Universal Credit debit

I have received my PIP decision which is to pay me £214.65 every four weeks, that’s a loss of £95.95 from DLA which was £310.60. All else being equal, and it isn’t, I can take the hit, it’s manageable. My first payment is due on 6 February which means neither DLA nor PIP this month, […]

Mental warfare – a battle for our minds

I feel as if someone has been drilling holes in my mind and filling them with poison. I am passionate about social justice and I am passionate about democracy, bottom up, that is, not top down. The Tories are wiping out people based on an insane binary view of humanity as either strivers or scroungers. […]

On this road lies danger

I find myself in an extraordinary situation. The Personal Independence Payment (PIP) forms have arrived and my head is full of the silent sound of synaptic klaxon’s going off, screaming, ‘Danger, danger!’ To achieve this monumental task requires throwing any semblance of independence out of the window and to be compliant to a system that […]

PIP in the age of stupid

I want to unravel the whole PIP thing a bit, along with some other stuff that I think needs saying and expressing. Let me start with a question. Why is the whole PIP thing so fucking stressful? The reason is that it falls to us to make it happen. Forget the ‘decision makers’ and the, […]

Everything is bonkers

Regular readers will know I lose the plot from time to time, but I have to say the last month has definitely been one of my more spectacular ones to live through. As a writer, finding I have nothing to say and no way to say it anyway, is itself a crisis. It’s like falling […]

We are not for one moment all in this together

A letter a day to number 10. No 1,379 Tuesday 22 March 2016. Dear Mr Cameron, I see you’re backing George (we are all in this together) Osborne. I can’t believe he’s still banging that drum, it is long past its sell by date. A millionaire heir to the Anglo-Irish baronetcy of Ballintaylor and Ballylemon […]

The DWP’s evil regime of sickness, disability and benefit denial

A letter a day to number 10. No 1,317 Saturday 16 January 2016. Dear Mr Cameron, It is unforgivable that in 2016 Iain Duncan Smith is still running a tick box assessment system with the express aim of denying people help based on narrow and stringent criteria absent of any human or humane considerations what […]

Benefit denial is the raison d’être of the DWP under IDS

A letter a day to number 10. No 1,283 Saturday 12 December 2015. Dear Mr Cameron, You know, some fool once said, ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch’ which is really just a triumph of cynicism but which sums up you Tories to a T. I have to wonder if you’ve ever done […]