……over the edge

. . . . how self-confidence, however rigorous, strong or embedded can be shredded by anxiety. I got MY letter today and read every word as it was not only an explanation of future matters but also a first point of contact. No one wrote or phone or emailed me to say this was coming and that I should prepare myself for a repetition of my humiliation by the ignorant to determine if I should be aided by Her Majesty’s Government. Appealing was an indignity, finally winning at Tribunal with specialists supporting me. The Department of Health & Security’s representative obviously having had the necessary papers thrown to him minutes before he sat down in front of a lawyer as chairman and a local Councillor and Trade Union representative. That told the whole story. When Neurologists and witnesses of my condition put ink on paper they cannot be mistrusted or brought into question by the DHS. I was made a lifetime decision. Because it took so long it cost HMG thousands of pounds in back payments with which I could repay my debts to good friends.

Already I hear the whisperings “but that’s my tax money”, well who helped pay for your grandfathers pension or hospitalisation? For your children’s education etc. etc. I did. After 2 World Wars after which the returning soldier or anyone who had a role in winning, were promised freedom, liberty and equality especially in medical and social matters, this Prime Minister has finally discarded some of the final threads of what his colleagues would call the “nanny state” in private of course. Soldiers literally, return from modern day battle with disabilities and are ignored, thrown aside. Sailors and Airmen after serving their country for many years are made redundant and then the government place an advertisement on the television for the Royal Marines??

Equality, – if you have enough money with which to try and destroy the world’s financial markets and oh by the way, make generous contributions to the Conservative or Republican party, which can now only be seen as corruption. Two to three years later how many financiers have been prosecuted, how many Executives have taken responsibility and how much non-paid tax has been gathered. I recently read that unpaid tax amounted to ten times the amount that could be possibly gathered from benefit fraud.

The very tone of MY letter is of constricted black and white alternatives, “You will” “It is important” the whole tone is that of you shall! or starve. Employment and Support Allowance (note the words of actual definition ‘Incapacity’ “Illness”, “Disability” and “Severe Disablement” have vanished from titles and text) and ‘lifetime decisions’ of the DHS Tribunal completely disappeared, no acknowledgement, nothing, no mention of appeal. The whole point of tribunal arrangements was to avoid the courts which were clogged up enough no doubt. This Prime Minister has played an ace card, it is not a court who made such decisions therefore, they count for nothing. So yet again I have to show that I do not have a wheelchair but still a big problem, however embarrassing, however hard I might try to pursue one day at time in some lucid form, I am required to…. well let me quote it:

“Customers will be considered and assessed for Employment and Support Allowance between 2010 and 2014”. I wonder what I am buying?

“We will send you a questionnaire” “We use the information to decide if you need to attend a Work Capability Assessment”, “A health care professional (a contractor has been employed to find and employ them) will assess you and advise Jobcentre Plus how your illness or disability affects you in your everyday life” This professional in most cases will be a doctor without a job, not a specialist Professor in Neurology and Neurosurgery whose clinic I have attended every 3 months for a very long time. They will, probably, not know the extent or possibility of harm complex partial seizures have and will do. Side effects of drugs or of the damage done by full seizure when I was younger.

“You may be required to attend a work-focused health-related assessment and work focused interviews” – oh boy, the bureaucrat is back in the saddle, despite amassing a bill at lunchtime (a recent scandal) larger than genuine benefit fraudsters create in one year. Yes, I believe that people out there are pretending because of sheer laziness or are just corrupt. Landlords claiming for dead tenants, people fully recovered but still claiming assistance. But I don’t believe that those who chase the sick have the clarity of thought that work should be created for the able-bodied and the cheater routed out in all places first. This week I heard British companies were advertising in foreign countries in the native language of those countries?.

“IF YOU DON’T YOUR BENEFIT MAY BE AFFECTED” (their capitals). “We then decide if you are entitled to Employment and Support Advice”. I now have a new Neurology Consultant who even expresses his concern at my being “unaccompanied” in a letter to my General Practitioner whose clinic I have to chase to get a medical prescription out of each month. This is for medicine I have taken for 25 years. This clinic is now run by a private company overseen by a medical Trust. 7 years ago it was run by a group of doctors and someone would call you, usually staff on doctor’s instructions, you would even know their name and say “you have forgotten your Prescription David, are you OK? Not now! The shifting of budget and medical referral responsibilities to the General Practitioner or the family doctor, a Urology Specialist once explained to me, was to slow down the money coming to medicine in general from central government.

I read and hear of the disabled, attending the above interviews and there is no access for wheel chairs! Mobility in the form of a car removed from a suffer of palsy, her husband worked part-time so they could afford their life and tipped the balance so no more going out. Others now taking their own lives rather than be immobilised or pushed into a lonely poverty, I understand, it is just too much. This letter lying before me now from Glasgow not a local Jobcentre, means I have travelled back in time to the mid 90’s, when self-employed I simply could not get people to pay me and so had nothing to eat or pay the rent and was epileptic too. A lowest point. The attitude then was ‘no wheelchair’ no disability, no assistance, until one asked about Disability Working Allowance and was asked to “wait a minute”.

All this instigated by a man who wheeled out his disabled son to meet the press, is now an overweight Prime Minister, who wants to hurt me for the accumulation of debt by the greedy?

dwk