The Ignorance of GP's

A phone call appointment with my GP confirms they simply do not understand the benefit system, specifically with regard to ESA. My GP is absolutely adamant that, even if I fail a tribunal she can somehow intervene so that I don’t end up with nothing. Oh how I tried; tried to explain that if you fail a tribunal that’s it. At least that’s my understanding. Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps the medical community does have some power in this situation but the tribunal is the last port of call; appeals do not get a further chance. This is the highest authority.

You see the CAB had asked the GP to write a simple letter (wouldn’t even take 2 pages) underlining what I had told them. My GP had previously said she can’t verify those issues and so couldn’t write a letter. I tried again today to explain this is what is necessary – because this is what is necessary. Unfortunately she doesn’t want to write a letter. Ironically she had no problem digging up a ton of information, none of it particularly helpful or relevant to the CAB’s request, way more than a letter would require.

This whole situation is bizarre to the point of insanity: what would really help is if the CAB could directly explain this to the GP. Instead I’m going to have to contact the CAB again and ask for further advice; maybe there is something they can do to explain to GP’s that don’t get it just how things work. It is ridiculous to suggest that, after failing a tribunal (should that happen), the GP can then intervene. Surely the question then becomes: why could you not simply write that letter in the first place? That is what the tribunal people would argue if the GP then decided to contact the DWP regarding a stoppage of ESA as a result. I suspect this is what the CAB will say also.

In her own weird way the GP is trying to be helpful, which is nice of course, but it is completely hobbled by her wilfulness in refusing to understand how this actually works. It is no more her fault than mine; blame the Tories. This is their mess. This is the product of welfare reform and the minutiae of which she ignores or doesn’t understand – why should she, I suppose, she is a doctor not a welfare advisor. Unfortunately a lot of people are now being forced to be welfare experts in having to help clients and patients untangle the mess created. It is not the patients’ fault either, but abandoning them is not an option.

She advised me to chase up the mental health people re: Aspergers diagnosis. Unfortunately if she had done this herself she might have found another reason to change her mind. It seems the waiting list for an appointment, despite new facilities being set up closer to home (which of course is great), is at least a year. I can’t see the tribunal people deigning to wait that long so as to facilitate a diagnosis. In fact they couldn’t even find a record on the system of her request for an appointment! Meanwhile she offered, as a compromise, that she’d write a letter if I got a diagnosis. Well that’s going to take a very long time, meanwhile I have to deal with the ESA system as is. Unfortunately, again, if she thinks she can help should I fail that tribunal I think she is in for a rude awakening: any subsequent ESA claims would fall under the new appeal system. This is the system (assuming it’s still on track) whereby appeals are effectively shut down pending a second decision maker’s assessment, which can be made without recourse to a time limit. These are the kinds of details that go beyond her understanding. Not only that, but I don’t think you can just go back to your GP and get a new sick note for a fresh claim; I think there is a waiting period at least wherein new claims will only be considered if the symptoms/problems differ. Again, she doesn’t understand it; this is what I mean by minutiae.

Fundamentally there needs to be a holistic approach. Why can the GP not be the one who processes a claim. Why do I need to see different people each with autonomy over a particular part of the process with no ability to connect or communicate? Why can’t the CAB explain things to my GP? Why aren’t GP’s made aware of or trained in these systems? Isn’t this important for them to know?

CAB vs GP

The CAB wrote to me the other day; a bundle of letters with a covering note explaining that this, what the GP has written, isn’t really going to help my appeal by and large. There may be something within that tangentially helps, this being the response to my GP writing to the JC last year. This was a naïve attempt by him (now her thanks to the difficulty of seeing a regular doctor, which I’m sure doesn’t help) to ask them how they are helping me. Of course they weren’t helping me, and neither were the Salvation Army whose own bullshit response was solicited; because of that bullshit quotient I’m reluctant to use that letter so I’m forced to try the GP again.

