coming into effect retrospectively from April when the bill is due to be signed. However, the argument against this change is that the majority of contributory ESA recipients take substantially longer than a year to return to work, indeed, when the benefit was set up it was imagined that most recipients would take 2 to 5 years to return to work. Those who reach the end of the time limit would be moved onto income related ESA which has the same means test as above of a maximum of a household income of £7,500 or £16,000 in savings before it is taken away completely. This could potentially penalise families where one partner is working as it would make the family financially better off by splitting into two households or by the working partner giving up work.

The other argument against the change is that the work capability assessment (WCA) that determines whether people should receive contributory ESA as opposed to unconditional ESA is deeply flawed and has an appeals system which is costly and where 40% of appeals at tribunal are successful. The government is reforming the WCA through a series of annual report but the changes won't be fully implemented until 2015 meaning that, at the moment, many of the people affected by the limit will include those suffering from degenerative conditions such as Parkinsons or cancer and who cannot be reasonably expected to work and that this would mean a three year window where people were affected by a time limit despite the fact that the assessment system which put them in the time limit was broken and described by it's designer as "not fit for purpose".

The lords’ amendment raised the time limit to a minimum of two years as it was felt that this would reduce the number of people caught by the cap and give those affected more time to be able to return to work.

• Amendment 38a: Exempts cancer patients from the contributory ESA limits

This is fairly self-explanatory. This amendment would have stopped cancer patients from being affected by the contributory ESA time limit and the associated Work Capability Assessment. Personally I think this should apply to other severe conditions, such as Parkinsons, but that's just me.

• Amendment 1: Passed last night, this drops proposals to cut disability living allowance payments by up to £1,400 a year for around 100,000 children.

Currently poorer families with a child getting Disability Living Allowance can get a payment of £53.84 a week via the "disabled child element" of the Child Tax Credit. Those with children with the highest care needs get an additional £21.73 a week. Under the new Universal Credit, the government proposes that those on the higher rate will get £77 a week - £1.43 more than currently. Children on the lower rate would get £26.75 a week, a weekly reduction of £27.09. In effect, this means giving a slight increase in support to severely disabled children whilst cutting it significantly for those with "medium" disability. The lords amendment sought to alter the bill so that the lower rate of disabled child benefit would be no less than two thirds of that of the higher rate.

-----

Every single one of these amendments (as well as others relating to child benefit and the benefit cap) were voted down in the House of Commons with the overwhelming support of Lib Dem MPs. About a dozen or so Lib Dem MPs abstained or voted against the rejection of some or all of the Lords' amendments. The government has also stated it's intention to declare the Welfare Reform Bill a "money bill" which would enable it to go to royal assent without returning to the Lords.

Now, our autumn conference unanimously passed a motion against the one year time limit to contributory ESA and made it party policy to oppose any arbitrary time limit - something that was a key point of the motion and my original purpose in writing it.

The argument made in the Commons by Jenny Willott was that since policy was that the two year time limit was just as arbitrary and should therefore the one year time limit should be supported. I disagree with this fundamentally as I think that a) the lords amendment was for a MINIMUM of two years and b) it was a damn sight better than what the government proposed and was for more in keeping with the spirit of the motion passed at conference.

Basically, I think that the way our MPs (and our peers before them, as they overwhelmingly voted against these amendments in the Lords) is disgraceful as the bottom line is that vulnerable sick and disabled people will suffer. The argument made time and time again by the government, when pushed to the wall, was that these amendments should be rejected as they would disrupt planned savings. I don't think we should balance the budget by cutting support to the most vulnerable for no reason other than to save money. The IFS today said that Osbourne has room for £20 billion of tax cuts due to lower than expected borrowing costs. The total savings the government intends to make from disability benefits is £3 billion - and these amendments don't even touch one of the major savings which was cutting DLA by an estimated 20% whilst also introducing a new assessment system at the estimated cost of £545 million.

In the long term, universal credit and the improved WCA will counter some of the most harmful elements of the changes but, over the next three years, sick and disabled people will be caught in the three year gap of the implementation of universal credit and the new WCA. Human beings will suffer unnecessarily through no fault of their own.

Danny Alexander said that we shouldn't balance the books on the back of the poor. But that's exactly what I view this as doing.I think it goes against everything our party should stand for, especially as these changes to disability benefits weren't in the manifesto of either coalition party or in the coalition agreement.

I've emailed Tim Farron and Jenny Willot asking for an explanation for the way they voted but I have yet to receive a reply.

This means war.

2012-02-01T19:04:00.003Z

Today Lib Dem MPs voted in support of the government's welfare reforms. As a result, from April, thousands of seriously sick and disabled people will lose support. As a result, severely disabled children will never be able to live their lives independently and with dignity. As a result, cancer patients and other people with long term, serious and degenerative conditions, in some cases terminal, will be expected to go through stressful work capability assessments. As a result, policy made by Lib Dem conference, just last September, is no longer worth the paper it is written on and the same applies to our party's constitution. As a result, we will see, up and down the country, human misery and human suffering by incredibly vulnerable people on a truly devastating scale. We will see deaths and we will see suicides because of the way Lib Dem MPs voted tonight and because of their failure to get the government to make it's policies ones which were humane instead of ones which were aimed first and foremost at balancing the books on the backs of those too weak to fight back.

As far as I am concerned, this means war. I will be doing all in my power to get this debated and condemned at our spring conference in Gateshead. And I will do all I can to make sure that our MPs, who betrayed the party, betrayed our principles and betrayed tens of thousands of vulnerable people, will have time to reflect on the suffering they have just caused.

Before the vote took place I wrote this email to Jenny Willott MP, the party's disability spokesperson:

I am writing to you as a fellow member of the Liberal Democrats and as the original author of the Liberal Youth motion on ESA at our autumn confence last September.

I was listening to your speech today in the House of Commons prior to the vote on the Lords' amendments to the Welfare Reform Bill and I will make no secret of the fact that I was bitterly disappointed by what you said. I personally feel that you have completely missed, not only the spirit and the letter of the policy made only four months ago, but also what I imagine most Liberal Democrat members would consider fundamental liberal values on support and protection on the vulnerable.

At time of writing, the vote on the Bill has not yet taken place but, from your speech, I can already see that my fears about the vote are almost certain to be proved correct.
As such I intend to submit an emergency motion to spring conference and to ask and encourage every conference rep I know to question and hold both you and all our other MPs to account for your voting record on the Welfare Reform Bill. However, before I do so I would very much like to be sure that the emergency motion I intend to submit is accurate and that I am not misjudging you or your speech due to potential lack of information on my part. As such I would very much appreciate it if you might find time in your, no doubt busy, schedule to discuss this issue with me.

Yours sincerely,
George W. Potter

It is deeply depressing to see my worst fears confirmed. I am filled with rage at this. It is utterly, utterly disgusting what our MPs (and peers) have done and I will do all I can to make sure that this issue is brought well and truly to the eyes of the membership, the media and the public at our spring conference.

I swear, if it takes me my whole life, I will not rest until there has been a reckoning on this. From now on, it's war to the hilt for the liberal principles, policies and values that our party leadership seems to have thrown in the rubbish bin along with their integrity.

Mr Potter goes to Westminster #wrb

2012-01-31T12:30:00.004Z

Yesterday I went to parliament to attend a meeting organised by the Social Liberal Forum. The point of the meeting was tolobby our peers to support party policy and party principles by getting them to support the Lords' amendments to the Welfare Reform Bill when they vote on it tomorrow.

Last Friday I wrote an article on Lib Dem Voice about the aims of the meeting so you can read more about those here.

The meeting itself was under Chatham House Rules which basically means everyone could say exactly what they thought as no one is allowed to disclose who exactly said what in the meeting.

I'm grateful to the Lib Dem MPs who turned up at relatively short notice, and I'm fairly confident they'll be able to take the key points raised and answers given, to others.

A number of different groups attended including people from Lib Ded Disability Association, Womwen Liberal Democrats, Social Liberal Forum and Liberal Youth (myself).
Some points raised at the meeting were:

The time limiting of ESA, which received particular attention from a lot of speakers
The impact of the benefits cap, including that people in receipt of ESA but not DLA would be hit by it and that, unless child benefits were excluded, it would have a massively detrimental impact on child poverty
The unfairness of the cuts to and DLA given how low the fraud rates
The belief that the cuts were motivated purely for the sake of saving money rather than anything else
The fact that some key items in the Welfare Reform Bill go directly against party policy
The need for Lib Dem parliamentarians to stand up on this issue

The impression I got is that the MPs who attended the meeting were broadly supportive of what we were saying but I can't say anything more than that.

I think one of the most important things we took away from the meeting is that the vote on Wednesday is not the end, whatever the outcome. The Lords will still need to be persuaded to dig their heels in against the DWP and there will need to be lots of lobbying and engaging with consultations to make sure that the changes we can't stop will be implemented as fairly as possible. The vast bulk of the changes won't be in actual legislation passed by parliament and this is where keeping up political pressure could really pay dividends.

The other thing I took away was that there is, apparently, widespread unease about the bill amongst Lib Dem MPs but that it's unease without direction. This is why it's vital that people lobby MPs and peers about the bill and keep doing so even after the vote on Wednesday. There's an easy way for you to do this here. You should also sign Pat's Petition.

Finally, one fairly definite bit of good news is that apparently Jenny Willott has indicated that the government is likely to concede to the Lords amendment on disabled children and National Insurance contributions. This was an item in the Welfare Reform Bill which would have meant that severely disabled children would have no longer be treated as having made NI contributions when they became adults. Since they're unable to work and therefore unable to build up NI contributions, this would have prevented them from having access to disability benefits in their own right ~~and would have even denied them access to a proper state pension when they reached old age~~(UPDATE: As has been pointed out in the comments, I was wrong on this bit). It was an utterly idiotic proposal (especially as it only saved £10 million a year) and it's good to see signs that common sense and decency will prevail on this.

UPDATE: Monday also saw me get an article published in the online version of the Guardian.

#shellshocked

2012-01-27T12:48:00.001Z

So today, not only do I have an article up on Lib Dem Voice, but I've also been quoted in a Guardian article (or rather, they've compiled what I said in a blogpost and turned it into a quote). As such, my mind is currently somewhat blown.

(For those interested, the contents of the letter to Nick Clegg can be found here.)

Lib Dem fightback on #WRB: Update 1

2012-01-25T12:45:00.000Z

This is a lunchtime blogpost.

Last week, in the aftermath of what I consider to be more shameful, and utterly illiberal voting by Lib Dem peers on the Welfare Reform Bill, I wrote this blogpost about my determination to make sure that there was some sort of fightback against what I can only describe as a shameful and deeply worrying dismissal of the democratic will of the party by our parliamentarians.

Fortunately it turns out that there were plenty of others who felt the same way I did. The same evening I was contacted by Gareth Epps, key member of the Social Liberal Forum, member of the Federal Policy Committee and all-round good guy. He'd been contacting some other people and, over the past few days we've worked out a plan of action. On Friday about 45 of our parliamentary candidates from 2010 will send an open letter to Nick Clegg, also hopefully to be published in the Guardian, that will express their concern over the way our parliamentary party has acted on the Welfare Reform Bill.

And then, on Monday, I'm going to be off to the Houses of Parliament to attend a meeting between our parliamentarians and various people who don't agree with what's happening and who want to change our parliamentarians' minds.

It's not possible to undo what's been done so the main aim will be to try and make sure that the House of Commons doesn't undo the spirit of what has been done in the Lords and to make sure that the Welfare Reform Bill is made much fairer. That said, I will also be speaking and, depending on whether they're stonewalling or not, our parliamentarians might well risk getting an earful about what damage the things they've voted for will actually do to the vulnerable people we're meant to be in politics to protect. I'll try and avoid swearing though.

I'll report back on how the meeting went while travelling home on Monday - assuming security actually let me into the meeting in the first place of course ;)

But above all, I'm determined that we will either change some minds at the meeting or we will turn up the volume on our opposition to aspects of the Welfare Reform Bill and to parliamentarians ignoring the democratic principles on which this party was founded. And I doubt that that will give them good publicity at all... ;)

Well done to Lib Dem peers over the benefit cap

2012-01-24T09:02:00.001Z

WARNING: This post contains a fair bit of swearing.

At last! Finally, Lib Dem peers are being collectively useful over the Welfare Reform Bill. Yesterday 17 [CORRECTION: it was 26] Lib Dem peers rebelled against the government and backed an amendment which stops child benefit from being taken into account in the £26,000 cap on benefits. It's great to see this happen and it's just a shame that only two of the rebels yesterday showed the same concern about disabled people a few weeks ago as they did about children yesterday.

I've already seen people come out of the woodwork and start condemning the decision of the lords to exempt child benefit from being taken into account. I've seen both commentors online and government ministers, MPs and spokespersons come out and call it every kind of evil under the sun.

And that makes me sick. And it just goes to show how fucking sick and twisted our society is. Apparently the benefit cap is popular and therefore we shouldn't do a thing about it. Well that's fucked up on two levels. On the one hand, support for it is based on how the question is asked. Of course people will back a cap of £26,000 because it sounds like a large amount and more than they themselves probably earn. But if you were to ask them if they support a cap which sees a couple who have never worked get £200 a week while a family where the parents have only just lost their job after working all their lives will only get £100 a week to support four people then the answer will probably be no.

Because that's what the cap does. Like so many money-motivated government welfare "reform" plans, it is arbitrary. Most of the money which makes up the cap is never seen by the recipients. It goes to private or social landlords. And that means that families in particular will be hit hardest. Because a single person might have a rent of only £150 a week. But for a family, in some places the rent might be much higher, £400 or £500 a week even. But because the cap is arbitrary, the single person will receive the full amount of housing benefit and be left with plenty a week to live on. But the family will receive far less per person, with most of what they get going on rent, leaving them a pittance to live on.

And, in any event, since when has popularity been a sign that something is right? Persecuting the Jews in Germany was very popular at the time but that doesn't mean that the Nazis were right to beat, rape, torture and murder innocent people. Politicians, and Lib Dems in particular, should do what is fucking right, and just regardless of how fucking unpopular it might be. It was fucking right for us to oppose the Iraq War even though it was unpopular for us to do so at the time.

But in any event, the entire rationale for the cap is bullshit. Utter bullshit. It's all about atomisation, setting one group of struggling people against another group of struggling people. We can afford to spend billions on the olympics, we can afford to continue fighting in Afghanistan, we can afford to build High Speed Rail and Crossrail, we can afford billions on new aircraft carriers but apparently we can't afford to spend money on welfare.

Let's put this in some fucking context, right? The savings the government is making from the benefit cap is just 0.1% of the welfare budget. The cost of taking child benefit out of the cap calculations is just 0.05% of the welfare budget. You could save that amount of money many, many times over purely by fixing the administrative procedures in the welfare system - all of which are bloated, ineffective, confusing for claimants and, above all, costly to run.

Eric Pickles, the tory local government minister, a fat oaf who has never known hardship in his life, has said that the benefits cap will make 20,000 families homeless, all of whom will have to be put in emergency housing at local councils' expense, ultimately costing the taxpayer more than it saves from the cap. And in big cities like London, it will mean the poor being forced out of the city, just like Paris, we will see a doughnut of ghettos and slums of poor people surrounding a glittering, gentrified city centre. Out of sight, out of fucking mind, right? I'm sure the middle and upper class tory voters will love not having to see untidy poor people at any point in their lives. After all, in Paris you have absolutely appalling and barbaric conditions in the ghettos around the city but central Parisians never see them as the motorways and railways just go right over the heads of all the poor people. For the wealthy, poverty is something which you flash past in five seconds on the motorway.

