Reform

I'm no way happy about reform but this is the time to put more pressure on labour regarding welform cuts let them know we will not vote for them again if reforms go through ! We all have to brave and I think this a perfect opportunity don't just sit back and wait for others to do so
Comments
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If Reform ever get into power, they'll be 10x worse for us disabled than Labour.
Farage wants massive cuts to disability and out of work benefits to the tune of £15 billion a year.
It's okay to punish Labour in a by-election like this, but come a general election we can't have Reform getting close to government.
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So let's email our mps and say we want to keep them in but they have to agree not to go with welfare reforms obviously I understand it needs changing but not the way their doing it
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I watched Starmer 'defend' his decisions earlier.
He's a weasel of a man. Banging on about how he gave pensioners extra funds via triple lock, additional 3m NHS appointments, lowering interest rates, and increasing wages.
Zero about the devastation his 'budgetary decisions' will have, and are having, on disabled people.
He's both a coward and a weasel.
My local MP, a newbie for Labour, already knows he's toast after this term. He's not even holding public surgeries, and he fails to respond to even the most basic questions from constituents.
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Unfortunately, the reform we get is worse. Reform is the establishment writ large and they will be even crueller than the Tories and Labour. I chose not to vote because I seriously think there is no party for ordinary regular working class people anymore. I used the term 'working class' in the broadest sense of that term, I mean 80% of the population who are not wealthy or affluent. Farage is a rich boy grifter who has nothing in common with ordinary people. He will do nothing for poor or disabled people. Sadly it seems we go from stepping in one pile of dog mess to an even bigger pile of dog mess. Oh well.
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But if we all email our mps especially if labour mps and warn them we will not vote for them next general election we have to say something I think there's loads going on number 10 I think they want him out
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Reform policy on benefits !
Pensions and welfare
- Back-to-work push
- Withdraw jobseekers’ benefits
- Face-to-face PIP assessments
- Remodel savings and pension system
Mr Farage’s party wants to get two million people back into work and would launch a wide-ranging suppression on welfare in order to achieve this, with a back-to-work push that places particular emphasis on those aged 16 to 34.
Benefits for jobseekers would be withdrawn either after four months of unemployment or the rejection of two job offers.
Assessment for personal independence payment (PIP) would have to take place face-to-face to build relationships and coach people back into work, while medical assessments for those on benefits would be required to take place independently.
A royal commission to tackle social care is among “critical reforms” to the social care system the party is seeking to deliver in the first 100 days after the election. A loophole that it says allows larger care home providers to avoid tax through offshore structures would be closed.
Reform has said it wants to improve the savings and pension system in the long term to make it “much better and cheaper, from a much younger age”, citing Australia as a model.
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Let's also add that Farage is a proponent of the 'too many people have diagnoses' campaign and a friend of Trump, whose own disability policies are very…questionable.
There is nothing good about Reform winning anything. It's not a protest vote. It's a very risky decision.6 -
No matter who or what we as disabled people do the main this is we are doomed. In the past weeks since Reeves/Kendall spoke of the reform cuts there have been loads of mention of everything else but absolutely no mention about reform of disability benefits. Nor have I read or heard of anything from organisations like Scope, DPAC etc of what they are planning on doing to help the reforms not go through. It is why I have stayed away recently even from Scope Online Community because I am now out of faith of anyone helping us…..I have written my MP who only answered after I called Lib Dem National headquarters and she skirted the who topic of the disability reforms by not saying anything about it and I have written to Lord Bird, the founder of The Big Issue, and I have never had a response. So as far as I am concerned I know that I will lose 3/4 of my benefits, lose my car because of it and hopefully can eventually start my own business as I know that no employer will hire a disabled person who also has depression, anxiety, PTSD and agoraphobia that kicks in when my anxiety and PTSD get triggered.
So who someone votes for doesn't matter to me and anything I say to try to dissuade someone from voting Reform will go in one ear and out the other. No offense to anyone here as you have to vote with your own conscious and opinions.
Sorry for the depressing post on this subject of the Reform party but it is true.
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I'm sickened and disgusted by the attacks on the poorest and disabled by this Labour government, a party that was set up for the advancement of ordinary people but is now essentially a right wing party for the middle class. The U turns by Starmer are shocking and a betrayal of almost everything he said. The last round of austerity under the equally abysmal Tories possibly sent a 3rd of a million people to early graves. If that is not genocide I don't know what is. Please bare with me here as I have a bit to say.
The government is balancing the books by taking money off those who can least afford for the mismanagement, corruption and embezzlement by the last government. I call that immoral, unjust and wicked.