What the CAB need is for the doctor to verify how and which of the ESA descriptors affect me. Her response was to tell me that she couldn’t do that. Now I have to try again otherwise my appeal may be compromised. It certainly would benefit from a concrete diagnosis. The problem is that because mental health is invisible and because I have yet to hear back from the Asperger/ADD diagnosis people (despite being contacted at the start of August, apparently) she is antsy to write anything in support. From this I can infer she – cards on table – doesn’t really agree with my assessment of my issues and needs. I haven’t directly confronted her about that; in fact trying to do this with any GP has been extremely difficult. They do everything they can to head off any such attempt. I suspect that, if duly confronted, she will try to have it both ways and claim that’s not what she’s saying. I hope I’m wrong. I don’t have an infinite number of attempts to persuade her.

Thing is they don’t have nor do they offer any kind of alternative. It’s all very well to say this is my professional opinion, but where does that leave the patient? If you are to claim that you cannot verify then are you not making a diagnosis of some kind? Is that not a medical opinion? But where is the evidence to support that – no doctor, not even the person at the CMHT (I say person, they weren’t a doctor and I don’t know what their official title is), undertook such a process with me.

Equally, to sit and wait for an external body, in this case the Asperger/ADD people, to present the GP with a diagnosis, is unhelpful. With all due respect to her, I think the GP is relying on that too much, and that also puts me in an unfair position. I doubt also a tribunal hearing will agree to wait until such an appointment can be made and any subsequent report.

Doctors are still too naïve about this process. Still too reluctant to understand how it truly works (or doesn’t). Any attempt to explain it’s real purpose – curtailing entitlement and support – is regarded as being a bit silly, or worse. You – I – am just not taken seriously. That has to stop. The BMA has emphatically spoken out against the Work Capability Assessment, yet still individual GP’s are not interested; they don’t want to get their hands dirty. Perhaps they feel doing so will attract blame and censure. It is not enough to dodge your responsibility as a carer in helping people. Again ESA is, according to the government website, not solely for people that cannot work at all: it is for people who need help and support. I have yet to see either.

Grant Shapps vs The UN

Raquel Rolnik may resemble the thinking man’s Su Pollard, but she is actually the UN’s housing ‘rapporteur’. You can tell this means something, because the word is all fancy sounding, like. A bit like the word ‘compftroller’. I don’t really know what either word means. She’s come to Shite Britain to assess the impact of the ludicrous bedroom tax, also known, variously, as the spare room subsidy, or the under occupancy charge. No matter how the scum attempt to rebrand this hated and hateful policy, its true nature shines through.

In a supreme act of straight-faced irony her preliminary findings have been thoroughly rebuked; a distraught DWP spokes-toad claims Ms Rolnik ignored the numbers settling instead for anecdote. Wasn’t it Duncan Smith himself who relied on ‘cosmic ordering’ a few months back when faced with the facts about his policies? Didn’t he argue that, despite what the numbers actually said, he believed he was right and that’s all that mattered?

What must stick in his craw the most is that it comes from a foreigner – some dirty outsider sticking their beak into the affairs of decent honest pure bred British folk. It is, in the words of Grant Shapps “an absolute disgrace”. No, it isn’t for you, Jenny Foreigner, to criticise us! Consequently he plans to pen a missive demanding the attention of the UN’s general fucking secretary! As if he has nothing better to do than read complaints from whiny Tories. What does he think this will achieve? Of course the Tories still think the sun has yet to set on Britain and so these upstarts will apologise for their impertinence. Shapps then went on to observe that Ms Rolnik’s home country of Brazil has housing problems as if this disqualified her from commenting – as if she’s directly responsible for that situation! The absurdity!

So, in the mind of the Tories, the UN just decides, one morning, to send some lefty investigator over to stir up trouble amongst the plebs. Of course, that must be it. What other reason could there be?

Would the Tories be so bent out of shape if this ‘premature’ press release congratulated their thinking? Would they be saying her work was flawed by not speaking to the DWP if she endorsed their policy? Of course not. There is is; the heart of darkness exposed. Shapps dodges the question about the negative impact uncovered (though we all know) by Rolnik and instead tries to score points by claiming this policy eases waiting lists. No, Grant, all you’ve done is highlight government failings to address the housing crisis as well as ignore the crisis caused by the Bedroom Tax (and he don’t like it being called that neither). Idiot! Idiota!