Above all, the most flawed aspect of the benefit cap is that it punishes children for the sins of their parents. Yes, there are some fucking lazy people out there, people who have loads of kids in order to milk the welfare system and to avoid working while the taxpayer pays for things. There might be fewer of them than the tabloids make out but they still exist. But if you punish the parents for being irresponsible then you end up punishing the children as well. Even with child benefit being excluded, the cap will still force thousands of children into poverty. I've never experienced real hardship myself but I damn well know what it's like growing up in a house where money is tight. My father is a brilliant man and gave my brother and I as stable an environment as possible, doing his absolute best at great stress to himself and as a result, despite losing my mother at the age of seven, I'd still say that I had a good childhood. But I know what it's like as a child to be aware that money is tight and to be worrying about that in addition to all the stresses of childhood. Children should not have to experience that. It happens, unavoidably it happens, but it shouldn't. And it certainly shouldn't be the case that the government knowingly passes laws which it knows will make that happen.

All, of course, under the guise of "incentivising" people to work. A noble idea but I fail to see how cutting people's benefits is meant to force them into work when there aren't enough fucking jobs to go round!

My generation has been royally fucked by the ones prior to us. They've left us a mountain of debt, a planet of depleted resources and an environment damaged by two centuries of pollution. The short-sighted consumerism of the past 30 years has well and truly fucked up our futures. But I don't think it's right to ask children to suffer, to make they pay for the sins of their parents, just so that I will have to pay ever so slightly lower taxes for ever so slightly less. The deficit is billions big. The national debt is hundreds of billions big. A few hundred million for the children of the poorest families is an insignificant additional burden.

And I'd much rather live in a society where the poor aren't forced into slums, where my children won't just live and grow up in a gentrified bubble where the real world and real hardship is swept under the rug. And, above all, I'd rather my children, if I ever have any, grow up in a society with slightly more compassion for the poor, the sick and the disabled than the heartless, selfish, merciless society we seem to be living in now and which our politicians seem to believe in.

And, maybe if our parliamentairns had enough backbone to make the counter argument against the cap, to stand up and explain why the amendment was necessary, then the tories might not be reaping political dividends for a disgusting policy and we might have actually made the world a slightly better place.

A response to "The best kept secret in the Lib Dems"

2012-01-22T15:43:00.000Z

The other day Mark Pack, one of the editors over at Lib Dem Voice, and someone whose opinion I respect, wrote a piece on his blog entitled "The best kept secret in the Liberal Democrats" which is a response, in part, to my article on Lib Dem Voice last week. In it he argues that the reason for Lib Dem peers voting with the government to time limit contributory ESA is because they must have secured improvements in the government's plans through negotiation and that the real issue is them failing to communicate this and thus giving the impression of ignoring concerns by disabled people and the party membership.

His exact words are:

"George Potter’s impassioned post, for example is understandable, but wrong. Wrong – because he is judging the peers by how they voted and not by what changes to legislation they have secured before and after votes. When you are negotiating to secure concessions and get concessions in return for votes, you should really be judged by that overall trade-off. But it’s hardly fair to criticise George or anyone else for not judging by the overall package – because given this omerta like news blackout, it’s not exactly easy to extract the necessary information."

I'm afraid I have to disagree.

There's no doubt that, as he pointed out, that some considerable changes took place on the proposals to replace DLA with PIP (something that will also include a 20% cut for a benefit which has a fraud rate of only 0.35%). Now, Mark refers to Sue Marsh's piece on this and I have to agree with her. There have been some improvements. But I also agree with her that they still aren't good enough. They are a lot better than what the government originally proposed though. Whether this is down to negotiation by Lib Dem peers or due to the government wanting to placate enough crossbencher (e.g. non-affiliated) peers to avoid another defeat on the bill is impossible to say. Either or both might be correct.

So, on that basis, we can potentially excuse Lib Dem peers for overwhelmingly with the government on DLA. I still don't think it was right, but the fact is that DLA wasn't specifically mentioned in the motion passed at conference and so they have something of an excuse.

But Mark Pack is utterly wrong about ESA. The fact is that the motion specifically called for

"Liberal Democrats in Government to oppose an arbitrary time limit on how long claimants can claim contributory ESA."

and for

"A presumption that ESA claimants with serious and uncontrollable life-threatening conditions should be allocated to the support group rather than the work related activity group."

The fact is that, two weeks ago, Lib Dem peers voted by a margin of 51 to 2 to back an arbitrary time limit on contributory ESA (the main benefit for people who are unable to work due to disability or illness). This means that long term sick and disabled people who are unable to work, will after one year of receiving contributory ESA, have support taken away. The DWP's own figures show that 40% of people receiving contributory ESA will lose out by the change. This is because after the year is up they will be switched to another part of the system, one which will take away all support for anyone with a household income over £16,000 - because that's clearly enough to support an entire family, including a severely disabled adult, on. And it will also take away money from people with household incomes below this level.

In fact, the only people unaffected by the time limit will be those with a household income of less than £7,500 - meaning that the majority of them will be sick and disabled people living on their own. But families where one parent is disabled and one works will be placed under financial pressure which will take away much needed support unless they have an income so low that they are actively living in poverty. In fact, it will place many families in the position where they'd be better off splitting up rather than trying to support an entire family , including the costs of sickness and disability, on one person's income or on ESA payment designed only to be capable of supporting one person.

Our peers also voted overwhelmingly in favour of subjecting cancer patients to the stressful ESA assessment process.

So I really can't see how, on either of the two points from the motion above, that our peers upheld the principle or the letter of the motion. More importantly than that, I really can't see how they can justify as in any way "liberal" changes that will put vulnerable people through significant hardship.

Our peers might have got changes to DLA or they might not. But they certainly haven't achieved anything significant on ESA when the most damaging and unnecessary proposal by the government is not only unchanged but also overwhelmingly backed in the lords by Lib Dem peers.

And, if Mark Pack is reading this, I'd like to ask him to also read this other piece by Sue Marsh. And, after reading it, I'd like to ask him if he still thinks we've won on disability benefits:

http://diaryofabenefitscrounger.blogspot.com/2012/01/so-how-am-i.html

Fire in the belly

2012-01-22T00:54:00.000Z

Long time no post - sorry about that. I'll try and actually have a decent and interesting blog post up tomorrow.

Right now I'm sitting in bed and will shortly be going to sleep. This evening my father and I went to see 'The Iron Lady' at a local independent cinema. It's certainly a good film and personally I think it very much reminded me that, no matter how much I despise her politics and the poisonous legacy of a divided country which she left us, Margaret Thatcher is now just a widowed old woman struggling with dementia. In the end, after all she did and didn't do, she has ended up facing old age and death in the same way that everyone else has to face. At the end of the day, she's human. And I think that that reminder of ultimate mortality is something that a lot of powerful people could do well to remember.

But that's not what this post is about. Because after the film my father and I got to talking politics - as we tend to do now and again. I won't go into details but it wasn't about party politics, it was about human nature and injustice and corruption and ineptitude.

As it happens, I rather enjoy that kind of conversation. Not just because it gets the old brain cells working and can give you new insights into things but because of the impact it has on me. Like a lot of people who take an interest in politics I can find things pretty depressing at times and end up wondering what the point of all the effort is when nothing ever seems to change.

But conversations like that, where I'm reminded of all the injustice, all the flaws, all the needless cruelty and poverty are brilliant at making me angry at the downright unfairness of it all. And, funnily enough, anger is my main political motivator. It puts fire in my belly by making me want to tear down the whole rotten edifice of the modern world and fix all that is wrong with it. In practice I know that I've got to be a tad more realistic in my aims than perfecting society, the radically reforming the economic system and fixing the flaws in human nature, but, by the gods, it certainly gives me something pure and unadultered to aim for. So, all in all, being angry and having the conviction and burning desire to end the injustice is probably a good thing. After all, it's that fiery anger that you need to keep you going, that you need if you ever want to accomplish something in the face of adversity.

So that's pretty much what I wanted to say in this blogpost. Incidentally, the whole recharging of the fire in my belly following the conversation (because I was feeling pretty drained and spread thin beforehand) is why tomorrow I intend to finally get round to a) writing a reply to this and b) beginning plotting in earnest over a fightback on the Welfare Reform Bill.

Welfare Reform Bill - real Lib Dem #fightback

2012-01-17T21:08:00.001Z

Well, they've gone and done it again It's rather depressing that I feel so unsurprised by the fact that, once again, by a margin of 65 to 2, our peers have decided to back yet another government proposal which will take support away from deserving sick and disabled people who can't survive without it. Apparently 500,000 vulnerable people losing support wasn't enough for them to bother to defy the whip. Of course, this might be partly related to the fact that so fucking few of them even bothered to turn up to the debate and listen to the arguments about the amendments they were actually fucking voting on.

As you can probably tell, I'm very angry. The only thing stopping me from going utterly berserk is that at least Lord Freud has been forced to agree to have a slow introduction of the replacement for DLA in order to make sure that any problems can be fixed before they cause too much hardship. Of course that's assuming Lord Freud and the DWP a) keep their word and b) do the job properly. And based on previous performance that's about as likely as me joining the tories.

But despite that the behaviour of our peers was far from good enough.

From tomorrow, I'm going to be getting together with ther grassroots Lib Dems and organising a fight back. We will force our parliamentarians to listen to the democratic will of the party or I'll do my utmost to make sure that we kick up such a media storm that it'll make them long for the days of merger and having the party leader on trial for murder!

The Lib Dem peers might have forgotten their principles, souls and spines but I and others haven't. Stay tuned for more in the coming days and weeks.

Help defeat the government on DLA

2012-01-16T12:30:00.000Z

I've been asked to post this on my blog and I'm proud to do so. Please read it.

Last week the government was defeated three times on the Welfare Reform Bill.

On Tuesday this week there will be another debate in the Lords - this time on proposed changes to DLA (Disability Living Allowance).

Sue Marsh is calling for a pause on Tuesday to reflect on DLA legislation in the light of the Spartacus Report.

Pat's Petition asks for the government to stop and review all the changes to benefits that are creating a perfect storm.

Pat's Petition has now reached almost 20,000 in a very short time. Our contacts in the House of Lords say Pat's Petition is being watched because it is a grassroots petition. High numbers of signatures give them evidence of the strength of feeling behind everyone's actions. This is exactly what they need.

If you want to support campaigners on Tuesday please help with Pat's Petition. Whether you've been on a Hardest Hit march, tweeted about the Spartacus Report or written to a Lord, please share the link as widely as possible in the run up to the vote on DLA on Tuesday. Keep sharing it so that Lord Freud and others know how many there are of us, watching their every move.

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/20968 is the link to the petition.

It's on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/patsepetition
and twitter at http://twitter.com/PatsPetition

What the hell is wrong with Labour?

2012-01-14T18:00:00.000Z

What the hell is wrong with Labour?

I'm serious, they probably couldn't be a more incompetent opposition if they tried. The government has given them so, so many open goals, so many opportunities to utterly destroy their credibility - and I say that as a pro-coalition Lib Dem.

Let me give you an example, last Wednesday, Ed Miliband faced off against David Cameron in Prime Minister's Questions. He could have hammered the government hard over cuts to disability benefits which the Lords were voting on later that night. He could have pointed out how unfair and unnecessary it was to deny profoundly disabled children the right to independence in adult life through removing their benefits, how the cost arguments didn't add up when the government was preparing to spend billions on HS2 which will inevitably end up over budget. But instead Ed chose to get into an argument about rail fare increases - one where both he and Cameron argued about whose figures were correct (according to FactCheck they were each partly right and partly wrong) - it might have been mildly interesting or informative but a knock out blow to the coalition it wasn't. And then Ed raised the matter of Scottish independence and both men had a chance to play at being statesmen - something which Cameron usually manages to do slightly better than Ed does.

So, once again, it was, at best for Labour, a draw. And yet later that same night the government received a massive defeat on disability benefit cuts in the Lords - an unprecedented triple defeat in fact. And then later on, to make things even better for Labour, Lord Freud used underhanded tactics to try and reverse the democratic will of the House.

But, because Labour hadn't mentioned it earlier, the story only got 45 seconds on the news and Chris Grayling was able to go onto Newsnight (which opened the segment with a piece by a tory former DWP minister on why the benefits system needed reforming) and spouting the usual paper thin guff about why the government's proposals to hit vulnerable disabled people purely for the sake of cost were actually the best thing since sliced bread. The entire story of the government's defeat was forgotten about in a whole news cycle despite the fact that masses of disabled people have revolted against the governments proposals, got the subject trending on twitter and have published a devastating report completely demolishing the governments plans on Disability Living Allowance (which will be voted on in the Lords next week).

This was a golden opportunity for Labour to force the issue onto the agenda and gain masses of political capital. Instead, just as they did for thirteen years in government, Labour seems intent on squandering chance after chance after chance. This is a government making a hash of already unpopular and complex NHS reform, making several counter productive cuts purely to satisfy the blinkered ideology of tory backbenchers and generally creating a crisis for themselves every other week.

But the best Labour seems to be able to think of is Ed Balls suddenly coming out and definitively yielded the entire economic argument to the coalition, agreeing to fight the battle entirely on their terms, and thereby losing any reason for support from the sizeable chunk of the public that disagrees with the government's strategy. The fact is that polls show that people aren't satisfied with government economic policy but think Labour are likely to be even worse. Putting up the backs of Labour's core voters by accepting massive and, let's be honest, at least sometimes unnecessary, public service cuts is going to make left wing voters consider finding another party (such as the resolutely anti-cuts Greens) while doing nothing much to gain any new support as more moderate voters will just see this as the latest of a series of Labour flip-flopping and mixed messages on the economy.

Labour should be destroying the coalition's economic credibility on specific arguments it knows it can win, while also setting out solid alternatives. And please note, a jobs scheme, a VAT cut, and gods knows what else relatively minor tinkering, all to be paid for out of the same, limited revenue raising of an unsustainable bonus tax, does not count as an alternative economic policy. When you say "we'd cut differently" the obvious question people will ask is "How?"

There is no more perfect time to be in opposition, the situation could hardly be more perfect and yet Labour are making a hash of it. And that's deeply worrying given that a) our political system requires an effective opposition to keep the government in check and b) even Lib Dems like me really don't like the idea of a Labour collapse if it means a massive boost to the tories.

For what it's worth, my assessment is that the Labour leadership doesn't seem to have any sort of ideological framework or vision and instead are obsessed simply with winning elections in order to win power for the sake of power. Don't get me wrong, I have fundamental disagreements with many elements of social democratic philosophy but if ever we needed a counterweight to neo-liberalist capitalist excess then it's now.

But all Labour's leaders can seem to think of is pandering to the prejudices of one set of voters after another - so one week you get Liam Byrne demonising disabled people by playing into the "scrounger" narrative and then attacking the coalition for "crossing a basic line of British disability" on disability benefit cuts the next.

If I was in opposition, I'd be having a field day right now. And I don't even have much of an interest in Labour doing well, other than my fervent belief that the best outcome for my party and the country after 2015 would be one which does not end up in a tory majority government or a renewal of the coalition. So when I say this it's mainly with frustration at the sheer apparent stupidity of the people deciding Labour's strategy.

Seriously Labour, please get your act together. I don't care what direction you pick as long as you pick one and stick to it. And quite frankly, facepalming at your actions on such a regular basis is bad for my health.

Let's put the welfare cuts in perspective

2012-01-12T19:25:00.000Z

I've seen some reprehensible individuals recently arguing that cutting disability benefits is necessary for the sake reducing the deficit and that no one should be exempted from having to share the burden, not even the disabled. But that's a load of crap.

So let me put this in perspective for you. A friend of mine is Sue Marsh and I visited her this weekend. She suffers from a debilitating illness called Crohn's disease - essentially she regularly gets massive kidney stones in her bowels which need to be surgically removed and which cause all sorts of associated health problems such as pain, lack of energy, lack of appetite, etc.

She's suffered since this since she was a child but was repeatedly misdiagnosed and therefore struggled through school and university and then through work for a few years before her illness finally became too much and she had to go on benefits.

She currently gets contributory ESA because she made National Insurance payments when she was working.

Under the government's proposals, in a few weeks her ESA would end (because the changes are retrospective) and she'd be cut off from support. She's ill enough to be permanently unable to work but not ill enough to go into the unconditional support group. And because of that, there's no provision for supporting her.

