Diary of a Benefit Scrounger: Confirmed - The FULL Impact of Cuts Disabled Peopl...

I have never re-posted a fellow blogger's posting, but this has to reach the BIGGEST audience possible.

Lord Freud (carefully typed to avoid a Freudian slip) and Iain Duncan Smith have been caught (may I add, again) in a lie.  This time, the biggest lie of the Con-Dem Coalition, the one they have been fighting all along.



Read it, share it, let them fight the truth!



Diary of a Benefit Scrounger: Confirmed - The FULL Impact of Cuts Disabled Peopl...: Since the coalition came to power, sick and disabled people have claimed we are being fundamentally harmed by the coalition welfare refor...

Taking over quietly.

I can't remember if I've mentioned this before, but if I have, I apologise, still, here goes.

From my point of view, this reared it's ugly head about ten years ago when coming back into the country via Gatwick airport.  

Picture the scene: it's about four o'clock in the morning and my wife and I have been up all day and night, it was a late night flight to save money and thanks to a delay.  So, we have about two hours before a train arrives to take us home, so I think "Coffee time"!

I toddled over to the coffee bar (who I won't mention as this is the only problem I have had with them), and through my sleep filled brain, I asked the "barista" for two white coffees.  Remember, this is in the days when you asked for a white coffee and got served with the establishments version of coffee with milk.

"Er, we don't do white coffee, only Americano, Latte or Cappucino", says the girl behind the bar.

"It's four a.m., I just want two cups of white coffee!"

"We don't do white coffee, only Americano, Latte or Cappucino", says the brain of Britain.

"Listen, in France, I'd ask for Café au Lait, in Spain, Café con Leche, in England I ask for a White Coffee or Coffee with milk!  Two, please!"

"We don't do white coffee, only Americano, Latte or Cappucino", says her again.

I gave up, scanned the menu board and requested, "Oh, heck, two hot chocolates please!" 

So the young mademoiselle turns to her colleague "Two hot chocolates"

While waiting, my eyes alighted on the cake display - "May I have two almond slices as well please?"

"Those have got nuts in them, you know" 

"Yeah, I think the idea's in the title, dear", she pulled two almond slices out of the display and then her colleague passes the hot chocolates over.

"Do you want chocolate on those?" says the young lady, holding a shaker of chocolate.

"I'm sorry?"

"Do you want chocolate on those?"

"Listen, sweetheart," says I, sympathetically, "there's chocolate in the cup, if there isn't enough chocolate in the cup why would I want more?"

So she capped the cups, took my money and I went back to my wife.  

So, the point -  it's not that some people are less intelligent than required, it's the principle of going to a coffee shop in England and having to ask for my coffee in a foreign language!  As I said to the young lady so long ago, if I'm abroad, I'll ask for coffee in the local language.

We're losing our identity.

But it's the thin edge of the wedge.

Look at the Ciabbata or Panini that you are going to eat with the coffee, even though I am the first to agree that it's the bread style that goes with those that names them.  But the coffee,  a white coffee, not Latte or Espresso or Americano or Cappucino is what I want.

Please Burn The England Flags!

I will freely admit I am a patriot, I love my country, I respect the monarchy and I respect the flags.

The title of this blog is not asking everyone to grab their nearest cross of St George and set fire to it, but to set light to the tautological flags.  Those that have the word England across the middle of it.  We all know that the N in PIN stands for the word number, and should not call it a PIN number as that would be a Personal Identification Number number.

The red cross on the white background already says "England", so why write the word across the middle of the flag?  We are the only country that does it, I have never seen "USA" written across the Stars and Stripes or "France" across the French Tricolore.

Why?

