BBC - Biased Broadcasting Corporation?

Political bias in the media is nothing new, and I'm not even the first person this week to suggest that the BBC are as susceptible to it as any tabloid or broadsheet newspaper. An online petition currently boasting over 40,000 signatures condemning the BBC's failure to adequately cover the Green Party's successes in the recent elections, coupled with some 1200 complaints regarding the matter made directly to the BBC have certainly put the issue into the public domain.

I have to confess that, perhaps naively, I feel really let down by the BBC over this. In my youth, I looked to the BBC for fair, factual, concise and impartial reporting of current events. Everyone knows that the Daily Mail is the go-to paper for sensationalist right-wing gibberish articles. Likewise, the Guardian has a reputation for being lefty and having a distinct whiff of muesli and yoghurt about it. But the BBC.... they were supposed to be the ones firmly on the fence, carefully presenting the facts without any intentional swing to one political side or the other. Even the staff's identity cards proclaim that first and foremost, they are to strive to be independent, impartial and honest!

Historically, criticism of the BBC has been that of a liberal-left nature - in fact, as recently as July 2013, senior Trust members stated that they felt issues relating to immigration and the EU had been represented with a definite liberal bias, and prior to that a 2007 report on Safeguarding Impartiality again focused on steering away from any left-wing tendencies towards a more central position. 

Well. In the wake of the 2014 UK local and European elections, I can definitely say I fail to observe any trace of liberal lefty influence. 

A crude example of this; a quick visit to the BBC News home page to type "UKIP" into the search box returned 897 news article results from the last 6 months (3rd December 2013 to 3rd June 2014).  Repeating the same search for the Green Party yielded just 247 results.

Impartial? What?

Taking the media-wide coverage of UKIP's "success" at the recent elections at face value, one could superficially justify this by saying that UKIP have done So Very Well and really have caused a political earthquake... Only, they haven't. 

UKIP still have no MPs (granted, this may yet change at the next general election). Nevertheless, they still don't have overall control of a single council in England, Wales or Scotland. Having 163 councillors up and down the country is much less impressive once you break that down into there being only 1 or 2 in the vast majority of towns and cities. They have not even established ground as the official opposition in any area, whereas the Green Party are now the opposition in Solihull, Liverpool, Islington, Lewisham and Norwich. Couple this with the Green Party's presence of 162 councillors across 56 councils, and it becomes immediately apparent that the much more established role of the Green Party at least equals the newly gained territory of UKIP. What earthquake?

But WHERE is the BBC coverage of this? 

Looking at the specific guidelines drafted for the 2014 elections by the BBC Editorial Guidelines board, there should have been:

 "impartial and independent reporting of the 

campaign, giving fair coverage, rigorous scrutiny and due weight to the 

policies and campaigns of all parties and candidates."

Please excuse me while I laugh until I cry. 

Stepping away from the BBC News website for a moment, I was dismayed to see Nigel Farage on the Andrew Marr show this Sunday, enjoying a very pleasant chat with the host. A little bit of banter, some gentle teasing about whether or not Farage will challenge Nick Clegg for his Sheffield constituency in the general election next year - not a trace of the usual roasting given to prominent politicians on this programme. With Andrew Marr's help, Farage came across in a very good light indeed. "What a pleasant bloke. I'd like to go for a pint with him." choruses the mindset of the electorate. The conspicuous lack of a manifesto for the European elections should have been a red flag to all and should have been subject to "rigorous scrutiny". Instead, we may as well have been watching a popular quiz show for all the camaraderie displayed within.

Even Question Time has fallen into this trap, having welcomed Nigel Farage no less than 16 times since 2009, while Natalie Bennett and former-Green Party leader (and current MP) Caroline Lucas total half that number of appearances between them. Once again, UKIP have no MPs but the Green Party do. 