And, because her husband works, despite also having to look after Sue and their two young children, and despite having spinal problems himself and having had two nervous breakdowns due to stress, they won't get any support. The only way they'll be able to get support under the government's plans is if Sue's husband gives up his job - the threshold for receiving support is a household income of less than £7,500 a year. But the support they'd then be eligible for is too little to support a family of four off of. The alternative that Sue's husband keeps on working and trying to support the family after Sue's ESA ends. But the fact is that they simply can't afford to live without the ESA payments.

And there's no alternative to the disability benefits system because Sue being long term ill makes her ineligible for things like JSA.

This is the catch 22 that the government's changes will put thousands of disabled people in. Not to mention the permanently disabled children who will be denied all access to benefits when they become adults (because they won't have been able to make any NI contributions) because of the flawed logic that assumes that their family (despite the fact that a lot of disabled children are in state care) will always be around and willing to look after them.

Protecting these disabled people would cost £400 million a year - an insignificant fraction of the amounts we spend on far less worthy causes.

Yes, we need to get rid of the deficit, yes we need to spend less money across the board. But it goes completely against the fundamental principles of this party to make people like Sue, who are already living with debilitating conditions and who are disproportionately likely to live in poverty, bear the burden of the cuts. They're already living right on the margins - how the hell can we expect to take even more away from them without it causing disaster?

I can tell you, I've never been more ashamed of my party than I am right now.

What the fuck has happened to us?

2012-01-11T20:25:00.001Z

Tonight the government suffered a massive triple defeat on elements of the Welfare Reform Bill that would have removed support from disabled children and cancer patients and that would have limited to one year the length of time seriously ill and disabled people could receive support for, after which they'd be denied support unless they had a household income of less than £7,500.

While it's brilliant that we won on this, and that the principles supported unanimously by Lib Dem conference in September triumphed in the lords, the fact is that this was no thanks to Lib Dem peers. Only three of them rebelled against the government on the whipped votes and only five of them went against the government even when the had a free vote. What follows is a list of all those Lib Dem peers who betrayed our party, our principles and the most vulnerable in our society:

Addington, Lord
Alderdice, Lord
Allan of Hallam, Lord
Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon, Lord
Benjamin, Baroness
Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury, Baroness
Burnett, Lord
Clement-Jones, Lord
Cotter, Lord
Dholakia, Lord
Falkner of Margravine, Baroness
Garden of Frognal, Baroness
Goodhart, Lord
Jolly, Baroness
Kirkwood of Kirkhope, Lord
Kramer, Baroness
Lee of Trafford, Lord
Lester of Herne Hill, Lord
Linklater of Butterstone, Baroness
Loomba, Lord
Maddock, Baroness
Mar and Kellie, Earl
Marks of Henley-on-Thames, Lord
McNally, Lord
Methuen, Lord
Newby, Lord
Northover, Baroness
Parminter, Baroness
Randerson, Baroness
Razzall, Lord
Redesdale, Lord
Rennard, Lord
Roberts of Llandudno, Lord
Scott of Needham Market, Baroness
Sharp of Guildford, Baroness
Shutt of Greetland, Lord
Steel of Aikwood, Lord
Stephen, Lord
Stoneham of Droxford, Lord
Storey, Lord
Taverne, Lord
Taylor of Goss Moor, Lord
Teverson, Lord
Thomas of Gresford, Lord
Thomas of Winchester, Baroness
Tyler, Lord
Wallace of Saltaire, Lord
Wallace of Tankerness, Lord
Walmsley, Baroness
Watson of Richmond, Lord
Williams of Crosby, Baroness

I feel so utterly, utterly ashamed about this. What the fuck has happened to us?

UPDATE: Some credit goes to the 44 or so Lib Dem peers who abstained and thereby allowed the opposition to win the votes. But the fact is that there's still no explanation for why they didn't vote against the government on the third amendment where they were specifically allowed to vote however they liked. Yesterday was a dark day for the state of democracy within the party.

Support the #spartacusreport

2012-01-10T12:48:00.000Z

This weekend I was working on the launch of Responsible Reform, a report into the government's changes to Disability Living Allowance by replacing it with PIP and cutting it 20% in the process. The report has found that the DWP has misled the public and parliament over the changes, using incorrect statistics and claiming support for the changes where there was none and pushing forward with proposals that were almost unanimously opposed by respondents to a government consultation on the changes. The consultation, incidentally, breached the government's own deadlines by being two weeks short, poorly advertised and finishing two days after the DWP had finished writing their response.

This report still hasn't been picked up by the TV media but it really is huge news. Yesterday, the report launched with the hashtag #spartacusreport which was a top trending topic all day and gained support from people ranging from Stephen Fry to the Royal Association of GPs.

The government has already tried to dismiss the report as being unrepresentative and out of date. But it's not. The government's latest impact assessment comes from only a few weeks ago and is virtually identical to the previous one, showing that they paid almost not attention to the consultation at all.

And the report certainly isn't just a group of left wingers upset at the changes. Why else does the Conservative Mayor of London oppose the DLA changes? Why does every single sickness and disability related charity, including giants such as Macmillan endorse the report?

It’s simple, the changes are rushed and don’t make sense. To give one example, one of the changes will stop DLA being used as a qualifier for other benefits – such as blue badges. Which means that loads of entirely new assessments will need to be set up.

All of these people have engaged with the consultations by the DWP. They’ve expressed concern over problems and suggested alternatives. But all of them have been ignored in favour of a DWP assessment which lies and says that there is “broad support” for the changes when the responses to the consultation which clearly shows otherwise.

The fact is that the DWP wants to cut DLA by 20%. The cuts will come only from those of working age. As these make up 50% of the DLA caseload, that amounts to a 40% cut in funding to those affected. The number of people in need of help isn’t going to decrease, it just means that they’ll be less disabled people able to get the help they need.

And this switch to a new system will cost at least £600 million in admin costs – and that’s with the DWP assuming there won’t be any hiccups, which, inevitably, there will be. DLA is an incredibly cost effective benefit. A large number of claimants are in work and paying taxes – but they are only able to do so because DLA helps provide them with the assistance they need to stay in work, for example, helping to cover the extra heating costs caused by working from home. If they are moved off of DLA then they’ll be left unable to work and will instead become an incredibly costly burden on the NHS and social care services.

The government talks about a rise in DLA claims, but the majority of the rise in DLA is down to demographic changes – as the population ages that means more people in old age are living with conditions associated with old age, such as partial blindness, hearing loss, mobility loss, back problems, etc. There’s also been a rise over the past decade because this is a relatively recent benefit and it takes time for people to move onto it – in fact, a lot of the rise corresponds with a government campaign to get people on it because too many people were missing out.

And the fact is that there is very little room for savings – true, some people defraud the system, though that amounts to less than 0.5% of claimants, and some people are overpaid. But there are also people who are underpaid and the net result of the overpayments and fraud and underpayments is a net SAVING for the DWP.

Switching to an entirely new system will only cause a bureaucratic nightmare and damage a group of people who are already struggling on a daily basis with disability and pain and who are disproportionately more likely to be living in poverty. Disability campaigners and charities have suggested ways DLA could be reformed to make it more cost effective but the DWP isn’t interested. All they’re interested in is cutting 20% from the budget. And that’s why Responsible Reform doesn’t propose an alternative – there’s not enough time for that. These changes could be rushed through parliament in a matter of a couple of weeks and campaigners are desperately focusing all their efforts on getting a six month pause for the proposals to be PROPERLY consulted on and examined. That’s all they’re after. And they deserve it.

The media dam is breaking...

2012-01-07T09:15:00.000Z

The official figures for Disability Living Allowance fraud is 0.5%. The government want to cut 20% from the disability bill. They plan to do this by abolishing DLA and making eligability for its replacement, PIP, harder.

That does not mean there are fewer disabled people, just fewer who will get the help they need.

A new report will be coming out on Monday which will reveal the results of FOI requests to find out about the responses to the government consultation on the plans to scrap DLA and replace it with "PIP". The reason FOI requests are necessary is because the government still hasn't published the consultation despite the fact that MPs have already voted on the proposals. There's also the small matter than it reveals that the government has been using misleading and incorrect figures to get parliamentarians to support the proposals.

Among the report’s conclusions that the press have already got hold of are:

Only 7% of organisations that took part in the consultation were fully in support of plans to replace DLA with PIP
There was overwhelming opposition in the consultation responses to nearly all of the government’s proposals for DLA reform
The government has consistently used inaccurate figures to exaggerate the rise in DLA claimants
The report shows that nearly all of the recent increase in working-age claimants of DLA has been associated with mental health conditions and learning difficulties. Between 2002 and 2010, the number of working-age DLA claimants – excluding those with mental health conditions and learning difficulties remained remarkably stable
98% of those who responded opposed plans to change the qualifying period for PIP from three months (as it is with DLA) to six months
90% opposed plans for a new assessment, which disabled people fear will be far too similar to the much-criticised work capability assessment used to test eligibility for employment and support allowance (ESA)
Respondents to the consultation repeatedly warned that the government’s plans could breach the Equality Act, the Human Rights Act and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

Today, this story is in the Mirror, the Mail, the Telegraph, the Indy and the Guardian. Boris Johnson has attacked the government's proposals. And the report hasn't even been published yet! The media dam is breaking and this issue is on the verge of exploding into the national conciousness and when it does, a lot of people in government will be asked some very hard questions.

But meanwhile, despite us passing a motion on this at conference, our leadership is maintaining the same silence and deliberate avoidance of this topic that they have for the past six months. Words cannot describe just how depressing it is when the Tory Mayor of London is doing a better job at standing up for the vulnerable then our own leadership.

Big report on DLA to be published soon

2012-01-05T12:47:00.000Z

This is one of my ongoing series of lunch time blogposts.

I happen to know from a very good source (e.g. the author) that there is a report entitled "Responsible Reform" which is due to be published soon - I'm not allowed to disclose the publication date.

The report will be about the government's plans to replace Disability Living Allowance with 'PIPs' (Personal Independence Payments). I don't know what it says but I highly doubt the evidence will be in the government's favour.

There's not much more I can say about it at the moment but I'll have a lot more details about it in the near future. What I can say is that, by the time it's published, it will have taken under two months to write and will have cost £4,000. Yet this is a report of comparable size and effort to that of a major think tank - which normally take £100,000 and up to a year to write and publish a report. Given that this is a report organised and researched mostly by volunteers, nearly all of whom suffer from disabilities or long term illness, I consider that a tremendous achievement.

But I also hope that this report won't distract from another issue facing disabled people which is just as damaging as the flawed schemed to replace DLA. And that other issue is the introduction of a 12 month time limit on how long sick and disabled people can receive contributory ESA.

As Caron says over on her blog (and I can't recommend you read the whole blogpost strongly enough):

At the moment, if you receive contributory ESA (based on your NI contributions), you get around £90 a week and are eligible for that until you reach State Pension age. Now, you will lose your entitlement to it after a year. So, if you work for 40 years and pay tax and NI for all that time, you will only, when you need it most, get a year's support if the Government plans become law. This will take effect in just 3 months' time.

That means that people who are too ill to work will effectively have to rely on their families to support them. Being ill is a pretty expensive business - if you need to have regular medical treatment there's transport costs affected with that. Also if your mobility is affected, you will need your house to be warmer. Not want. Need.

I think depriving sick people of the support they get from the State based on an arbitrary time limit is wrong. It flies in the face of everything I believe as a liberal in terms of looking at the person and what they need.

Most people, thankfully, do recover from illness within a year but some don't. It certainly took me two years after contracting Glandular Fever to feel remotely human again and it's left me with continuing health problems. Luckily I didn't need to claim ESA, but if I had, I am fairly sure I'd have had problems proving eligibility because of the fluctuating nature of the condition. If Sue Marsh, who suffers from really severe bowel disease, has trouble convincing the authorities that she's ill, then we have to suspect that the system is very flawed. Sue isn't my only example. Four years of working as an MP's caseworker provided me with many examples of the wrong decisions being taken and overturned after a lengthy and stressful appeals process.

The best argument I've heard against the time limit was put forward by Ken Reed, the new Chair of RNIB Scotland. He and I were speakers at a fringe meeting on welfare reform chaired by Secretary of State for Scotland Mike Moore at the Scottish Lib Dems' Autumn conference. Ken said that if you became blind as the result of an accident today, it would take a year just to get used to being blind, let alone being ready to get back into the labour market.

Election results 2015: 40 Lib Dem seats

2011-12-31T13:33:00.002Z

A week is said to be a long time in politics so it's incredibly foolhardy to make predictions about politics in three to four years' time. However, I'm going to do it anyway.

I predict that in the 2015 general election, the Lib Dems will get around 40 seats in parliament.

This prediction comes from taking the results of the latest ICM poll, putting the results into the UK Polling Report swingometer and then making some adjustments.

I chose ICM because they are the "gold standard" when it comes to polling. They got the vote shares in the 2010 general election almost spot on, likewise with the Scottish 2011 elections and they also got the vote shares in the AV referendum within 0.2% of the actual result.

ICM uses a methodology which includes weighting responses by the liklihood to vote and reallocating half of "don't know" answers to the party they voted for last time. Which methodology pollsters should use remains debatable but in ICM's case it seems to be pretty accurate.

Now, ICM has had the Lib Dems at around 14 or 15% for most of 2011. Overall, things have been pretty consistent with them.

So, what I've done is to take the latest ICM poll (CON 37%, LAB 36% LDEM 15%) and adjusted the figure slightly. I've tried to be fair with the adjustments as they're based on the fact that the Lib Dems still don't get equal news coverage at the moment and therefore can expect their position to improve slightly when the next election comes round and the news media (apart from newspapers) is required to provide balanced coverage. In previous elections this has given the Lib Dems a boost of 5 points or more when it comes to votes actually cast on polling day. To allow for Lib Dem unpopularity caused by going into coalition, I've reduced that boost to 3 points. This means reducing the current position of other groups in the ICM poll as follows:

Conservatives: -1 (A slight loss from 2010, probably realistic as support they've won will be offset by the impact of the unpopularity of cuts and by the fickleness of those swing voters who always vote against the government)
Labour: -1 (Still a big improvement on their 2010 position and allows for a slight loss of support due to protest voters reconsidering Labour as they come under closer scrutiny during the election campaign)
Lib Dems: +3 (As explained above)
Others: -1 (Still leaves them three points higher than they did in 2010)

Once these adjusted figures are put into the swingometer we get the following:


Conservative		272 seats (-34)
Labour		310 seats (+52)
Liberal Democrats		41 seats (-16)
Others	11%	9 seats (-2)
Northern Ireland		18 seats (nc)

Now, that's based on a uniform swing on the 2010 election results. But the 2015 general election will most likely be fought on the new boundaries which will see an equalisation of constituency sizes and reduction in the number of seats to 600.

One of the main effect of the boundary changes will be to remove the current bias towards Labour. As you can see from the swingometer, Labour can get less votes than the tories and get more seats. This will also mean that all of the parties get less seats than they have at the moment.

Now, current predictions are that, under the boundary changes (and excluding Wales, as the boundary changes there haven't been published yet) the Lib Dems would get 44 seats if their vote share remained unchanged.

The caveat to this however is that the Lib Dems in particular have a tendency of bucking the national trend where they have MPs. This is called the incumbency effect.

For example, the party president, Tim Farron MP, is notable for being one of the very few MPs in the country who won over half the votes in his constituency, including those who didn't turn out to vote. So that means that over half the population in his constituency support him. Yet his seat is being abolished in the boundary changes and is being split between what is notionally a tory seat and what is notionally a very marginal Labour seat. But Tim has a long, long record of squeezing Labour voters in his seat and persuading them to vote for him and there's no reason why he couldn't do the same in the new seat of Barrow-in-Furness. On top of that, his activists and campaigners who have been moved to the new tory seat are highly likely to travel up to Barrow to campaign for Tim there rather than waste their time in a tory seat that they won't be able to win. So it's highly likely that Tim will remain an MP despite his seat being abolished.

It's not unlikely that the Lib Dems could do similar things throughout the rest of the country, but that's not accounted for in these notional predictions of the impact of the boundary changes. But then again, neither is the Lib Dem loss in support since 2010.

