How on earth is Therese Coffey fronting the Tory general election campaign?

Compared to most people I'm a total politics nerd, after all, it's my job to study and write about politics, yet I'd barely even heard of Tory MP Therese Coffey until Boris Johnson suddenly put her in charge of hounding the disabled and further impoverishing the already destitute duties at the DWP.
 

Before this unexpected appointment to a senior government position, Coffey was most famous outside her constituency for the repulsive boozed up picture of her slobbering on a cigar like some bizarre female Ken Clarke tribute act.

But suddenly Coffey is sobered up and all over our TV screens, airwaves, and social media feeds, fronting up the Tory general election campaign.

Yesterday she was sent out to cynically pretend that nine years of relentless Tory wage repression and cuts to in-work benefits have been a good thing for ordinary working people, and today she's been wheeled out again to defend the Tory parliamentary candidate who said that people on benefits should be put to death!

Picking someone most of the public have never even heard of to front their election campaign seems like an extremely odd strategy for the Tories to adopt.

Yes, there's often someone like Barry Gardiner in 2017, who comes from nowhere to charm the public during an election campaign, but a charmless figure like Coffey, monotonously reading out scripted lies is never going to be able to enchant the nation is she?

It's interesting to look at the reasons someone as limited as Coffey is being pushed as the face of Conservatism.

Firstly Boris Johnson is in hiding.

He can't go out in public because he's getting booed and heckled wherever he shows his face, and his minders are keeping him away from as many interviews and debates as possible because they're all to aware that he's shockingly unprepared, utterly ignorant of stuff like facts and details, liable to make up absolute nonsense on the spot, or to just start spouting blatant lies.

Then there's the fact that most of the far-right Brextremist mob Johnson has surrounded himself with are freakishly unpopular with the public. 

Michael Gove with his coked-up, plastic-faced, right-wing goit act.

Sajid Javid, the reckless junk bond trader that Johnson has somehow decided to put in charge of the entire UK economy.

The haunted pencil figure of Jacob Rees-Mogg, like Lord Snooty but always with the sinister whiff of fascism about him.

Liz Truss, who is perpetually on the verge of another weird rant about imported cheese, or using barking dogs to scare away drones.

Priti Patel with her perpetual smirk, her open contempt for ordinary working Brits, and her liability to go off and collude with foreign governments again.

And then the absolute chancers who have been promoted exponentially above their abilities like Dominic Raab ('where's Dover?') and Gavin Williamson ('Russia should just shut up and go away!').

Rory Stewart was one of the very few sympathetic and relatable figures in the Tory ranks (to 'centrist dad' types at least), but he's been driven out of the party altogether because he wouldn't do as he was told, and Johnson simply can't bear to have anyone in the party who clearly has infinitely more eloquence and charisma than he does.

Amber Rudd was Theresa May's reliable and ever-willing dogsbody, always willing to step up when things got difficult, or take the fall for May's racist Windrush scandal, but she's quitting too, standing down from parliament in disgust at how awful the Tory party has become.

There's basically nobody left in the Tory ranks with any talent whatever, and of those actually capable of stringing a few sentences together without making an absolute tit of themselves, Coffey is the most human-looking specimen they've got!

And that's why a a slow-witted slob that virtually nobody has even heard of before has ended up fronting this Tory general election campaign!

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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The barbaric Tory sanctions regime is still going on

The draconian Tory sanctions regime is callous, shockingly ineffective, economically unjustifiable, and deadly.

The stated purpose of the DWP Sanctions regime is to shock benefits claimants into putting more effort into looking for work by consigning them to periods of absolute destitution.

The Sanctions regime hit its peak between 2012 and 2015 during the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition, with up to 90,000 people per month hurled into absolute poverty, and never fewer than 30,000 people per month subjected to either Jobseekers or Universal Credit sanctions in the austerity coalition era.

The sanctioning rate has dropped off since the Lib-Dems left government, but there are still thousands of people per month receiving letters like the one above, and being forced to go through lengthy (and expensive to the taxpayer) appeals processes, or just give up fighting against a system that's designed to abuse them and live in extreme poverty for as long as it takes.