The Tories have dismissed her work on the basis she’s only been here a couple of weeks and that, by not talking to the ministers concerned (she met with Eric Pickles apparently), her findings are to be ignored. It’s all such a travesty. But does anyone really think that the UN is going to just send a ‘special rapporteur’ to a couple of British housing estates to share a morning cuppa with some chavs and then call it a day? Is that what the government actually believes goes on at the UN? Probably; these swivel eyed loons routinely traduce these sorts of organisations when it suits them. Of course she came here just to meddle, with her nefarious foreign ways and unwelcome bureaucracy. What does she know? Well, if she has been speaking to those experiencing the sharp end of this policy, probably a lot more than Grant Shapps or Michael Green.

It goes beyond irony, however. This is the government that rattled the spirit stick of war less than a fortnight ago. Cameron and his out of touch coalition allies banging the drum to drop ordnance on Syria indiscriminately. That was most certainly a premature action (Rolnik’s full report is due next spring) and most certainly based on anecdote since we still don’t know whether Assad was responsible. Why would he do such a thing with the weapons inspectors in the same city and with the war going his way.

How the Tories function in the modern world I do not know. They are riddled with cognitive dissonance. It is simply inconceivable to them that anyone would disagree with their policies. It is simply inconceivable to them that anyone might find fault with them. So full of their own hubris and so convinced of their right to rule they cannot understand why someone might think the Bedroom Tax an exercise in hateful stupidity.

They cannot even understand why poor people are poor, what with all the flat screen televisions they own. It is gibbering simple mindedness of the sort espoused only a few days ago by Michael Gove; one of the most arrogant ministers this country has ever known. Bad life choices, he claims, are the cause – the sort that might lead someone to claim £7000 for expenses they shouldn’t have. No, wait, that was Michael Gove. Or to overextend themselves on someone else’s dime in purchasing expensive furniture for their state funded home. Sorry, nope, that’s Gove again. Oh dear. I’m sure he believes what he does is right – because he’s a Tory.

Capitalism Has Failed Us

What are they doing?

Our future is sold from under our noses; repossessed by people with no legitimate claim to it in the first place. This is the biggest and most insidious betrayal of our society – and people are blind to what is happening.

Recently, on Question Time, George Galloway advocated the ‘beatification’ of workfare hero Cait Reilly. She’s a hero because she stood up to the full weight of this disgusting system and helped expose the incompetence and lies at the heart of Mandatory Workfare.

This was the scheme, if you’ll remember, that saw Cait forced to abandon the work she had arranged herself to go and stack shelves in Poundland, a highly profitable group of austerity shitehawks. She was already doing what the DWP wanted her to do and that still wasn’t enough. Better, in their beady eyes, she make Mr Poundland a few more of those lovely pounds.

This week, those odious spongers and fantasists at the Taxpayers Alliance tried again to resurrect the idea of workfare, unaware its spectre hadn’t left the building. Chris Philip, another wannabe Tory top dog, authored a report claiming, inexplicably, workfare is good for the economy, and, of course, will help people get work. This is obvious bullshit, easily debunked elsewhere. Why champion workfare on the grounds of economics? Is this the default justification for every mad scheme going? It isn’t the fault of the unemployed that the economy is in so parlous a state.

We are living under a system that is failing. It is a slow motion destruction of every social good that proves, finally, the ruling elite are only in it for themselves. Fortunately for them the speed of destruction is such that people don’t notice. Doubly fortunately the media is either on their side or in their pocket. Thus when anyone speaks up in favour of progressive values or social justice the masses conjure images of Citizen Smith in their minds to facilitate dismissing, out of hand, such views. This is a kind of NLP – a method by which rationally presented views are immediately rendered comical or facile. No one even questions it. That is the job of the media – it certainly isn’t to present factual accounting of the days events!

