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To: UK Government

Scrap PIP (Personal Independence Payment) & restore DLA (Disability Living Allowance.)

1) Scrap PIP (Personal Independence Payment) & restore DLA (Disability Living Allowance.)

2) End Discrimination in Disability Benefit Assessments especially where invisible disabilities are the main or only presenting issue.

Why is this important?

Great! This petition now has a target of 100,001 signatures! Well done (and please keep going!) to all who helped us to reach10,000 ~ people's signatures have shot up in the last few days.

Achieving change depends on all of US to promote this petition on any and all platforms/social media and to contact all your friends and families and all other organizations to which you belong or think would publicize us ~ THANK YOU!

https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/news/2016/april/great-benefits-row-channel-4-dispatches-tonight

(Channel 4 has pulled the original page...) showed the extent of the problems faced by disabled people of all sorts in claiming these Social Security Benefits. People with "invisible disabilities" e.g. mental health issues face particular problems in these assessments.

"PIP assessments are not fit for purpose. They are especially unfit
where non-physical disability predominates. The result is that people
who used to qualify under DLA, and whose condition may actually have
deteriorated, are suddenly found not to fit the PIP 'criteria.'"

... and PIP assessors appear to be immune : https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/disgraced-pip-assessor-escapes-being-struck-off/

During the Channel 4 programme shown 11.4 2016, various people agreed
with the premise that PIP assessments are not fit for purpose. The
assessments are covert, superficial and unfair especially where mental
health is the presenting issue.

There is clear bias in these assessments and that constitutes discrimination against people with "invisible disabilities." If you agree then please sign the petition and pass it on to your friends and family and networks. Thank you.

How it will be delivered

Not sure ~ perhaps via press conference and / or email.

Updates

2023-11-20 15:21:01 +0000

While we await bang-up-to-date C13th "ideas" from the latest reshuffling of the musical deckchairs ~ I thought I'd wish everyone an early happy Winter Solstice.

PS in the meantime let's all welcome Esther back to wreak some more... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2018/oct/17/steve-bells-if-from-dead-paupers-to-royal-babies

2022-10-05 14:02:41 +0100

If there is one glorious thing the latest 'government' (honey - I crashed the Pound now you gotta get orf your "benefits street" and get down the salt mines) has shewn it is this: their 'management' of affairs in general and the economy (it's 'the,' stupid) in particular has shattered the myth that work equals wealth and well-being. Those mystical 'work' qualities disappear in a puff of smoke when people working two, three or more jobs find that 'work' does not enable them to look after their children, pay their bills or keep up with rampant inflation.

What of people who are not able to work outside the home? Lone parents, pensioners, the sick, carers and people with disabilities?

As for PIP ~ It's only for the deserving disabled... the "inspiration to us alls" and the oligarchs in 'government' will restrict that ever more tightly. This perpetuates centuries worth of such ideological abuse.

2022-01-26 12:22:00 +0000

These welfare cuts are an ongoing, cruel political choice. This government, like so many over the last 10 or so years, clamours to destroy the welfare state (including starving the NHS to the point where it can be 'legitimately' labelled 'unfit for purpose') and to privatize our every vital public service. These cuts enable the squandering of our money on more 'red meat' for the back-benchers and assorted war-loving gung-ho's, to transfer public services into private hands, to protect the usurpers, selected despotic washed-up colonisers, 'our' land-owners, the rich and their hangers-on and to do all that on the backs of us the poor, the children, the sick and people living with disabilities - It’s really that simple. The strategy is WRONG and only serves to keep us ALL impoverished ~

2021-12-17 07:33:34 +0000

hypocrisy | hɪˈpɒkrɪsi |
noun (plural hypocrisies) [mass noun ]
the practice of claiming to have higher standards or more noble beliefs than is the case...

So cheering that on the morning following their Shropshire election "triumph," i.e. defeat, a Tory greydee comes out swinging for all those poor mental health sufferers isolated by Boris' policies on omicron. Where is the concern for those of us robbed of DLA by the imposition of bent PIP policy?

Happy New Year ~ and please continue to pass on this petition as widely as possible. oxo

2021-05-10 09:35:51 +0100

Already repudiated by the UN (scroll down 4 years) today we hear that Boris' "government" is being taken to Court over PIP and its [alleged] direct causality in the death of a human being. As we have been saying for years PIP has been Tory policy to rob disabled people of DLA. From my direct experience: PIP has been outsourced by said "government" to uncouth, unqualified zealots, chits given to full rein of their discriminatory hatreds and selections of the truth. Even when challenged e.g. see https://www.hcpts-uk.org/hearings/hearings/2017/september/mr-alan-barham/ ~ merely a caution. And let's not forget the right wing extremist elements in the rump of "Labour" keen to be even tougher on social security...