Callous

Excerpt from a 2014 Johnny Void article
about Jobcentres rewarding staff for 
high sanctions rates.

We know that during the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition Jobcentre staff were given mandatory targets to sanction a set percentage of claimants per week, in order to get the unemployment figures down (people subjected to sanctions aren't counted as officially unemployed).

It's beyond obvious that Jobcentre staff ended up targeting the mentally ill and severely uneducated by sanctioning every minor error, or deliberately giving them impossible tasks to comply with (like two appointments at the same time so they miss one and get sanctioned).

It's just so much easier to target the vulnerable than it is to expend significant amounts of time and energy on catching the tiny minority of die-hard benefits scroungers who know exactly which hoops to jump through to avoid losing their payments.

Perhaps most shockingly of all, the Liberal Democrats have openly bragged about how they helped the Tories make this sanctions regime even more draconian, in return for 5p charges on plastic bags.

Ineffective

We know from extensive research that sanctions are a massively counter-productive method of encouraging people into work.

Just think about it for yourself. If you had your income reduced to just £5.82 to last an entire month, how would you afford to print CVs, travel to job interviews, clean your clothes, eat properly so you can concentrate on making a good impression?

Multiple research papers have found that the victims of DWP sanctions ended up suffering extreme poverty, ill-health, mental distress, and resorting to survival crime like shoplifting.

Yet the Tories persist in using these sanctions (which disproportionately hit disabled people) under their warped belief that you motivate the poor to work harder by making them poorer, while you motivate the rich to work harder by giving them ever more lavish handouts and tax breaks!

Deadly

It's no exaggeration to say that sanctions are deadly. The most notorious example was the death of the ex-serviceman David Clapson who died of diabetic ketoacidosis in 2016 after being left penniless by sanctions and having his insulin supply spoiled because his electricity supply was cut off.

Although the most high-profile case because of the campaigning of his family members, David Clapson is far from the only example, with dozens of people having been driven to suicide after suffering sanctions.

Economically unjustifiable

Three years ago the National Audit Office found that the benefits sanctions regime costs more to administer than it will ever save in reduced benefits payments.

This means that the Tories have actually been using public funds to treat people in this despicable manner, and they've continued doing so despite knowing that it's a total waste of public money.

These Tory devils know perfectly well that sanctions don't work, yet expect the rest of us to actually subsidise their barbaric treatment of vulnerable and disabled people through our taxes because they apparently get some kind of kick out of it.

It would be bad enough if they were behaving like this in order to save a few million quid, but they're not saving anything, it's actually costing us fortunes to subsidise their system for treating vulnerable people in this disgusting way!

Conclusion

Even if you're the kind of person who doesn't care about all of the evidence that sanctions are unspeakably cruel and demonstrably ineffective, or that they're disproportionately used against vulnerable and disabled people, or even if you're completely indifferent about all of the suffering, misery, and death this barbaric regime has caused, surely you can't believe that it's a good or sensible use of public funds?

Surely you can't approve of the money you pay in taxes being used to subsidise a system designed to make vulnerable and disabled people suffer absolute destitution?

Surely you can think of better uses of your money than that, even if it's just being allowed to keep a bit more of it in your own pocket?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Who actually approves of this grotesque Tory barbarism?

Steven Smith spent the last months of his life fighting an utterly perverse decision to declare him 'fit for work' and strip him of his disability benefits despite evidence from his doctors that he could barely walk 20 metres without collapsing.

In February 2019 he was hospitalised weighing just 6 stone, but he had to get a pass out of hospital to attend an appeal against the perverse DWP decision to deny his disability benefits, despite the mountains of medical evidence that he was severely ill like his diagnoses of incurable Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, and osteoarthritis.

Thankfully the judge saw what should have been glaringly obvious to the Tory-administered DWP and the corporate outsourcing minions who operate their disability denial programmes, that 64 year old Steven could barely walk down the street, let alone hold down a full-time job.

