"A hostile environment"

Here's why I knew I'd have to leave Britain if I didn't want to starve or freeze to death sleeping on a London sidewalk ("footpath" in English english).

I saw this (as described in the video linked below) personally--experienced it done to me and observed it being done to others. It is, as pointed out in the video monologue, a completely deliberate, rationalized, policy and program, designed to produce the most exquisitely perfect of stream of uninterrupted bureaucratic cruelty and blank unresponsiveness. Race is really beside the point. Anyone in Britain can be the victim of this shit:

"Trapped in an endless fucking cycle of hold-music and fear." (Jonathan Pie, reporting...)

__________________________



Douglas Murray, ..."Show me the country that actually says, 'We're for meanness.' " (counter: @ 00:47 mins. :03 secs. )

I like Jonathan Pie but to describe the Windrush issue as purely a Tory policy is a bit disingenuous - both major parties contributed to this clusterfuck during their time in power. Not to take away from the despicable nature of the situation - I'm utterly appalled by the whole thing, but it can't really be used to score political points, other than pointing out that every politician seems to be a complete shit.

It serves to illustrate the accuracy of the late, great Douglas Adams when he said "The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."

>2 BuffaloPhil:

I quite agree-- " to describe the Windrush issue as purely a Tory policy is a bit disingenuous - both major parties contributed to this clusterfuck during their time in power. "

that, in fact, would be my main criticism of Tom Walker's ("Jonathan Pie's) presentation. This wretched policy easily finds its roots in Blair and Mandelson's ugly despicable work. You are so very right to object to the impression that it is solely a Tory scandal. Not at all. Nor, indeed, is it confined to only victims "of colour"--non-"white" populations. Again, far, far from it.

UK austerity has inflicted 'great misery' on citizens, UN says | by Robert Booth and Patrick Butler | Fri 16 Nov 2018 17.40 GMT

_________________________

"The UK government has inflicted “great misery” on its people with “punitive, mean-spirited, and often callous” austerity policies driven by a political desire to undertake social re-engineering rather than economic necessity, the United Nations poverty envoy has found.

"Philip Alston, the UN’s rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, ended a two-week fact-finding mission to the UK with a stinging declaration that levels of child poverty were “not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster”, even though the UK is the world’s fifth largest economy,

"About 14 million people, a fifth of the population, live in poverty and 1.5 million are destitute, being unable to afford basic essentials, he said, citing figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. He highlighted predictions that child poverty could rise by 7 percentage points between 2015 and 2022, possibly up to a rate of 40%.

“ 'It is patently unjust and contrary to British values that so many people are living in poverty,' he said, adding that compassion had been abandoned during almost a decade of austerity policies that had been so profound that key elements of the postwar social contract, devised by William Beveridge more than 70 years ago, had been swept away.

... ...

How sad that, at The Guardian (London), the overwhelming weight of news-and-opinion was devoted to anything except these vitally-important issues. Instead, editors and writers had no end of column-inches for writing about men who, uninvited, put a hand on some woman's shoulder--a work-place colleague, some stranger encountered at a bar, etc.

How Neoliberalism Is Normalising Hostility

(from openDemocracy.netHow Neoliberalism Is Normalising Hostility

By Couze Venn, Emeritus Professor of Cultural Theory in the Media & Communications Department at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Associate Research Fellow at Johannesburg University; author of After Capital (2018, Sage Publications)

(excerpt (final ten paragraphs of the article)



(Image: Homeless man with commuters walking past, Waterloo Station, London. Credit: Jessica Mulley/Flickr, CC 2.0.)

... ...

"As Ha Joon Chang has shown, by the 1990s, financial capitalism had become the dominant power, prioritising the interest of shareholders, and incentivising managers through share ownership and bonuses schemes. The disruptions due to this recomposition of capital have been a global squeeze on income, the creation of a new precariat, and the debt society. People who feel insecure, abandoned to forces outside their control become easy prey to demagogues and prophets of deceit who promise the return of good times, provided enemies and outsiders who wreck things are expelled.

"Meanwhile, neoliberal political economy gradually became the new orthodoxy, increasing its impact through right wing thinktanks and government advisors and spreading its influence in academia and economic thought. Its initial success in terms of growth and prosperity in the 1990s and turn of the century consolidated its hold over the economy until the crash of 2008.