No, accusations of pro-UKIP, anti-Green media bias are not exclusive to the BBC. But the other media outlets are not publicly funded by a licence fee, and the BBC's own charter and specific guidelines explicitly pledge to deliver bias-free reporting. Consequently, I hold them more accountable for the obvious - and it is obvious - right-wing slant to the recent election coverage. 

Should they have ignored Farage and UKIP altogether? No, because that wouldn't be "fair coverage" or "due weight" either. But to have completely sidelined the Green Party by lumping in results with the "Other" category, by giving ten minute interviews with defeated Liberal Democrat members immediately after the Green Party pushed them into fourth place in the European elections, by publishing daily articles on the antics of UKIP candidates, members and supporters and thus keeping UKIP more on the population's radar than any other party - that has wholly and entirely deviated from their own guidelines. 

I strongly suspect that a "rigorous scrutiny" of the BBC's election coverage guidelines compared to the actual output from the past two months would demonstrate a gross deviance and generate many more than the current 1200 complaints on the matter. In an age where two-thirds of the eligible electorate didn't even bother to show up and vote, the role of news media in communicating the policies and values of each and every party cannot be underestimated. As a publicly funded body, the BBC owes its readers and viewers a truthful representation of who will offer them what, and not some circus act propaganda for who will, inevitably, turn out to be a very dangerous party with some very dangerous ideas. 

Why I'm voting Green on May 22nd, and you should too.

Fear leads to anger. 

Anger leads to hate. 

Hate leads to suffering...

- Master Yoda

That's right, I am prefacing a political blog post with a quote from Star Wars. Read on, and this will all make perfect sense. 

Today I received a message from a dear friend asking "Tell me, why not UKIP? and why Green?".

With 9 days until the local and European elections, this is a question I'm sure many people are asking. Satisfaction with the traditional three main parties is at an all time low, and the new kid on the block - UK Independence Party - has experienced a meteoric rise to infamy as a result. Newspapers have reported ever-increasing support for them in the form of "protest votes" against the existing government and the as-yet unforgiven Labour party. You could be forgiven for thinking that they had proposed a set of policies that would make millionaires of us all, bring about world peace and end global poverty. The truth could not be much further from this. 

Before I continue, I would like to say that I have refrained from writing any UKIP-bashing posts for the simple reason that there is already a plethora of literature that neatly summarises why they are a party largely consisting of misogynists, xenophobes, homophobes and generally quite unpleasant people. They have most recently been labelled as fascists, the response to which was a call from three senior UKIP MEPs to have everyone naming them so arrested. So much for free speech...

Why are they so bloody popular then? WHY have polls suggested that more people will vote for UKIP than any other party, despite acknowledging that their views are racist, amongst other things??

That my friend asked me to explain how and why to choose between two such fundamentally different parties illustrates the crossroads at which many voters currently find themselves. This isn't like choosing whether to have jam or peanut butter on your toast for breakfast. UKIP and the Green Party could not be any less alike. There is quite literally no crossover in their policies, their core values or the personal philosophies of their members. 

Those among us who no longer have any faith in the Conservatives, Labour or the Liberal Democrats are crying out for a legitimate alternative to bring about BIG changes that truly mirror what the people want, and what is actually good for the country. UKIP have capitalised on this through the very powerful medium of fear, specifically that which is directed at the contentious issue of immigration. 

Fear is a powerful tool. The Conservatives have utilised it well in the last four years, constructing a rhetoric that maligns the low-wage earners, non-earners and disabled. While benefits are slashed, sanctions imposed, and lives quite honestly torn apart, the neo-Dickension construct of the "undeserving poor" has thrived and kept the public's attention focused on blaming 'benefit scroungers' for the UK's financial woes. In a similar vein, UKIP's primary focus is on immigration as the root cause of the UK's problems and they have wasted no time stirring up plenty of fear around it. They speak of "uncontrolled immigration" coming from the EU, and cite themselves as the only way to "Return power to the UK" by leaving the EU and effectively closing the UK's borders. There's a whole lot of hate there. 

Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

So then. Why are the Green Party a more viable alternative? Why would having more Green MEPs, more local Green councillors and, following next year's general election, a Green Party government (dream big, people!) be better for the UK? 

Because their message is one of HOPE. 

Politics should work for the benefit of all, not just those who shout the loudest or have the deepest pockets.

We believe in “The Common Good”

It takes a great leap of faith to vote for a message of hope, for a party that seeks to embrace unity through diversity. It is far easier to buy into the negativity that UKIP and the Conservatives spread and to accept their scapegoating of the poor and vulnerable. But for a real change, to have a political system that has the interests of all areas of society at its heart, and not just the ones with the power and money to influence those in office, the only party with a legitimate claim to offer this, is the Green Party. 

For further reading, please look at the Green Party's European manifesto: here

And for a really rather amusing summary of why the Green Party's policy on the EU is a hundred times more promising than the other parties, have a watch of this:

May 22nd. Vote Green.

(It seems the gremlins are interfering with my video posting as well as text formatting, so if you can't see the video above - it is there, honest! - here is a nice link to youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDsV8YumePk)

I'm going on an adventure!

A lentil-y sort of adventure anyway... I have decided to become vegan. It's been on my mind for a while since my mum became vegan last year, and this week I decided to take the plunge and just go for it. I was vegetarian for many years before getting pregnant with my eldest son (whereupon a violent aversion to cheese led me to start eating chicken and then gradually pretty much anything!) so I'm not a complete novice at avoiding particular food. 

Why vegan and not just vegetarian again then? That's the question I've been going over for some time. I spend a lot of time writing about, ranting about and worrying about human rights and the plethora of infringements we witness on a global daily basis. It struck me as just plain bizarre that I don't worry about animal welfare in the same outspoken way. It's not that I don't care; I do. It just hasn't gotten me as worked up as the stuff I've written about people. And I cannot, for the life of me, explain why. The more I pondered this, the more I realised that I've suppressed my feelings on the meat, poultry and dairy industry because, selfishly, I really like the way it all tastes. 

Unlike many vegans I've met, this is not a spiritual matter for me. I do not have an ideological problem with eating meat. Having studied human evolution, I am satisfied that our bodies are intended for the digestion of meat and that we are supposed - biologically speaking - to be omnivorous, as many animals are. I have always maintained that I would only eat meat if I knew that I would be prepared to kill an animal myself. It seems immensely disrespectful otherwise to say "Well I'll eat this piece of flesh, but only if I can distance myself from the fact that it once belonged to a living, breathing creature". No, you have to accept where your food comes from and take ownership of what you're eating. 

For the past decade, that way of thinking has enabled me to push aside the guilt I felt through eating meat. I managed to bypass the farming and industrial element of meat production in my thought process, but now I realise that is where my issue lies.

It's no secret that the meat, poultry and dairy industries are brutal. There is a wealth of evidence to demonstrate that the animals in this process are not happy or comfortable. They are not treated with dignity, respect and compassion. While I don't have a problem with eating meat per se, I do take real issue with mistreating another living creature in the name of making meat, eggs and dairy more cheaply available to the masses. 

Why not just eat organic meat and free range eggs then? Because I don't trust them. The "free range" label on egg boxes is misleading. The hens who lay those eggs are not merrily meandering round a nice lush field, laying when they want to in nice, comfortable coops. In order to qualify for the "free range" label, it is only necessary for the hens to have access to outdoor space for a portion of the day. They may well never actually GO outside, because they're too scared or unwell. I'm not going to get graphic about this or post any of the emotive imagery or video on the matter, but if you really want to learn more, the internet has a vast array of footage. 

Living Vegan for Dummies

This is going to be a huge adjustment for me, basically because there is nothing I love more on a Sunday morning than a bacon, egg and cheese toastie. I've bought a 'Veganism for Dummies' book to ease myself into this lifestyle and already identified many recipes that my husband and I cook together which can be easily tweaked and made vegan-friendly. Fortunately for me, he's very supportive (although he did sulk briefly when I asked him to leave the fish sauce out of the Thai curry paste he was making). 