So, as a crude measure to take these effects into account, I'm going to say that they'll pretty much cancel each other out. And that's why I'm going to predict that the Lib Dems, after the impact of the incumbency effect, after the seats in Wales are added to the total, and after the impact of the loss of support, are going to win a minimum of 40 seats in the next general election.

What's very much harder to predict is the totals of seats that Labour and Tories will get. The notional impact of the boundary changes (excluding Wales) would give the Tories 293 seats and Labour 209. Given that both parties are likely to have fairly equal levels of support in 2015 I've decided to split the difference somewhat. This gives both parties about 250 seats each. However, the Tories are likely to stay ahead somewhat in England where they are traditionally stronger than Labour and Labour are likely to stay ahead somewhat in Wales where they are traditionally stronger than the Tories.

Wales is due to lose 10 seats under the boundary review, bringing the total number of seats to 30. I'm going to guess that Labour will continue to get well over half the seats in Wales while the tories are likely to lose most of their gains from the last election due to the combined impact of the seat reductions and of the swing back towards Labour.

It's impossible to hazard a guess of any sort on the exact numbers of seats Labour and the tories are going to get but it's almost certain that neither of them will be able to achieve a majority with their current polling figures. It's also likely that one or both of them will be able to form a majority with the help of the 40+ Lib Dem seats. So this means that, despite our loss in support, the Lib Dems will still be in a position to enter a coalition or a confidence-and-supply agreement which would enable us to continue implementing some Lib Dem policies.

Personally, I think some sort of agreement with Labour would be best, preferably a confidence-and-supply agreement, because that would show that we are capable of working with both of the other parties whereas a second Lib-Tory coalition would risk us losing our identity as an independent party. And a confidence-and-supply agreement would also allow us to get the occasional headline grabbing Lib Dem policy implemented whilst also giving us time in opposition to rebuild our support. That's my personal preference though and the fact is that the outcome of the next election is still very much in the lap of the gods.

Things could also change radically between now and 2015 as unforeseen events can overturn everything in an instance (after all, Thatcher was well on the way to becoming an unpopular, one-term Prime Minister before the Falklands Conflict boosted her popularity to a landslide second term). That said, I think that my key prediction is likely to come true:

At the next election the Lib Dems will win 40 or more seats in parliament.

P.S. I've assumed that Scotland won't vote for independence in a referendum and will instead plump for some sort of devo-max.

Hiatus over

2011-12-28T12:45:00.000Z

Well, I know I've been a bit quiet lately so I'd just like to take the opportunity this lunch time to inform ~~my loyal reader~~ all my loyal readers that the hiatus is over and I will now begin blogging again with more regularity now that the holidays are out of the way.

That said, unfortunately I can't think of anything to blog about right this minute so I'll just conclude by saying that the most unusual present I received this year was an adoption pack for an Indian elephant that my aunt has adopted on my behalf. Her name is Kiruna (or something like that) and apparently she lives in a national park somewhere in northern India. I can safely say that it is a present I never expected but one that I'm very pleased with all the same.

Incidentally, my cousin's present was the adoption of a tiger. Given that he's already fairly good at fencing, I'm starting to wonder if he's about to become He-Man:

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-25T10:17:00.000Z

I'd like to wish all my readers a very merry Christmas and a happy new year! (And, for the benefit of the fictional PC brigade: happy Winterval as well).

How laws are made - #WRB

2011-12-19T13:14:00.000Z

This is one of my lunchtime series of blogposts.

Yesterday I was reviewing the progress of the hideously flawed Welfare Reform Bill through the House of Lords and realised that I wasn't entirely sure about what was meant to happen next. Given that I'm something of a political anorak, it suddenly dawned on me that if I didn't understand what was going on then it was highly likely that most people wouldn't understand what was going on either. So this blog post will be dedicated to giving a very brief overview of the way in which parliament passes laws and what this means for the Welfare Reform Bill.

Laws can be written and proposed in either the House of Lords or the House of Commons. A law passed by parliament is called an Act of Parliament while one which hasn't yet been passed is called a Bill.

Procedures differ slightly depending on which House the bill originates in but the basics remain the same. The first stage is the First Reading which is where the bill is formally proposed. It's not voted on at this stage as this is just a formality.

The first test comes at the Second Reading of the bill. At this point a debate and a vote will take place on the principle of the bill. It's very rare for a bill not to be passed at this stage as even people who disagree with the bill will still often vote for it in principle with the intent of amending it later. An example of where this happened is the NHS Reform Bill where Lib Dems who disagreed with a lot of the proposals in the bill still voted for it at the Second Reading so that they could try and amend it later.

After the Second Reading comes the committee stage - this is where the bill is examined and detailed amendments are proposed. This can take quite a while. At the end of it, the bill then enters the Report stage where amendments and the bill as a whole are debated line by line. Finally, the bill will then move onto the Third Reading which will debate and vote on the final version of the bill. If the bill is in the Commons then the votes on amendments will take place at the Report stage - if it's in the Lords then amendments can be voted on and proposed in both the Report stage and the Third Reading.

Assuming the bill is passed, it will then move onto the other House of parliament for the entire process to be repeated again. So if a bill starts in the Commons (such as the Welfare Reform Bill) then it will go all the way through to the Third Reading in the Commons, after which it will be passed to the Lords which will then repeat the same process.

The only time a bill need not go through both Houses of Parliament is if it's a supply bill (e.g. the government's budget) or a confidence bill (e.g. a bill which tests whether the government still has a majority in the House of Commons).

After a bill has made it through the second House then two things can happen. If the second House hasn't made any changes to the bill then it's approved by parliament and goes onto receive Royal Assent and becomes a law. If changes have been made, or the bill has been rejectded entirely, then it has to go back to the House it came from for the entire procedure to be repeated again and the changes either approved, rejected or amended. If the original House rejects the changes, or makes additional changes, then the bill is then sent back to the second House for the same thing to happen there. A bill will ping pong back and forth between the two houses until both of them agree on the same exact text of the bill.

However, the Commons has the option of using the Parliament Act to force through a law without the Lords being able to block or amend it. This is an extremely lengthy and difficult process though, which is why it has only happened in the past for crucial pieces of legislation which the government places a priority on. Most of the time the government will prefer to try and reach some sort of compromise as to try and use the Parliament Act for every bill would tie up parliament so much that only a handful of pieces of legislation would be able to be passed before the next general election.

The Welfare Reform Bill is currently at the Report stage in the Lords and will enter the Third Reading in the new year. As the Lords have already made at least one amendment to it, the bill will have to go back to the Commons. And if the Commons makes any further changes to the bill then it will have to go back to the Lords once again. The long and short of it being that legislative ping pong makes it look like it'll be quite a while before the time limit to ESA gets implemented - assuming it's not scrapped entirely of course.

Texans are an invented people

2011-12-14T12:32:00.001Z

This is one of my series of lunchtime blogposts.

The man who looks likely to be Obama's opponent in the 2012 US presidential elections is Newt Gingrich - the man who once closed down the federal government because President Clinton made him sit at the back of a plane.

In an interview, Gingrich thought it would be a good idea to describe the Palestinians as "an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs and who were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places, and for a variety of political reasons we have sustained this war against Israel now since the 1940s, and it's tragic".

When challenged over this he then decided to add that "Somebody ought to have the courage to tell the truth. These people are terrorists."

Well, Gingrich is an idiot. His entire argument is that Palestine was a province of the Ottoman Empire and was never a country in its own right and therefore Palestinians are an "invented people".

But the thing is that that can apply to a lot of people: there was never an Argentinian state until it gained indepence from the Spanish Empire, the same with Uruquay and Paraguay and others. A lot of the Balkan nations never existed as independent nations until recently either.

Yet all of them have a national identity. Now, national identity is an invention. It was a concept invented in the 18th and 19th centuries and which has gradually been spreading throughout the world ever since.

So if you're going to use the argument that national identity is an invented concept then you have to apply it equally. So let's look at the biggest example of an "invented people" in history: the Americans.

After all, Americans don't have any single cultural identity or ethnicity to bind them together - they're a mixing pot of every race, culture, religion and creed imaginable. Yet you can hardly say Americans don't have a national identity. But, then again, the USA gained independence from the British so you can say that now they're a nation, they have a national identity.

But what about the US states?

Look at Texas, or Iowa, or Ohio, or Indiana. All of these states have strong identities. Yet only Texas was ever an independent nation (and even then only briefly). But you try and tell a Texan. or an Iowan, or an Ohian or a Hoosier that they're an invented people. Yeah, they might have come from all over the world before settling in their respective states but that doesn't stop them from having a strong identity as a state. Iowans will tell you about how they're self-reliant, how they sort out their problems for themselves, Texans will tell you about going to church and family values, and so on with the others.

So if they obviously have their own identity then who the fuck does Gingrich think he is to tell another group of people they can't have their own? Yes, Palestinians are Arabs - but so are the Israelis when you look back far enough. To deny them a national identity simply because of their race means you might as well say that there's no such thing as a Frenchman or an Englishman or a Scotsman or a German because they're all Europeans ethnically.

And as for the terrorist comments - does Gingrich really have nothing other than horse manure for brains?

There are about 4 million people living in the Palestinian territories - anyone who says that every single one of them, right down to the last man, woman, child and newborn baby is a terrorist is an absolute idiot. More than that, they're a bigot. It's exactly that kind of deadly bigotry that led to millions of Jews being killed in the Holocaust. When you say that one group of arbitrarily defined people are bad then it's only a few steps from there to genocide.

Now, I don't want to go into the ins and outs of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict because there are faults on both sides. But if you and your family have lived on and owned a piece of land for centuries, which is your only livlihood, imagine how you might react when a foreigner from another continent pitches up and declares that it belongs to them now because their distant ancestors lived in the region and because bad things happened to their people in another country and that if you want to stay then you'll have to become a second class citizen.

Under those circumstances, it's not surprising that some Palestiniant turn to violence against a state that they view as besieging and arbitrarily punishing the inhabitants of Gaza and that is constantly stealing more of their land. And, likewise, it's not surprising that some Israelis take extreme views when their religion has made them a persecuted minority for the best part of two thousand years and when people living in their country are regularly attacked by indiscriminate rocket and suicide attacks originating from people who follow a religion which has not exactly shown historical frienship to Jews.

So for an outsider to wade into a decades old conflict, without any apparent knowledge or understanding of the issue, and to state that one group does not have a right to exist, as they are made up, and that that group are all terrorists anyway is absolutely repugnant.

And, just to turn it the other way round, imagine what would have happened if a politician had got up and said:

"The Jews are an invented people, and they're all terrorists."

Except of course, we don't have to imagine it - a politician once regularly said something similar and he was Adolf Hitler.

So, in conclusion, congratulations to Newt Gingrich for being the kind of idiotic, shit-for-brains, racist moron who makes arguments using the same logic that the Nazis did. Well fucking done.

Help protect disabled people with a single email

2011-12-10T15:04:00.000Z

Caron's said this better than I can, so I'm crossposting what she said. Please, please act on it:

One of the great things about this party is that ordinary members can get involved in policy making. Look at what Ewan Hoyle's achieved in getting through an evidence based drugs policy as an example. Our raising of the tax threshold policy was the brainchild of WLD member Lizzie Jewkes. Our Conference is the sovereign body of the party and means that we as ordinary members have big say in the direction of the party.

There has never been a more important time to be a member of the party. Now we have a chance to influence what the Government does. This week, I've been asking you to sign George's and my petition asking ministers to make sure that all chemotherapy patients are not hassled by ATOS to do work capability assessments. A couple of months ago, I asked you to write to Lib Dem peers to make sure that they voted in accordance with the motion on Employment and Support Allowance passed at our Birmingham Conference.

The Welfare Reform Bill has been wending its way through the Lords over the past few weeks and the next few days see some critical votes. One of the most iniquitous parts of this legislation is the withdrawal of contributory ESA from people after a year, regardless of their condition. The most compelling argument on this I heard came at Scottish Conference from Ken Reed, the incoming chair of RNIB Scotland:

Ken is a really eloquent speaker and made the clearest argument I've so far heard against the arbitrary time limit for contributory ESA. He asked us all to imagine what it would be like if we lost our sight tomorrow. It would take us 12 months just to get used to life as a blind person. No way would you be ready to get into the job market again. You can see what he means. Imagine if it happened to you - once you've got over the sheer shock and can get around your own home without incident, there's becoming fluent in Braille to consider. Maybe you could have a look at an introduction to Russian or Chinese to see how quickly your brain could learn to process different symbols properly just to get a smidgen of an idea of what that would be like.

Yet, under the Government's plans, that newly blind person would be left without any ESA after 12 months. The person whose body is wracked from exposure to toxins at almost fatal limits as a result of chemo is unlikely to have recovered. And what of long term conditions from Depression to Crohn's Disease? What's particularly bad is that it's darned hard to get decent treatment for many mental health conditions. Nick Clegg's helped that with an extra £400 million for talking therapies, but it's still not enough.

If you want to see our peers vote in accordance with the policy passed in Birmingham which was very clear that Lib Dems in Government should "oppose arbitrary time limits" then you need to encourage them along that path by writing to them soon. Pick as many as you like at random. Campaigner Sue Marsh, at Diary of a Benefit Scrounger, has suggested a template letter. I think it's vital that our Peers see the strength of feeling amongst our membership on this, so please write yourself and encourage others to do so.

You can take your pick from the list here. If you know them personally, so much the better - the more you can write to the merrier.

These are a crucial series of votes which make a huge difference to sick and disabled people. Please take some time out of your day to e-mail our peers and let our party leadership know how strongly we feel on these issues.

Scottish pandas, Scandinavian salmon and Chinese dissidents

2011-12-09T13:08:00.001Z

This is one of my series of lunch time blogposts.

I'm ashamed to say that I make a point of not commenting on Scottish affairs - mainly out of ignorance and out of fear of being swamped by cybernats frothing at the mouth at an Englishman daring to tell Scots how to run their lives (in fairness, I do have a regular cybernat visitor in my coment threads already - but he seems fairly tame).

However, I was reading Private Eye this lunchtime and I noticed a brief piece about the two Chinese pandas that have arrived at Edinburgh zoo. Although Private Eye neglected to mention that the pandas were drunk within two minutes of arrival (that's a joke by the way) they did mention a few interesting facts.

The first is that the pandas are not a "gift" to Edinburgh zoo as they remain property of the Chinese government - which is why Edinburgh zoo will be paying £1 million+ over ten years to lease the animals.

The second is that the arrival of the pandas coincides neatly with the Scottish and Chinese governments agreeing to export thousands of tons of Scottish salmon to China - something which has meant the expansion of 441 Scottish fish farms with the associated increase in pollution.

The reason for the sudden boom in Scottish salmon exports is the Chinese banning the import of Norwegian salmon following the Nobel Prize Committee deciding to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese dissident and artist Liu Xiaobo.

Whilst it's depressing that the Scottish government is boosting their economy through complicity in China's appalling record on human rights and the suppression of free speech and protest, it's not exactly unique in doing so.

What did strike me though is that, by doing this, the Scottish SNP government are rather sticking two fingers in the air at the Norwegian government's decision not to bow to Chinese pressure to interfere with the Nobel Peace Prize committee.

Which is odd given that the SNP have been going on lately about how they want to be much closer to the Scandinavian countries. I won't say anything else now so that at least I'll retain a little bit of a chance of avoiding cybernat wrath.

An email to Tim Farron about cancer patients

2011-12-08T12:36:00.001Z

This is one of my series of lunch time blogposts.

I'm afraid I'm going to cheat today. Instead of writing a proper blogpost, I'm just gonna post an email I sent to Tim Farron MP, President of the Liberal Democrats, yesterday.

You see, yesterday I tweeted Tim about my article on Lib Dem Voice about the government's proposals to force cancer patients to undertake work related activity. Because Tim is so awesome, he replied to my tweet almost immediately and asked me to email him about it. So, below, is the email I sent to him:

------------------------------------------------

Hello,

I tweeted you this article from Lib Dem Voice (http://www.libdemvoice.org/opinion-government-must-not-force-work-activities-on-cancer-patients-26128.html) and you very kindly said you'd raise the issue with the DoH. As it happens, this issue is actually one governed by the DWP and they're the ones proposing the changes.

