I promised to go further into the implications of the cuts to disability benefits that Labour had been proposing and that were then confirmed in Rachel Reeves’ Spring Statement – just don’t call is an emergency budget because amongst the many things that Rachel Reeves has promised us, and she does so like to keep to her promises, does Rachel, was that we wouldn’t be having any emergency budgets ‘cos that’s the sort of thing that mentalists like Liz Truss would have done – oh no, we would now be be doing mental things in an entirely rational manner, and all announced through that universally nasal, but rational-sounding, Labour 2025 voice pattern. How is it that they all sound exactly the same, each Labour government minister as dreary sounding as the last?
I looked up the PIP criteria, to make sure that AJ would still be worthy of receiving some support. And the good news is that, yes, AJ is sufficiently needy to make the grade. If you look at the list below, and you know Ava-Jane, you’ll see that she’d get a tick for each category in both the Daily Living and Mobility parts, so that’s a relief. We might need to make sure that we don’t encourage her to brush her teeth, which she can do… on a good day… more often than not, she’ll chuck her toothbrush across the room – Ava-Jane has a remarkably strong throwing arm just as long as you don’t actually ask her to throw anything. When you ask her to throw something, something that you are supposed to throw, like a ball for instance, she lets it dribble pathetically down her legs. But she could take your eye out at twenty paces with a toothbrush. Anyway, as I was saying, we had better not let the PIP assessors see her brushing her teeth (clever girl), for fear that they might quibble about her needing help washing and bathing.
Daily living part
You might get the daily living part of PIP if you need help with:
- preparing food
- eating and drinking
- managing your medicines or treatments
- washing and bathing
- using the toilet
- dressing and undressing
- reading
- managing your money
- socialising and being around other people
- talking, listening and understanding
Mobility part
You might get the mobility part of PIP if you need help with:
- working out a route and following it
- physically moving around
- leaving your home
As far as I understand it the PIP (personal independence plan) assessment is a points-based system, where the ability to not be able to do certain of the things on the list gets you points and if your points tot up to 8, you get support and if you get 12, you get enhanced support. So you’ll get points for things like needing supervision to prepare food and if you can wash your upper body, you’d get fewer points than not being able to wash at all. I don’t know if you lose points for being able to brush your own teeth, so we had better encourage AJ to chuck her toothbrush around rather than use it for brushing her teeth to ensure that we get maximum points to get the best financial package available.
I am being silly, of course, I am trying to satirise the system but there is some truth to it – Ava-Jane’s severe disabilities mean that she will probably be supported however much the Labour Party tries to contort itself to hoover up the votes of those that think that kicking the very weakest in society will somehow help the weak. Thankfully, I believe that there are very few people who think along these lines.
But that is the smokescreen that the government is hiding behind, they are try to cloak these cuts in a veil of a pretence to be helping people get back to work. If you do actually want to help people get back to work, you have to spend money, not cut it.
Anyway, as I said, the good news is that Ava-Jane’s support will probably not be cut… but people who can wash their upper bodies, but not their lower bodies, will see their support packages be reduced. Why?
Well, Rachel Reeves made a series of quite rash promises in order to win the election – she promised not to borrow any more money and she promised not to raise taxes, so if she needs a few extra billion, because the whole world is going completely bonkers, the only logical thing to do is to remove disabled people’s wheelchairs, right?
Yes, we do, very sadly, have to buy a shitload of weapons because the Ruskies are on the warpath again. It’s not great, but couldn’t we investigate other solutions other than yet more austerity. Where once again a government seems to think that the only way to balance the books is on the back of the most needy. As a family that does rely on state support, we can tell you that the support for the needy is getting ever more haggard.
Random state of British military facts that help illustrate why we need to up our spending on the military:
We have more admirals than we have ships.
We have more horses than we have tanks.
I have had a couple of glasses of red wine this evening and I am going to propose a couple of mad ideas that would help the UK economy as much, or even a bit more than not helping people who can wash themselves above the waist, though not below.
So here we go:
- admit that Brexit was, maybe, not a great idea
- tax billionaires more
Let’s start with point 2. – taxing billionaires more. A billion of any modern-day currency, such as the dollar, the pound, or the euro, is an awful lot of money. That might not have been true of the Italian lira of yesteryear but if anyone is calling you a billionaire these days, you have got more money than you, your children, and their children would be able to spend in their combined lifetimes.
Call me “lacking in ambition”, and many have, but I cannot possibly conceive of why anyone would want a billion or more of whatever they were: dollars / pounds / euros, what would you do with with billion or more of whatever they were: dollars / pounds / euros?
Billionaires are already very rich and they are getting richer.
One of my favourite ever podcasts and one that I have been listening to a very, very long time, is the comedy podcast The Bugle. Andy Zaltzman, the presenter, has now achieved fame on the BBC in the New Quiz and as the stats guy on Test Match Special. But before that he spent years being very funny about quite how ludicrous this world is. In a recent episode he reeled out some stats about the rich and about how, maybe they could probably give a bit of hand to help avoid the £5bn welfare cuts that Rachel Reeves is enacting without really taking much of a hit.
To paraphrase Mr Zaltzman:
- The top 20 billionaires in the UK have a combined wealth of £303bn
- The richest billionaires, the Hinduja family, are £8bn richer than the next richest person on the list, Leonard Blavatnik, so the Hindujas could pay the £5bn cost of the welfare cuts and still be the richest people in Britain by £3bn.
