Blue Badges For People Given Wheelchair Prescriptions

 Guest blog from Helen Page

I recently lost my DLA higher rate mobility and was therefore unable to renew my blue badge. This has left me really struggling - just weeks after receiving a wheelchair from my local wheelchair service. I could try and apply but would have to go for a medical and reading the criteria I wouldn't qualify. Basically because I can walk across the carpark I can't have a blue badge, even though if I can't walk around the shop.

Already this has meant that my husband has had to push me half way across a stone carpark and when I go to guiding events I won't be able to park near to the entrance so I won't be able to use my wheelchair. On a trip to Filey I was unable to park where I wanted to be which meant I couldn't spend time with my kids in the way I and they wanted. Absolutely barmey when you consider that just over a month ago I received a prescription and voucher for a new wheelchair! The wheelchair had to sit in the car because I had to climb down steps and the extra painkillers I had to take as a result have caused 2 days of side effects.

It's crazy enough that I have lost my DLA mobility which has caused me considerable stress and has meant my parents have had to purchase me a new car but losing the blue badge has been a nightmare. The decision is a farce. They didn't write to my GP initially and when I asked for a reconsideration they contacted my GP asking her to comment on my dementia presumably because I have written about my memory problems. I'm 29 years old so it's fairly clear I don't have dementia i'm sure. To top it the letter saying there would be a delay as they wrote to my GP was addressed to the wrong address and was luckily found by one of my Brownie mums in the flats nearby which have half the same name!

Addressing the blue badge situation I have created a government e-petition as it seems totally ludicrous to me that you could be given a wheelchair and not be given a blue badge. It appears that in Scotland that I would have been given one so it's not an unreasonable request. If you'd be able to sign it it would be much appreciated.

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/32844

#PIP Survey - Please Help

The wonderful Sam Barnett-Cormack and wearespartacus.org have designed this survey to help them put together an official Spartacus response to the PIP consultation.

We'd be REALLY grateful if you could spare a few minutes to take part. The more people that reply, the more reliable the results will be.

We don't feel that we should speak for you - but would love to base our response on what YOU think and need.

Thank you so much.

SURVEY

The Insanity Of Power - Guest Post By Hossylass

Some seek power, some have power thrust upon them, and some become Prime Ministers.

Personally I cannot get excited about a Prime Minister. After all it is just the “Prime” Minister, an MP that has been selected by wit, wisdom or, more usually, the absence of either.

So what is a “Prime”?

As an adjective it is described as;

1. First in excellence, quality, or value..

2. First in degree or rank; chief.

3. First or early in time, order, or sequence; original.

4. Of the highest U.S. government grade of meat.

5. Mathematics Of, relating to, or being a prime number.

Now I can deal with number 5. Prime numbers are the equivalent of porn to mathematicians

Number 4 is an odd way of grading meat. In the UK we use a much more sensible system of EUROP, which is the way many farmers spell Europe. The exception is in Essex, where its “phwoar”.

Number 3 is far too dull to discuss.

So that leaves us 1 or 2. What a miserable choice. Actually number 2 just doesn’t cover it. A first in History of Art is still as much use as tits on a jelly fish (yes I know that’s not what it means, but the prized prime shit degree still has to be media studies). The word “rank” is appealing, and sadly has fallen in disuse of recent years, and the word “Chief” walks the same line as the word “Pal”, as in you don’t want to use it in the wrong company.

And that leaves number 1. Which is just wrong.

So what about “Prime Minister”?

A few suggestions spring to mind;

1.     1.  Person who dedicates themselves to make the UK a better place for everyone, then decides it would be more beneficial to make it better for them, resulting in a form of power crazed insanity.

2.     2.  Person who wants to be Prime Minister, achieves this, and goes mad.

3.     3.  A madman who sets out to fulfil some elements of (1) and (2) but is actually clinically insane from the start.

So how do these seemingly harsh suggestions fit in with our most recent PM’s?

1)      Harold Wilson; Resigned with the early signs of Alzheimer’s, so I am quite happy that this had nothing to do with sociopathic tendencies, though had a list of successors that had some very dubious thought processes.

2)      Edward Heath; Not particularly good but not notably mental until the very end when he asked “Who Governs Britain”. At that point everyone knew except him.