2021-03-31 10:15:19 +0100

The Times recently (and I kid you not) ran a piece suggesting that to avoid closure a UK aviary needed £100k per month for its 100 birds. Now I am not against avian conservation at all and whilst comparisons, as we know, are odious, it does show in stark terms the differential we face from all sides (Because I have a "robust political message expressed in equally robust terms" those naice people @38 have barred me from contacting you... Just goes to show... what.) We disabled people have so very few friends in supposedly high places ~ we have virtually to do this on our own. Keep passing it on!

2020-10-13 13:47:48 +0100

Dr David Nabarro, UN special envoy on Covid-19, stated stated that Covid-19 is a disease of the poor ~ those with the least resource (13/10/20 BBC Radio4 World at One.) 

Britain, he said, is a relatively prosperous country...

...yet as we know this regime (and its predecessors) has maintained a rigged PIP assessment 'procedure' to strip the resource of Social Security from even greater numbers of disabled people.  This refusal to share resources (the 'commonwheal') obviously affects our ability and our resource.

[Also, and I don't know whether or not you apply for it, this year's application from my energy supplier for Warm Home Discount appears ever more restrictive.  It no longer asks about disability in specific terms (as it did until last year;) ~ we are being erased from consideration - and it's this we combat (against all the odds...)

Please go well, keep spreading the message and thank you so much for your continuing faith in our campaign for disability justice.

2020-04-08 12:54:35 +0100

Hi
Covid rattles on and I guess, like me, you've already been bombarded by "what are commercial firms doing for you..." emails. However, this update is just a quick plea to consider that nowhere in Covid are we in any way referred to. I believe that we are not cut off from from our sister and brother workers at all, may well have increased costs not being met and that "benefits" have been an artificial, right-wing and politically expedient distinction to divert the commonweal to who knows where for many years (selected wars etc come instantly to mind ~ the $50,000 wrench or the £nBillion ("useless") F35s.)

Who is to say - the tyranical majority? - of those people unable to "work" outside the home that we do not deserve a living wage? Universal Basic Income is usually derided by the right wing swivel-eyed, the capitalist, the thrusting "self-made" entrepreneur ~ those against universality, who shun sharing, inclusion ~ ultimately, their fellow man. This we fight. We fight on.

2019-02-19 19:50:20 +0000

10,000 signatures reached

2018-10-18 11:14:32 +0100

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2018/oct/17/steve-bells-if-from-dead-paupers-to-royal-babies

~ McVey Radio 4 retraction : disabled people: some are born, some are made... but she (apparently) did not say some may even be fake and... McVey didn't even bother to turn up to deliver it in person.

2018-07-04 10:23:59 +0100

English actor Hugh Grant seems to have channeled his inner Danny Dyer, delivering a brutal attack on the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and the government as a whole:

" The most fuck awful government in the history of fuck awful governments. "
https://t.co/om9ZrKnc8N

— Hugh Grant (@HackedOffHugh) July 2, 2018

2017-11-29 09:21:40 +0000

21 minutes…

Just 21 minutes after the royal engagement story broke, the tories announced that social pay (aka 'benefits') will be frozen for the next 12 months.

This freeze will enable the tories to bung an additional £3.9bn a year by 2019/20 on their sub to the NWOPP (New World Order Paranoia Project.) But it will plunge millions further into poverty.

The move comes as another report has shown that economic inequality in the UK is higher than ever.

2017-11-11 09:42:26 +0000

The teflon tory regime responds to UN condemnation of its treatment of UK disabled people... gives it the finger...

"Only in August, the Chair of the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Theresia Degener, said the UK government had created a ‘human catastrophe’ for disabled people, where society viewed them as ‘parasites,' living on social benefits… and [living on] the taxes of other people."

For some disabled people unable to work outside the home, they have taken away all of our monetary support. We aren't disabled at all according to their hired 'experts.' People's comments as a result are harrowing...

https://www.thecanary.co/uk/2017/11/10/viewers-noticed-something-curious-happening-background-last-nights-question-time-showdown-video/

2017-03-05 23:27:09 +0000

5,000 signatures reached

2017-03-02 09:31:35 +0000

The recent comment about invisible disabilities not being 'real' http://www.itv.com/news/2017-02-26/theresa-mays-head-of-policy-criticised-over-pip-comments/ clearly demonstrates ingrained political dogma.

For what purpose do they "need" to claw back the little bit of social security that empowered and minimally compensated us? Where has our money gone?

The party I rejoined when it appeared to have rediscovered its bottle says it reversed these cuts... but they, driven in part by the crisis in capitalism, remain however one dresses it up. At the sharp end where we live they are vindictive, destructive of spirit... ultimately counterproductive. But that's neoCON-ism for you...