With any luck, I'll have lots of stuff to bore you with post as I learn more. Wish me luck!

Big Bad Benefit Bashing Bandwagon

Indulge me; I do like a bit of alliteration...

British television's flavour of the month seems to be poverty porn - we've seen a multitude of programming dedicated to the so-called "benefits culture", purporting to present a factual analysis of life in the UK's welfare state but in reality feeding the spiraling right-wing propaganda that demonises the poor and maligns the vulnerable. 

I couldn't bring myself to watch very much of it. At most, I managed a cursory glance to establish the level of rage it would induce. For the most part, I apprehensively scanned over social media to watch the reaction of the general public to the smorgasbord of poor people circus acts that was paraded in front of them. Regrettably, the internet didn't disappoint and a plethora of "get a job", "lazy scroungers" blah blah blah, commentary poured forth.

I'm not going to rant about precisely why these programmes are both ludicrous and obscene. Many others* have already done a far more eloquent job than I could in recent weeks. I would like to organise my personal feelings on why this whole topic bothers me so much.

On one point - and one alone - I believe David Cameron and I share common ground. There IS something very wrong with the mentality of modern Britain. However, where he lays this at the feet of those at the bottom of the social food chain, the feckless and lazy, I believe we all have a part to play. This is not simply a problem of work ethic, of wanting "something for nothing". There is a massive clash of ideals in today's Britain and we are seeing more of the consequences of that each day. 

I remember sitting in an A level Sociology lecture, discussing issues of "Class" and learning how various social theorists distinguished one class from another. The notion of 'gratification' came up, and it was neatly imparted that the Working Class value instant gratification above delayed gratification; that short term gain is more appealing than working hard now for something that takes longer to come to fruition. The latter is the preserve of the Middle and Upper Classes, which of course explains social mobility - or the lack thereof - and why the poor stay poor and the rich get richer. It didn't make sense to me then, and even less so now. I was reminded of this recently, however, whilst on my soap box about the credit industry and personal debt. 

This is where I place much of the blame (for want of a better word) for the alleged crisis we face today. 

Ok, so that's a somewhat simplistic overview. I don't just hold the credit industry responsible. Rather, it represents the worst of the disposable, materialistic, instant-gratification based society we have become. We want the shiniest things NOW. We don't want to spend months or years saving up first. Why should we?? We can buy the damn thing immediately, and worry about paying for it some other time. You don't even have to be well off to do this - in fact, you don't even need a great track record for managing to pay for all the things you bought NOW (but neglected to pay for LATER). With an abundance of "poor credit lending options" there's the option to pay a premium and STILL have the shiniest of the shiny things. Because commodities matter. Advertising tells us incessantly that gadgets and gizmos are no longer the playthings of the wealthy, but more vital tools for the everyman and woman. 

Who, right now, is reading this blog on a smartphone or a home computer? Do many of you have your flatscreen tv on in the background too? Are you sitting comfortably on your 0% interest sofa? These things are NECESSARY, if you believe the advertisers - and it's pretty hard to ignore them (unless you're my mum and choose not to own a television at all!). 

We have very quickly constructed a society in which things matter more than people. And that is massively incongruous with the reemerging Victorian rhetoric of the deserving and the undeserving poor, to which it runs parallel. 

Briefly, the current economic climate is not the fault of low wage earners or those out of work altogether, despite what the mass media and the Tories would have you believe. The poor and vulnerable make a neat scapegoat precisely because they lack the means or power to speak up against the propaganda which ostracises them. Yes, benefit cheats and career claimants exist - in a negligible minority. Where there is a system, someone will play it. Fraudsters and confidence tricksters have always existed, and I suspect will always exist. They are not limited to a particular socio-economic class or faction of society. 

