Not grasping the nettle

I am somewhat disappointed  in the Lib-Dem/Conservative coalition's planned welfare changes. What they amount to is beating sick people with a stick and threatening to take away their benefits because ATOS is incapable of making a fair assessment of whether they can  work.  This is why so many people appeal and there is up to a 9-month wait for a tribunal hearing.

What I wanted to hear is that the ESA/ATOS system would be scrapped and the DWP would go back to relying on the opinions of the health professionals closest to the claimant who are best placed to know if that person is fit to work or not. ESA/ATOS treats people with mental health issue particularly unfairly, putting them under additional and unnecessary stress. - the coalition really has to ask the mental health charity Mind about this.

Ian Duncan Smith seems to have fallen into the Conservative trap of thinking that work is a cure-all for everything and worse still, that jobs for the unemployed can simply be conjured out of thin air in a recession. There is no incentive or requirement whatever for any UK company to inform the local JobCentre when it has vacancies. Some companies hardly ever advertise OR tell the JobCentre, they rely entirely on internal promotions and word of mouth if they need new people.

People who have a job simply have no idea what it is like living on benefit. A recent TV programme showing an MP living with people on benefit seemed to have little effect. Take my bank Halifax. They have just decided with no consultation or discussion to take away my overdraft. They didn't consider first what the effect would be or ask about it. Now they are expecting me to live AND pay back some of the overdraft and want to take nearly a third of my benefit income to do so. Their customer service is absolute poo. It has so far taken me over 2 hours total phone time to even get to a department who has a tiny bit of sympathy for this problem. They say blandly that yes, they realise what a disaster it is to lose the ability to pay direct debits and standing orders, or just to go and use my debit card to buy food, but I'm darn sure they don't.

In the end they agreed I could have some of my last lot of benefit to pay for essentials and I had to suffer the humiliation of standing in the middle of the bank with other customers around to tell my story to someone on the banking floor, and then being escorted to the cashier who was told in a loud voice how much she could give me and why this was being done. A little trust would have been nice, telling me I could withdraw up to a specific amount via my debit card in the ATM or over the counter without the loud accompaniment.

The overdraft level I am currently on was GIVEN to me by Halifax last year, it was just increased from its previous level. In the circumstances I was in then, I had no choice other than to use it. At that time, they were snatching outrageous amounts of money from me for every transaction if I went over my overdraft. Expecting that the courts would tell them that those charges were unfair, they switched me to a differently named current account but the charges are still very steep and I understand other customers who have been hit hard by them too, are considering another court action. Basically, Halifax charges BEFORE the change of account last December are responsible for me reaching the level of overdraft I am at now. So, when they call me back later in the day to have another discussion about it, I will remind them about that.

Banks need to take a very new and different attitude to customer financial difficulties. At present, this service is phone based. I can't go and talk to someone from the 'customer priority team' in my branch. I wouldn't even mind going to a larger branch a few miles away if they had one person in each big city or major town.

My stress levels have taken a major beating this week and it has taken every bit of determination that I would not give up and self-harm, but I can tell all of my readers that it has come very near it, to the extent of sitting on Hayling Island beach and considering suicide by drowning. Why should I let these heartless bastards win. They can't even run their own business - Halifax having been taken over by Lloyds TSB last year - what do they really know about running mine? Onwards and upwards.

Prime-ministerial spouse tittle-tattle

After the solid and stodgy diet of politics over the days since the election, now perhaps we can look forward to a little entertainment from No.10.

We have already seen inside the Cameron's kitchen, although I have to admit missing that TV program, but what can we expect as the media gets to grips with the Mrs' Cameron and Clegg.

I very much liked Samantha Cameron's elegant navy maternity dress, worn for the visit to the Queen and despite her determination to stay in the background, I am sure there will be more about Miriam Clegg's fashion preferences in the weeks to come.When she has been seen, she has looked very stylish. Samantha reportedly doesn't have a favourite designer label and admitted to having 'borrowed' a maternity dress. Very thrifty - will she be seen in London and Oxford's more up-market second hand dress agencies as her bump grows?

Please, please don't either of them make the mistake that Cherie Blair did in her first weeks as wife of the PM, by opening the front door in her dressing gown. I don't think she'll ever live that gaffe down. Miriam Clegg may get an unjustified rough ride for leaving for work without her make-up this morning though - she looked fine, but appearing without warpaint is a no-no for the celeb. watchers.

Both women are determined to continue their high-flying careers, Sam as creative director for Smythsons, a luxury stationery and luggage company, and Miriam (professionally Miriam Gonzales Durantez) as a lawyer, but it will be interesting to see what Sam decides to do post-baby - flexible and reduced hours perhaps.

One of the first headlines after the announcement that David Cameron would be the new PM, was an invitation from the White House for July. Now, Samantha is due to have her baby in September, so there might just be time to fit that in before a mid-Atlantic birth became too much of a risk. Perhaps President Obama will send Air Force 1 to collect them - I hear it is rather better equipped for such emergencies than your average British Airways jet. I am sure Samantha will get on very well with Michelle Obama who has trod a very careful path between family and First Lady in the first year of the Presidency.

