In Defence Of Iain Duncan Smith - By Hossylass

As if.

To be honest, I think that IDS is indefensible.

I have this to say to him, and all those other MP’s who “met a man”;

to all those neighbours who are expert medical consultants, but prefer to be bin collectors, lorry drivers and administrators;

to those Atos Doctors who don’t even try to be fair;

to social service workers with preconceived ideas;

and to those who should know better but can ignore their own knowledge in favour of easier to enjoy bigotry;

this is for you.

So, so you think you can tell,

Heaven from Hell, 
blue skies from pain. 
Can you tell a green field,

from a cold steel rail? 
A smile from a veil? 
Do you think you can tell? 

And did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts? 
Hot ashes for trees? 
Hot air for a cool breeze? 
Cold comfort for change? 
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war,

For a lead role in a cage? 

How I wish, how I wish you were here. 
We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year, 
Running over the same old ground. 
What have you found? The same old fears. 
Wish you were here. 


Living in a country that promotes people to consider themselves capable of judging blue skies from pain and a smile from a veil, and to condemn those who are judged to be “undeserving”.

Spinning lies on the spinning wheel of hatred, convincing the public that 75% of people are faking, and then patting yourselves on the back for "saving" billions.

Removing benefits from sick and disabled people and spinning it that they are “trapped on benefits, which is not fair on them”  is like raping a 10 year old girl and then telling her that at least she won’t still be a virgin at 50.

Indefensible doesn't even come close.

Lyrics by Pink Floyd.

BREAKING NEWS - DWP BLAME EVENT ORGANISERS (C4) FOR TELLING IDS TO DO IT!

BREAKING NEWS - DWP CLAIM EVENT ORGANISERS TOLD  [IDS] TO DO IT.

Disabled people query whether telling him to jump off a cliff would have the same level of obedience...


Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith has been caught using an accessible toilet, just minutes after telling a live television audience that parents must teach their children “right from wrong”.

Duncan Smith – responsible for a series of sweeping welfare reforms that will see savage cuts to spending on disability benefits – had been one of the guests in a live debate on the riots that had swept across England.

At the end of Saturday’s debate, hosted by Channel 4, the Conservative cabinet minister told the audience that the one thing the riots had shown him was the need for “communities where people take responsibility for their actions for bringing up their children, for teaching them right from wrong”.

Minutes later, the Work and Pensions Secretary – who is not disabled – was caught coming out of an accessible toilet on the ground floor of the building.

Sean McGovern, a wheelchair-user and chair of Lambeth Pan-Disability Forum, who had been in the front row of the audience and spoke during the debate, had been waiting in some discomfort to use the accessible toilet, and challenged Duncan Smith.

When McGovern reminded him of the words he had used in the debate, Duncan Smith replied that “someone told me I could use it”.

McGovern told Disability News Service: “He had been sitting there pontificating, telling us what we should be doing as a society, only then to walk away and flout the ‘rules and regulations’ because he can, because he is who he is.”

A Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) spokeswoman said: “He wouldn’t have been jumping the queue. He would have been using facilities he was directed to use by the event’s organisers.”

But she refused to say whether this response had come from Duncan Smith, or even whether she had contacted him to pass on the request for a comment.

Disabled activist Kaliya Franklin, co-founder of The Broken of Britain, who published McGovern’s account of the incident on her blog, said: “Recognising when the needs of others take priority over our own is a fundamental part of knowing right from wrong and taking responsibility for our own actions.

“As minister for DWP, IDS is expected to have a greater understanding and sensitivity to the needs of disabled people, especially as the many ‘reforms’ to disability benefits and services are predicated on a claim that accessible facilities are now readily available wherever needed.
“Given the minister’s commendable desire for everyone to be held responsible for their personal behaviour through community service, sick and disabled people will expect the punishment to fit ‘the crime’.

“Apologising and committing to inspecting the standard of accessible facilities, cleaning them himself where needed, would show strong leadership and set an example to the rest of the country that ministers are not exempt from the standards they themselves set for others and demonstrate that we really are ‘all in it together’.”

Channel 4 has so far failed to comment.

News provided by John Pring at www.disabilitynewsservice.com

Personal Responsibility: The IDS Way - "Someone Told Me I Could"

Taking Responsibility for Our Own Actions

A lovely 'you-couldn't make-it-up' incident presented itself to me tonight. Earlier on this evening I took part in Channel 4's 'Street Riots: The Live Debate' over in a studio in Endell Street, Covent Garden. It's nice being picked up by a chauffeur driven car; deposited into the heart of the West End; and, by-passing queues to be admitted into the green room for free nosh and drinks.

But, I deviate.

Anyway, back on track. Eventually we're herded into the studio and the warm-up guy does his warm-up stuff, and we gingerly laugh at his not-so-funny patter. Krishan Guru-Murthy, a lot smaller in real life (wears Cuban heels), then gives the SP of the show and introduces us to Iain Duncan-Smith,Hilary Benn MP, Adrian Mills an Ealing restaurateur (his restaurant was ransacked and looted), Paul Gladstone Reid a composer, pianist, singer-songwriter and producer, and a rather taciturn policeman who referred to all explanations and views contrary to his as 'excuses'.