Basically, it used to be the case that cancer patients getting chemo intravenously received unconditional support once they'd proved to the DWP they were undergoing the treatment. But radiotherapy patients and patients getting chemo orally were placed in the Work Related Activity Group and were forced to undertake work related activity, such as attending physical interviews with DWP employees, or have their benefits cut, and to undergo medical assessments - despite the fact that radio and oral chemo are just as debilitating and horrible as intravenous chemo.

Macmillan Cancer Support were asked to make recommendation for change on this issue to the Second Year Harrington Report (http://www.dwp.gov.uk/docs/wca-review-2011.pdf).

The DWP response to the recommendations (http://www.dwp.gov.uk/docs/wca-review-2011-response.pdf) was to end unconditional support for all cancer patients. Instead, radiotherapy and chemotherapy patients (including those receiving it orally and those receiving it intravenously) will all be forced to undergo medical assessments and will be expected to attend work related interviews. The only good news is that the DWP has said that more of these assessments and work related activity will be made paper based.

This is obviously better than cancer patients having to physically go to assessment centres to undergo the Work Capability Assessment, but it still means that they'll be burdened with form filling in and paperwork, with the threat of financial sanctions hanging over them, when it's obvious that they're sick and really don't need the additional stress.

The DWP's reasoning behind the changes is that to give this group of people unconditional support would prevent those who want to from working or undertaking work related activity but the fact is that those receiving unconditional support have always been entitled to take up work related activity provided by the DWP if they want to.

Macmillan aren't happy about this (http://www.macmillan.org.uk/Aboutus/News/Latest_News/DWPproposestoforcechemotherapypatientstoundergostressfulbenefitchecks.aspx) and, aside from all the ethical and moral reasons for us Lib Dems to want this group of cancer patients to receive unconditional support (which is my primary concern), it could potentially turn into a damaging PR disaster for the government and us as a party by association.

It's be really great if you could try and convince the DWP to change their minds on this issue.

I know that as an MP and Party President you must have a lot on your plate (and that's probably understating matters) but if you could also find a few minutes to read this brief overview of the disability benefits situation (http://thepotterblogger.blogspot.com/2011/12/concise-disability-benefits-fact-sheet.html) as it should give you an idea of the context of the overall situation within which this change is taking place. The time limit, in particular, will hit cancer patients (as well as the sick and disabled in general) and is in fact something which autumn conference opposed by unanimously passing a motion against it.

Thank you so much for your time.

Best Regards,

George Potter

An email to the spammers

2011-12-07T14:22:00.001Z

This is an email to the company that a spambot in the Potter Blogger's comment threads recently linked to:

To support@laws.com

Dear Sir/Madam,

Is the blogspot profile CPSL (http://www.blogger.com/profile/07428876147362609952) anything to do with you? As far as I can tell it appears to be a spam bot which has been leaving links to your website in the comment threads on my blog (http://thepotterblogger.blogspot.com/).

Here is an example of the kind of messages it has been leaving:

CPSL said...: Attorney and Law Firm Information and Directory. Find Legal Information, Laws and local Attorneys. legal advice

If this spam bot is anything to do with you then kindly desist from using it on my blog. It's pretty shoddy as it doesn't even make an attempt to pretend it's related to the blogposts it comments on and it's immediately obvious that it's spam. In any event, there's no point in it as I immediately flag as spam and remove any comments it leaves.

So, aside from being incredibly irritating, it's utterly pointless. As I said, if CPSL is anything to do with you then please keep it away from my blog. And, incidentally, if it is anything to do with you then I think you should know that using spambots is a sign of an utterly pathetic business. If you struggle to attract clients so much that you're forced to rely on spambots then you really have hit rock bottom and you might as well give up and try something of use to society. Such as cleaning sewers.

Yours sincerely,
George Potter

Idle Speculation

2011-12-07T13:05:00.001Z

This is one of my series of lunchtime blogposts.

Idle speculation and day dreaming is one of my favourite ways of wasting time. And, lucky you, you're about to be introduced to a piece of my groundless, out-of-thin-air, speculation about the new planet recently discovered by astronomers.

Courtesy of the BBC

Kepler22-b or, as I will henceforth refer to it, lizardworld, is nearly two and a half times the size of the Earth, has liquid water on the surface and has an average temperature of 22C.

Now, you might be wondering why I've decided to name it lizardworld. Well, that's because I've been wondering what kind of life might exist there, if life does exis there.

Of course, the only thing we have to go on is Earth's own lifeforms and alien life could be radically different.

But, if we assume life does exist, the first place to look for it would be in the oceans. Algae and plankton are some of the simplest life forms so I guess there might be something similar on lizardworld. And fish of some sort would probably be there and would most likely look something similar to what we have on Earth - that's because the evolution of the body shapes of fish is determined by the bouyancy of water rather than by gravity.

And, if there are fish then it's possible that some of them might have crawled onto land and become amphibians. And, much like on Earth, these amphibians could possibly have evolved into some sort of lizards. They might have different numbers of limbs and eyes (they'd almost certainly have eyes as those have evolved independently in several species on Earth) and it's anyone's guess what their body structure would be like in gravity 2.4 times greater than ours.

But, if these lizards do exist then they'd probably be cold blooded. With an average temperature of 22C (as opposed to 15C on Earth) then there wouldn't be any need for them to adapt to cold temperatures - which would also mean no evolution of anything equivalent to animals.

So, letting my imagination run wild, I'm gonna guess that the dominant life form on lizardworld will be cold blooded lizards. They'll also probably be stumpy and muscular due to the high gravity.

Of course, this is all assuming that they have plants which photosynthesise carbon dioxide to oxygen so that these lizards can breathe. That's assuming they breathe oxygen of course.

Anyway, what my imagination has produced is a balmly planet, with nice sandy beaches and ruled by giant monitor lizards. Although this might sound like a nice place for a holiday, sadly, even if you were to travel at 500 kilometres a second it would still take you over 36,000 years to get there.

On the brightside, this means that no one will be able to disprove my speculation for a while yet :)

Concise disability benefits fact sheet

2011-12-05T22:20:00.007Z

This is the concise version of the disability benefits fact sheet I produced earlier. Sources are provided in the long version.

Overall, there are 10 million disabled people in the UK, half of whom are over the state pension age. In total, 19% of the working population are disabled. However, 50% of them are in work with another 1.9 million looking for work. They are hindered in the job market by the fact that 23% of disabled people have no qualifications compared to 9% of the rest of the population. These figures are in line with the European average.

4.7% of government spending is on disability and sickness benefits. This includes £17.2bn on Disability Living Allowance (DLA) which is paid to 1.8 million sick and disabled people to cover the extra costs caused by their conditions - such as the petrol costs of regular hospital visits. It is a working benefit and a significant number of recipients use it to help them remain in work. Approximately £220 million a year of the DLA budget is lost through fraud and error. However, only £60 million of the money lost is due to deliberate fraud. The rest is lost through errors by claimants or errors by the Department of Work and Pensions. This equates to a fraud rate of just 0.5% for DLA.

In contrast, each year the DWP saves a net £70 million due to DLA underpayments. The maximum amount of DLA a disabled person can receive, incidentally, is £125 a week. Proposals by the government to replace DLA with PIP will lead to a 20% cut in funding.

The main form of support for sick or disabled people whose condition prevents them from working is the Employment Support Allowance (ESA). This is worth up to £100 a week. People claiming ESA are placed in two groups. One group receives contributory ESA which is taxed and which they will only be eligible to receive at full rate for a maximum of 12 months, including a 13 week assessment period where they can receive a maximum of only £67.50 a week. After the 12 months has passed, they will be moved into the income-related ESA group which is means tested and withheld completely from anyone with combined household savings (including those of a partner) of more than £16,000.The means test also removes support if the household income is over £7,500 a year.

The assessment which determines which ESA group claimants will be placed in are carried out by a private company, Atos, which employs assessors who are not required to have any specialist knowledge of the conditions they are assessing. Atos had influence in the development of DWP disability benefit policy.

The assessment itself, the WCA, works on a tick box system. Out of WCA decisions appealed, 40% are overturned, indicating a high inaccuracy rate. The WCA does not properly take into account time variant conditions and many disabled people are stuck in a revolving door where they are found fit to work by the WCA, have the decision overturned on appeal and are called in for another WCA which once again finds them fit to work. Additionally, a large number of the WCA assessment centres lack disabled access.

The WCA also determines whether people belong in the Support or WRAG groups of ESA. Those in the WRAG, which can include cancer patients undergoing radio and chemotherapy, are required to undertake 'work related activity' or face financial sanctions.

The DWP recently proposed halting all ESA payments for claimants who appeal WCA or sanction decisions for the entirety of the appeals process.

Over the past two years reports of disability hate crime have risen by 75%. Disability hate crime includes people being spat on, physically attacked, verbally abused and being thrown out of wheelchairs. More generally, two thirds of British adults admit to actively avoiding disabled people. This situation has been fuelled, at least in part, by a significant increase in the use of pejorative language such as "scroungers" and "fiddlers" by the media when referring to benefits claimants. There have also been a large number of widely reported, inaccurate stories which have made such claims as that the cost of disability benefit fraud is £1 billion, that all 1.5 million households on disability benefits are scroungers and that 70% or 75% are 'perfectly' fit to work. None of these figures are accurate and, for example, the 70% figure comes from including people such as cancer patients as 'fit to work'.

Finally, here is a link to a blogpost which in turn contains links to many terrifying and horrific of what disability hate crime actually means in reality. Please take a few minutes to read them.

NOTE: This was updated on 20/01/12 with some minor changes to make the wording slightly clearer.

Disability benefits fact sheet

2011-12-05T21:24:00.009Z

This post was prompted by the frankly terrifying level of ignorance and the buying into of myths about disability benefits by some of my fellow Lib Dems. Hopefully this post will go some way towards dispelling ignorance about a vital issue.

If you don't have the patience to read all of this, I'm compiling a separate, concise fact sheet.

Spending on disability benefits

In 20010/11 of £691.7bn of government spending, £32.8bn, or 4.7%, was spent on disability and sickness benefits. This figure includes £17.2bn on Disability Living Allowance (DLA) + Attendance Allowance (an associated benefit) and £7.8 on the Employment Support Allowance (ESA) which is replacing Incapacity Benefit (IB) and Income Support (IS) - the latter of which represents the remaining £7.8bn of spending.

ESA, DLA and the Mobility Allowance are benefits only available to the long term sick and disabled. This is because Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) paid to people by their employer for up to 28 weeks if they are sick and unable to work. Only after this point do long term sickness benefits kick in.

In 2009/10, government expenditure on ESA was £2.84bn. Of this, £1.17bn was spent on Contributory ESA and £1.67bn was spent on Income Related ESA. The overall purpose of ESA is to support people who are unable to work due to long term sickness or disability.

Contributory ESA is paid to those who have made sufficient national insurance contributions and is taxable. This requirement is waved for those who become unfit for work before the age of 20 (25 in some cases). Income-related ESA is means tested, non-taxable and will not be paid to anyone who has household savings of more than £16,000.

When someone claims ESA there is a 13 week assessment period period where claimants have to undergo various tests and assessments, including the Work Capability Assessment (WCA). During this time, they are paid a reduced rate of ESA of a maximum of £67.50 a week. The highest amount available to someone who has passed the assessments is £99.85 a week.

DLA is a payment made to people to cover the extra costs of long term illness or disability and is received by 1.8 million people. DLA is split into a care component and a mobility component. Someone eligible for the highest rate of both components would receive a total of £125 a week. 1.8 million

DLA is currently in the process of being replaced by PIPs which will be modelled on the ESA assessment system described below. This is intended to cut 20% off spending on DLA. 20% of those on DLA are expected to be ineligible for PIPs.

Number of people claiming disability benefits

According to DLF:

People with disabilities

There are over 6.9 million disabled people of working age which represents 19% of the working population.
There are over 10 million disabled people in Britain, of whom 5 million are over state pension age.
There are two million people with sight problems in the UK.

Families with disabled children

There are 770,00 disabled children under the age of 16 in the UK. That equates to 1 child in 20.
Only 8% of families get services from their local social services.
It costs up to three times as much to raise a disabled child as it does to raise a child without disabilities.

Disability and employment

There are currently 1.3 million disabled people in the UK who are available for and want to work.
Only half of disabled people of working age are in work (50%), compared with 80% of non disabled people.
23% of disabled people have no qualifications compared to 9% of non disabled people.
Nearly one in five people of working age (7 million, or 18.6%) in Great Britain have a disability.

Disability benefit fraud

Official statistics for DLA show that £220m was lost 2009/10 through t fraud and error. Following a DWP press release, a figure which has been quoted in the press is £1bn. The £1bn figure is the total cost of disability benefit fraud and error over the six years from 2004 to 2010.

An official breakdown of the figures showed that, of the £220m, £70m was lost through mistakes by claimants, £90 million was lost through mistakes by the DWP and £60m was lost through deliberate fraud.

Given that the total spending on DLA, and the associated benefit AA, in 2009/10 was £11.8bn, this equates to a fraud rate of just 0.5%.

Additionally, in 2009/10, the government saved £290m through underpayments caused by error. When you take into account the cost of overpayments through error (£220m) this meant that the government saved a net £70m through accidental underpayments - ten million pounds more than the cost of deliberate fraud.

ESA and the WCA

Eligibility for Employment Support Allowance is primarily determined through an assessment process of which the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) plays a key role. WCAs are conducted on behalf of the government by the private IT company Atos Healthcare which has been involved in forming DWP welfare policy. This contract is worth £805m over a ten year period.

The WCAs entail a form which a claimant is required to fill in with details of their condition and an interview with a Health Professional. The Health Professionals employed by Atos consist of doctors, nurses and physiotherapists. They are not required to have any special knowledge of the conditions they assess as their job in the interview is to check the claimant's answers against a computer generated questionnaire. The questionnaire consists of various "descriptors". If a claimant matches a particular descriptor then they receive points. If a claimant gains more than 15 points in the WCA then they are deemed eligible for ESA.

The WCA has been criticised over the inaccuracy of the assessments. Claimants are able to appeal their assessment decisions at an Independent Tribunal. Of those assessment decisions which make it to appeal, 40% are overturned. Where the Citizen's Advice Bureau provides advice and support to claimants going to appeal, 70% of decisions are overturned.

The WCA also determines whether a claimant belongs in the Support group or Work Related Activity Group (WRAG) of ESA. Those in the WRAG are required to adhere to strict work-related conditions in order to continue receiving the benefit in full and face financial sanctions if they do not. The conditions may involve attending 'work-focused' interviews.

Government proposals about ESA include time limiting contributory ESA to 12 month (including the 13 week assessment phase where it is paid at a lower rate) after which claimants will be automatically moved into the Work Related Activity Group.

Government proposals on ESA

Government proposals about ESA include time limiting contributory ESA to 12 month (including the 13 week assessment phase where it is paid at a lower rate) after which claimants will be automatically moved into the Work Related Activity Group and required to undertake work related activities. This is a cause for concern as the time limit of 12 months has been arbitrarily selected and is not based on whether a claimant is capable of undertaking work related activity or not.

Other proposals are halting all payment of ESA to claimants while they are appealing against the WCA or against WRAG sanctions and to remove the exemption from work related activity of cancer patients undergoing radio or chemotherapy.

Negative media coverage

One tabloid headline this September said that there were four million scrounging families in Britain. As was pointed out, for this figure to make sense, it has to include all the 1.5 million households living on disability benefits. This is an example of how sick and disabled are painted as scroungers by the media.