Is it that our country is so apathetic about teaching our population about the flags that represent us?  Thanks to Doctor Who we were all reminded that the flag that represents the United Kingdom is the Union Flag, when not on a ship.  Why do we not teach our children the flags of foreign nations and our own.neighbouring nations?  As a child I was taught the evolution of the Union Flag, the four flags of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales (For the Welsh dragon, look in the middle of the Union Flag).  I was taught a few of the neighbouring countries, the red, white and blue vertical stripes of France; the horizontal arrangement of the same colours said "Netherlands"; red, yellow and red of Spain and so on.  Does this happen in schools today?

The flag is the descendant of the coat of arms of the lord of an area and then the arms of the king.  For when the king was not on the field something was needed to give the troops to follow.  So all the troops knew that they were fighting for the right side, they had to know their flag.

So again, I say burn all the England England flags.  If you want to look stupid, fly them on your car or in your window but my recommendation is that you burn them!

OK folks, just to prove I'm not dead, here's another posting.

If you were thinking of retiring to Spain, think twice.  First, what will happen when you get too infirm to look after yourself?  Second, who will take care of you when you need it?

In Spain, they still work on what is known as "Roman Law".  This means that if you are the second, third or younger child of a family, you have very few rights to look after your parents.  I am lucky, I am an only child, had I not been, I would have needed proof in writing from any older siblings that I had permission to generate a Power of Attorney to look after my father's affairs.

Any how, you search around to find a solicitor or factor to prepare the "Power" they then make an appointment with a Public Notary to witness the parent's signature and hear a statement that they know what is going on, thank goodness he remembered!  Now comes a week long wait for the Notary to finish what they have to do (possibly sending a copy to Madrid, like they do with wills) then it comes back and you get a copy of it to go to all the people you have to.

It seems, from past experience, that most legal papers have to go off to Madrid for storage.  When my mother passed on, her will had to be retrieved from storage in Madrid, but in this day and age of technology there is still a built in wait of a week to ten days while the copy from Madrid is brought down by horse!  Alright, it's not a real horse, but there is a built in delay that represents the time it would take by horse.  (This is the explanation given to me by the solicitors while we were waiting for Mum's will, I don't know if it is really that reason.)

Spain has a reputation of "Mañana" or "tomorrow", that is if you want anything done, you have to wait.  There is no question of rushing official stuff it all takes ages.  If you need to do anything, you need paperwork, or a passport, or both. 

There is an annoying thing that all Ex-pats are supposed to have and that is an N.I.E. (Number Identificacion de Extranjero) that and the Passport number (which changes every ten years for us Brits) sit comfortably alongside the Spanish Social Security Number, which you will need if you have a reason for visiting a doctor or clinic.  Obviously enough, the numbers most Brits have, like the National Insurance Number, and the National Health Number are not used, as this is a totally separate system, but if you are relying on a British pension, you need to keep the NINO for dealing with the Pensions Service.

The NIE is obtained from certain Police Stations but it's a palaver!  You go to the office with a form already filled in, they stamp it, tell you to go off to a bank to make the required payment for the fee, then back to the office to hand your form in, when the Chief Commissar of Police deigns to sign the application, you go back and get your number on a printed and rubber stamped form.  Spain would collapse if there were no Rubber Stamps.  Everything has to be stamped and signed over the stamp, even a form from a doctor to the local council for a "Lifeline" type button.

If your parents retire to Spain, prepare for a lot of hard work!  The thing to remember is that they are happy, sort of warm, and possibly drier!  The Winter Heat Payments to pensioners is another argument, for another time!

Keep smiling!

Here goes for the Indignity!

Coming to a computer screen near you, the final degrading step that a person who is already ground down by the benefits system in the UK has to undergo.  

I have been poked, prodded, lied about, forced to travel near enough 200 miles to fight my case and now I'm called for a Work Focussed Interview.  This is an interview that will most probably be carried out between me and a twenty-something slip of a girl (or man) who has had one job in their life, other than a paper-round while still at school.  

