GREEN LIGHT TO LIE FOR BRITAIN

So Alistair Carmichael has won his court case. I'm sure that we will get a professional reading of this from Lallands Peat Worrier shortly. In the meantime, for what it's worth this is the opinion of a non-legal mind. It's probably worth remembering at this point that they bulk of the population has non-legal minds.

It has been ruled that Carmichael broke no laws in the course of his election campaign following the Frenchgate exploit.

That he is a cheat and a liar, no one, including him, disputed. 

Remember that having won his election in the Northern Isles, he admitted that he had lied and smeared Nicola Sturgeon, the French Ambassadress and the French Consul, and lied to the Press and to the people of his constituency. He had the decency, at least, to write to the First Minister apologising for doing so.

None of that was in dispute. What was in dispute was whether smearing an opponent with fabricated allegations in the course of an election broke any electoral law.

The ruling appears to have shown that it did not.

It  seems, then,  to this non-legal mind, that we must accept that UK electoral law allows for Right Honourable gentlemen or ladies to use their position and access to private information on meetings with elected politicians and diplomats to smear other parties and to lie to the press, about having done it.

It allows them to waste the time of the Cabinet Secretary carrying out an investigation into the source of the smear with all the waste of time and money that that involves whilst all the time the politician knows the truth and protests innocence to his/her constituents.  

It also allows them to further smear the integrity of ambassadors and consuls of other countries by implying that they too, are lying about reported conversations.

It accepts that despite the style "Right Honourable",  it is OK to lie to the Deputy Prime Minister, the Prime Minister and an underling in their department of state, to your prospective constituents and to the United Kingdom. (The assumption is that Clegg, Cameron and Mundel knew nothing of these lies.)

It seems to allow for a person having done all that, and having been elected, to keep that position and salary for the duration of the parliament, despite the possibility that, had they known that he was a lair and a cheat, his constituents might have been less inclined to vote for him.

So now we know.

Malcolm Bruce was correct when he pointed out that all politicians lie and if they lost their seats on account of that, the Commons would be empty.

We also know that no matter how "honourable" or "right honourable" an MP is, (s)he is legally allowed to lie her/his backside off.

OK, I guess we suspected that anyway. But it's nice to have it as a statement of legal fact.

Another Great British value.

Just let's remember that at the next election.

You could be excused for thinking that you should believe NOTHING and if you assumed that, as they are legally allowed to do it, they will be lying.
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TRY NOT TO VOMIT. THIS IS A POST ABOUT IAIN DUNCAN SMITH

Is it just me or do others agree that Iain Duncan Smith’s Department of Work and Pensions descending into a very unfunny farce?

We've long known that Smith himself is a figure of fun. That was never in dispute. The Quiet Man...his University of Perugia degree (or not as may be the case), his management diploma at a posh college (or the two day course he did there), his expenses for underpants and wet wipes, his wife's salary for being...erm... his wife, his sick leave... The list goes on.

We have known too about the wasted money, the inefficiencies, the lies about sanction targets, the gross inefficiency of Atos, the computer programmes that don't work and the deadliness that have not even started to be met. We even know that Cameron tried to reshuffle him away from the DWP, and failed. 

That should tell us something!

But in the last few days we have heard that the DWP have invented characters and situations, and then used “stock pictures” to make posters that support the idea of a caring sharing DWP. 

People, they implied, were actually being helped by his department. 

Of course there aren't any real success stories so they have had to make them up. Of course it wasn't IDS. His officials are to carry the can. Whatever happened to the buck stopping here?

Then we heard that, having just made 3824 people redundant, they seem to have suddenly found a need for 2,800 new staff (which the unions claim are to do approximately the same jobs and the redundant staff, but on temporary contracts of 18 months).

That's just plain rotten. IDS wastes millions on computer soft wear that isn't worth diddly, and they make up the money by paying off staff, then taking on temps.

Additionally, they listen in to staff on the telephone and nit pick when they treat clients like human beings.

But worst of all, yesterday we were told that call centre staff have been sent a leaflet on how to deal with suicide threats from “customers”.

The article in the Sunday Herald, where I originally learned of this, suggested that most of these staff earn around £15,000. That is to say they are junior admin staff.

Dealing with people who are so distressed that they may be contemplating suicide is a job for a professional with a great deal of training in how to read the situation and respond to it. Getting it wrong can make a bad situation 100 times worse, and in this case, lead to deaths.