In February, following the release of DWP statistics, several media outlets reported that 1.8 million people, or 70%, receiving Incapacity Benefit were fit to work. The figures come from two research projects where IB claimants were reassessed under the criteria of the ESA assessments. These found that 29.6% were found fit to work immediately. The 70% figure came from combining this figure with the 39% who were found to belong in the WRAG. At that time, claimants were placed in the WRAG if they were:

“Suffering from a life threatening disease in relation to which there is medical evidence that the disease is uncontrollable”.
“An in-patient in a hospital or similar institution”.
“[Receiving] regular weekly treatment by way of by way of haemodyalisis or chronic renal failure”
“Receiving treatment by way of intravenous, intraperitoneal or intrathecal chemotherapy;”

This does not equate to everyone in the WRAG being fit to work. Despite this, media coverage, as recorded by Factcheck, described them as fit to work with the Daily Mail in particular using the phrase "perfectly" fit to work.

Following another DWP press release, it was also reported widely in the media that three quarters, or 887,000, of ESA claimants were 'fit to work.' However, 428,800 of these withdrew their claims prior to assessment - given the 13 week assessment period some of these withdrawals will be due to people recovering enough to be fit to work. When the number who appealed decisions, and the appeal success rate, are taken into account, the actual proportion found fit to work was 57%.

It is also worth bearing in mind that all those who previously received IB are being migrated onto ESA via the WCA. ESA was designed to be stricter than IB so the high proportion found fit to work is not necessarily surprising.

More generally, a recent report found a significant increase in both the coverage of disability benefit fraud and in the use of pejorative terms towards disabled people by the media.

Disability hate crime

Disability hate crime in the UK has risen by 75% in the past two years. According to Scope, this is partly due to the vilification of people on welfare by the tabloids. Additionally, two thirds of adults admitted actively avoiding disabled people.

#Occupy protesters are terrorists

2011-12-05T12:59:00.002Z

This is one of my series of lunchtime blogposts.

This is why we need a Lib Dem Home Secretary.

Today we have the wonderful revelation that the City of London police have labelled #occupy protesters as a "domestic threat". Here's the "Terrorism/Extremism Update" letter where they do so:

In quite literally the same breath as talking about the threat from Al Qaeda and the IRA (terrorist organisations which have killed thousands of people between them) the police also talk about the "domestic threat" from a protest that has so far managed such heinous attacks on our way of life such as annoying the clergy and taking a prolonged camping trip in central London.

This is both chilling and disgusting.

In this country we are fortunate enough to have a strong tradition of freedom and liberty, built up over a thousand years. And every single liberty, every single right - from the right to speak your mind to the right not to be kidnapped and tortured by the police - was fought for and won through relentless struggle that was frequently met with violence and repression from the authorities.

We are not China. We are not Belarus. We are not Nazi Germany. We have rights and one of the most vital of those rights is the right to protest. Likening citizens to murdereds like Al Qaeda purely for activism is nothing less than an utter assault on the right to protest.

Activisim is a brilliant thing. I'm an activist. Everyone in a political party or a charity or a pressure group is engaging in activism. Activism is what builds a strong society, where people feel involved and feel that they have a stake in society. The kind of paranoia that views this as a threat is potentially deadly. It is not a thousand miles away from the thinking that led to the mass imprisonment, torture and execution of protestors in authoritarian regimes throughout human history.

We should be beyond that. Have we learnt nothing from the semi-police state that New Labour created? One where everyone was a suspect and where an attitude of "if you're innocent you shouldn't have anything to hide" prevailed. Except that attitude led to the imprisonment of the innocent. Right now, literally right now, there are men under permanent house arrest, with no prospect of appeal or even a trial, for the crime of being in a house where ricin was being produced. Except there was no ricin. The intelligence that ricin was being produced came from an anonymous tip off and not one shred of evidence to back up that suspicion has ever been produced. Yet, because of that, innocent men are facing life imprisonment without ever having been found guilty in court.

That is exactly the attitude that the paranoia in the above letter leads to. To all liberals this should be utterly abhorrent. Yet, because we have a Home Secretary just as idiotic, just as authoritarian just as contemptuous of fundamental British liberties as her New Labour predecessors, this paranoia is allowed to continue and allowed to fester and gnaw at the heart of the men with truncheons and tasers and guns who are supposed to defend those liberties. But instead they are turned into a suspicious organisation where anyone who dares to stand out from the crowd is a suspect as threatening as Bin Laden.

That is what we have come to.

I'd hope that our Lib Dem ministers will do something about this. I'd hope that they'd tell the Home Secretart to fuck off and stop the police from treating peaceful protesters as terrorist suspects. I'd hope that they'd convince the police of how wrong it is to send out letters to the public where activism is conflated with terrorism.

I doubt it though. Too many of our ministers seem to have turned to snivelling cowards whenever matters of principle are involved. I really, really hope I'm wrong but, from where I stand, I can't see any reason to be optimistic.

Hat tip to Lib Con.

Latest from the DWP: F*** cancer patients

2011-12-04T12:51:00.000Z

Caron Lindsay and I have set up a petition against an utterly disgusting decision by the DWP to force cancer patients undergoing radio and chemotherapy to attend work related interviews, despite the fact someone undergoing that kind of treatment often will be physically unable to do so, and face financial penalties if they don't.

As someone whose mother died of cancer, I can tell you first hand just what an impact chemo and radiotherapy can have. The last thing cancer patients need is extra stress and hassle while fighting for their lives.

So that's why I'd ask you to sign this petition to get the government to change it's mind. I'd also suggest you go and read Caron's other suggestions on how you can contact Lib Dem ministers to get them to put pressure on the government on this issue.

Finally, if you're still not convinced, I suggest you read the following from Sue Marsh about the DWP's decision:

"You know how I often point out the fact that if you have IV chemotherapy you qualify for unconditional ESA support, but if you take chemo orally, you don't?

Yup, it's that tough. Despite the fact oral chemo or radiotherapy can be just as physically devastating as IV, one meant you got unconditional support, the other meant you had to attend work related interviews!! Yup, seriously. No, I'm not making it up.

As you can imagine, Macmillan Cancer Support campaigned pretty hard on this issue, pointing out that the system was clearly unfair.

Well, after due consideration, the government appear to agree. It is, they conclude, clearly unfair that the scrounging IV chemo and radio patients are getting off scott free. Therefore, the government suggest they will all now have to face work related interviews.

Yup, seriously. Yes, you did read that right.

Anyone undergoing chemo or radiotherapy for cancer should not be considered unfit for work, according to the government. (Unless they have less than 6 months to live, great ole softies that they are)

I can't even think of a snappy conclusion. I literally do not know how to put that into words.
If however, the government are actively looking for ways to create the biggest PR disaster of all time, then surely this will be a top contender?"

Let's scrap road tax

2011-12-04T10:45:00.000Z

One of the (many) things readers might not know about me is that I was born in Brussels. Or, as I put it to eurosceptic tories, I come from the EU and I'm here to eat your house prices.

Now, one of the interesting things about Belgium (which, for the geographically impaired, is the country in which Brussels is located) is that they don't have road tax. And, therefore, they don't have road tax discs in cars.

What they do have, however, are insurance discs. While looking much like road tax discs, insurance discs confirm that the car is insured and contain basic details of the insurance policy. As you may imagine, this makes it very easy to spot uninsured cars and also makes it easier to get another driver's insurance details in the event of an accident.

I happen to think that we would do well to emulate the Belgians in this area (if we started emulating Belgian beer manufacture then that would be an added bonus).

If it were up to me, I'd scrap road tax completely. I'd then increase insurance tax for vehicles in order to make up for the lost revenue. But some of the money from the increased insurance tax should be used to replace road tax discs with insurance tax discs.

At the moment, there is a tendency among some wealthy people not to bother with insurance. They're not likely to get caught and, if they are, then paying the fine is cheaper than buying the insurance in the first place.

The problem of uninsured drivers is a big one and one which will only get bigger. Personally, I think a scheme along the lines of the Belgian one would be a good step forwards. In fact, I'm even considering putting it forward as a motion to spring conference. Any thoughts on the idea? Please feel free to comment.

Are the Lib Dems really doomed because of the autumn budget statement?

2011-12-03T20:32:00.000Z

Ugh. You go away for a few days and suddenly all sorts of interesting stuff happens without you around to blog about it. How will the world survive?

But seriously. Having got back I've seen some speculation how the announcement that deficit elimination won't be completed until 2017 will tie the Lib Dems into the tories and permanent destruction.

Well, sorry, but that just doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Yes, eliminating the deficit will mean that we have to go into the next election with £30 billion of cuts/tax rises in our manifesto. But so will Labour and so will the Conservatives.

This won't make things much different from the last election. All the major parties were agreed on the need for deficit reduction but there were huge differences on how they proposed going about it.

At the next election, the tories will no doubt put forwards a manifesto based on cutting public services, cutting taxes for the rich, cutting employment rights and selling national assets off on the cheap. In contrast to the usual tory idiocy, and the economic incompetence of Labour, it won't be hard to offer our own, credible alternative.

For example, there's already an ongoing project to work out how we as a party would like the tax system to look in 2020 and then working backwards to find out the changes we could make to get us there. Lib Dem tax priorities have long been orientated towards a redistribution of the tax burden - specifically towards taxing unearned wealth a lot more and earned wealth a lot less. This is a fundamental part of the belief in fairness that has underpinned two centuries of liberal philosophy.

Now, I don't know about you, but I think that a manifesto that promised, for example, significant increases in the personal tax allowance and a reduction of VAT paid for by an increase in taxes on land and property (after all, income can be moved into tax havens but land can't) would be rather popular. Maybe one which also promoted green issues by investing more in the green economy and in new green taxes which would be countered by cutting taxes elsewhere.

The fact is that £30 billion of savings can be found in a variety of ways. And there's also room for varying the time scale. We could say that, now the economy is improving, we can afford to slow down deficit reduction in order to reduce the burden on people. I'm not saying we should, but it just shows that being committed to eliminating the deficit doesn't mean our manifesto has to be identical to the tories'.

The other argument some have been making is that Ed Miliband will refuse to work with Nick Clegg in the event of another hung parliament and therefore necessity will force us to stick with the tories in some sort of electoral pact. Again, this is a load of nonsense.

The fact is that sticking close to the tories would mean a wipeout of most of our seats in the south east where we often depend on Labour supporters tactically voting for us. And Clegg, whatever you might think of him, isn't stupid.

I've blogged before about how I think that ditching Clegg ahead of the next election would be detrimental to us. But there's no reason he can't do a Gordon Brown and resign after the general election if that's what it takes to make a coalition work. After all, Clegg's already had an immensely successful career and, what with a minister's pension, a previous career in lobbying and the knowledge that he'd always be a likely candidate for a job with the EU Commission, I can't see any reason why he'd be determined to cling steadfastedly to a path that would be damaging to his party when instead he could leave frontline politics and be able to spend much more time with his family (something which, by all accounts, is important to him) while probably earning more money.

That's the cold hearted, cynical calculation of course. Personally, I really dislike a lot of Clegg's politics, but I still think that he has the best interests of the party at heart and I doubt he'd try to stay leader if it meant destroying the Lib Dem claim to the centre ground.

And let's consider a few options shall we? It's perfectly feasible that after the next election, if there's a hung parliament, we could: a) stay neutral, treating each piece of legislation on a case by case basis, compromising in order to achieve Lib Dem priorities whilst remaining unaligned, b) have a formal confidence and supply agreement with another party which would allows us to either keep or replace our leader as we saw fit, or c) enter a full blown coalition with another party, if necessary holding a leadership election while our Deputy Leader in the House of Commons filled the role of DPM into our next leader had been chosen.

It'd be foolish to pretend that the worsened economic situation and the impossibility of eliminating the deficit before 2015 has made our job as a party harder. But only someone utterly ignorant of the way our party can function would assume it automatically means our extinction.

Why I support the strikes

2011-11-30T12:37:00.000Z

This time yesterday I was ambivalent about the strikes. They weren’t, and still aren’t, going to affect me and I could see some sense in the arguments from both sides.

Today, however, I support the strikers.

This sudden shift in opinion is mainly due to Osbourne’s Autumn Budget Statement yesterday in which he announced a two year limit of public pay increases to 1%. Given how high inflation is, that amounts to a pay cut two years running on top of the pay freeze (effectively another pay cut) that public sector workers are already undergoing.

Whilst this will save some money, the choice of this particular way to save money looks to have been made purely to spite the unions for daring to go on strike.

Now, the fact is that public sector pensions are already sustainable. There’s no black hole in the pensions budget which needs to be filled. Despite this, the Tories are telling a lot of public sector workers that they will have to work longer and pay more in order to receive lower pensions. The logic behind this being that people in the private sector have even worse pensions.

Well, that might well be the case. I don’t have the facts at hand to make a detailed comparison. But let’s assume that Osbourne is correct when he says this. That still leaves unanswered the question as to why it is necessary to make everyone equally worse off (apart from the very rich of course) instead of trying to make everyone equally better off. Comparing downwards all the time can only lead to a race to the bottom.

And that's why I think that the unions are right to go on strike. When Osbourne responds to genuine grievances by cutting public sector pay for a lot of people who aren't especially well paid then that simply cannot be called right.

In my opinion, government should be honest about why they’re cutting pensions. They should have the guts to tell public sector workers that they haven’t done anything wrong, that their pensions are unsustainable but the fact is that they need to make them pay more in order to pay down the deficit and bring the country through the economic crisis. That’s what the truth really is and it’s the one thing that no one seems to want to admit.

The unions say the government is cutting pensions because they’re evil tories and the government say they’re cutting pensions because they’re overly generous and unaffordable. None of those claims are true.

Much as I hate it, public sector pensions probably do need to be cut to lower spending. It is unfair but the only alternative I can see is cutting other services even more. But if the government is determined to make people work longer for less then it should at least have the courage to tell them the real reason why.

Osbourne's Autumn Budget Statement

2011-11-29T12:31:00.039Z

I know everyone's going to be doing this today but I intend to liveblog from my lunchbreak while listening to the Chancellor's autumn budget statement. Sadly I don't have any fancy technology to help with the process so I'm afraid you'll have to keep refreshing your browser between 12:30 and 13:00. After than I'll just update it with a quick addendum and that will be that.

Don't forget, the setting for today's statement are predictions of the UK and the eurozone reentering recession but today is also a day where the markets have lowered the interest rate the UK will pay on government bonds (e.g. borrowed money). So that's the scene and the speech will be starting shortly.

12:32 Osbourne begins by saying how bad things are and that it's the fault of the eurozone and not the government.

Promisng investment and rebalancing the economy, standard guff.

12:33 Osbourne saying that OBR hasn't forecast UK returning to recession but a slow down in growth which will then improve year on year. These figures could always be revised downwards though...

12:34 But if we do enter recession then it's all the fault of the euro crisis.

Also claiming credit for setting up the independent OBR...

12:35 Predicted low down in growth apparently due to "external factors" such as "unexpected" energy and food price rises.

12:36 And now Osbourne's shovelling more blame onto the last government for "unsustainable growth". Therefore situation is even worse than previously thought.

Now more about how bad it is and how it's all Labour's fault...

12:37 But don't worry, borrowing costs going to fall and therefore the government will spend less on interest rates than predicted

12:38 And this reduction in borrowing cost is only down to the government's action and therefore we'd be in a much worse situation.

12:39 Osbourne's saying that if we change our course then we'll be in a much worse situation.

Admits that headroom has disappeared but claims credit for allowing headroom.

12:40 Now onto the meat. Effectively dmits that will miss deficit elimination by 2015 but will achieve surplus by 2016

12:42 More cuts coming... savings to be used for economic investment. This includes Clegg's youth job scheme.

12:43 Cuts to public pay and limiting increases to 1% after pay freeze ends. This will be well below inflation. Osbourne says will be better than private sector though.

12:44 Money saved from pay cuts will go back to treasury apart from schools and NHS where the departments will keep the money for use elsewhere.

12:45 Union bashing and telling the unions to call off the strikes. Effectively indicating that government won't change its pay offer.

12:46 Overseas aid budget to be preserved

12:47 Pensions to rise by Lib Dem triple lock

12:47 Disability benefits and child tax credits to also be increased in line with inflation

12:48 But scrapping additional previous plans rises above inflation

Hints at big increases in personal tax allowance (another LD policy) in the budget next year.

