A local Green Party colleague sent me pdf [Portable Document Format] e-copy of what Boris Johnson had written MPs today toward suspending UK Parliament.
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Boris Johnson's 'Dear Colleague[s, I'm suspending Parliament] letter, p1 |
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Boris Johnson's 'Dear Colleague[s, I'm suspending Parliament] letter, p2 |
My colleague noted,
see attached for his dreadful letter, which unsurprisingly fails to
mention climate change, inequality and child poverty in his list of
what needs to be done (add your own 'burning injustice)
I responded:
I don't generally get around to read BoJo's literary output, and now I feel more justified in that omission.
Re Bojo's "bold new agenda," I guess that with Gove as Brexit Secretary, Gove's back story as Education Secretary
and as Justice Secretary
gives us a foretaste of how being more Trump-trade deal friendly might fit in with such a 'bold agenda'.
Beyond
that, I append text from my reply to someone's rather misinformed
reference to Blair's welfare reforms being worse than his Tory
predecessors got up to.
Best Wishes
Alan
[Someone wrote]
----extract starts----
i know the torys have taken things to extremes but it was labour that
started the welfare reforms and a lot of the people are still there in
the background
----extract ends----
"The
people still there in the background" include senior Civil Servants,
ex-Civil Servants, and a continuum of Government ministers and
opposition spokespersons, as can be deduced from this article outlining
the research of a medically retired RAF veteran, Mo Stewart.
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Disabled researcher’s book exposes ‘corporate demolition of welfare state’
A string of activists, academics, politicians and journalists have welcomed the publication of a new book by a d...
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Eg,
----extract starts----
Disabled researcher’s book exposes ‘corporate demolition of welfare state’
By
John Pring
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John Pring
the country's only news agency specialising in disability issues
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A string of activists,
academics, politicians and journalists have welcomed the publication of a
new book by a disabled researcher which exposes how successive
governments have planned the “demolition of the welfare state”.
Mo
Stewart has spent eight years researching the influence of the US
insurance giant Unum over successive UK governments, and how it led to
the introduction of the “totally bogus” work capability assessment
(WCA), which she says was designed to make it harder for sick and
disabled people to claim out-of-work disability benefits.
Stewart’s
book, Cash Not Care: The Planned Demolition Of The UK Welfare State,
published this week, argues that the assessment was modelled on methods
used by Unum to deny protection to sick and disabled people in the US
who had taken out income protection policies.
She
says in her book that the WCA was “designed to remove as many as
possible from access to [employment and support allowance] on route to
the demolition of the welfare state”, with out-of-work disability
benefits eventually to be replaced by insurance policies provided by
companies like Unum.
She warns that the UK is now close to adopting that kind of US-style model.
Stewart
is a former healthcare professional and a female veteran and
self-funded her six years of research, which has been repeatedly
referenced in parliamentary debates, and
has been highlighted by Disability News Service (DNS) for nearly five years.
She
describes in her book how Peter Lilley, secretary of state for social
security in John Major’s Conservative government, hired senior Unum
executive John LoCascio to advise the UK government on how to cut the
number of claimants of long-term sickness benefits.....
----extract ends----
Further
on there having been a continuum of Tory and Labour politicians
involved in the corporate demolition of the welfare state, the changed
'descriptors' for disability benefit assessment tests that the Tories
piloted in 2011 had actually been signed off by Yvette Cooper as DWP
Secretary in April 2010, as this article shows:
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Even harsher new ESA Medical approved''(warning very bad news inc)
Even Harsher New ESA Medical Approved Tens of thousands of claimants facing losing their benefit on review, or o...
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Yvette
Cooper is the kind of Labour MP who would come more to the fore again
if Labour right wing MPs managed to oust Jeremy Corbyn as that Party's
Leader.
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