Just a couple of months after winning his appeal against this utterly barbaric Tory system Steven died.

This is a shocking individual tragedy that should make even the most hard-hearted of Tories question what their beloved party did to this poor man, but this isn't just an example of an unfortunate individual falling through the cracks, it's an example of the Tory disability denial system working exactly as designed.

Literally thousands of sick and disabled people have died within weeks of having been declared fit-for-work in the Tory disability denial system.

Just imagine the suffering of being so ill you're on death's door, and being told by the Tory DWP that you're not really ill, but actually an idle scrounger who needs to go and get a job. Imagine how you would feel seeing a member of your family being psychologically tortured like this in the final weeks of their lives.

Then there's all the money the Tory government have spent fighting against appeals from people like Steven Smith. In 2017-18 they blasted an extraordinary £120 million opposing appeals against their barbaric disability denial system, with over 40,000 people proving that they were entitled to the benefits they'd been denied.

That's £120 million in public funds that could have been spent on all manner of useful things, like rehiring some of the 20,000+ police jobs the Tories have scrapped since 2010, more nurses, more firefighters, Sure Start centres, or affordable housing.

And then there's the fact that these Tory disability denial programmes actually cost far more to administer than they will ever save in reduced benefits payments.

The Tories have known for years that it actually costs more to treat disabled people in this horrific manner than it will ever save, but when it comes to systematically abusing sick and disabled people, suddenly the Tories' absurd "there isn't enough money" austerity narrative goes in the bin, and there's plenty of public cash to subsidise their malicious abuse of sick and disabled people.

This despicable Tory mistreatment of sick and disabled people at the public expense is so barbaric that it's been repeatedly condemned by the United Nations as a "grave and systematic violation of the rights of persons with disabilities".

Labour have pledged to put a stop to this absolute barbarism, and several of the other opposition parties (Greens, Plaid Cymru, and the SNP) have been absolutely vehement in their opposition to this systematic Tory abuse of disabled people too.

However the big problem is that there are literally millions of selfish "I'm alright Jack" wankers out there who consider the plight of Steven Smith (and tens of thousands more like him) to be "a price worth paying" in return for whatever (probably imaginary) benefit they think they're getting from voting to keep the Tory party in power.

If you're one of the 13.6 million people to have voted Tory in 2017 then you should have a long hard think about the appalling suffering that you've helped to inflict on literally thousands of people like Steven Smith.

And if you're still planning on voting Tory, even after reading this, and even after learning that a Labour government would put a stop to it, I honestly don't think I'm being too harsh to point out that you're an absolute fucking monster of a person.

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How to impoverish disabled people, a lesson from Tory Britain.

Just imagine what it must be like to be a disabled person opening a letter that threatens to cut off your disability benefits if you fail to attend an interview five days ago.

Luckily the individual who received this letter has a good support network who are helping them to fight against this deliberate trap, but there are huge numbers of disabled people out there without strong support networks to help them fight against this kind of injustice.

People with mental health conditions and learning disabilities are particularly vulnerable to this kind of benefits denial trickery.

Whether people have mental health conditions or not, this kind of thing exacerbates their illnesses by loading masses of stress, anxiety, and depression on top of whatever they were already suffering with.

The last thing you need when you have a heart condition or terminal cancer is a prolonged bureaucratic fight to obtain the social security payments you're entitled to.

And just look at who the letter had been sent by. It's not from the DWP, it's from the private profit-seeking outsourcing company Capita who have been contracted to carry out the Tories' dirty work.

Chaos, inefficiency, and vast cost-overruns have been commonplace wherever the Tories have brought in profiteering outsourcing firms to do their dirty work in the welfare system. The WCA assessment regime has ended up costing more to administer than it ever saved in reduced benefits payments, unlawful Tory workfare schemes ended up subsidising private profit-making companies at the Taxpayers' expense, and the corporate-administered Work Programme ended up producing results that were worse than literally doing nothing at all!