An interesting bit of Samantha trivia is that she has a tattoo, a dolphin on her ankle - is that a first for a Prime Minister's wife or did Cherie or even Norma Major hide one away? Or, here's an exotic thought, maybe Maggie T had an anchor-chain-link tattoo somewhere in keeping with her Iron Lady title.  I'll leave you with that one.....

Gordon, going, gone

After all his embarassing key rattling to get Tony Blair out of No.10, I was not surprised by GB's reluctance to quit it. I imagined him squatting like a large warty toad on the bottom stair while poor Sarah Brown wrung her hands and begged him for permission to pack. Well, now she can.

Fact. Our electoral system is broken, and needs reform and updating at the very least so people who want to vote can do so and are not denied it because their polling station can't cope with the numbers. My polling station, by the way was an oversized garden shed in a pub car park - at the most it would hold about 10 people apart from the two officials.

Fact. Labour got fewer seats and a lower share of the national vote

Fact. Nick Clegg said all through his campaign that he would follow the will of the British peoplle in the event of a hung Parliament. So, why is he looking like reneging on that promise?

This is not the result I would personally have wanted, but it is a far better prospect than another 5 years of Labour, regardless of who is at the helm. Whatever David Cameron continues to insist, is Conservative policy, I believe that many of the more progressive grassroots members of his party now see electoral reform as an inevitable and necessary procedure because the British people as a whole want it.

Over the weekend, the money markets were on tiptoe, waiting to see what happened in those meetings between the Lib-Dems and the Conservatives. If GB had shown any signs of doing a deal with Nick Clegg, I think they would have reacted very badly.

As I write, David Cameron has upped the stakes, promising a referendum on electoral reform, albeit in a rather watered down form. What will happen tomorrow - I really don't know.

Never mind the b******* Gordon

One way and another, the media has played a far bigger part in this General Election campaign than any other in British history.  Today's huge gaffe by Gordon Brown, calling Gillian Duffy, a lifelong Labour voter from Rochdale, Lancashire 'a bigoted woman'  has the potential to totally destroy Labour's slim chances of winning on May 6th.

Mr Brown has not done well in the two leaders' debates to date. He has been notably the one leader who has argued, interrupted and tried to cut across the other two party leaders, and then called them bickering children. He has consistently said that this election is about substance and policies, not style, then comes today's outburst, not to mention previous accusations of bullying by Number 10 staff.

The Labour party have reportedly been responsible for leaflets being issued, telling the most outrageous lies about supposed policies that appear nowhere in either Conservative or Liberal Democrat manifestoes.

Only this week, Mr Brown said on a BBC Radio 4 programme that both the other parties planned to cut child tax credits as if this was a policy directed at the poorest in our society. I can find no reference to removing this benefit totally.

With regard to benefits, I would like to hear something very specific from Mr Clegg. The Labour party were at one time working with the mental health charity Mind, to improve the process by which people with mental health issues apply for E.S.A., the benefit that is gradually replacing Incapacity Benefit. Recently they have come out with a new application form which is even LESS likely to result in someone with depression or anxiety being granted benefit, and MORE likely to start a very expensive and long-winded appeals process. The Conservatives think that work is a cure for such ailments and intend to put everyone back on Job Seekers Allowance. See this link for Mind's reaction to the planned changes.

Mr Clegg, to finally win my vote for the Liberal Democrats, please tell me that you are going to scrap the Government quango ATOS and return the decision of whether or not a person is fit to work to the NHS staff like GP's and mental health professionals who you are already paying to determine the appropriate diagnosis and the appropriate treatment. By doing so, and granting benefit to claimants on the basis of a written agreement that they are unfit to work, you will cut the work of tribunal staff and save claimants months of stress and worry which is hardly good for their condition in the first place.

My GP referred to ATOS original decision that I was fit to work as 'talking out of their backsides' - except she replaced 'backside' with a word beginning with 'a'. The eventual outcome appears in previous posts.

Mr Brown's indiscretion today will be a very clear warning to all other candidates of all colours that they are being watched 24/7 by all forms of media,  and that bad news spreads virally via Twitter, Facebook and other social media.  However, what is more worrying is that Mr Brown's attitude that anyone with the view that immigration should be cut, is bigoted.  What I would expect that to mean after the election is that immigration issues will be shuffled under the carpet and talked down as less important than other issues on the agenda of a new Government if Labour have any part in it. Actually, Mr Brown it isn't less important, and I don't think I need to elucidate why.

BBC Report on 'the Rochdale incident'.

Candidate's debate

I'm about to watch the very first American style candidate's debate on TV. The media have been building up to it all day, speculating on which policies are going to capture the nation's imagination and win votes. Now the moment has arrived it feels like a damp squib.