12:49 State pension age to be increased to 67 by 2026 - will save £59bn

12:51 Bank of England to be enabled to effectively do more fiscal stimulus through stuff like quantitative easing

12:51 Major programme of credit easing to be announced (leaked in yesterday's papers). Will be payed for by lowering BoE assest purchasing limit for small businesses.

12:52 Will be called national loan guarantee scheme and will be targetted at small businesses. Probably good but all measures like this take a while to see whether it worked or not.

12:53 Initiatives also aimed at medium sized businesses to boost investment in them. Will be increased if they work.

12:54 Osbourne now talking down expectations and not guaranteeing all of them will work. "Don't let the best be enemy of the good" - sounds reasonable to me.

12:54 Funds to boost development where planning permission already exists (targetted at housing marker).

12:55 Interesting stuff about increasing right to buy - each home bought will be replace by a new social house. Sounds reasonable.

12:56 Vickers banking commission report to be published soon. But will block EU financial transaction tax - stupid decision and damaging in the long term.

Increasing banking levy though - not to raise additional money but just to raise amount originally planned.

12:57 Will also clamp down on bank tax loopholes to save £.5 bn a year.

12:58 Announcing a national infrastructure plan - 500 projects to be announced. "Mobilising finance needed to deliver"

Tax cuts mentioned earlier will enable £5bn of public spending on infrastructure apparently.

12:59 Pension funds to provide £20bn of private investment.

13:00 Specifically talking about infrastructure plans which will benefit the north and the midlands. Trying to appeal to Labour voters.

13:00 South West Water prices to be cut significantly. Good news for Lib Dem voting areas...

13:01 Still no third runway to be built, but more river crossings in London. My ex will like that...

13:02 More stuff about broadband and mobile phone expansion. Boosts for enterprise zones in northern England.

Well, I have to go now. Devil will be in the details so we won't really know what's going on until tomorrow. I like the infrastructure proposals and it's good that disabled and pensioners will benefit but the details of the cuts might dampen my enthusiasm. There's no indication that strikes will be ended soon judging from Osbourne's rhetoric.

Personally, I'm glad he's just announced (13:04) that more will be invested in scientific research and other stuff like that. I think this probably amounts as a signpost to a Plan A+ budget in April which is what I always thought would happen. The government was always going to find that some of it's cuts and lack of investment would prove politically impossible. Giving up on this slightly was inevitable.

Unfortunately, he's also just signalled (13:06) that he'll water down green measures by £250 million tax relief measures for big polluters. Absolutely idiotic but it will appeal to the tory far right though. I'll miss the rest of his speech but I expect that it'll be a mix of good investment ideas and fairly short sighted red meat for tory backbenchers. Hopefully the Lib Dems will have limited the worst of them though.

I'll probably do more analysis later but I'm pleased that Osbourne has just announced that the worst ideas about limiting workers rights will go to further examination (where they can hopefully kicked into the long grass). Anyway. Got to go now.

As I said, more analysis later.

Big rant from me coming up

2011-11-26T15:38:00.000Z

I recently read an article by Jenny Willot MP on Lib Dem Voice where she claps herself and the government on the back for obeying the motion we passed at conference by implementing the recommendations of the second Harrington report.

Unfortunately, the motion was about the time limit to ESA, not the Harrington reports. So what Jenny's said is, not to put too fine a point on it, a load of cow dung. In fact, by ignoring the main point of the motion, Jenny's betraying the trust that was placed in her by members of our party when they selected her as, and campaigned for her as, a parliamentary candidate. More importantly, she's ignoring the part of the constitution which, unlike any other party, places the power to make policy in the hands of the members and not the leadership. Given that we've got the word "Democrats" in our party name then that's a pretty fundamental principle that she's breaking.

So, as a result, I've written an angry piece about it which Lib Dem Voice will hopefully publish in the next few days (assuming they don't have any issues with my second draft of it). Which means that, with a bit of luck, they'll soon be another rant of mine floating around the internet. Enjoy :)

A brilliant interview from Tim Farron. But...

2011-11-23T22:01:00.001Z

There's a really brilliant interview with awesome Tim Farron in the Guardian where he basically says what most Lib Dems are thinking about the Coalition. I can't recommend enough that you go and read it here.

I do, however, have one teensy criticism of what Tim's said:

Q: At the Lib Dem conference, the party passed a motion that could lead the way to the partial decriminalisation of drugs [it said the government should set up a panel to review the drug laws and that it should consider decriminalising the possession of controlled drugs for personal use]. Is that something that will appear in the party manifesto?

A: That's a good question. It's important we do reflect what the members support. Our view on drugs is that the debate is so witless … politicians don't seem to be able to help themselves but take populist lines on these things, and ill-informed ones.

I've highlighted in italics the bit I disagree with. This isn't a mistake that Tim alone makes as it's the case amongst a lot of our MPs and other important figures in the party. Because the fact is that it's not enough just to "reflect what the members support". Conference, where every member can have an equal say and an equal vote, is sovereign on policy. If the membership decides on a policy then it is the duty of the leadership and our MPs to accept it and advocate it, even if they disagree with it personally. Now, the leadership does have the power to decide what to prioritise in our manifestos, but what Tim's said implies that the leadership only needs to reflect what conference decides. Well that simply isn't good enough. This isn't one of these fiddly little bits that can be ignored, it is vital to our party's constitution and the fundamental ethos of this party that conference and conference only has the final say on policy. And, as someone who is frequently spoken of as a potential future party leader, I hope Tim realises this.

Why the Lib Dems won't be annihilated in 2015

2011-11-22T12:57:00.002Z

This is one of my series of lunchtime blogposts.

Only a few months ago I was convinced that Nick Clegg would have to be replaced as leader if we were to have any chance of avoiding being slaughtered at the next general election. I also thought such an act would be justly deserved given the way in which he comprehensively mucked up over tuition fees and how damaging his behaviour in government had been to the party - not speaking up for Lib Dem principles, ignoring the membership on issues like the NHS and being seen as a frontman for everything bad that the coalition was doing.

Well, I still don't like Nick Clegg. I still don't think he gets it that the outrage over tuition fees comes not from not delivering on our manifesto policy to abolish fees (which was impossible to deliver in coalition) but from so many of our MPs, himself included, breaking a cast iron, written and signed promise to the electorate to vote against higher fees.

He hasn't yet managed to grasp that his excuses about being in coalition and being forced to compromise on policy simply won't wash with people who, like myself, are angry for an entirely different reason: the matter of integrity and principle.

But, that said, I'm starting to think that much of my assessment of our position as a party and his as leader was, in fact, wrong.

You see, despite going from being ignored by most of the media to being actively attacked on a regular basis by most of the media, our polling numbers have remained relatively constant. If you take the ICM polling figures (which are the gold standard in terms of accuracy when it comes to actual results in elections) then you'll see we're currently at 14%. Now, that's a massive drop from our general election result of 23% but it's not annihiliation.

A lot of us, myself included, naively assumed that being in government would mean we got equal coverage by the media. We don't though - just as an example, Question Time always has a Labourite and a Conservative on the panel but only has a Lib Dem on the panel once in a while - even when the issues being debated are ones which the Lib Dems have something relative to say: such as when QT debated the Iraq War and voting reform.

So, in the absence of being given a fair chance to get our message across, we can probably assume that at least some of the drop in our support is the standard problem we see between elections. For decades our numbers have dropped between elections and just bumped along and then suddenly risen significantly when the election rolled around and the media were forced to give us equal coverage. That means that our polling position probably isn't as weak as it looks.

Now, whilst I used to think we should get rid of him, I think Clegg's position as leader is pretty strong. The fact is that it's very difficult to dislodge a leader and, even if we did it peacefully, we'd then have a new leader going into a general election with no time for the public to get to know him - hardly the best situation to be in. On the other hand, Clegg, no matter what you think of him, is extremely charismatic and likeable in person. And, given that televised leaders debates at the next election are inevitable then it's not impossible that we could see some form of Cleggmania again.Well, Cleggmania is a bit much - in all probability he'll just be able to win back some lost support as long as he puts up a good performance.

And, let's think about those debates. Cameron will still be leader but he'll have a problem in that his credentials of being a modern, compassionate, progressive conservative will be severely damaged due to tories constantly coming up with some of the most unpopular proposals of the coalition government - such as scrapping employment rights for workers or giving tax cuts to the rich. So at best I think Cameron will only be able to put up an adequate performance in the eyes of the public. And Clegg will always claim to have been acting as brakes on the tories in government. Some people won't buy that but some of them will - and that'll be a little bit more support that comes back to us.

Ed Miliband, on the other hand, will have the biggest problem. He isn't exactly renowned for his debating skills and suffers from having a popularity rating as bad as Clegg's. People just don't seem to warm to him - my father is a case in point. My father is a man who I might normally think would be at least open to listening to what the Labour leader had to say but, in practice, just changes channel when he sees Ed Miliband - because he "can't stand his voice".

So, as I said, in those circumstances it's not at all unlikely that Clegg might well be able to put up a performance that wins us back some of the lost support.

Meanwhile, being in government has led to a much more united party and one which is, despite failures in messaging by the leadership, becoming better at getting its point across and which will be boosted in the general election thanks to the same state-of-the-art election software that played a huge part in getting Obama elected.

And the final thing to bear in mind is the vagaries of our voting system. At the last general election we got a million more votes but lost seats. So, in reality, we have something of a buffer in losing support before we start losing large numbers of seats.

It's always considered foolish to make a prediction about general election results this far out, but, with that proviso, I think it's not just plausible but likely that we will hang on to most of our seats and that we should keep Clegg as leader.

Please sign the sickness and disability petition.

2011-11-20T17:21:00.003Z

With more and more evidence emerging of DWP policy making being influenced by companies which stand to profit from the erosion of provisions for sick and disabled people, it's vitally important that Lib Dems make a stand against government proposals which will be incredibly damaging to some of the most vulnerable people in society.

Just this week there have been proposals to hand responsibility for sickness notes from GPs (who know their patients and their medical history) to panels run by private companies which will have a financial interest in making the process as simplified as possible and therefore more susceptible to potentially devastating errors - it may be cheaper and easier to train someone to fill in a tickbox form than hire an experienced medical professional but the cost to people whose conditions don't fit neatly into boxes will be immeasurable. Personally I think a far better solution is providing better training to GPs but I'm not the one writing the report.

And the reason for this proposal are statistics showing some people are given sickness notes despite not having anything physically wrong with them - completely missing the fact that people can have mental and psychological problems which make them unfit to work.

This week MPs also debated the proposals to cap the amount of money in benefits that people can receive - despite the fact that it will hit disabled households the most given that they, naturally, receive greater amounts of benefits due to having greater need for support than most people.

So this is why it's vitally important that you sign, and get everyone you know, to sign the petition to ask the government to stop and review the impact of benefit changes to sick and disabled people:

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/20968

All the big disability charities are backing it, including charities like Scope, MIND and the RNIB. The Greens are backing it and so is Compass. Labour and the Conservatives are ignoring it. So please, please, please sign this petition and ask your friends, colleagues and families to sign it as well.

Thank you.

UPDATE: Turns out that the co-chair of the committee producing the aforementioned report works for an organisation funded by Atos Healthcare - a company which already runs ESA assessments for the government and which would be the logical choice for the "independent body" to handle sick notes.

Government intervention that works

2011-11-18T13:00:00.000Z

One of the blogs I've been reading recently is Munguin's Republic. One of his recent posts made me stop and think.

You see, in addition to his perfectly justifiable complaint about the BBC apparently not realising Scotland exists when it comes to news reports, the situation he mentions is quite interesting.

You see, in the Western Isles of Scotland, petrol has to be imported from the mainland, which means it costs a lot more - in fact, they've got possibly the most expensive petrol prices in the world. In recognition of these unique circumstances, the government recently waived part of the fuel duty on petrol on the islands in order to bring the prices in line with the mainland. Unfortunately, the petrol stations on the islands all immediately raised their prices by a corresponding amount.

So all that's happened is that the petrol companies are making more money while islanders are stuck paying high prices and the government has lost revenue.

And this I think illustrates a flaw in both the two "either or" models of government intervention.

You see, if you spoke to a conservative about this, they'd say that the government should only intervene by lowering the tax, and that if the companies refused to lower their prices then free market forces would mean another company would open up petrol stations and undercut them. Except, of course, this won't happen since there are only a few big fuel companies and why would they undercut each other when they can all charge the higher price and profit from it?

And if you were to speak to a socialist, they'd probably say that the government should intervene by lowering the tax and then, if the companies refused to lower their prices, by setting up a government pwned petrol company to run the petrol stations and remove the evil forces of capitalism from the land all together. The only problem with this is that it would be immensely expensive, more bureaucratic and inefficient and would be run by civil servants hundreds of miles away from the islands.

This may be exagerrating things slightly, but those are generally the two models of government intervention put forward by Conservatives and Labourites respectively. Either the government should leave it all to the private sector or the government should take over everything. Those are the only two options - or so they'd have you believe anyway.

Personally, I think that there's a third option, drawing on the liberal philosophy. You see, if it were up to me, what I'd do is offer a government loan to the islanders to set up a customer and employee owned co-operative on the island to run its own petrol stations and to compete with the big fuel companies by charging fair prices. And, because it would be based locally and run by local people, it would be far more responsive to their needs. Also, any profits it made would be redistributed amongst the members of the co-operative (i.e. the islanders), as opposed to shareholders and executives profiting from over pricing people living in what is, essentially, a captive market.

And, as it'd be run as a business, it would be far more efficient than a state run company and would be able to make a profit to pay off the government loan. So the taxpayers would get their money back and the islanders would get cheaper fuel prices.

Now that's the model of government intervention I belive in: intervening to empower local communities to take control of their own lives. That's a core part of the liberal philosophy and, in my humble opinion, one far superior to abandoning people to the not-so-tender mercies of unbridled capitalism or subjugating them under the heel of the centralised, overbearing state.

The scandal of the DWP's advisors

2011-11-17T13:04:00.003Z

This is one of my series of lunchtime blogposts.

WARNING: This blogpost will contain swear words in the last paragraph.

As regular readers of this blog will know, I've spent the past three months taking quite an interest in disability welfare issues. Specifically, I wrote a motion which was passed at Lib Dem conference, becoming party policy, and which called for the government to scrap their planned arbitrary time limit on how long disabled people could receive benefits for and for the government to fix the utterly broken assessment system that was bequeathed to them by the last government.

One of the things that has come from that is that I've learned quite a bit about how the DWP reaches decisions and who advises them when they make those decisions.

And the picture that's emerged is rather disturbing. All the way back in 1994, the DWP hired the Vice-President of the US insurance company Unum, Dr Le Cascio, to sit on the group responsible for designing and enforcing new medical tests for disability benefit claimants.

Now, according to Private Eye:

At the same time, the UK wing of Unum was launching what it boasted was “a
concerted effort to harness the potential” from predicted cuts in benefits,
urging people to protect themselves with a “long-term disability policy from
Unum”.

A year later Private Eye questioned Le Cascio about a potential conflict of interest, which was denied. Fast forward ten years and:

Unum was found guilty in the US of “systematically violating” insurance regulations and fraudulently denying or “low-balling” claims using phony medical reports, misrepresentation
and biased investigations

But despite this, despite Unum being described as an "outlaw company" by the California Department of Insurance Commissioner, and despite a BBC report in 2007 which revealed that internal Unum documents stated that they were driving governmnet policy, Unum's executives have continued to be heavily involved in advising the DWP.

In 2006 Unum executives sat on the panels that devised the Work Capability Assessments introduced in 2008 and which have an failure rate of 40% (according to official figures). Not only that, but, along with Atos (the company that conducts the assessments) they were the only for-profit companies on the panels. So even if you believe that private companies should be included in governement policy making then why was this cartel of two massive organisations the only companies listened to by the DWP?