I noticed that as I've started posting about this stuff on here the email notifications don't work. Perhaps someone doesn't like us fighting back. I think Scope as good as it is seems more about 'tea and sympathy' than much else and if they are funded by government then that is a further problem.
I am a Christian and I struggle deeply with the idea of getting involved in political issues but I also believe this is the thin end of the wedge. These cuts will also personally affect me and I suggest may kill of 100s of 1000s more people yet where do we hear about this in the media? We don't just need MPs on side, we need all kinds of people in the public eye to challenge these unfair cuts, we need church leaders and others to openly condemn them as wicked and punitive, no matter what reason, and if they want to 'balance the books' let them tax the wealthiest not genocide the poorest and disabled. They've left millions of us with no choice but to fight back and resist.
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It's the insidiousness of Labour's actions I find beyond abhorrent.
Pushing this through without access to OBR analysis is an outright betrayal of everyone in the country.
Those who believe it's fine to pick on the disabled appear to forget some of us were fortunate to not always be so. We were just like them, fit and healthy, once upon a time.
We were living full, unhindered lives, earning a decent salary, and contributing fully to the country via our taxes in order to educate their children, provide social care and pensions for their parents, NHS treatment for themselves.
They could so easily become 'us' after just one event, one illness, one diagnosis.
Voting for Reform is a cast-iron guarantee they will be entirely poverty-stricken should poor fortune regarding their health befall them.
Hell mend them if they believe any money saved by punishing immigrants and/or disabled people will find its way into their pockets. It won't. It will be found in Reform MPs pension funds, expenses and stocks/shares portfolios.
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Farage doesn't believe in benefits - similar to Labour and Tory - only he is willing to go one step further - he wants UK out of any European protection - Leaving the European Convention on Human Rights - then forcing EVERYONE (Non-disabled as well) into work by stopping benefits if they don't accept a job. Where these jobs are going to magically appear from is beyond me….
The ECHR is an “international” court. The UK co-founded it and provides a judge and staff. If the UK quit, it would join a club of two nations - Russia and Belarus.
His whole policy is based on making the rich even richer at the expense of the rest of us.
Such as raising stamp duty levels to £750,000 from £250,000
Scrapping HS2 completely - with no idea how to deal with all of the tunnels and bridges already completed or all of the people who have been "compulsarily purchased" out of their homes already.
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'Farage doesn't believe in benefits - similar to Labour and Tory' Indeed, but I may amend and qualify the right honourable member's statement - they don't believe in benefits for poor people or the disabled or whom they see as the 'lower orders' in general, on the contrary he is happy to see the wealthy, big landowners, corporations and royals accrue even more wealth via tax breaks and creative accountancy and lax laws when it comes to government and establishment corruption, financial chicanery and outright embezzlement during the Tories tenure, now carrying on under Sir Keir. The first thing to go under a corrupt and corrupting establishment and society are financial checks and balances. After that, they will maintain that corruption and division and hypocrisy at any and every cost. Not to themselves of course, but everyone else.
Before the Nazis persecuted Jews, they first picked on the disabled. There is a warning from history right there we would all do well to focus on. Punching down is fine after all, and austerity is fine when it only affects someone else, someone 'over there', right?
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The Nazi's 'Arbeit macht frei' - 'work will set you free' was deeply offensive and, as the sign above Auschwitz, was a symbol of their savagery and inhumane, evil intolerance and wickedness to fellow human beings.
I find Reeves' mantra of 'Work gives people dignity', also very deeply offensive. The inference being that those of us disabled and unable to work, have no dignity. Dignity should be THE most important principle for how we live as, it alone, creates respect and fairness for us all.
To suggest or infer otherwise by introducing the cruel policies which will cause us further deep harm, is at best, grossly ill-thought out or, at worst, planned with ill and malevolent intent. I fear a slippery slope, especially after yesterday's local election results.
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And this merry dance continues we are dragged from one disaster to another ! I keep saying this let'sif we have a labour mp demand that they vote against benefit reforms we will keep them in thier seats in the future they are feeling troubled scared uncertain exactly like we feel email them today only 3 weeks till votes and alot of them do not want to be seen as the nasty party
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Labour mps urging starmer out of echr watch this space
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Labour mps urging starmer to come out of echr and it only takes 6 months to do this
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There is a better solution.
''A windfall tax on the profits of Britain’s biggest banks would bring in £15bn for public spending. (Positive Money).
Britain’s ‘Big Four’ banks – Lloyds, NatWest, HSBC and Barclays – made an eye-watering £45.9bn in pre-tax profits last year.
These earnings are not normal: they far outstrip the £25.6bn those same banks made on average between 2018 and 2021, before the Bank of England started raising interest rates. High interest rates allow banks to charge more on loans. Such bumper profits are currently taxed at a measly 3%.