The PIP assessment regime is no different. Costs have overrun so dramatically that instead of the £2 billion saving the Tories predicted in 2013, but figures from the OBR (page 113) reveal that by May 2018 it was already costing £4.2 billion more than they projected!

This disgraceful PIP letter is just one isolated example of the kind situations disabled people are suffering in Britain on a daily basis, but there's no denying that this kind of abuse is widespread and systematic.

When the United Nations investigated the treatment of sick and disabled people, they concluded that the Tories are inflicting "grave and systematic" human rights violations against disabled people.

Even if people were somehow unaware of the damning United Nations report, there are news stories virtually every day highlighting the disgusting consequences of these botched and malicious Tory welfare reforms. Stuff like tens of thousands of people dying within weeks of being declared fit for work, people with terminal illnesses being treated like scroungers, denied benefits, and told to 'get a job', people winning their benefits appeals after they died, people committing suicide because of all the stress and anxiety of having their disability benefits cut ...

There's absolutely no pretending that the Tory government aren't administering the systematic abuse of sick and disabled people, and there's no pretending that the millions of people who vote Tory simply consider this systematic abuse a "price worth paying" in return for whatever (probably imaginary) personal benefit they think they're getting from keeping this malicious and incompetent party in power.

Unfortunately we live in a nation of selfish "I'm alright Jack" bastards who actively endorse the Tory party and the system they've built which results in private profit-seeking companies running the show and sending con-trick letters like this.

Tory voters endorse this abusive system because they naively imagine that things like sickness, disability, or simple misfortune could never happen to them or their families, and they're absolutely chilled as long as this systematic abuse is targeted at other people.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Charlie is an actor

There's so much wrong with Amber Rudd's tweet on a basic level that it's difficult to know where to start.

Consider the absurdity of an actual government minster using emojis as bullet points to pretend that they're down with the kids.

Consider the unbelievably patronising tone of "I am going to share these good stories with you".

Consider the fact that anyone with the slightest grip on reality can see that this is a desperate effort to whitewash the fact that Universal Credit is a massively delayed, incompetently administered, poverty-spreading, and deeply unfair reform to the social security system.

And just listen to the awful saccharine feelgood background music on the propaganda video she's shared.

But aside from all of the obvious flaws there's something else. Charlie isn't just a personal trainer as is implied in the Tweet and the video, he's actually a professional actor, which is rather a large omission given the Tory DWP's history of inventing fake claimants to provide fake quotes about how great Universal Credit is.

The Universal Credit blogger Alex Tiffin spotted the fact that Charlie is a professional actor and shared several pictures of him doing professional acting work for companies like Sky Atlantic and Vodafone.

The choice not to mention Charlie's apparently extensive acting work is an example of deception by omission, and the presentation of this professional actor as if he's just some Ordinary Joe member of the public is downright dishonest.

The choice to pick a professional actor to play the role of someone who supposedly had their life improved by Universal Credit (rather than ruined by it like most people who experience it) leads to the suspicion that they couldn't actually find any real ordinary people to speak positively about it at all.

One of the worst aspects of this Tory propaganda is that deceptions and lies from the Tory government have become so commonplace these days that nobody is even surprised by them any more.

There are the dupes who still actually believe the lies and deceptions, but even when the dishonesty is revealed, a significant proportion of people have become so normalised to it that they respond with a shrug of the shoulders and a "what do you expect?" attitude, rather than fury that the government is demonstrably being run by a pack of lying propagandists.

Amber Rudd resigned in disgrace over the lies she told about the Windrush scandal, but then she was brought straight back into government within a matter of months to take over the DWP and the Universal Credit fiasco. And this Tweet is evidence that she's clearly learned nothing about honesty or integrity from her extremely brief non-punishment on the back benches.

It's a very dangerous road we're heading down when our government deceives us and lies to us on such a regular basis that most of us end up reacting to it with apathy, not anger.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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How bad is the Tory Universal Credit disaster?