"What is important here is the radical shift in values and attitudes that recall utilitarian values in the 19th Century. In particular, it is reflected in the neoliberal hostility towards the poor, the weak, the destitute, the ' losers', expressed in its denial or abnegation of responsibility for their plight or welfare, and its project of dismantling the welfare or providential state.

"This pervasive atmosphere of hostility is the real triumph of neoliberal political economy. Not the economy – privatisation, monetisation, deregulation, generalised competition, and structural adjustments are immanent tendencies in globalised capitalism anyway. But neoliberal political economy reanimates attitudes and values that legitimate the consolidation of power over others, evidenced for example in the creation of an indebted population who must play by the dominant rules of the game in order to survive. It promotes new servitudes, operating on a planetary scale. What is rejected are ideas of common interest and a common humanity that support the principle of collective responsibility for fellow humans, and that radical liberal philosophers like John Stuart Mill defended. They were the values, along with the principles of fundamental human rights, that informed major reforms, and inspired socialism. The establishment of the welfare or providential state, and programmes of redistribution, enshrined in Beveridge or New Deals, draw from these same principles and values.

"Neoliberalism has promoted a self-centeredness that pushes Adam Smith-style individualism to an extreme, turning selfishness into a virtue, as Ayn Rand has done. It is a closed ontology since it does not admit the other, the stranger, into the circle of those towards whom we have a duty of responsibility and care. It thus completes capitalism as a zero-sum game of winners and ‘losers’. Apart from the alt-right in the USA, we find its exemplary advocates amongst leading Brexiteers in the UK, backed by dark money. It is not the social democratic compromise of capitalism with a human face that could support the welfare state. Seen in this context, there is an essential affinity between alt-right, neoliberal political economy and neo- fascisms, punctuated by aggressivity, intolerance, exclusion, expulsion and generalised hostility.*

"There are other important stakes at this point in the history of humanity and the planet. We tend to forget that support for fundamental human rights, like equality, liberty, freedom from oppressive power, has long been motivated by the same kind of concern to defend the vulnerable, the poor, the destitute, the oppressed from the injustices arising from unequal relations of power. We forget too that these rights have been hard won through generations of emancipatory struggles against many forms of oppressions.

"Yet, it is sad to see many institutions and organisations tolerate intolerance out of confusion about the principles at stake and for fear of provoking hostile reactions from those who claim rights that in effect disadvantage some already vulnerable groups. Failure to defend the oppressed anywhere and assert our common humanity is the slippery slope towards a Hobbesian state and great suffering for the many."

* "It thus completes capitalism as a zero-sum game of winners and ‘losers’. Apart from the alt-right in the USA, we find its exemplary advocates amongst leading Brexiteers in the UK, backed by dark money."

It helps nothing to make the blunder of stupidly confounding "Brexiteers" en bloc with these forces of Dark Money; Dark money's forces there no doubt are; but singling that out as though it doesn't pervade all sorts of issues and controversies is extremely counter-productive. The motives of Brexiteers are too varied to be so simplistically dismissed.

Neo-liberal finance can and does easily adapt to and adopt whatever the current fads of political correctness require in banal, superficial inclusion of anyone, regardless of skin-color, 'sexual orientation,' or other skin-deep manifestations of one's personal 'identity,' one's particular in-group memberships. Tattoos, dread-locks, pierced noses, ears, tongues, Doc Martin boots, black leather biker-jackets--high finance doesn't give a shit about any of these outward markers of identity as long as one embraces, body and soul, the vicious ideology it requires from those to whom it issues important power, influence and salaries.

________________________________


By all indications from the lack of interest in this thread, Britain's monied power-elite, "Dark Money" or otherwise, have nothing to worry about.

The problem with the thread is the messenger rather than the message.

If we are into hurling brickbats across the pond, I reckon I can "Trump" anything coming our way.

>5 abbottthomas:

LOL!

It's not a 'contest' to determine who gets the prize for "Morally-ugliest, most-disgusting real-or-pretended First-World-nation."