En passant a little story. I recall a colleague in a place I worked in many years ago, was sent on a “counselling” course. It lasted a mere 2 days, and upon her return to work aforesaid colleague thought she was the very dab at counselling.  

Indeed within days she had put her new-found “skills” to work. 

However, it seems that a two day course doesn't provide quite all the skills required to do this kind of work effectively in real life situations...and, long story short, the client got very disturbed. This upset provoked a relatively dormant (and unknown to the colleague) heart condition the client had… and an ambulance had to be called.

My colleague had had 2 days’ instruction in dealing with difficult situations complete with role playing exercises. The DWP staff are getting a leaflet to read, and wave in the air if they require supervisor support! I wonder what training the supervisors have had.

According to the  Guardian: "Absolutely nobody has ever seen this guidance before, leading staff to believe it has been put together ahead of the incapacity benefit and disability living allowance cuts."

Making a mess of the staffing levels relatively incompetent management; making up names and success stories is pathetic… but suicide counselling with no training is altogether another kettle of fish.

Firstly from the point of view of the staff it is utterly ridiculous to demand untrained junior staff deal with potential suicide threats as part of their call centre work. That’s WAY above the £15,000 pay band responsibility.  How traumatised is a member of staff going to be if the client ends the call with: "Right, that's it. You can bin my claim. I'm dead by 5 o'clock!"

From the client’s point of view it is nothing short of criminal to leave untrained staff to deal with them. If you are taking away the last vestige of their humanity and leaving them to starve, the least you could do is to provide someone with a bit more than a typed out instruction list to deal with them. Surely they deserve at least that.

Then again, when you consider that paramedics and nurses in Atos have been allowed to override diagnosis made by specialist and professors of medicine, who would really be surprised at how low IDS will stoop to save a bob or two, and who could doubt that he doesn't give a damn about the people who use his "service"?

THE GIFT THAT KEEPS GIVING...

TO BE FAIR, THE SAME QUESTIONS, WORD FOR WORD, AMAZINGLY, SEEM TO HAVE BEEN SENT TO SEVERAL BORDER TORIES, ALBEIT FROM ENTIRELY DIFFERENT PEOPLE

And the MP and MSPs all managed to answer with the same lies, in the same words.

And they said Harry Potter was magical. 

I suspect that when you have been caught out lying, the best thing to do is admit it was a publicity stunt gone horribly wrong and apologise. 

Jeez, not only have these people not heard of the internet, they don't appear to have heard of television, radio or indeed the electric telegraph or ink.

Fortunately someone has taken the time to correct the most idiotic of the statements that Johann Lamont has churned out here. (Nice glasses Johann. They make you look younger and erm... more masculine.)

YOU'D THINK THAT WITH ALL HIS MONEY HE'D BE ABLE TO AFFORD SOME NEW LIES TO TELL

According to David Cameron, an independent Scotland would find itself behind countries including Serbia and Macedonia in the process of joining the European Union.

iScotland would have to "queue up" to join the EU, he said, for some strange reason, while he was campaigning in the Newark by-election in England. They care in Newark?

He also said he was disappointed that Scottish people living in the rest of the UK would not be able to vote in September's independence referendum. Although, as the referendum, by UK law, had to get the permission of the UK government to take place, and was the joint responsibility of the UK and Scottish governments in its range and methodology, it seems strange to bring this up now and not before the Edinburgh Agreement was signed. Of course it would have been almost impossible to ascertain who would have been eligible to vote, and that is why it was not seriously considered. But people like Cameron never let the truth get in the way of creating bitterness when it suits their own political ends. 

He said: "If Scotland vote for independence they are no longer members of the EU and it's become clearer and clearer since this campaign started that they would have to reapply to join the EU and as such, as an independent country, they would have to queue up as it were behind other countries - for instance those in the western Balkans that are already on the path towards membership”.

Well that’s, at best, conjecture, and at worst, lies. He must be the only person in the world who seriously believes that an expansionist organisation like the EU would disfranchise Scottish citizens, take away their passports, driving licences, and all their rights as European citizens, at the same time as removing all the rights a privileges of other EU states’ citizens to live, study, work in Scotland, and put them on hold so that countries like Montenegro and Macedonia could take precedence over them.

The scenario is too ridiculous to imagine. All EU students at Scottish Universities would immediately be obliged to either return home in the middle of their courses, or to pay steep fees for the rest of their education. All fishing in Scottish waters would stop; all projects being funded by the EU would immediately have no cash; Scottish people living overseas would become aliens in their new countries, as would all the Europeans working here. And for what?