There are so many problems with the Tory government's botched Universal Credit policy it's impossible to list them all, but here are just a few:

• There's a demonstrable link between Universal Credit being imposed on an area and rising rates of poverty and food bank dependency. The Trussell Trust has reported that Food Bank usage has soared 52% in Universal Credit areas, while the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have highlighted the way that Universal Credit has tipped struggling families into absolute destitution (the 42 day wait from initial claim to first payment being one of the worst aspects).

• Despite the 42 day wait a shocking one in six of the unfortunate people who have been subjected to the Tory Universal Credit experiment were still not even paid in time. Imagine if the business you were involved in had a 1/6 failure rate. There'd be hell to pay.

• There's the fact that Universal Credit discriminates heavily against the self-employed (especially seasonal workers and self-employed people with fluctuating monthly earnings), This means extreme income losses for self-employed people who are transferred to Universal Credit. That's some 5 million self-employed people in the UK at risk of impoverishment if this flawed Tory scheme is ever rolled out nationally.

• Another flaw in Universal Credit means that some people would actually be financially penalised for working extra hours. Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that some people would actually end up with less disposable income if they changed from working 3 days a week to 5. What kind of incompetent government economically punishes people for working longer hours?

• The way Universal Credit is paid out per household creates a very strong risk of domestic violence perpetrators taking control of the entire family budget. One victim told a committee of MPs that her husband would "wake up one morning with £1,500 in his account and piss off with it, leaving us with nothing for weeks". Shockingly the Tories have continued pushing ahead with the scheme despite these warnings, doing nothing but issuing an Orwellian statement that they take tackling domestic violence "incredibly seriously" as they simultaneously turn a deliberate blind eye to the devastating consequences of their own policy.

• Universal Credit is so badly flawed that it economically penalises parents for getting new jobs, forcing them hundreds of pounds into debt because the system won't take account of their childcare costs. Just imagine the combination of incompetence and outright malice that drives Tory ministers to continue rolling out a scheme that penalises people for finding work.

• A National Audit Office report into the early stages of Universal Credit found that £34 million had already been wasted on botched IT systems. In 2014 the amount wasted on botched Universal Credit IT systems was upped to £500 million+ by the Public Accounts Committee.

• A leaked 2013 report described the absolute chaos in the Universal Credit team. One respondent said that there was "a near complete absence of anything that looks like strategic leadership in the programme", and another said "I have never worked somewhere where decision making was so apparently poor at senior levels. This programme should be a case study for how not to engage with your people to get the most out of them".

• David Cameron had such a lax attitude to incompetence amongst his ministers that he simply ignored the hundreds of millions in scrapped IT projects and the reported administrative chaos at the DWP, allowing Iain Duncan Smith to continue as the minister responsible for the chaos until he resigned over Brexit in 2016.

• There's the fact that it's ridiculously delayed. The entire country was supposed to have been converted to Universal Credit by October 2017, but instead just 815,000 people in a few unfortunate areas had been subjected to it by March 2018.

• In 2017 Labour Party and other opposition MPs voted for a "pause" in the roll-out of Universal Credit to deal with some of the most glaring flaws. The vote was won by 299 votes to 0 after the government deliberately abstained on the vote, but the Tories have carried on with the roll-out regardless.

• In 2017 the Tories quietly shelved plans to roll out the full version of Universal Credit in the areas of several senior Tory MPs (Iain Duncan Smith, David Gauke, Damian Green, and Theresa May), including two of the DWP ministers who were responsible for devising and implementing the scheme in the first place. Cancelling the roll-out of Universal Credit in their own constituencies as they force it on Labour and SNP areas is a very clear implicit admission that they know Universal Credit is utterly flawed and devastatingly unpopular.

• In July 2018 the Tory DWP minister Esther McVey outright lied to parliament about the botched roll-out of Universal Credit, claiming that a damning National Audit Office report didn't take account of changes to the system when it actually did. Theresa may refused to sack her despite this egregious breach of parliamentary standards.

• There's the fact that the Tories repeatedly lied and misled to pretend that Universal Credit isn't making people worse off, before Esther McVey finally admitted the truth that people would be worse off under the scheme she's imposing just one day after Theresa May had lied to the public that nobody would lose out.