I have no more friendly brief for the American version of Britain's truly ugly, vicious, disgusting misery-production. So your concern there is completely misplaced. But it does show how defensive you are in your reaction to these fact-supported scathing reports on Britain's hostile environment.

In other words, faced with a U.N. report, you retreat into juvenile strategies of "what-about"-ism.

Obviously there is gratuitous cruelty and simply stupid, self-defeating insult-added-to-injury in both Britain and the United States. So what?! This thread is about Britain, where, God help me, I'm both a resident and a natural-born citizen with the right of abode. So, it isn't as an American that I'm pointing out the glaring sores all over Lady Britannia.

While, in the U.S., one finds the disgrace of ambulances which dart into deserted alleyways to dump indigent patients on the street, here in Britain, rough-sleepers, such as myself, who fall ill and need cold-medicine, can't get an aspirin or antihistamine at the nearest Boots chemist--even showing a NHS-issued document which absolves them of having to bear the out-of-pocket cost of medicine.

But, to use it, one has to be really, really very ill. A common cold is not sufficient. I should come back when I have pneumonia or something worse.

Coughs, colds and congestion? These Medicines are no longer free via nhs prescriptions
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5932438/full-list-medicines-no-longer-free-nhs-pre...

So, never mind that I sleep rough, never mind that, suffering from a cold and, with a waiver issued by the NHS which exempts me from having to pay for serious medicines, I cannot obtain a free package to relieve headache, sore-throat or nasal & chest congestion--not from an NHS doctor's surgery and not from a commercial chemist (which once upon a time would have been reimbursed for the costs by the NHS.

Sleeping rough, without money for cold medicine, I have the privilege of helping save the NHS money; I can just wait until my symptoms are exhausted--and suffer through them until then. This is insult added to injury.

So, now, tell me all about how proud you are of this state of affairs: a two-tier system in which those with money can buy cold medicines and those without can fucking lump it till they're no longer ill--or they get so sick that the system decides it's important to treat them.

Tell me: In Britain, do cancer-patients get aspirin included in the other therapies and drugs they're allowed through the NHS covered medicines? Or is that their problem to pay for along with all the other items not covered?

_________________

HERE'S A FREE PALLIATIVE, JUST TO MAKE YOU FEEL BETTER IN YOUR TOUCHY DEFENSIVENESS:

The U.S. health-care system is also in many ways a horror-show.

There now, feel better?

________________

Here's an up-date:

LOL! Regarding cancer patients, the answer turns out to be, YES, cancer patients are exempt from bearing the costs of medicines (provided they apply for a formal exemption (LOL!) ) :

2.2 Medical exemptions
Individuals are exempt from prescription charges if they have one of the
medical conditions listed below and hold a valid medical exemption
certificate. Medical exemption certificates are given on application to
people who have:

• a permanent fistula (for example caecostomy, colostomy,
laryngostomy or ileostomy) requiring continuous surgical dressing
or requiring an appliance
• a form of hypoadrenalism (for example Addison's disease) for
which specific substitution therapy is essential
• diabetes insipidus or other forms of hypopituitarism
• diabetes mellitus, except where treatment is by diet alone
• hypoparathyroidism
• myasthenia gravis
• myxoedema (that is, hypothyroidism requiring thyroid hormone
replacement)
• epilepsy requiring continuous anticonvulsive therapy
• a continuing physical disability which means the person cannot go
out without the help of another person. Temporary disabilities do
not count even if they last for several months
• Or are undergoing treatment for cancer:
o including the effects of cancer, or
o the effects of current or previous cancer treatment. (10)

Patients with one of the specified medical conditions can apply for a
medical exemption certificate from their GP. Further information on the
process for obtaining a certificate is available from the NHS: Get help
with prescription costs.

______________

In addition, anyone

• 60 or over
• under 16
• 16-18 and in full-time education
• pregnant or have had a baby in the previous 12 months and
have a valid maternity exemption certificate
• with a specified medical condition and have a valid medical
exemption certificate (MedEx)
• or with a continuing physical disability that prevents them from
going out without help from another person and have a valid MedEx

• holding a valid war pension exemption certificate and the
prescription is for an accepted disability
• or is an NHS in-patient (8)

is entitled to free prescriptions in England.

HOWEVER, this above is for prescription medicines only.