If we must beat our chests and shout about those who play the benefits system, let us also apply the same to the large corporations and wealthy individuals who fiddle the tax system; to the members of parliament who exploit loopholes in expenses legislation; to the workplaces who subtly discriminate against minority employees. In fact, let's take this down to the micro-level and vent spleen at everyone who ever ducked a library fine for a late book; who boarded a bus or train without a ticket; who squished their salad down inside the medium-sized plastic tub in Sainsburys to avoid paying for a large. 

Where there is a system, someone will play it. This is not new. It's not right either, but let's not allow ourselves to be duped into believing that there exists sufficient manipulation of the welfare state to explain away every financial difficulty the UK faces today. It's simply not true. More than 99% of those claiming benefits - and let's again remind ourselves that many of those people ARE working - have no nefarious agenda. They are just people trying to get from one end of the month to the other with bills paid, a roof over their heads and food on the table. 

Whenever I read a comment about a benefit claimant with a flat screen television or the latest model smartphone, I want to bang my head into the wall. Which discourse do we favour then? The one which tells us we all NEED shiny gadgets and makes them readily available to anyone and everyone, regardless of employment status or the contents of your bank account? Or the one which reduces those on incomes too low to meet the ever rising cost of living to a less than human state, and views them as mere leeches on the fine, upstanding "hard working" earners? The two cannot exist together, and until we accept that and begin to deconstruct them, we will never move beyond the selfish and resentful circle in which we are collectively currently trapped. 

*Further reading:

Ragged-Skirted Philanthropist: http://raggedskirt.blogspot.co.uk/

Buddhuu: http://www.buddhuu.com/

Happy New Year (eventually!)

Once again, it has been far too long since I had the time to write a post and there are dozens of topics racing round my head at the moment. Seeing as we have a whole new year to get our teeth into, I would like to say something about my hopes and thoughts for 2014.

Though it may seem twee, I do like a good New Year's Resolution and have made a few of my own. Firstly, I need to get my driving license. Milton Keynes is not the sort of place you can easily get by without a car, not least because public transport here is appallingly unreliable and hideously expensive. Secondly, I am determined to finally shift the excess 2... ok, 3.. FINE 4 stone in weight that I'm currently lugging around. Yes, I know. I've blogged at least once about body imagery and basically sticking two fingers up at a society that demands women conform to a certain size in order to be considered attractive, BUT my desire to lose weight is not about being attractive. Alright, if I'm going to be entirely honest, maybe there is an element in there of wanting to feel pretty but for the most part, this is a health issue. As I've previously blogged before, I have fibromyalgia which leaves me feeling pretty wrecked 99% of the time. Every morning I wake up and every bit of me hurts, I feel nauseous, headachey and as exhausted as though I hadn't slept in days. It's not unlike feeling epically, permanently, hungover. My doctor has told me off about my weight a few times and really believes that shifting the flab will alleviate my symptoms. It's worth a go, hey!

Here's the problem I have; it's not as though I haven't tried to lose weight before. In fact, I've spent almost the entirety of my twenties feeling self-conscious and frumpy, wanting to slim down, trying all sorts of diets and fads, and yet I suspect I'm currently bigger than ever before. This is not even slightly uncommon, and I think I've finally realised why. Typically, I'll buy low fat or fat free options wherever possible; diet coke, fat free yoghurt, light soft cheese, lean beef mince, and so on. That's the healthy option, right? Apparently not! All this stuff might be low in fat but instead it's packed full of sugar, salt and artificial flavourings to restore the taste that is lost by taking out the fat. It wasn't until people on the weight loss section of Mumsnet pointed out that fat (in food) doesn't make you fat that I started to actually think about what I've been eating and why I haven't been losing weight. I felt pretty shocked and in all honesty quite stupid. It's prompted me to start really reading the nutritional information on the food I buy and I've completely stopped buying anything marketed as fat free or low fat. Just to illustrate the point, I used to love the Activia fruit yoghurts BUT one teeny 125g pot contains over 16g of sugar. Right then, I thought. I'll go for plain yoghurt instead. Comparing the labels of the low fat and full fat options, it seems that where the full fat option has 5.1g of sugar per 100g, the fat free has a staggering 8.9g! I'm completely appalled and kicking myself for years of trying and trying to slim down, really believing that I was choosing the right foods and all the time I couldn't have been more wrong.