I've been reading manifestos from the principal parties, and based on those, none of the major contenders really attracts me. I started my voting life as a member of the Young Conservatives, and I have worked for the party in the past to win marginal seats such as North Portsmouth. On the face of it, where I live now, in Havant, looks like a safe Conservative seat.

But I can tell you Mr Cameron, and Mr David Willetts, the Conservative candidate for Havant that it is far from that. I very much doubt that it would go to a Labour candidate, but a result for the Liberal Democrats is a very real possibility. I've been listening to what my friends and neighbours are saying. Beware.

Naturally, I was most interested in the aspects of the manifestos most likely to affect me personally. I'm still on sickness benefit and still suffering from depression which ebbs and flows but never really seems to get totally better. One of the reasons for this is that my local mental health services are overwhelmed. They are ALREADY seeing cuts and valuable staff diverted to other areas. My GP told me only a few days ago that there is very little hope of me getting access to therapies that might help me because she has tried to get urgent first referrals into appointments at Parkway and they are saying 6 to 8 weeks at the earliest. I can tell you that saying this to someone with a depressive illness may well end up in a suicide attempt, even if they are handed out anti-depressants.

In Mr Cameron's manifesto, he tells me that everyone on Incapacity Benefit will be re-assessed to see if they are fit for work.I am assuming he includes Employment and Support Allowance as well - perhaps he doesn't know it exists. I was wrongly assessed by Labour's quango ATOS as fit for work. Thousands of others in this country have had the same experience, including people with terminal cancer and people receiving treatment in psychiatric hospitals. Most of us have appealed and had our benefit granted after a tribunal. Why has this happened? Because the application form isn't fit for purpose and because ATOS reportedly employs medical assessors who don't meet standards for the NHS either because their qualifications in other countries are not adequate or because they don't speak English well enough.

Mr Cameron, are these the people who you are going to waste money on all over again, or are you instead going to accept the word of our primary NHS carers - the doctors and mental health workers who see us every week and know us and our illnesses well. They can tell you that the idea that 'work' - if only we could get it - is a 'cure' for depression and similar problems is a total and ridiculous myth. I can't think of an employer that would accept me arriving for work at 11am. Not because I am lazy and idle but because the medication I need to take makes me feel tired and exhausted all the time.

I haven't seen anything in any of the manifestos which addresses the problem of age discrimination in employment. Why do we need a stream of immigrants to the country when there are skilled older British people who could fill vacancies if only they were allowed to?

Mr Clegg was suitably woolly on both the above topics. The only thing I would praise his manifesto for, is the way the Liberal Democrats have costed their proposals.

I have been making some efforts to get back to work. I've been doing an IT course at a local FE college that would enhance the skills I already have. My tutor has told the class that he won't have a job for the rest of the year because the Labour Government have ALREADY slashed the college budget not just for adult education, but for vocational and other courses for school-leavers too. Is this the action of a party who want the votes of first time voters and out-of-work adults?

As an ESA claimant I had to go through a back to work process while I was waiting for my tribunal hearing and was far from well enough to benefit from it. Even if I said I was well enough for work tomorrow, I couldn't revisit that help or see the same people, because as a JSA claimant, I would be on a 'different programme'. What a total waste of money!

Why is it that people on ESA get more benefit than on JSA? I lived for 7 months on the JSA rate while waiting for my tribunal hearing or rather I failed to live. How is anyone expected to survive on £64 per week when their energy costs in the middle of winter were nearly half of that amount. I ran up debts and an overdraft. When I got the money I SHOULD have got after the tribunal, it went to pay debts. What I get now is barely enough even with my mortgage and council tax paid. My bank manager is rubbing his hands in glee because the courts allowed him to carry on scourging me for unreasonably high bank charges. I have no doubts that this was a directive from a Labour Government terrified that the banks might collapse if they had to pay it all back.

Assuming that I stay on the same income I am now, I don't see one single policy in any manifesto that is going to SAVE me any money on what I buy, quite the reverse. I don't see any proposals to ensure that the energy companies pass on their cost savings on wholesale energy to the consumers. They make massive and obscene profits every single year. My house is already insulated and double glazed, so no help there. What WOULD help me is for the Government to pay 100% up front for some solar panels on my roof . The repayments could come out of future savings on heating water and electricity, plus any profit I make sending power back to the grid.

I'm watching the leaders now. I see the same pathetic schoolboy bickering as happens every day in the House of Commons. I'm not seeing anyone I trust enough to run this country for the next 5 years, and what would happen in a hung Parliament really scares me. Would anything EVER get done?

It is too much to hope that any of the potential leaders ever read this blog and actually care about the real issues here. Maybe they would be better off sitting down and reading some of the blogs and tweets from the British electorate to know what we really think about them and their policies. I have not yet made my mind up who to vote for. Maybe if enough desperate people in my constituency sickened with this lot decided to vote Green, we would return the first Green MP to Parliament.