Kendall’s, Starmer’s and Reeves’s longstanding utter contempt for the vulnerable is on full show
Keir Starmer and his DWP Secretary Liz Kendall are continuing their harrying of the sick and vulnerable by announcing that they will impose interviews with ‘work coaches’ on patients in hospital for treatment for poor mental health. The government claims this will ‘help them get back to work’.
Since last year, DWP work coaches have been responsible for applying benefit sanctions – a massive cause of debt and poverty – on claimants they decide are not working hard enough to find a job, so a meeting with a job coach is inherently a source of stress and anxiety for claimants. Forcing mental health patients to meet them, especially while they are in poor enough health to need treatment, is cruel and astonishingly reckless – and entirely in line with the approach of Starmer’s ‘Labour’ government, which has announced a raft of policies and punitive measures on benefit claimants without conducting any kind of assessment of the impacts and dangers of them and which is taking legal action to hide how many people the preceding government’s DWP policies killed.
Making the announcement, Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall said that trials had produced ‘dramatic results’. At the time of writing, Skwawkbox is still waiting for a reply from the DWP press office advising whether and if so where these ‘dramatic results’ and the trial methodology can be found.
Mikey Erhardt of Disability Rights UK condemned the plan:
It is ridiculous to try and turn a hospital, a place of care and support into a business setting… [and] hugely inappropriate to be considering subjecting people who experience mental ill-health and distress to a CV check-up,
Kendall has previously made clear that her plans on benefits will see some people lose them altogether, implying that unemployment benefits – the UK has one of the stingiest social security regimes of comparable countries – are too generous and disincentivise people from working, a parrot-like repetition of Tory propaganda.
Kendall claimed that the UK is ‘really struggling with health problems’. The solution for that is to improve the NHS and help people have better health, not to traumatise or persecute them into work they are unfit for, but this seems not to occur to the Starmer government. Labour yesterday announced it will make the unemployed take a slimming drug or lose benefits – and that eventually NHS treatment may be withheld from any ‘overweight’ people who refuse to do the same.
The United Nations repeatedly slammed the Tories for their abuse of poor, sick and disabled people and their human rights and last year the Equality and Human Rights Commission submitted a report to the UN condemning the government’s discrimination against the vulnerable. It seems Starmer, Kendall and co, who have long made clear their intention to force sick people into work, are not only determined to do nothing to reverse those evils, but to extend and intensify them.
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Bloody hell! 4.5% Kendall and the Pet Shop Boy Sweeting teaming up.
The poor sods don’t stand a chance.
What would Nye say?
He’d probably say don’t sign up for UC in the first place. It’s a death sentence for your mental health. You can get by on 20 hrs work per week. When my JSA finished, I blagged my way into p/t cleaning and signed off. Anyone can do cleaning. UC won’t let you go till you’re on 35 hrs. Few people survive it for long…
No surprise.
Easily predictable and thus PREDICTED
🪳🐽🪰🪳🐽🪰🪳🐽🪰
much Much MUCH worse to come from OBVIOUS
bad Bad BAD news Keith Rodney Freeloader Freebees Scrounger Free-gear Sponger HUNDRED THOUSAND POUNDS gobbled up in WEEKS spectacles, suits, luxury lounge seats at football and childrens’ pop concerts,
while children miss meals, many badly housed, basics lacking …
Keith (SIR) Rodney Starmer stays in multimillion pound luxury Covent Garden & Soho apartments to produce fraudulent videos, then, when discovered, Sir LIES that his son needed a quiet place to study for GCSEs already sat.
lies Lies LIES from LIAR Establishment TOOL Keith Rodney Starmer, bad Bad BAD news🥀🥀🥀
The total and utter shitbags. Out-dummkopfing dummkopf-schmitt AND fester mcvile, combined.
And what happens, when forced into the workplace, one of them has an ‘episode’ and harms either others, or themselves?
What have the unions** had to say about this? Happy with their members being made to be responsible for colleagues with mental health issues, are they?
**except for the abhorrent pcs, who will be the union that the ‘work coaches’ responsible for these ‘assessments’ will be from.
And we were told we should vote for this…
Toffee you are right that the Trade Unions should be involved to ensure that their members only participate in this scheme when certain conditions are met:
– The first step would be for patients to be referred by their psychiatrist and for patients to be willing to engage with this program
-Second to have an audit on the skill of each patients alongside what jobs each patient is willing to consider.
-Third to provide with good quality training that would ensure that patients would be able to get a high value job that will keep him/her able to sustain a good quality of life without resorting to mean tested benefits.
Somehow, I don’t believe this is what Kendall and Starmer have in mind. I fear it would be find them any job and it they kill themselves, well them less benefits to pay.
Hence, saving all around in the quest to reduce the 22 billions budget deficit.
Mental health workers strike in manchester …
https://www.itv.com/news/granada/2024-10-16/cuts-to-mental-health-services-putting-lives-at-risk
“Do you know what it’s like.
To always feel sad.
Capitalism.
Can drive you quite mad.”
Disabled Apartheid, The Big Red Freedom Train.
I have mixed feelings about this proposal:
– Some patients get very mentally ill because they are unable to find a job. Hence, to be able to secure a job while in hospital could be very therapeutic and help with their recovery.
-Alongside helping the patients that want help getting a job, it would be good to do an audit on the existing skills that each patient that signs up for this program has and offering suitable training so that those patients who want to work can find high value jobs that needs filling up.
– Hence, provided that the work coaches only work with patients with their consent and after securing their consultant psychiatrist OK, and with the focus on getting the patients high value jobs, I don’t see the problem.
However, I fear that the programme is gear to get mentally ill patients employed no matter as to whatever is in dead end jobs. In this case rather than therapeutical it could result in creating extra pressure and could end up with an increase in the rate of suicides for those suffering from mental illness.
Tell me, Maria – who is gonna employ someone with mental health issues in ‘high-value’ jobs?
(Apart from 20% of the british public, who have given the green light to employ a bunch of retards to run the country?)
One is six people are on anti-depressants. That suggests systemic problems with our society that rose-tinted CBT won’t cure. It’s not your fault: the really sick F***ers are the ones in power.
This is the post Facebook removed. I was posting for likes they said.
I do see that in a society where people are valued and supported by employers, perhaps finding a suitable job, with suitable hours, might help someone with mild depression, anxiety, for example.
However, we do not have that society, far from it. Given the appalling state of mental health care since 2010, and the difficulty people with even mild mental health problems have in accessing support ofthe most minimal kind, I don’t think hospital beds are going to be filled with patients who with a bit of encouragement are going to think “Oh yes, a minimum wage job at the beck and call of the boss is just what I need to help me cope with my mental health problems”. More likely those at very very serious risk to themselves or others.
Of course, there would be no ‘compulsion’. Hah, with the DWP in charge?
Given the short time Labour has been in government, the ‘trials’ must have been initiated by the Tories – or have there been any trials at all….
I had the lowest expectations of a Starmer government, but I don’t have the words to express my utter disgust at how low they are actually stooping and this really is obscene.
Apparently, according to this sites sage and fount of all Officially approved knowledge….
https://skwawkbox.org/2024/10/15/starmer-streeting-to-force-weight-loss-drug-with-known-fatal-side-effects-on-unemployed/#comment-260160
…..there’s nothing to worry about. The Balls Crystal 1A reveals that all these trials will (quote) “very likely to lead to both better outcomes for patients and considerable savings for the NHS.” (unquote).
Remember, straying from The Official Narrative (TON) can be bad for your health.