 Scotland, as a current member of the UK, and therefore the EU, meets all the criteria of being a member of the EU. Why would they queue behind countries which are working to bring their finances, human right, etc, etc, into line with Europe, possibly taking decades to do so?

No one is suggesting it would be an overnight rubber stamping. A new country would most likely have to negotiate terms, and no one really expects that any of the opt outs, or penalties for these opt outs, currently enjoyed or paid by the UK would necessarily continue. But most intelligent and educated estimates are that, within a period of 18 months, these issues could easily be resolved. East German territories and citizens, after all, became a member overnight when accepted into reunified Germany.

On the other hand, when Greenland obtained the power from Denmark to make its own decisions on these matters, and decided to withdraw from the EU, it took it 2 years for the EU to reluctantly let it go.

Of course Mr Cameron could have sorted this uncertainty long ago. It is in his hands to ask the EU for a judgement on Scotland’s position. Mr Salmond has asked him to do this. He has refused. He prefers to be able to play on fear. That is the kind of Prime Minister that Scotland has. One who appears to be at war with the country. In short, an enemy. 

Meanwhile, almost unbelievably, this week Mr Cameron warned FrauMerkel that if the man she has backed to become president of the EU Commissiongets the job, then Britain may leave the EU. You couldn't make it up.

Needless to say Cameron continued with the usual tired old dross about hoping the Scottish people will vote to remain in the United Kingdom because we're a successful family of nations, all bringing something to this United Kingdom.  But I refer you, and him, to the video in a previous Munguin post.

For someone campaigning in an English by-election with absolutely no connection to Scotland he made a great deal of independence. You began to wonder if he hadn’t lost the plot as he rambled on about risks outside the UK. Not being able keep the pound (lie), outside the UK you wouldn't have such a strong economy with so many jobs…(another lie, as the economy in London and Oxford is entirely different from anywhere in Scotland… and the unemployment figures on a country wide basis being better in Scotland than in England). Then there was the ever reliable “banks” tale. The British taxpayer saved the Scottish banks. Except that that’s a lie too. The actual losses from banks (which might have had Scotland in their titles, but are based in, and regulated by London) in Scotland was tiny. The Scottish liability could easily have been paid. The massive losses came in London and in the USA. And the USA liabilities were, by law, paid by the USA government. 

It seems to me that if you have to rely on lies for ALL your arguments, you actually don’t have anything. Cameron must be thanking his lucky stars for a compliant press and a BBC that desperately needs his English Culture Secretary to raise the licence tax.

In conclusion with sickening predictability he said: “I think the UK has been a great success story”.

Tell that to people on the receiving end of Iain Duncan Smith’s Department of Wickedness and Purgatory (DWP). Tell that to all the people forced to live on the lowest comparative minimum wage and the lowest pension in Europe. Tell that to people paying the highest fares for the worst trains in Europe, or the most money for the smallest houses, the most expensive petrol, cars, furniture etc… The list is endless. 

Statements like that remind me of the speech made by the prince of Wales, welcoming some immigrants to England where he said: “I’ve always considered myself extremely privileged to be born British.”   No seriously, he did!

DO THEY EVER TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT ANYTHING? REALLY...EVER?

"I"

"Financial Times"
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WHY DOES ANYONE BELIEVE ANYTHING THAT COMES FROM THE DWP?

Cameron has been making much of the dramatic fall in unemployment, bragging about it like he has brought it about. 

But if one jobcentre can take 2,700 off its books in one month by sanctioning for minor misdemeanors, and get away with it, then surely we can wipe out unemployment, if not overnight, then at least within a couple of months. 

Simply sanction everyone for some perceived fault. Then Iain Duncan Smith can add that to his list of lies.

Having worked at jobcentre, I know that sometimes sanctions have to be used, but, in the absence of enough suitable jobs, and with tight targets to meet, there are reports of people being sanctioned for being a few minutes late from an appointment, although they are clearly dependent on unreliable privately-owned public transport; people being sanctioned for not having enough money on their cell phones to phone for jobs; people losing money because they got two interviews on the same day, at the same time, and failed to turn up for one of them; people being sanctioned because they moved home and were transferred to another jobcentre, and their details got lost in the system. 

Is it too much to ask that the DWP treat people like human beings?