Dr Sarah Woollaston Calls Obesity Sickness Benefit Loss Idea ‘Illegal’

Same Difference

Senior Tory MP Sarah Wollaston has demanded that a Conservative proposal to cut benefits for obese people, drug addicts and alcoholics is dropped immediately.

The chair of the Health Committee has written to David Cameron to warn that he is effectively asking doctors and nurses to break the law.

She said the law on consent was clear: that all patients have the right to refuse treatment. By threatening to take away people’s basic income, the government would be forcing people to get help.

“A doctor would not only find themselves in breach of the law, they’d find themselves at risk of being struck off,” Wollaston told BuzzFeed News. “So in fact, his proposal is utterly unworkable in terms of the existing law.”

The prime minister has declared that people who cannot work because they are too fat – or addicted to drugs or alcohol – could have their benefits cut…

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BBC Radio Host Michael Buerk Says ‘Let Fat People Die To Save The NHS Money’

Same Difference

Mochael Buerk, host of BBC Radio 4’s The Moral Maze, has made some outrageous comments about obesity.

He said the state should let fat people die to save the NHS money and that obesity should not be classed as a disease. He added ‘leave couch potatoes alone. They’re weak, not ill.’

Michael Buerk is wrong on all levels.

Firstly, obese people are still human and they fully deserve support to live for as long as is naturally possible. Some of them maybe do bring obesity on themselves, however there are many reasons for obesity which no one can help. Every obese person is not, as Michael Buerk suggests, fat because they eat too much.

Steroids, which are prescribed for many genuine conditions and physical disabilities, particularly arthritis, cause obesity. No one asks for arthritis, or Crohns, or colitis.

Also, wheelchair users and physically disabled people are often obese. They do…

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Great Tastes of America: The New York Stack

Cut Sexual Health Services Over Our Dead Bodies!

ACT UP London

On March 28th, ACT UP London hosted a film screening followed by a panel discussion at The Cinema Museum in Kennington – ‘Cut Sexual Health Services Over Our Dead Bodies’. We were inspired by Kings Fund analysis exploring the effect public health grants being cut has on sexual health services. The aim of the evening was to mobilise a growing coalition of healthcare professionals and activists.

2019 sees the 40th anniversary of the Radical Faeries, so we screened ‘Hope Along the Wind’. ‘Hope Along the Wind’ documents the life of Harry Hay, who founded the Mattachine Society in the 1950s and was a founding member of the Radical Faeries in the 1970s. Both groups pioneered radical and modern sexual freedom.

The film follows Harry Hay, founder of the Mattachine Society and later the Radical Faeries. A radical gay activist, Hay provided a space in which…

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The Bedroom Tax that Never Went Away.

Ipswich Unemployed Action.

It’s still there, and worse, under Universal Credit.

Amongst all the other things about Universal Credit, wait for payments, sanctions, benefit freeze, on-line forms and the hated ‘journal’, life under the rules of Coachy, and all the rest, most people, well this Blog for one, had forgotten about the Bedroom Tax.

Not, apparently the dogged Newshounds of the regional press.

Today: Birmingham Live.

Universal Credit claimants face bedroom tax of up to 25 per cent – here’s what you need do

These are the Universal Credit housing rules – as Government tries to make system fairer for tenants.

People receiving Universal Credit are being hit by cuts in their benefit because of the so-called bedroom tax.

Those in council or housing association properties are finding their Universal Credit reduced if they have more rooms than they need – even if there is a lodger living in one of them.

The…

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Never before in UK history has so much been owed to so many by so few

Fear and Loathing in Great Britain

It is worth bearing in mind that a government is not the country, it is not the people, it is not society and, most especially, it is not community or the daily reality of people’s lives.

Good governance is like grease on a bearing, never to be confused with the bearing itself, which actually does the work.

Remember how Margaret Thatcher broke the unions, shut the mines and devastated the communities of those who mined the black gold? What an astonishing achievement, given that no government ever extracted a single lump of coal from the earth to warm the hearth and heart of another human being.

There is no greater tyrant than a government that gets above itself, that believes in the myth of its own privilege and which ceases to serve, to become the master.

When the people become the slaves of government, the game is over and the…

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Misleading DWP letter to GPs is depriving disabled people of lifeline support

Politics and Insights

Credit: PA Images

Last month I reported about the issues raised by the Department for Work and Pensions’ ESA65B GP’s letter template, which was only recently placed on the government site, following a series of Parliamentary Written Questions.

Campaigners and MPs have called for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) standard letter to GPs to be scrapped after it emerged that ill and disabled appealing against unfair work capability assessment (WCA) decisions were left in near destitution after their GPs refused to provide further ‘fit notes’, because they were advised they did not need to by DWP officials.

It emerged that ministers ordered changes to the standard-issue letter to remove references that made it clear to GPs they may have to issue a medical statement if their patient wished to appeal against a WCA decision. The DWP claims this was not intended to dissuade GPs from issuing fit…

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There is only one reason Tory policies kill the sick and disabled (and they do): THEY LIKE IT

Fear and Loathing in Great Britain

Imagine there’s a pit full of bodies beneath the falling wheelchair-user, totallyingat least120,000 people [Image: Black Triangle Campaign].

Here’s a great Twitter thread from Rachael Swindon, listing only some of the vile treatment endured by sick and disabled people at the will of the Conservative government led by Theresa May (and formerly David Cameron).

It isn’t entirely accurate, of course. Nobody in their right mind thinks MS or Parkinson’s Disease is curable; it’s just something that they said, to justify victimising the poor sufferers of those illnesses. What were these benefit claimants going to do? Take them to court?Impossible.They would have needed Legal Aid to do soand legal aid for this purpose has been banned by the Conservatives.

It’s the policy of the Nazi, but with an extra layer of pretence; the Nazis pretended that disabled people were “useless eaters” who were to expensive –…

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Court victory for disabled EU benefit claimants at appeal

Politics and Insights

Two disabled people who moved to the UK from other EU countries have won an important Appeal Court case which entitles them to disability-related benefits in the UK from shortly after they arrived rather than having to wait two years.

The case, brought by Child Poverty Action Group and Harrow Law Centre, will ensure that disabled EU citizens and their carers who have a “genuine and sufficient” connection to the UK will receive social security support at an earlier point if they relocate to the UK.

The ruling overturns an Upper Tribunal finding that had denied both households benefits. And it confirms that the “genuine and sufficient” link which must be demonstrated by claimants in these circumstances is to the UK as a whole, rather than to its social security system.

One of the claimants, Ms Mohamed, is a Somalian-born woman who after 14 years’ residence in Germany as…

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