Ne'er get thee stitched til Booris be ditched: UK General Election 2019

Day after day, Jo Coburn spouts seemingly endless propaganda for the Tories on the BBC's Politics Live. So it's good to see Andy McDonald call her out on her desperate spin today.

Our NHS is #NotForSale #TrumpUKVisitpic.twitter.com/YhQhSOViwL

— Corbyn for PM (@CorbynASAP) December 3, 2019

Andy McDonald not taking no shit off feeble tory campaigning bbc presenter, again.

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This video on the cost of US healthcare is amazing and not just when that girl says ‘shut the fridge’. pic.twitter.com/PaFyLcRqLK

— Ioan Marc Jones (@ioanmarcjones) December 3, 2019

Labour has launched its disability manifesto:

🔥 Scrap the Tory ESA (WRAG) cut and reinstate £30 per week

🔥 Bring Carer’s Allowance to the level of JSA

🔥 Immediately suspend all benefit sanctions

🔥 Scrap the Work Capability Assessment

🔥 Scrap the PIP test

— Frances Ryan (@DrFrancesRyan) December 3, 2019

selfishly need this Labour government for the Carer's Allowance payrise alone!

Absolutely nothing selfish about that.

otm

I'll promise not to fritter any of it away on booze and gambling!

i may be a tactics fan but how could anyone not vote for that tbh

It's expensive, you know. And zilch can be done about it:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/dec/03/uk-six-richest-people-control-as-much-wealth-as-poorest-13m-study

i attended my wife's PIP assessment with her yesterday morning, first time i've been to one. i think it actually went okay for her but she's an ex-nurse so she had the advantage of being used to talking about the issues and all the attendant form-filling you have to do. it was still hugely stressful though and i couldn't quite shake the feeling that we were under investigation somehow xps

Scrap the Work Capability Assessment

as someone who has been passed as "fully fit for work" 3 times and then won each lengthy appeal (with notes from the appeal doctors saying variations on "why the fuck is this person even here, they should be home in bed" lol) can I just say FUCK YES VOTE LABOUR

xp
My partner had her assessment at home because she struggles to travel, even with a mobility scooter. I got really bad vibes from the assessor and her first application for PIP went very very wrong, but she got awarded it. GL to your wife Nick, being a nurse and being comfortable with medical terminology should help her case.

but that is what its like. Some Kafkaesque nightmare where you are making a case that they are out to disprove.

When people keep winning these appeals and gov legal fees are mounting up into the hundreds of millions - I wouldn't be surprised if they haven't saved any money at all but are just persecuting and killing disabled people at a cost.

I'm v grateful to our hospice nurse who filled in the forms for my wife and ticked whatever the box is that she never needed to have an assessment, it just went straight through. all I hear are nightmarish scenarios with people being assessed by people who don't even know anything about the medical conditions they are supposed to be assessing.

it was never about saving money, it was about further demonising sick and disabled people for the crime of receiving pitiful amounts of support from the state and, if at all possible, driving them to death

only last week a friend was telling me about the assessment he'd been to where the lol expert said to him "well you've only had a stroke"

someone with a lower B-Tec qualification in first aid pretending to be medical expert is what you seem to get.

i attended my wife's PIP assessment with her yesterday morning, first time i've been to one. i think it actually went okay for her but she's an ex-nurse so she had the advantage of being used to talking about the issues and all the attendant form-filling you have to do. it was still hugely stressful though and i couldn't quite shake the feeling that we were under investigation somehow xps

You are under investigation, also, like most bureaucracy, the more together and honest and conscientious you are the more likely they are to screw you.

i think from what i know the assessors are medically qualified in some area but it's like Occ Health, they are in no way qualified to make prognoses on complex neurological or physical conditions, and the assessment framework ignores conditions where the impact between a bad day and your best day is extremely debilitating

The PIP forms are all about making up the points, not honestly talking about your condition - that's how my partner failed the first time. And if you turn up at the assessment centre rather than saying "you come to me, fuckos" they often put some euphemistic stuff in the report about how spritely you were looking after sprinting up 4 flights of stairs and were tap-dancing on the reception table etc..

the hope, it burns

Just found out that in the Tory safe seat I grew up in, the local MP (who never shows her face otherwise) has been going door to door begging for votes. Something's up.

— Christmas Eve ain't what it used to be (@bloonface) December 3, 2019

they often put some euphemistic stuff in the report about how spritely you were looking after sprinting up 4 flights of stairs and were tap-dancing on the reception table etc..