In 2001 our old friend Le Cascio:

was a key player at a ground-breaking conference at Woodstock near Oxford, titled “Malingering and Illness Deception”. Malcolm Wicks, Labour work minister at the time, and Mansel Aylward, then chief medical officer at the DWP, were among the 39 delegates.

And, at the same time Unum set up a lobbying group to try to further influence DWP policy.

Then, in 2004, Unum set up a £1.6 million research centre in Cardiff which subsequently received £300,000 of taxpayer's money from the DWP.

According to the Private Eye article from last year:

Unum has been lobbying, sitting on expert groups and hosting meetings at party conferences of all colours ever since. And lo and behold, in May this year, Unum’s then medical officer Prof Michael O’Donnell jumped ship to become chief medical officer at Atos. He barely had time to catch his breath before giving evidence to the Commons committee looking at the welfare reform bill.

Despite all of this, the DWP has repeatedly brushed of enquiries about the relationship with Unum, including one from Norman Lamb, Nick Clegg's health advisor, and has continued to involve Unum with policy making - something which is still happening at the moment. It appears that it doesn't matter which government is in power as the DWP seems to pay more attention to private insurance companies than ministers when making policy.

Meanwhile, the DWP has continued to publish misleading statistics (which are then picked up with glee by the tabloids) such as the claim that 75% of claimants are fit to work - something which was reported by papers as "75% of claimants are scroungers". The DWP has been repeatedly rapped over the knuckles for this by the Office for National Statistics (partly because only 0.5% of claims are deliberate attempts to defraud the benefit system) and yet employment minister, Chris Grayling says he is "bemused by it". Given the recent dramatic rise in disability hate crime then I'd call that criminally irresponsible and callous.

But this attitude isn't surprising when you consider who advises his boss, Ian Duncan-Smith. His two key Special Advisors are both, shall we say "questionable". Susan Squire is one. Until just after the general election she worked for the Taxpayers Alliance, an organisation which fully signs up to the "all disability claimants are workshy scroungers" and which is so right wing that it makes Margaret Thatcher look like a bleeding heart liberal.

Still, Susan Squire seems perfectly normal when you compare her to IDS's other advisor, Phillipa Stroud. This woman is a politician who believes that homosexuality is a "demon" which must be driven out of people through prayer and who set up a church dedicated to doing just that.

Meanwhile, disability charities and organisations such as the CAB are generally only given lip service by the DWP when it comes to involving them in policy making. It's not surprising that the DWP thinks that arbitrarily cutting benefits off to disabled people after 12 months, regardless of their condition, is a good idea when the main people driving policy are right wing nutters and rogue companies with vested interests in milking the public purse for all they can get.

Words cannot easily describe how horrifically DWP policy making seems to be. But perhaps if people like Chris Grayling and IDS actually spoke to some disabled people occasionally, instead of listening to religious and political extremists, then they might actually start to treat sick and disabled people with some basic compassion and dignity, rather than acting like the idiotic, incompetent, heartless cunts that so many tory ministers seem to be.

The Potter Blogger's first year

2011-11-16T13:13:00.003Z

WARNING: This lunch time I've decided to write a self-indulgent, introspective post. Normal service will resume tomorrow with blogpost about the scandal of the people advising the DWP on disability issues.

Last Friday marked exactly one year since I started the Potter Blogger. My first blogpost was about my experience of going on the first tuition fees protest and of my feelings about the subsequent violence.

So, one whole year of blogging. A lot's changed in that year. Over the past 12 months I fell in love for the first time, attended my first Lib Dem conference, campaigned for the doomed Yes to AV campaign, stood and lost in the same council elections which saw the Lib Dems lose over 700 seats, broke up with my girlfriend, finished the second year of university, started my first job, celebrated my 21st birthday and got the ESA motion passed by conference.

All in all, it's been quite a busy year. In that year the Potter Blogger has been something of a success. From 723 pageviews in November 2010, the Potter Blogger reached an all time high of 5,143 in September 2011.

Exams are the sworn enemy of blogging.

This blog also managed to become the 80th most popular political blog (according to wikio) back in September and has held onto since then (for now at least). It was also awarded the title of 11th most popular Lib Dem blog in the annual Total Politics blogging award.

Over the past year I've written 243 blog posts and, looking back at them, there's not one that I'm ashamed of or that I feel embarrased by. As long as I can keep this up in the years ahead then hopefully that should make sure that I don't abandon my principles or become all twisted and cynical.

More broadly, I think I'll always look back on the last year as the year in which I grew up. I don't say that just because I turned 21 in the past year, and I certainly don't think that I haven't got plenty of growing up left to do, but if I compare myself now with the version of me that existed last November then I honestly think that there's a huge difference. This time last year I felt like I was still a teenager and now I feel like an adult, albeit one who's prone to bouts of silliness (not that I think that's a bad thing). I'm also generally much more comfortable - both in my own skin and in socially. For someone with Asperger Syndrome it's certainly nice to feel confident that I can now at least approximate normality in social situation. I think about things more and I'm much better at considering things properly instead of jumping to a black and white conclusion. Hopefully that means I've perhaps gained a little wisdom.

I also think that I can be proud of what I've achieved. Admittedly, I am a proudful person (despite my best attempts to be modest), but I don't think many people my age have ever written a substantial motion on a national issue and gotten it passed near unanimously by conference while also speaking for their first time at conference. Of course the important thing is that the changes called for by the motion do actually get made - but if they do then I think I'll be able to justly proud of my part in the much bigger efforts to protect 3 million vulnerable people from being failed by the system.

In conclusion, I'd like to think that the first year of the Potter Blogger was a good one. As for myself, I feel like a better, more confident person that I was a year ago. I'm young, I'm educated and I live in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. There are lots of problems facing both my country and the world but I'm optimistic that the mistakes of the past decades can be fixed and that the successes of the past decades can be built upon. The Chinese use the phrase "may you live in interesting times" as a curse. Well my generation is certainly living in interesting times but, despite everything, I think that the future is our's to create. And, you know what, I'd like to think that I might be able to play a part in making sure that we do a better job of it than those before us.

Fingers crossed for some sense on fuel prices

2011-11-15T13:02:00.002Z

This is one of what is becoming a series of blogposts written in half an hour of my lunch break. Hopefully this will force me not to ramble on at ridiculous length.

I was very pleased to see in the news that MPs will be having a parliamentary debate petrol prices.
This is thanks mainly to a petition on the government petition website reaching the requirement of 100,000 signatures. A while back I talked about how I thought that high petrol prices were hurting the economy and how the government needs to lower them. The debate will, according to the BBC, focus mainly on whether or not to scrap Januarys increase in fuel duty but there is also a proposal to scrap the VAT increase on petrol.

All I can say is that it's good that this is being debated in parliament. When people on low incomes are spending a high percentage of their wages on petrol just in order to get around (and let's not forget, the state of the public transport system in this country means that anyone not living in a city does need a car) then it will only lead to them cutting back on spending elsewhere - exactly the opposite of what the economy needs right now.

On top of that, the increase in fuel prices has actually cost the treasury money because people are quite literally being priced off the road and therefore the government gets a lower amount of net tax from petrol sales (not to mention the loss of revenue from road tax, VAT on insurance policies, etc).

So hopefully our MPs will show some sense and at least take measures to keep fuel prices static so at least people won't be burdened with even more demands on their finances at a time when most people have gone without pay increases for three years.

One other thing I quite like about this is that it shows that the new petition system is actually working and that parliament will at least listen to the public even if they won't always decide to do what they want. It's certainly a marked improvement on the No. 10 petition website from the Labour era where it didn't matter how popular a petition was as they were all ignored - predictably leading to people not taking the petition website seriously. In short, a typical New Labour example of style over substance.

And that at least I think we can say is a general improvement of this government on the last one. I don't agree with a lot of what this government is doing but at least they've stopped Labour's patronising tradition of spin and vanity projects designed to distract the public and consume a lot of money without doing anything.

A reply to David Babb of 38Degrees

2011-11-11T12:34:00.001Z

This is one of what is becoming a series of blogposts written in half an hour of my lunch break. Hopefully this will force me not to ramble on at ridiculous length.

The other day I wrote a post about why I'm leaving 38Degrees over it's treatment of disability campaigners.

David Babb from 38Degrees was kind enough to leave a comment on the blogpost but unfortunately it got caught in the spam filters. I've rescued it, but, for those who missed it, here it is in full:

"It's David Babbs from 38 Degrees here. I've just posted the comment below on David Gillon's original blog post (http://davidg-flatout.blogspot.com/2011/11/disabled-people-betrayed-by-38-degrees.html#comments)

We have not "cancelled the results" of a previous poll. We run fresh polls every month or so, quite often with different options if new potential campaign ideas have arisen. This is so that we keep an up to date picture of what 38 Degrees members want to be working on.

You can read more about how 38 Degrees members shape what 38 Degrees campaigns here: http://38degrees.org.uk/pages/faq/

There's a detailed explantion of how the campaign suggestion forum "uservoice" works here: http://www.38degrees.org.uk/suggest-a-campaign

And you can read news stories (and view stats) for past polls here: http://blog.38degrees.org.uk/tag/future-campaigns/

I'm not sure why you think our legal advice confirmed that most of the problems with the NHS legislation have already been resolved. I think our legal team would be quite surprised to read that interpretation!

I am sorry to hear that you have decided to leave 38 Degrees. But that's obviously up to you.

--

My comment on David Gillon's blog:

Hi, it's David Babbs from 38 Degrees here. I am sorry it has taken some time to reply to this debate. The whole 38 Degrees office has been very busy pulling together the latest stage of our NHS campaign which needed to go live today in time for a debate in the House of Lords this Wednesday.

To be honest, not including welfare cuts in this month's member poll was a mistake. The member of the office team in charge of preparing the poll this month was in a car accident last weekend (she will be okay, but it was quite nasty and she's currently still off work). In the scramble to get the poll out in her absence we left a couple of things off by mistake. We couldn’t add an extra issue in half way through as that would have definitely badly skewed all the results.

I don't think the omission actually matters that much in the practice – though I am very sorry for the negative impression it has caused. We have polled the 38 Degrees membership around this issue several times before and I feel pretty sure on the basis of all that information that if we can find a way in which 38 Degrees members can make a real difference to this campaign, they will want to take part. The office team is already actively looking at ways we can contribute to this campaign, and we are in touch with many organisations active in this area. That won’t stop because of this omission.

There are two main reasons why we haven't done more on welfare cuts and their impact on disabled people so far. The first is that we are still only small and can only do a very limited number of things at once. The NHS campaign has been massive, and has been quite a struggle for us to keep on top of it. I wish we had more staff so we could do more. The second issue has been trying to work out where 38 Degrees members could add value to the excellent work already being done by other groups already. We don't want to simply duplicate (or even worse dilute) the great work of groups like Hardest Hit and Broken of Britain. We don't want to just do something for the sake of being seen to do something to.

The implication that we're in some way deliberately skewing the results of polls/ignoring past poll results because of some bias against disabled people is wrong. To be honest I find it a bit upsetting to read this accusation. As we explain on the uservoice forum, where an issue is popular we poll our membership on it in other ways. We don't rely on uservoice alone for two reasons: firstly most 38 Degrees members don't regularly visit so it isn't necessarily representative, and secondly non-members can vote which can skew the results. The DLA issue has been very high on uservoice for some time, which has led to us including it in several member polls since."

Unfortunately I have to disagree with quite a bit of what David Babbs has said.

For starters, he is correct in that they didn't cancel the poll. They started a new monthly one.

But what he doesn't mention is that the issue here stems from the fact that there were two very popular campaign suggestions relating to disability benefits. 38Degrees then agreed to merge the two campaign suggestions given that they were so similar.

However, in the process, thousands of votes were lost. 38Degrees promised to fix this. Months later and, despite repeated promised they would, they still haven't got round to restoring the missing votes. There have been a lot of peope complaining to them about this but they've been brushed off and ignored.

And the fact is that these missing votes, plus subsequent votes in other monthly polls, show that this is a campaign idea that has massive support from 38Degrees members. Despite that, there hasn't been any kind of other consultation with members - which means that the excuse about "not using uservoice alone" is a load of hokum. This is clearly a popular issue yet they haven't even taken baby steps towards looking at potentially running a campaign.

On top of that, if they are so member driven, then why is it that another reason given for not doing the campaign is because they don't want to duplicate the work of other organisations? Believe it or not, more than one organisation campaigning on something is usually more effective than just one. I can't even believe that David Babbs seems to think that they shouldn't campaign on an issue just because someone else is - does that mean they'll be stopping their forests campaign given that the National Trust is also campaigning on the issue?

Now, it is reasonable enough that David says that 38Degrees doesn't have the resources to run lots of campaigns. But let's be honest, a lot of their activities involve writing petitions and getting people to sign them and to also write to MPs or peers. That isn't particularly intensive given that all it requires is sending out emails to their members and that there are lots of disabled people who would leap at the chance to volunteer to help with this by actually doing the research to write the petition and all that other stuff that might otherwise consume 38Degrees resources.

And, given that this issue was more popular with their members even than the NHS, why is it that they can't spare the resources for disabled people but can spare the resources for three separate campaigns on wildlife in general, forests and badgers? Are you really telling me that those all necessitate a separate, dedicated campaign each while 2 million disabled people don't even deserve one?

Finally, with regards to the legal advice produced by the NHS, here's a very good analysis of what the advice actually said and how it's been misrepresented by 38Degrees. Basically, one of the big things 38Degrees has been campaigning against (and frightening people about) is the "opening of the NHS to competition law" in a manner they say will be just as though the NHS were a utility like gas or electricity. But, when you actually look at the bill, you can see that there is no change between the current competition regime and the one used in the NHS bill.

The other thing they're tearing their hair out over is the removal of the "duty to provide". But again, in point of fact, the only significant change is replacing the current Primary Care Trusts (which currently have the "duty to provide") with GP consortiums (which will have an identical "duty to provide").

Now, I don't agree with the NHS bill in its entirety and, overall, I think it's a massive waste of time and resources. However, the way 38Degrees presents the issues over the NHS reforms is misleading and fosters misunderstanding. So you'll have to excuse me if I also disagree with David Babbs over their legal advice.

Buy expensive presents or your kids will hate you!

2011-11-09T12:42:00.000Z

This is one of what is becoming something of a series of blogposts written in half an hour of my lunch break. Hopefully this will force me not to ramble on at ridiculous length.

What follows is Littlewood's Christmas Advert:

For those of you unable to watch it, the basic premise of the advert is a bunch of children performing a nativity play where they talk about their "lovely, lovely" mothers who are "wicked" because they've bought christmas presents such as an Xbox, a HTC phone and an Optimus Prime toy. There then follows an exhortation to go to Littlewoods stores for great gift ideas.

Now, I'm not by any means a kill joy but this advert is literally sickening. Much to my annoyance, it keeps on coming on the radio and whenever it does I find myself forced to turn it off - that's how nauseating I find it.

What the advert boils down to is emotional blackmail. If you buy your children really expensive presents for christmas then they'll think you're awesome. Implied of course is that if you don't spend hundreds of pounds on expensive gifts then you're a bad parent.

Well, I don't know about everyone else but when I was a kid I did get some expensive presents. And I won't pretend I didn't like getting them. But the novelty usually wore off after a few days and then the games were ignored. What I really loved as a kid was having both my parents around for christmas and spending time with me. That's what children want for christmas, they want to feel loved by their parents.

Alternatively you could do as the advert suggests and work long hours to save up the £600 or so that the presents mentioned woulc cost. But while you're working long hours your children won't have you around. Or you could buy them on credit and load yourself up with debt just to pay for some presents that your kids will forget about after a couple of months.

And this is what really makes me hate the consumerist message pushed in adverts like the Littlewoods one. They urge people to spend money they can't afford to buy things they don't need in order to make their children like them. And, by pushing this message, more children will find themselves with parents to busy working to spend time with them and more families will find themselves loaded up with debt this christmas.

More broadly this is the problem with our economic model. What we've effectively done is create an economy and society which knows the price of everything but values nothing.

So, if you really need to be told, don't waste your money on expensive presents. Spend time with your kids instead - that's all they really want for christmas.