The idea of this interview is to tell me that I should be doing this, that and the other to find a job where the employer will not employ me, or if they do, they will most probably ask me to leave after a week because of my disability.  I mean, what employer wants an employee that has trouble concentrating in the morning and has trouble staying awake in the afternoon, needs to get out of a normal chair after about 15-20 minutes to loosen his knee joints, can hardly climb stairs (and so is a fire hazard), cannot lift his hands above his head and cannot stand for more than a few minutes.  

Yet this is the indignity I have to face on Tuesday.  I have to pray that I can park near the DWP office on the other side of town and that they do not want me to go upstairs to an interview room.  On top of all this, I have to hope that I do not do, or say, the wrong thing and have the DWP "sanction" me.  For those outside the UK, this is where the Department for Works and Pensions arbitrarily decide that I have breached their rules and stop all of my benefits.  Not some of my benefits, we are talking, for a first offence (supposedly), all of my benefits.  This will mean that my wife and I will have no money for food, heating or light, but we will owe our landlord £200 for the two weeks of rent that will not be paid, if not more if the council do not restart the payments after the fortnight.

The standard working period for the DWP is a fortnight, as, in the past, unemployed people had to sign on for their benefit and then get paid this often.  This is not a problem for the clerks in their centrally heated offices who can mark off two weeks on a calendar easily enough.  For businesses and banks this is unworkable.  It seems that direct debits and the like can only be paid monthly, that is, on the same date every month, days do not come into it unless the 14th falls on a weekend, in which case it used to be paid on the Monday following.

Now, I think to normal people, the problem will be becoming obvious, some months have five weeks in them, in fact, the only month that is an exact four week period is a non-leap year February.  So, although the 14th of January is on a Tuesday this year, it is not an even number of weeks from the 14th of February, and so on and so on.  This means that budgeting on benefits is an amazing feat of accounting, and if the Chancellor of the Exchequer needed to do it, he would fail unless, as he does, he had a large bank balance in the black.

So, the Minister for Works and Pensions has decided to bring in a system whereby benefits claimants will be paid monthly.  It has already cost £50M of lost money already to prepare the system to do it, but it doesn't work.  So will future sanctions be for a minimum of a month?

The government, which, yet again, has been caught in a PR lie, is trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the public by making every claimant guilty of "shirking" and cheating the system by use of the media.  This government by Upper Class Twits who only have the needs of themselves and their own classmates from Public School or University in mind.  These cheats who started by preventing themselves being voted out in the first days of their filling the seats of power with a bunch of sycophantic cronies who are all filling jobs for which they have little or any qualification for.  

The people are getting fed up with the austerity package they are being forced to undergo - pay rises capped to 1% while MPs vote themselves a massive pay rise; high paid people get tax cuts in their favour; power companies raise prices by 3% and train companies raise fares by 6%.  There will come a time when the people can take no more hypocrisy.

Its were the system fails!

I do not apologise for the title of this post, in truth I wanted to take it further. I have turned into a Spelling Pedant!

Reading an item posted on facebook today, I had to mentally replace "there" with "their" and "where" with "were" on so many occasions it made me feel physically ill.  I fully realise that not everyone is blessed with a decent education in the UK, but please people, if you are going to write in English, use the right words.

I must have been so lucky in my education that I was taught where to use the right homonym.  There are several ways to remember which spelling is required for the correct meaning to be conveyed, it's a case of finding the one that works for you.

For example, one of the worst culprits is the easiest to remember:

THERE/THEIR/THEY'RE

• There - is not HERE.
• Their - that person is the HEIR, the item is tHEIR property.
• They're = They are - the apostrophe is here to take the place of missing letters.

WHERE/WERE/WEAR/WE'RE

• Where - it is not HERE, wHERE is it?
• Were - They wERE here ERE they left.
• Wear - You wEAR glasses over your EAR.
• We're = We are - the apostrophe is here to take the place of missing letters.

So you can see that with a little simple thought and care homonyms can be tamed. (sEE with your EyE not sEA that meets the bEAch.) [oh, and that was mEEt as in sEE not mEAT as in EAT]

The biggest drawback with homonyms is that you the user has to know how to use them as a spell-checker will see "We wear here" as correct as "we were here".