The debate went fairly well. Duncan-Smith and the businessman holding the old law-and-order line; people-have-to-take-personal-responsibility-for-their-own-actions was intimated several times by Duncan-Smith in relation to cutting benefits and evicting, even, parents of children convicted of looting.

The Tory line when confronted with problems is always to fall back on the old chestnut of family values and personal responsibility. And Duncan-Smith ensured that nobody, whether they agreed with him or not, left the studio without his message messing around with more pleasant thoughts, such as those ice cold bottles of Peroni waiting for me when I get home.

The show ended and the floor manager wanted us, wheelchair users, to wait until the studio was cleared. No way Pedro! I'd sat for an-hour-and-a-half in a lot of pain, and I needed to pee, quite quickly. So, I got out first, or so I thought, and headed for the lift to take me to the ground floor and the adapted toilet.

Up we went. Out of the lift, throw a right. Bob's your uncle, there's the 'special' loo waiting to accept yours truly.

A young geezer all skinny jeans, Loake's brogues and Ralph Lauren cardy looked at me as I reached for the door."Sorry sir, there's someone in there. He won't be a minute" instructs this trendy clothes horse, probably a TV researcher. "Ok mate" I say; relief, hopefully, a minute or two away.

Three minutes later the door to the disabled toilet, the one with the big sign announcing in pictogram the universal symbol of disability, and out strolls Iain Duncan-Smith!

Oh glory! Hallelujah! My peeing need seemed to vanish from my mind as I mentally uncrossed my legs and said to Duncan-Smith: "This is an adapted toilet, see the sign?" Which he acknowledged uncomfortably. "Why are you abusing this facility? I've had to wait in extreme pain and discomfort because you think you're above the rules that everyone else accepts!"

Duncan-Smith, is somewhat trapped, because I've placed my wheelchair between him and the door, and my PA is standing by my legs, so the trapped rat can't vault over me and do a runner.

Then I have him on the ropes, just waiting to deliver my coup de grace down drop his gloves his guard is gone as he splutters out "I'm sorry, but somebody told me I could use it".

And, in true Sun headline grabbing thought...GOTCHA! 

"So, if someone told you to pick up that TV because it was going begging. You'd pick up the TV?" I asked. "What's happened to your sense of personal responsibility for your own actions?" I pressed. "Are you exempt from the rules and regulations you spent the past hour telling us we must adhere to because that's how we maintain an orderly society?" I finished pushing my way into the loo.

Duncan-Smith, thinking he could do a runner took full advantage of the cessation in my harangue and just as he thought he'd escaped the loony wheely, I looked into the bowl and spotted he hadn't flushed the loo.

"Oy!" I shouted, arresting IDS's flight: "Do you know it's customary to flush the khazy after use?"

I can still picture his look, a mixture of abject contempt and 'beam-me-up-Scotty', as he drew an embarrassed grin across his Chevy while abruptly turning a corner to the safety of the street.

Open Letter To Iain Duncan Smith

 By Sue Marsh

The day you get that diagnosis is the day the blood runs cold in your veins. Everything stops. Sound is muffled in your ears, shock runs through you and you know in that moment that nothing will ever be the same again.

Life, that always seemed so ordered and full of potential becomes precious. A gift greater than any you ever appreciated. A privilege, not a right. Your own mortality comes crashing in around you, redefining love and hope and dreams for the future. Everything will change forever in that one horrifying moment.

If the unthinkable happens to one you love, the sense of impotence and fear is worse. You want it to be you. You'd give anything to change things around, to take away all the pain and suffering. You want to take on every invasive test, every painful procedure. You want it to be you laying there, pail and weak, vomiting endless traces of chemo or morphine into a grey carboard tray.

You want to be there. All the time. Every minute of every day. You want to protect the person you love most in the world, to fight for them, to arrange the very best care available. Suddenly work and meetings and focus groups are forgotten - irrelevant even - when contrasted with the battle for life.

Money won't save them. It might make things easier, speed up care or assure access to the most innovative treatments, but the battle is yours and yours alone. Together.

You grieve. Grieve for the carefree days, the easy confidence that good health brings. You grieve for the future, so cruelly and randomly threatened. You grieve for the love and support that always came first. You grieve for your children and the spectre that now hangs above their heads every minute of every day. Youngsters become carers and you grieve for the easy innocence they will never know again.

The luckiest of all might be able to leave work that very moment, rush home and gather up family in strong, caring arms. The luckiest will only have to face a battle with the disease now tearing their family apart, with little thought for other practicalities.

Most are not that lucky.

Most will find that just as their world falls apart, they must still pay the mortgage, still feed the children, still keep working hard. They will suffer endless, unimagined agonies as they try to keep all the balls in the air, desperate to fight side by side with their soul mate but unable to do so.

They might lose a wage. Suddenly and without warning their income may half just as they need it most. They may have no choice but to watch in terror as their modest savings drain away, placing fear of poverty side by side with the fear of death.