I'm not going to go down the path of waxing lyrical about one method of weight loss over another. Everyone's metabolism and personal tastes are different and the key is really in understanding your body and what works for you on both a physical and an emotional level. I envy people for whom food is nothing more than sustenance, but for me and many like me, my relationship with eating is very emotional and not in a good way. So my goal - or more accurately, my hope - for 2014 is to change my relationship with food, ditch the sugar addiction and eat proper, real food where I KNOW what's in it and where it has come from.

Perhaps the next time the topic of childhood obesity comes up, we could all take a moment to think about what we really know about the food we eat and how we really understand what our bodies do with fat, protein, sugar, etc. I'm a reasonably intelligent woman and I got it horribly wrong. It's not really that much of a surprise that we have an obesity epidemic on our hands when we can't trust the labels on the food we buy, particularly when that food is presented to us as the norm over buying masses of fresh ingredients to prepare each and every meal ourselves from scratch.

Money, money, money

For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil, and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. - Timothy, 6:10

It's not often that I look to the Bible for gems of wisdom, but I find this particular extract ubiquitously true. I've often heard it paraphrased as "money is the root of all evil", but I think that misses out a crucial human element. Currency in itself is neither evil nor benevolent; but the pursuit of wealth, the ease with which we exploit fellow humans in a bid to maximise profit and reduce expenditure certainly forms the foundation of pretty much every worldly evil I can think of that we visit upon one another. I've pondered this one for a while and I cannot think of one single atrocity that cannot be traced back to money. 

Periodically, I struggle with writing about humanity. I find myself drawn into existential crises, unable to justify why we spend so much of our lives worrying about things that really - in the grand scheme of things - just do not matter. I watch the news and despair at how unkind we are to each other, whether that's one person committing a violent crime against another, entire governments carrying out appalling attacks on their own citizens, or deeply ingrained social attitudes about immigration, benefit claimants, drug abusers, obesity, mental illness, etc. It alarms me even more when I put this into the grander context of civilisation and realise that we are pretty much living in a golden age of compassion, by historical standards at least. There is not a single period in history that springs to mind where human beings were habitually kind to one another and endeavoured to improve the lives of their fellow men and women for no reason other than that they could. Instead our history books are overflowing with records of war, torture, oppression, slavery, bigotry and murder. Yes, this is all punctuated with notable examples of philanthropy, but the fact remains that the instances of People Being Nice To Each Other are comparatively few and far between.

In essence, human beings, as a species, are not very nice. And that's before we get anywhere near how we treat animals and our planet. This is only dealing with how we behave towards each other. 

It all comes back to money and the acquisition of wealth. I've posted before about global corporations exploiting the poor and doing an astonishingly good job of covering it up, because they have the means to do so. Global industry is so rife with this sort of behaviour, that it's very difficult to buy "necessary" products that are 100% ethically sound. I do not wish to perpetuate the exploitation of my fellow man but the likelihood that my clothes, furniture, mod-cons and food were all manufactured by companies endeavouring to ensure that every member of staff at every level of production was properly paid, well treated and happy is slim to none. Why? Because business need to make profits. Bigger profits than their competitors. Oh, and they need to keep the costs for the end user at the lowest possible so they don't lose customers to competing companies, so profits can't come from hiking up the prices at that end. The profit margin has to be struck between minimising the cost of production and offering a attractive price to the masses. The company who can come up with a way to strike that balance will be a ground breaker indeed!