But it doesn’t have to be this way, Countries like Spain, the Czech Republic and Hungary have imposed windfall taxes on credit institutions. Banks currently pay a special surcharge on profits, which was introduced after the last financial crisis in recognition of the risks banks’ activities pose to the wider economy, though the last Tory government slashed this surcharge by 60%, from 8% to 3%. If the Bank Surcharge was raised to 35%, in line with the Energy Profits Levy on the windfall profits of oil and gas companies, the Treasury would receive an extra £14.8bn from the 2024 profits of these four banks alone.
Even just reversing the last government’s cuts to the Bank Surcharge and Bank Levy would bring in more than £3.5bn for the Exchequer, Positive Money estimates.''
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The QE money the BOE printed is held on reserve at the BOE who pay interest at the current rate on the reserves to the entity that has a claim on the funds.
The Banksters themselves.
So taxpayers are literally being charged by the banks for bailing them out, after credit derivative traders committed the biggest fraud in history;
It took the BOE over 300 years to create the first one trillion pounds and only 8 years to create the second trillion.
From 2000-2008 Banksters poured hundreds of billions into the mortgage market to inflate the value of land/house prices paper, before demanding a bailout in 2008.
They called this too big to fail.
The house price inflation which took place under Blair was one of the most destructive events in British history.
People 'on the ladder' were ecstatic, when they saw they're houses triple in value in less than a decade, 1999-2007, in Labours era of 'free money'
According to the IFS just 27 per cent of middle-income adults owned a home in 2016, down from 65 per cent among the same age group in the mid-Nineties
New Labour inflated house prices from 3x salary (the 20thc median) in 1997, up to 9x, 10x salary, by 2008. Then they bailed out the banks 'propping up' house prices at 10x salary.
The average FTB was paying just 17.5% of their take home pay on their mortgage in 1997, but over 50% by 2008.
Nobody had heard of foodbanks before 2008.
(The house price inflation, was a cover for the biggest fraud in history, as the Banksters were listing hundreds of billions of mortgages as being AAA rated, knowing they were junk, BB, C, D class mortgages)
I believe that the Bank bailouts would have been considered illegal in previous decades and centuries due to this Fraud.
Lord Denning;
'………no order of a Minister, can be allowed to stand if it has been obtained by fraud. Fraud unravels everything. The court is careful not to find fraud unless it is distinctly pleaded and proved; but once it is proved, it vitiates judgments, contracts and all transactions whatsoever....'
Under Blair mass immigration occured and the birth rates of the native population crashed, due to unaffordable housing.
Then in 2009, Labour announced QE which enabled central banks to give us a decade of the longest prolonged period of the lowest level of IR throughout the whole of recorded history, 5000 years!! (IR control house prices)
The bailouts themselves are something new. 2008 and Covid. And horrifically may now have become normalised. But we are in the upside down world!
Before 2008 the possibility that the government would issue bonds to immediately repurchase them in order to pretend that it wasn’t actually providing direct finance, to itself, from its own central bank, to fund its own programmes, to ensure that the economy kept going, was completely unknown, had never happened.
Labour believe they are devoid of the responsibility. Was it a crime? Was it a mistake?
Labour should Tax the Banksters, not the Sickest, but all our politicians are Neo Liberals.
Back in the fifties and the sixties, under the old Keynesian economies, industry got the lions share not bankers, (for shuffling paper around)
This is where it all went wrong over the last 30 years, and its truly sickening.
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@Dav1D Sadly, all very true. But I believe the rot set in well before then.
When Thatcher started giving away public assets (houses, utilities etc.) she broke the idea of community, social responsibility etc. She created the focus solely on self, and f*ck everyone else.
The masterstroke was tying the plebs, who could never afford a mortgage at market prices, to a mortgage and creating slaves. This allowed her to "break" another strand of social cohesion/responsibility - trades unions.
You can see the effect, even on here. There's a poster who uses a bible quotation to justify that very thing - me first!! It's questionable that they are using the quote correctly as it's often used by MAGA, who are not the brightest bulbs in anyone's box but happily hide their bigotry/racism behind the thinnest veneer of Christianity. To me, it's an attempt to justify their f*ck the rest of you, I'm only interested in me and mine mindset.
They seem entirely oblivious that our strength as individuals only exists in a group - whether that's as tenants, union members, customers, voters etc.
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It was a protest vote, there are a few things I don't like about reform but anything that sticks fingers up at labour can only help.
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Yeah, a protest vote.
Unless, of course, you happen to be employed within a council over which they now have control.
They are, unsurprisingly, following Trump's playbook and telling workers they will be sacked.
Next up - adult care services etc. etc.
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