^^^^

I think the appeal success rate is something like 50%. It's an unbelievable waste of money, and there are dark instincts at the bottom of it - hatred and cruelty systematised.
Alongside that, it feels something like a racket - it's that political/civil service love of handing out and managing large contracts. Power. Playing at being a cost-cutting, efficient business while killing people.
just fucking believe doctors ffs. so what if (as they believe) there are too many doctors who sign people off too lightly? Is this monstrosity the answer to that?

xxp
perhaps the LibDems will do better than the polls are saying, despite being hampered with a useless manifesto and tethered to squirrel's corpse of a leader. Lots of pissed of remain Tories might just stay at home, or vote LibDem despite how useless they've been.

in sarah o'connor's piece on blackpool from last year:

Kerr will help these two women file appeals; Blackpool Citizens Advice has an 80 per cent success rate at overturning the DWP’s decisions. The benefit system is swallowing up time for many local charities. Dave Flanagan, who works for the GMB union, chairs a charity called the Blackpool Centre for the Unemployed. “What it should be about is a one-stop shop for anyone unemployed, but it’s going into a rut where all we’re doing is welfare rights advice,” he says. Across the country, the system has been clogged with appeals. Between October 2013 and March 2016, 57 per cent of original decisions that were appealed were overturned, according to the IFS think-tank. “This is arguably suggestive of a system that is not working well,” it said.

'Arguably suggestive' is putting it mildly. Those figures are extraordinary. Any other system with that failure rate would be shut down or put on emergency measures and overhauled.

meanwhile, in salisbury

Boris Johnson getting heckled out of Salisbury. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. pic.twitter.com/mbB4q6XtGb

— Ash Sarkar (@AyoCaesar) December 3, 2019

Slightly surreal moment on campaign trail in Salisbury as Boris Johnson is confronted about rail services

Conversation cut short after man warns that ‘perverts and robbers will run amock’ unless things improve pic.twitter.com/KvdGYYXPT8

— Steven Swinford (@Steven_Swinford) December 3, 2019

A mis-step from CCHQ sets activists' teeth on edge. An email has gone out in the name of co-chairman @benwelliot asking for money: no thanks for what you're doing or giving already, and a bossy tone that is going down badly. Just an email, but shows how easy it is to get wrong. pic.twitter.com/cqV6gKaHO8

— Mark Wallace (@wallaceme) December 3, 2019

xp the man says “people want a guard on the train”, it doesn’t just come out of nowhere

and by 'guard' he appears to mean 'judge dredd'

mr prime minister, when will you finally provide train guards with the authority they need to dispense instant, brutal justice on fare-skippers, litter-droppers and sticky-fingered children

would approve of that, some of the obnoxious pissed up geordie twats I've seen on trains deserve summary execution.

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.coverbrowser.com%2Fimage%2Fjudge-dredd-2000-ad%2F318-1.jpg&f=1&nofb=1

a chilling vision of boris' britain

SNP source about Jo Swinson’s seat: “it’s hanging on a shoogly peg”.

— Lewis Goodall (@lewis_goodall) December 3, 2019

this seems... significant

UK medicines pricing clearly on US side of table...

This video from January is US Pharma industry lobby telling US trade negotiators that US-UK trade deal is “an important opportunity” to deal with “artificially depressed prices” in UK - “dictated” via our “primary payer” system pic.twitter.com/ptXlcThTfV

— Faisal Islam (@faisalislam) December 3, 2019

Whether Labour win or not (I gave up on hope a while ago, and only do action) it's a pleasure to watch the Tory mask slip all the way off. Nasty incompetent morons. Eventually things reach a tipping point.

ARTIFICIALLY DEPRESSED PRICES ffs

Like, the idea that you vote Conservative because they're sensible businesslike chaps is long gone, these days Tory voters and activists as far as I can see are all screeching about vote Tory to save us from this inflated balloon monster called Corbyn and omg Greta the environmentalist will murder us all with her nice coherent protests

Salisbury is about as Tory as you get, it's been blue since before the publication of The Great Gatsby, so if Boris is getting a rough ride there then Tory strategists are right to be worried.

They are almost back to being the obvious non-starters they were in 1997, in other words

lol the Labour candidate in Salisbury is a Tom Corbin. Good to see 'King Arthur Pendragon' running again also.

A leading campaigner against racism has resigned from a Church of England advisory body in protest at the archbishop of Canterbury’s support for the chief rabbi’s comments last week on antisemitism in the Labour party.

Gus John, a respected author and academic, said: “As a matter of principle, I cannot continue to work with the Anglican church … after the archbishop of Canterbury’s disgraceful endorsement of the chief rabbi’s unjust condemnation of Jeremy Corbyn and the entire Labour party.”

Welby getting some blowback from last week.

It did seem to be one woman heckling in Salisbury and a toff shouting "good man!" so I'm not sure it counts as a rough ride, but all the same you love to see it

Would party leaders be going to safe seat at the the last week of a campaign?

Thing is even if the only thing you care about politically is building the wall at Dover and ethnically cleansing the shires, there is no sense in which you could call Johnson a good man

I was thinking how pivotal making inroads to some of these northern brexit voting seats are to the Tories strategy and boris doesn't seem to have been up here for a while.

Not sure Johnson has ever set foot in the South Ruislip part of his seat. The tarmac at RAF Northolt doesn't count.

Anyone willing to read this?
https://www.bitebackpublishing.com/books/may-at-10

has anyone done a chris cook style analysis of what the JC/BJ visit locations tell us about their campaigns ?