Business isn't the only culprit. Socially, we (at least in the developed world and specifically, for the purpose of this rant post, the UK) are greedy and invest far too much emotion in the value of Stuff. I read a fantastic piece a few days ago about the audacity of poor people daring to own shiny things (here) and it really brought home to me how ludicrously cyclical the whole thing is. Appearing to be well off is important, even if you're flat broke, so we have credit options for those without the actual cash to buy the latest commodities and endless upgrades to quickly outdate the latest shiny thing for those who do have this kind of disposable income. Oh, but be careful not to flash your non-existent cash too much or you risk incurring the wrath of... well... of people who think they have the right to pass judgment on whether you fall under the banner of the "deserving poor" or the "undeserving poor".

It's all changing at the moment. It used to be ok to be poor; there was a reasonably decent welfare system to stop you from hitting rock bottom and a bearable stigma to claiming from it legitimately. Then something happened, a sea change came upon us and now we face an extraordinary conundrum where even middle of the road earners cannot afford to own or rent their homes, pay their bills AND put food on the table without an income top-up from the state but our newspapers and social media chatter are filled with extreme and inflated examples of the workshy fiddling the system to fund a decadent and frivolous lifestyle. If this was your only source of information, you could be forgiven for thinking all poor people are scheming and manipulative, plotting their next move to extract cash from the hard-working wealthy upper class, all while the poor fatigued government endeavour to instil some manner of work ethic into the nation. Yes, Mr. Cameron, I'm looking at you again. 

It's not even ok to be disabled anymore. Just in case you were wondering... I have always believed that you can judge how civilised a country is by how they treat the vulnerable and the deviant. Our deviants are probably not doing too badly, compared to the rest of the world. We don't have capital punishment anymore, we don't (officially) carry out or endorse torture. There are massive gaps in the efficacy of our justice system, but I'll take it over that of the USA or China, thank you very much. 

Our vulnerable, however, are not faring so well. Thanks to New Labour's moves to reduce the number of Disability Living Allowance claimants - and let's not forget, for all that I loathe about the Conservative party, it was New Labour who brought in ATOS - even the life-limitingly unwell are targets. Got cancer? Well you can still sit in a chair and type, right? You over there - missing three limbs? Pfft! That one remaining arm could stack shelves! Mental illness? What's that?! 

Medical assessments of a person's fitness for work are being carried out by people with no medical background. Consequently, people who are utterly unemployable are told that their disability benefits are to stop and they must try to find someone who will give them a job and then hope to God that they can actually turn up to work every day and fulfil the requirements of that job without either being fired for unreliability or dropping dead from the stress and strain. 

Why are we doing this to people? Because the government need to save money and reduce what they're spending. Never mind the fact that benefits make up a TINY fraction of their annual expenditure - in fact, in the last fiscal year, more was paid out in interest on national debt than on unemployment benefits. Poor people make an easy scapegoat because we don't have the means to fight back. 

Once again, it's all about money. WHY do we accept it? The government have constructed a very helpful rhetoric, demonising those with the temerity to be poor and we are buying into it. Those who fight back are quickly dismissed as bleeding heart lefty liberals. Well I know where I would much rather align myself.

I fully intend to post again about this issue, hopefully in a less ranty capacity. In the meantime, I'll leave you with this thought:

Testing, testing. 1, 2, 3...

Hello blogworld. It's been quite a while since I posted anything, mostly because life has been a little crazy here. Things are settling down again now so I'm hoping to find the time to write a bit more about the millions* of ideas I have swimming through my head at the moment. Between the government offering monetary incentives to mothers for breastfeeding (WTAF?), to Katie Hopkins vs Peaches Geldof, from Christmas madness to crochet heaven - there's lots I want to write about. 

Right now, I'm going to make a cup of tea, deploy the electronic babysitter and get back to work on some posts that have been in the pipeline for a few weeks. 

*not literally