Is there anything worse? Could there be anything worse than finding your life turned upside down in every area? Job under threat, home at risk, ambitions and dreams destroyed? As your children's faces become etched with fear, do you tell them Mummy will be OK? Do you keep your financial fears to yourself? Do you take on every burden until the pressure gets too much? Do you try to do the work of 10 men? Superman at work, loving support at the hospital bed, devoted father and capable housekeeper? Can you bear the pressure or do you crack yourself?

There is something worse.

Finding that there is no cure.

Finding that there are no magic chemo bullets to stamp out the darkness, no dazzling operations to cut out the contagion. Treatments are patchy - the doctors tell you if you're lucky they can "manage" your condition, but from this day, life will be about survival. Forever.

The treatments won't stop in a month or a year, but they will still make you vomit or send shooting pains through your skull or make you so sensitive to sunlight that you can no longer go outside. No longer take your children to the park or dig sandcastles in the hazy summer sun. They might make you weak, or angry or depressed. They might cause more symptoms than the disease itself, but they keep you alive and "alive" is all those who love you need. Do anything Mummy, but don't die.

The boss who's been so supportive can't support you forever. 6 months, maybe even a year, but in the end, even the most caring boss will have to draw the line. What do you do? Who will care for your family while you work? Is you child old enough to call an ambulance if she has to? Would she know where the special pills are kept in case Mummy won't wake up? Can you teach her your work number or do you fret and worry through every day, never knowing what you will return home to?

Things won't improve. A grey faced doctor might tell you gently that they will only ever get worse. Functions will fail, dignity will crumble, every previously automatic task will need thought and support. There will be wheelchairs or oxygen tanks or feeding tubes. You will have to learn to change incontinence-bags or give injections or rig up sterile feeds. You will have to find money for a hoist or a  voice recognition system.

One day, Mummy might not be able to answer. She may not be able to walk or leave her bed. Birthday parties will have to move upstairs to a fetid room that smells of the end, but you will smile brittle smiles and put up bunting, pretending that nothing has changed. You will all laugh a little too shrilly, jump just a little too nervously, but you will pretend. When the kids are safely tucked up and your partner is finally sleeping a tortured morphine sleep, you will cry great heartwrenching sobs into a cushion so nobody hears.

There are legions of us Iain. Probably millions.  We fight great battles every day. We find resilience and love we never knew existed. We find pride in the face of indignity, hope in the face of despair. Our relationships are tested every day and every day we have to whisper "but I love them". Every day, that love has to win. Every day, love is all we have left to get us through.

We pretend the poverty doesn't matter and when faced with life or death, it's funny, but it doesn't seem to matter so much. An afternoon in a park at the beginning of spring, watching the children climb steps to great slide-summits, their joyous eyes flashing in the watery sun is almost too much pleasure to bear. The poignancy of knowing it could always be the last time makes the simplest things precious.

We pretend our ambitions and dreams were not important. Strange, but when your ambition becomes surviving to see your children married, it's true, they don't matter so much.

We pretend we're strong, but we only have the strength we all have, buried deep inside us. We just have to dig deep down to find it. Every day. Forever.

****************

This is why you cannot decide, randomly, that after a year, our families must struggle on alone. A year?? Why Time Limit ESA to a year? Why remove all support from these vulnerable families after one year? Why not 6 months or 3 years or a day? It bears no relationship to the real world, it is policy designed by Dali.

This is why you cannot make us wait 6 months for Disability Living Allowance. Why 6 months? By then we may be bankrupt, we may have lost our homes. We may be dead. The state may end up paying much more through picking up the pieces than in supporting us fairly from day one.

This is why more people must qualify for long term support and go into the Support Group of ESA. Because at the moment, you are failing people with lives like mine. People with Parkinson's and Arthritis and MS. Mothers and sons, daughters and fathers. People with lupus, schizophrenia, bowel disease, kidney failure, epilepsy, personality disorder, heart disease, COPD and thousands of less well known conditions that destroy lives. Countless things as devastating as cancer and some more so.

This is not "welfare." Welfare means to fare well. It is the mark of compassion and evolution in a democratic society. It means no-one should be left in absolute desperation. Your policies are causing this total desperation and I'm sure it is not what you want to do or set out to do.

By all means reform. Goodness knows the system does need to change, but the great myth is that it needs bigger sticks to beat us with and stricter reasons to ensure we do not qualify. Please Iain, listen to me today. You have all beat us hard enough for many years. There is nothing more to squeeze or remove or deny. We live in poverty and uncertainly already, and we have reached a tipping point. Labour's ESA was disastrous enough and already failing. Time limiting, tightening the descriptors yet again and leaving a lengthy qualifying period for DLA is going to cause real hardship and suffering.

Please listen. Please think again.

*************

Please do all you can to help me share this today. You can link to it, share it on Facebook, Twitter or Google+. If you have a Conservative MP, then PLEASE can I ask you to send him this today? You can do it in just a few moments here http://www.theyworkforyou.com/

Thank you.