This is what is stacked against us. They – the movers and shakers of this system – are a minority with power and wealth whose interests are to maintain that position and privilege, no matter the cost. No matter that it is we who pay. When it all collapses, and it will – indeed must, they will still be sitting pretty. That is the whole purpose of this system and it is incumbent on us, somehow (I’m by no means expert in revolution), to expose and challenge this as best we can.

Perhaps you still think I sound like someone that’s watched the Matrix once too often. Don’t worry I don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories, even though the capitalist neoliberal system is certainly a conspiracy of self interest. Let’s go back to unemployment then. What good does it do us to have our kids, fresh from school and university (if they are lucky enough to afford it, that is), forced into wage slavery. They are programmed to expect nothing more than the first job that comes along. Invariably that will be nothing of any value (or even any kind of decent wage). Refusal is not permitted and resistance is to be crushed and demeaned. Support or even compromise is completely out of the question. Cait Reilly found that out.

They tell us we are to be a competitive country, but how can we even achieve that if our kids can expect nothing more than a career in the social cancer that is the supermarket. These companies are like cockroaches; they can survive any kind of economic apocalypse and thrive during austerity. So of course, as they spread like an angry tumour across the country, there is always room for more low paid staff to be exploited. When we can’t even guarantee a wage thanks to zero hours, and when the government tells people they should be grateful to work in such places, notorious for their terms conditions and wages, for nothing, you know the ruling elite is working against us.

Yesterday I did some searching, as I occasionally do, for volunteer work. There isn’t a huge amount locally that’s not either charity shop work (been there, done that) and care work, which I don’t feel up to (you can’t be frivolous with people’s well being). My heart broke when I saw the number of positions for nothing more than companionship: befriending a lonely pensioner, or a person with learning disabilities.

Later that day I looked on Universal Jobmatch (I try to look as I think it’s good practice for when I inevitably fail ESA). Wading through the agency scams and low rent crap advertised I wondered why we aren’t paying people to be companions? Why are things backwards? What can be more fundamental to the wellbeing of a healthy society than the simple act of companionship? Are we saying that it’s better for people to work as minimum wage chattel for the insatiable supermarket than it is to sit and be a friend to a lonely human being? Why is one paid and not the other? Why don’t we have a government that supports this kind of social good?

This is why our system is broken and this is why it must be challenged and destroyed. How? I don’t know. But it must. There is no other choice.

Kids are taught in schools to aspire, but this is false hope. We have put a price on things that should not have one, like education. Knowledge is its own reward, but in this society it only serves a purpose if it’s profitable – so the rich can take a cut as our owners. We have allowed these people to own us and the land we live upon (fracking, anyone? No?). What is the point of an education system anymore if the best thing that can happen is a ‘taster’ session with a supermarket?

Three days unpaid work experience with Morrisons. This is the result of your hard work and your study. Of course, because these employers are so prevalent, there’s doubtless something of value they can offer but it only has value if you capitulate. If you refuse to play their game, then they can’t win.

This is why it is offensive to have the CBI lecture schools and traduce the efforts of teachers by accusing them of failing kids. We’ve heard all the scare stories about hordes of illiterate innumerate feral kids falling out of schools unable to work. Do we ever question the employers in this? Maybe the conditions are ridiculous: unnecessary make-work for a risible wage.

Who are these employers to lecture the ‘work ethic’ of school leavers and demand their gratitude when they don’t even pay a wage people can live on. Consequently a certain cuddly cockney TV chef is allowed to get away with what might seem uncharacteristically barbed comments from such a ‘cheeky chappy’ demanding kids be grateful to work utterly unreasonable hours. A man who had a lucky break with  TV career, unlike 99% of other aspiring cooks, the irony of which is that his position now leads those that look up to him to have even more unreasonable aspirations.

A man that made a tidy sum hawking Sainsbury’s product with a straight face.

Yet when does he ever speak out against the practices of a notoriously harsh industry; staff in kitchens are underpaid and overworked. However he’s given free reign to whine about ‘wet’ native brits as if he knows them all and using that as an excuse to hire immigrants while backhandedly criticising them as foreigners who shouldn’t be working in Britain.