- If the richest 30 billionaires combined to pick up the cost of the cut for ten years, that would cost them 6% of their combined wealth meaning that collectively, they would still be worth almost £750bn.
- The wealth of wealthiest is currently going up by £35M a day, so the increase in their wealth in a year could pay for all the £5bn welfare cuts this year and still leave them with £8bn in spare change as well as all the billions they already had last year.
This might sound like some dangerous communist thinking that I am indulging here, and I might need to avoid a trip to the US in the next four years (fours years – oh my sweet summer child, Luke, haven’t you heard that Trump is already planning for an illegal third term? Apparently his ploy is to put Vance up as President and himself as VP and then do a swapsy once they win – much like Putin and Medvedev did – Vlad is such an inspirational figure to us all) but there’s a bunch of actual billionaires who are proposing much the same thing. They are basically asking to be taxed more. See:
Patriotic Millionaires UK ‘Tax our Wealth’ campaign visits Bristol
Something that has come up as we quake in fear of Trumps salvo of tariffs is that we should lift the taxes on tech companies so that the ogre in the White House might avert his ire from the UK and leave us alone to pick on someone else. The likes of Amazon in particular but all of them, pay an absolute pittance in tax compared to the billions they take in the UK and we are are thinking of taxing them less so that Trump and Musk look favourably on us.
Also today, there’s a report from the Tony Blair Institute recommending that we amend copyright laws to allow AI firms to freely scrape copyrighted materials to feed the maws of its data hungry large language models.
This comes in the midst of a court case against Facebook owner, Meta. It is under investigation for taking the decision was taken to train its AI system on LibGen, a pirating company that openly steals books and posts them on the internet. This was done with the approval of one MZ (who could that be?) This was done because someone decided that paying copyright holders for the right to scrape their content was going to be too time-consuming and costly. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis
That’s the thing about these disruptors, they often have genuinely innovative ideas but how they really make their money is by circumventing existing laws and avoiding taxes. And of course, Mark Zuckerberg (MZ) has made himself an awful lot of money and circumvented an awful lot of laws. You know who doesn’t make an awful lot of money??? The average author.
1. guys, guys, guys, huddle round… between us… whisper it… but Brexit was a really shite idea. It was a shite idea in the summer of 2016, before the first Trump presidency. It exposed itself for the shite distraction that it was always going to be, when we were still arguing the Brexit toss while something far more real was coming along in the shape of the Corona Virus…. (when did we start calling it Covid, and why?) And it is a really shite idea now. One of the main tenets of Brexit, and one that we have seen the adorable Farage beat a drum for, is that by liberating ourselves from the EU, we could get ever closer to the US. Well, how is that working out for you?
An American I know from the Facebook parish, who was apparently about to vote for Trump last year, questioned why I, or any European, would really be interested in or care about an American election. I would like to think that the last couple of moths would make it clear why the rest of the world should be interested, and concerned by the person that the American electorate has out into the White House, including my Facebook friend. The consequences of having his orange baboon shaping world affairs affects us all, but the fact that he is so consequential is on you, people of the American electorate.
We could well be, if the economists are right, on the brink of a severe world-wide recession based on the whim of one man.
We do seem to be at some sort of historical watershed – a moment when tectonic plates shift, and far greater minds than my own will be able to make sense of it all, but for now, one of the things that we should watch out for is that we are living though a period when democratic voters choose to shoot themselves in the foot with both barrels. I cannot think of any instances when an electorate so flagrantly voted to make their own lives worse off and took that decision so brazenly.
It’s the people who voted for Brexit in 2016, Trump in 2016, and Trump again in 2024 who will suffer most from those votes. Comfortable middle-class people like me, who opposed them all are probably not substantially any worse off… we’re all just worrying about AI nabbing our fearfully creative jobs.
I listen to lots of politics podcasts some are specifically about US politics. The basic take on all of them is “What The Actual Fuck?”, some of these podcasts avoid obscenities and might say something like “this is thoroughly discombobulating”, others that are less sensitive to adult rating restrictions put it as “What The Actual Fuck?”
You might not believe it but I have actually sanitised some of the language on a read through. Fo tutted at me this morning when I used a rude word that I have avoided here to describe Trump on the morning of the news of his wonderful tariffs (begins with C ands U-N-T), but there are times when one needs the full range of the English language!
On a more cheerful note, who wants to see the list of tapas I prepped for some mates the other day?
Well, there you go:
- Aubergine fritters with honey
- Tomato, avocado, mozzarella, basil salad
- Chicken wings
- Chorizo
- Jamón
- Fried Halloumi
- Manchego and membrillo
- Tomato and anchovy toast
- Tortilla
- Mushrooms with smoked garlic
- Leeks
- Stuffed red peppers
Oh, and lambs… lots of lambs!!
Footnotes
Oxfam Report on billionaires
Oh and, Brexiteers – please do bugger off is anyone thinks a Brexit benefit is that we only got hit by 10% tariffs by Trump and the EU got 20% – na-na-na!!
We export £360bn to EU and £60 to US, which is more valuable!?
For what it’s worth, on a personal level, I do have a BA in American Studies and worked on the Bush/Quayle 88 Presidential Campaign, and I follow US politics quite closely. I have just listening to the full Tracey Chapman debut album.
Calling all potential Reform voters (possibly a small subset of my readership, particularly of those who don’t instinctively skips the politics bits): Trump is giving us all a handy preview of what government by the far right looks like, a try-before-you-buy, if you like.
Misliterature 