So please, people, take care and learn the differences, and make sure you use the right word.  I know some will knock my use of grammar in the examples I have given, but if it works, it works!

The turn has wormed!

Yes, OK, I know that it should be the worm that has turned, but in the two months since I last wrote on this blog things have changed a little and it's not me that changed.

So there was I, at the end of my tether, DLA had been denied, ESA on Assessment Rate while I appealed and the thud of paper hitting my doorstep threatened to break my floorboards.  Wait five weeks and the date for the appeal into my ESA arrived. Nice and close, BRIGHTON!

In case you don't already know, Hastings is 52 miles away from Brighton and like most people asked to visit a town or city so far away I do not know the layout of it.  So, thanks to my dad, I bought a train ticket and got some cash for the taxis and some food.

The day arrived, fortunately as I was about to walk to the station (600m to the platform) so I was going to be in agony before the day started, and my darling daughter turned up to drop her mother off, so I begged a lift and cut out 400m of the walk!

I got to Brighton, fell off the train (at the wrong end) and hobbled to the exit.  Unfortunately, Brighton station is designed so that you have to walk across 20 m to get to the ticket barrier and then back 20 m to get to the taxis, which I sort of bypassed and went and got a coffee.  Great little coffee bar in the old waiting room with the imaginitive name of "The Waiting Room", nice staff and nice coffee.  So then I downed some instant hit Tramadol (those that I get sent into the country from Spain) and shuffled off to get a taxi for the mile to the tribunal centre.

So, there is our hero, arriving at the tribunal centre with his customary early arrival - 30 minutes in this case, and the security man says "Really early sir!  You're due to be here in 2 and a half hours!"

"No," Says I, "my appointment is for 2 pm.  If they don't like it, they can get me a chair to sit in because I am not sitting on that sofa, as there's no way I'll ever get out of it!"

He dials a number on his telephone and I am soon greeted and taken to the Tribunal Service office and shown into a waiting room.  Barely had I sat when a clerk with his shirt hanging out from the back of his trousers called me in to the hearing room.

Quick little chat with a GP and a judge about how things were and how they are (I told the GP that Arthritis is a degenerative illness and yes, over the last 18 months it had got worse).  How do you manage to do things, like shopping? We have it delivered, I can drive to the supermarket, but can barely walk round it.

"How do you grip the steering wheel?" asked the judge.  The next day I nearly died at the answer I gave!  "I don't grip the steering wheel, you don't grip a steering wheel, if you do and hit a pothole you're going into the kerb or a car, anyone that says you grip the steering wheel should go back and learn to drive!"  It was the next day I realised the judge had blushed!

"Go sit down again and we'll make our decision." Eh, what? I haven't had a chance to put my side of the argument over, I haven't had a chance to point out the 22 errors in the Atos report!  If you have a complaint about Atos, you'll have to take it up with them!

So, I go back to the waiting room, take my bag off my shoulder sit down and the clerk comes back!  I was escorted back to the hearing room and there on the table was a piece of paper with "Appeal is allowed"!  Mr Turtle is hereby awarded 15 points! 6 more than the original decision.

Now all I have to do is wait for the money to go into my bank for the backdated money that they owe me, including TWO Christmas bonuses - a whole twenty pounds!  Ten pounds for each Christmas, a measly fiver for me and a fiver for my wife!  This amount was instigated way, way back many decades ago when £10 filled a shopping trolley, now it will pay the delivery fee for the shopping and the electricity to heat the house on Christmas day!  Still, the government know the use of a ten pound note, it's used to light a cigarette, well, you can't light a cigar with a £10 it's way too small!

Still, my 18 month fight against the system has been won and now I have to fill in the 40 page form for Personal Independence Payment. I did 5 pages last night, I might go for 5 tomorrow that'll be a fortnight to fill in the whole form!  Don't these people realise we're disabled and we didn't choose to be!