No one’s forcing Jamie to hire foreigners. He could easily hire local staff, he just chooses not to. He’s a multi millionaire with, on presumes, a profitable empire. Jamie could advocate sensible conditions, not the 80-100 hours he outlines as the standard below which excuses are made and Brits are lazy for aspiring toward.

It all feeds into the system. In this he is a stooge; another useful idiot who appears to accept every media bogeyman going, from the evil EU to unfettered immigration. Incredibly he argues here against the EU believing that decades old nonsense about straight cucumbers – as if the people of the EU are biologically alien to the righteous British who would find EU standard vegetables somehow toxic. It’s like thinking they aren’t human abroad; the implication being they don’t value good quality food. Seriously Jamie?

He’s a public figure who unwittingly enforces the propaganda of the government: the serfs, for that’s what we are, deserve crap wages. Not only that but this propaganda always cites the ‘work ethic’, a pseudo religious construct of control, to keep people mollified, in line, and even divided – those that don’t have a work ethic are legitimate targets for Room 101 style hate from the rest. Look at the scroungers! Get angry!

Meanwhile these people face as much uncertainty as their kids. They could be out of work easily. Only then will the mask slip; only then will they get a real glimpse at just how nasty the capitalist elite really are when they find they are entitled to fuck all, just like Cait Reilly. She did the right thing – according to the government – and they still criticised her for it (even more so for daring to stand up and give them a bloody nose). In her response to Galloway and his effusive approval Baroness Kramer utterly disowned Cait’s efforts.

A Baroness (and a libdem) for fuck's sake; it’s something right out of dark ages Britain. That should tell you something right there. So what that she found her own voluntary work, geology and museums are meaningless, Cait should be grateful that the Coalition deigned to force her to work in a demeaning unpaid skivvy job for a highly profitable company (whose success comes from selling cheap knockoff goods).

This is the reality: it’s better for someone to work unpaid for the high street equivalent of some Delboy style market stall than to pursue science and technology. Just because it’s a little harder to get a career using a worthy degree we should abandon that and go stack shelves. (Geologists correctly lambasted IDS for his snide comment toward Cait’s degree by saying without geology there’d be no shelves for her to stack). However what help does the DWP offer in finding something using that degree? What do they do to support and ensure those that want to care for lonely people get a good wage and decent working conditions? Even when it might seem to be in its own interests, the system still screws you. This is because its interests are not the social good.

Creativity, art, science, research, technology, community – even compassion and friendship; none of these are intrinsically worthwhile to the system. They do not directly fill the pockets of the landowning gentrified elite. If they could, it might be different. That’s why these jobs are reduced to the level of volunteer work – and that’s not to say there’s anything wrong with voluntary work; I’m speaking in terms relative to the system.

To conclude: we should be championing those values above because that is how you build a worthwhile society. A world where there is no division because communities integrate over shared values. We all want to live free and in compassion with our neighbours. People should value art and creativity because it inspires others to better things. Science and technology should be valued so as to improve things and community building should be equally valued and sneered at. If the best we can manage is to champion supermarkets and other antisocial interests, then we have utterly failed.

Pagan

Summer fades and as it does so there is a hint of melancholy on the wind that makes all the days seem more precious. Soon the sunshine, that we have been blessed (or cursed, I suppose!) with this year, will be cold and the warmth gone. Accompanying this is a breeze that blows through the trees making the light hazy and yellow. It is times like these that tell us who we are. There is a connection between a person, what some might call his soul, and the living world; the world away from buildings, electricity, jobcentres and chemical weapons.

I am not religious. I abhor organised religions as systems of control that instil subservience and fear into people. We should not be afraid, though often we are. However I acknowledge the presence of what some might, in fluffy terms, call spirituality. I do not believe in new age philosophies; much of these beliefs are a kludge of older systems that now exist in syncretism; forms whose true natures are ignored by those that practice them. What matters to me is the world around me and how I fit into that.