• The former Tory Prime Minister John Major attacked the scheme, saying that Univeral Credit has the potential to be as disastrous for the current Tory government as Poll Tax was for Margaret Thatcher!

• Fury amongst the Tory MPs has been further exacerbated by a Residential Landlords Association report showing a massive increase in landlords with Universal Credit tenants in rent arrears. A rise from 27% in 2016 to 61% in 2018. The immense suffering of the working poor under this botched scheme was never likely to factor into Tory MP's concerns, but ever growing numbers of wealthy Tory-voting landlords losing cash to the scheme is much more likely to grab their attention.

Despite all of these problems the Tory government continue pushing on regardless. They don't care that the scheme is pushing people into poverty and Food Bank dependency; they don't care that it's an absolute gift to controlling domestic violence perpetrators; they don't care that it penalises self-employed people and entrepreneurs; they don't care that they've wasted over £500 million of public cash on this botched scheme; they don't care that it actually creates various disincentives to work; they don't care that it's years behind target; they don't care that parliament voted for them to stop and iron out some of the worst faults; and they don't care that Theresa May outright lied to the nation when she said people wouldn't be worse off just one day before the minister in charge of it admitted that they would be.

The only real hope that the Tories will stop pushing this malicious and incompetent farce is if they start getting stick from the wealthy Tory-voting landlord class who find that Universal Credit is impoverishing their tenants so much that they can't afford to pay the rent.

If the Tories won't listen to the interests of the rich, then who will they listen to?

The other option of course is a Labour government. Whether they'd "pause" the Universal Credit roll-out in order to try and fix all of the Tory flaws, or scrap it altogether is a question that will be answered by the next Labour manifesto.

Whatever the case, anyone who votes Tory in light of this absolute farce is complicit in the waste, the inefficiency, the dishonesty, the poverty, and the suffering.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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How gullible would you have to be to believe Theresa May's latest Orwellian propaganda trope?

How cripplingly gullible would you have to be to believe Theresa May's latest Orwellian reality reversal that her government are the only option for "moderate" voters?

Just look at how unpopular the Tory hard-right privatisation agenda is, and consider the fact that there's virtually no public support for the 8 year Tory ideological agenda of privatising police services, prisons, state schools, the Royal Mail (at massively below its true market value) and swathes of the NHS.

Then consider the fact Labour's policy of running vital national infrastructure and services as not-for-profit public services is actually incredibly popular with the public (see picture).

Look at how 8 years of ideologically driven Tory austerity dogma has led to the slowest post-crisis recovery in a Century, the longest sustained collapse in UK workers' wages on record, failing public services, and the huge wave of public anger that drove the Brexit vote.

Labour are unquestionably the moderates when it comes to economic policy, but there's more.

Think about Theresa May's grotesque "hostile environment" strategy that led to British citizens being denied employment, housing, social security, bank accounts, and vital medical treatment, with unknown numbers of deportations, and even several victims of May's extremist "deport now, hear appeals later" stance dying in exile from their homeland.

Consider the ongoing systematic Tory abuse of disabled people, and the fact that it actually costs far more to force sick and disabled people through the dehumanisation and humiliation of "fit for work" assessments than this systematic persecution will ever save in reduced disability benefit payments!

And look at the way Theresa May has continually attempted to run Brexit as a tyrant intent on sidelining and marginalising everyone else (opposition parties, the UK business sector, devolved parliaments, trade unions, judges who defend parliamentary sovereignty ...) and recall how the Tories cynically voted down Labour's move to prevent the Tories from using Brexit as a Trojan Horse in order to trash our workers' rights, our food standards, our equal rights legislation, our environmental laws, and our consumer protections.

Labour have pledged to put an end to ruinous Tory austerity dogma, public opinion-defying privatisation mania, to reverse Theresa May's "hostile environment" persecution of British citizens, and to completely scrap the grotesque (and economically unjustifiable) systematic abuse of sick and disabled people.