3)      James Callaghan; Inherited a position that no sane person would have accepted. It didn’t take him long to fail to improve anything at all, entered a period of denial, became a bit delusional and eventually got ousted.

4)      Margaret Thatcher; A chemist who became a Barrister, Mother, MP, social climber par excellence, and a power crazed freak of nature. Unpopular with dairy farmers, she then managed to become unpopular with huge swathes of various industries, and then went completely barking mad. That was the first 6 months – you know the rest. Has now got dementia which has tamed her sociopathic tendencies a bit, but definitely not eligible for a gun licence.

5)      John Major; Managed seven years and nobody noticed. Power was forced upon him, but with a shy smile he neatly sidestepped it. Well he would have smiled but he was at home after having had a wisdom tooth removed. Not so much mad as vacant possession, his absence of reality allowed lots of other power mad people to do exactly what they wanted whilst John smiled, vacantly, a lot.

6)      Tony Blair; juvenile who was mad, he had a guitar and believed he was a musician. Innocent enough attitude but became Prime Minister and tried to get other people to believe he was a Socialist. Then decided that he should become the richest person on earth so changed lots of things to ensure this came true. Definitely a case of number (1), and phenomenally barking at the end – though having Gordon saying “Is it my turn yet?” for years would send anyone mad. Now works in a freak show for mad people, gibbering about his sex life whilst lots of very rich people laugh at him.

7)      Gordon Brown; Really, really, really wanted to be Prime minister. Mad, though not sociopathic, Gordon discovered that Tony hadn’t been checking his sums, and was a bit cross as this made him look incompetent. (As opposed to a fool).

8)      David Cameron; Definitely a number 3 – a person who sets out to be Prime Minister for the sheer hell of it, and to have fun and make money for himself and his friends. A very new breed of sociopath, David was the only PM of recent years that was certifiable before he even got the job. Sadly there is no humour or irony in this statement.

So if anyone still wants the job, I think there may be an opening in the future, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Tell Me Lies, Tell Me Sweet Little Lies #esa #wrb #nogobritain

It all sounded such a positive idea; reform Incapacity Benefit by introducing Employment Support Allowance to ensure those who are too sick or disabled to ever work receive life long financial support, those who could do some work with the right support get that support, and those who've been 'gaming' the system get kicked off the benefit. What's not to like about that? Those in need of protection get it, those in need of support to work receive it and the 'drains on society' drain jobseekers allowance instead of sickness benefit so hard working tax payers can rest easy knowing their money is going to the right place. It's such a lovely idea that its impossible to argue against. It's why welfare campaigners have had such an uphill struggle to explain to the public that the "I don't mean people like you" they always exclude from benefit scrounging justifications are actually almost all "people like me" and not the amorphous drain on society type that everyone knows exists...until you actually ask them to name just one person they know and head scratching ensues.

Support for the genuinely sick or disabled is so entrenched in British thinking that it doesn't get questioned until people are in that position themselves and discover that at the time they are most vulnerable those nice little bungalows and free cars they thought would be there to enablee the practicalities of life never really existed. It's why slashing welfare can be done on the premise that it won't affect 'people like me', because until you don't know any better you'd assume people like me are getting all they need to support their ill health or disability.

We've had 18 years of laws the government insist make Britain accessible to disabled people, laws now being used to justify removing financial benefits designed to help us pay for those access needs. Laws which have seen great progress but that are so poorly enforced that a Baroness found herself needing to crawl off a train dragging her wheelchair and a famous yachtsman told he could not travel on a train because "those things will damage the floors".

Against that background of promises to always protect the most vulnerable its proved impossible to explain to the public that the welfare cuts are disproportionately falling upon sick and disabled people. Impossible to demonstrate that this was in fact a giant exercise in simply redefining what to be sick or disabled means, whilst the media floundered around struggling to understand the different names of benefits, what they are for, let alone what losing that support might mean. As campaigners, we always knew what that would mean was being unable to alert the public to the long term human consequences of this until after the changes became law and enough time had passed to collect evidence of what happens to people.