So I suppose, in a strange way, that makes me a pagan. That is, someone who marks the passage of time through the seasons and in the cycle of years months and days. Some might do this with a nod to the supernatural, a goddess or a belief in Gaia. I’m not sure I’d subscribe to that, but the world is a living thing, a complex biosphere of interrelated forces and life forms. As I walk through the fading summer light I see the changes in the patterns of wildlife that thrive now, as the nature of their habitats and resources change with the seasons and the cycle of years months and days.

Maybe it’s a thing peculiar to our location on the planet; we go from a long day that stretches into the late night to a short one with very little daylight at all. Perhaps it’s unique to the weather and environmental patterns we have: rolling mists, driving rain, hot sun and winter snow. Four seasons in one day, month and certainly year.

Whatever it is on this island we pack ourselves onto there is something beyond our lives as regimented by TV schedules, trips to the supermarket and the drive to consume and provide for a system not of our choosing. This something is, in poetic terms, a living force that can tap on your window on a windy summer night, or invite you to stare at the stars in the shivering cold. It reveals itself in the falling autumn leaves that carpet the pavements lanes and gutters and tempts you with the promise of summer in late spring. No matter how much we threaten this natural order with fracking and a demand for poisonous energy sources, this spirit will never yield.

Verifying Mental Health on ESA

When it comes to mental health, trying to get onto ESA is uniquely difficult. Of course it’s difficult, period. But I think, and I’ve seen, that mental health is peculiar in this.

The CAB needs me to get a letter from my GP to underline how my conditions affect me. Specifically this has to pertain to what the ESA descriptors require to qualify for the points awarded. It’s like a terrifying game show. Turns out, however, that my GP received a letter from the CAB asking for this already and she has responded – but, I fear, not in the way the CAB and I need. I tried to explain that the process requires she verify my explanation in response to these descriptors. Here’s an example:

ESA Brucey Forsythe: “Now for 6 points, can you tell me whether or not you can cope with small unexpected changes to your daily routine.”

This is the specific requirement for the descriptor ‘coping with changes’; in other words this is what the ESA system needs to know about in order to qualify.

Contestant Ghost Whistler: “no – change to an appointment time would be upsetting and uncomfortable (I also said to the CAB adviser that had she changed this appointment I would have struggled).

What the CAB needs is for my GP to rubber stamp this with a letter or document I can take to the tribunal. Unfortunately for me my GP doesn’t quite understand this. Again there is the lack of appreciation for what is actually required of the claimant according to the system. According to her she can’t actively verify this. Unlike, say, a broken arm (something tangible and visible), she can’t know that’s true. She can’t diagnose this.

Herein lies the problem; it seems that for mental health issues people in her position require a diagnosis. She’s happy to facilitate that (though god knows when or even if that will happen locally – never mind in time for a tribunal), but she can’t directly verify my description as above. That’s not to say she doesn’t agree, though of course we all know that’s how it will be seen. So she has sent off some evidence to the CAB sort of answering the questions. Unfortunately she couldn’t get me a copy of her answers so I have to wait for the CAB to receive her report (posted Friday) and get in touch to see whether it meets with their approval – i.e. whether they think it’s going to help. It might, but then again I fear it will not do so directly and that is the problem.

The great irony is that while GP’s speak in the language of diagnosis, the ESA assessment system does not. In her mind a diagnosis of ADD/Aspergers (or whatever) is answer enough, but to the DWP a diagnosis is irrelevant. You could present them with a diagnosis for terminal cancer and three months to live and they would only pass you for ESA if that condition triggered 15 points worth of descriptors, regardless of how you feel. When it comes to mental health, which is largely invisible and poorly understood, even by GP’s (who thus rely on diagnoses, as here), this approach is woefully inadequate: conditions fluctuate and are difficult to explain or pin down. This leaves individuals caught, once again, in the zone of uncertainty this deficient system creates.

I hope I have explained this well enough. It’s difficult to really parse because it’s subtle. In many ways it makes sense to assess what a person can or can’t do, but the problem is how. By editing the descriptors and setting the goalposts how you like you, as architect of this system, have free reign to determine who passes and who doesn’t. But remember, ESA is meant to be for people who need help – even if they can, or are even in, work. It is called Employment SUPPORT Allowance; not Incapacity Benefit.