When it comes to Brexit it's even more obvious that the Tories are radical extremists who have insisted on running the whole thing for their narrow party political benefit since the beginning, and deliberately unpicked every move to stop them from using it as an excuse to ideologically vandalise our rights, standards, and protections.

Yet somehow Theresa May believes that people are so cripplingly gullible that they'll ignore all of this evidence and believe her shockingly dishonest Orwellian posturing that she's some kind of "moderate" in the face of Labour extremism!

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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The depraved coalition deals the Lib-Dems cooked up with the Tories behind closed doors

Polly Mackenzie was never a Lib-Dem MP, but as one of Nick Clegg's core advisers she played a crucial role during the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition period. She's just admitted the kinds of depraved horse trading that went on between the Lib-Dems and the Tories at the time in a Twitter mini-thread.
 

She starts off with an unobjectionable and actually rather astute observation about how the Tories seem to announce a new green measure or plastics ban every time they want to move the news away from their latest scandal, but she followed the Tweet up with some more observations that shine a light on the grotesque horse trading the Lib-Dems did with the Tories.

She claims that the clampdown on plastics was actually a Lib-Dem idea, and that they finally secured the limited introduction of 5p charges on plastic bags in return for their support for a toughening of the draconian Tory benefit sanctions regime.

Here are a few facts about the benefits sanctions regime:

• Benefits sanctions condemn individuals and their families to periods of absolute destitution for up to two years by stopping their social security payments.

• Benefits sanctions have been applied for the most grotesquely inappropriate of "offences" such as having a heart attack during a work capacity assessment, a veteran selling poppies a few hours a week, being five minutes late to an interview, missing an appointment because their child was stillborn, missing an appointment because they had a stroke (see a list of grotesque examples with sources in this article)...

• Benefits sanctions have been shown not to work. It's obvious that removing a person's ability to eat properly, clean their clothes, print documents, travel to interviews reduces rather than increases their ability to find work, but the Tories insisted the opposite. That condemning people to absolute destitution is a way of helping people.

• The Tories repeatedly and vehemently denied that there were benefits sanctions targets and league tables, and that they had created a culture of sanctioning as many people as possible. In 2013 the sanctions targets and league tables were leaked to the press.

• A huge proportion of people caught up in sanctions destitution have been those with mental illnesses and learning disabilities. It's obvious why. If Jobcentre staff were under pressure to sanction a set number of people per week, it's much easier to trick a few mentally ill people into committing sanctionable offences than it is to spend huge amounts of time and effort catching out the tiny minority of hardened benefits scroungers who probably know the rules of the system better than the Jobcentre staff themselves.

• Doctors from Britain's leading mental health organisations have demanded that the government stop their sanctions regime because "it fails to get people back into work and damages their mental health".

• Benefits sanctions have killed. The ex-serviceman David Clapson died after suffering benefits sanctions. He was left with no money to buy food, and no money to pay for electricity. He was found dead from diabetic ketoacidosis with no food in his stomach, a supply of ruined insulin in his powerless fridge, and a pile of CVs by his dead body.

• Probably the most shocking thing of all is that the draconian sanctions system costs more to administer than it ever saves in reduced benefits payments, meaning that the Tories (and Lib-Dems) actually used taxpayers' cash to subsidise their malicious treatment of some of the most vulnerable people in society.

So in return for the limited introduction of 5p plastic bag charges the Lib-Dems green lighted even more savage Tory abuse of some of the most vulnerable people in society.

There's nothing wrong with caring about the environment, in fact it's highly commendable, but if you're willing to kick thousands of extremely vulnerable people under a bus in order to make a minor step forward in combating excess plastic waste, then you've got your priorities disgustingly wrong.

So the next time you hear someone trotting out the tired old Lib-Dem platitude about how they were a "moderating influence" on the Tories, remind them of the way they decided to give Iain Duncan Smith even more power to brutalise the most vulnerable people in society in return for nothing more than 5p plastic bag charges (that would have eventually been introduced anyway due to EU legislation).

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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