That evidence is still at best patchy, and will gradually emerge over the next 18 months as the tribunal service struggle to process soaring number of appeals against denial of benefit. It will continue to be obscured by the confusion between responsibility caused by outsourcing the medical testing part of the system to a private company not known for their competency, leaving the final decision with an administrative employee of the Department of Work and Pensions and the appeals process by another arm of the civil service. A private company who have failed to provide adequate access to examination centres, failed to inject any humanity into their working processes, frequently failed to acheive the required standards for those working processes but been astonishingly successful in obscuring the true heart of this problem, the deliberate redefinition of sickness and disability designed by the Department of Work and Pensions.

Because, really that's the key to this issue. And slowly, but surely now the evidence will start to emerge that these cuts are very much targeted upon 'people like me', people like the mum with a fractured spine who's lost her adapted mobility car, the mum who used to be a nurse, but now recovering from breast cancer complicated by severe osteoporosis declared fit for work, or the 1100 people who died last year after being found fit for some work and put in the Work Related Activity Group. That's the same group of people now receiving letters to inform them the benefit they believed they'd paid for all their working lives is now being time limited retrospectively if their partner earns more than £7500 a year. These ARE people like me, and when life brings the events we all most instinctively fear they will also be people like you.

So as the government continue to tell their sweet little lies, remember that one day "people like you" will become "people like me", the people you so wanted to believe were somehow so different from you they could be excised from conscience with clever words and promises to protect.

How Gullible Are The Population? Guest blog by Hossylass

How gullible are the population?

Its official - 75% are.

We all know these people, they read it in the paper so it has to be true, we saw it on the news and the BBC don't lie, etc.
But I didn't think for a minute that over 3/4 of the population are so gullible.

We have ourselves been victims of propaganda, and know that it is true, these people do exist. 
Oddly they seem to be relieved when the news or the government or the papers dictate how to live their lives, what decisions to make, how to form their opinions. They need not just opportunities but they also crave direction, and lap it up with abandonment - the abandonment being their inability to recognise the cognitive dissonance that is going on inside their minds.

For those who don't know, cognitive dissonance is where you try and have two conflicting ideas at the same time, like nearly every disabled person could work, except for my auntie, and my sister, and the bloke down the road, and people who have MS, or Parkinson's, or cancer, or those horrid diseases.

The same people who are so easily swayed and have their opinions formed by newspapers or the tv, or government, are also the same ones who scream about the nanny state, without realising that they are so immature about forming their own educated opinion they are actually relying on Nanny to form their ideas for them.

No greater demonstration of this can be seen that the recent petrol fiasco.
There is no petrol fiasco, there is no shortage in the availability of petrol at this precise moment.
And there may never be a fuel crisis if the oil companies release their grip on the world's economy and allow other technologies.

The tanker drivers feel a need to strike - not over pay, but over health and safety issues.
These health and safety issues are quite probably the same issues that Camoron wants to dismiss as red tape.
But there are health and safety issues - petrol is a dangerous substance, as one lady in York found out, after listening to Nanny, she decided to stockpile petrol and consequently managed to set fire to herself.

So where is the 75% that are gullible? 
Well yesterday they were mainly sat in queues outside petrol stations.
Ok, so maybe gullible is the wrong word.

Maybe I meant brainwashed, mindless, stupid individuals with no more foresight than a stone.

This was an exercise by the Government to test the reaction of the populace - and it worked on a large number of them.
The Government must be hugging themselves.

This week spending is up, "hurrah!" shout the government - "there is no slow down in the economy, our plans are working, we are not heading back into another recession so yahboo sucks to you OECD".

This week they have shifted the anger about the budget to anger about the tanker drivers, and bemusement about pasties.

No more peeking at those rich people who have re-written the policies of Government by bunging Call-me-Dave a quarter of a million.

No, now the country is sat outside petrol stations like good little sheep, praying that the "talks" between the Government and the tanker drivers union means that the strike wont go ahead, but if it does, like boy scouts, they will be prepared, because our caring Government warned them, told them to fill up their cans, fill up their tanks and fuck over their neighbours by CAUSING a petrol crisis.

I don't think there will be a strike, I don't think there ever was going to be a strike. Strikes are the threat needed to get people to listen. 
Well mission accomplished, the threat of chaos that would be caused by a strike actually became a reality without the strike taking place.

Some would say that the Government cocked up.
I doubt it. I think they created a lovely little crisis so they had a good day to bury bad news.