For what it's worth (or "Rabid Davies Raves Again")

Another cog in the machinery of the relentless Tory onslaught on the ill and the disabled clicked into place this week, in the unlikely form of Philip Davies, MP for Shipley, who suggested that because “disabled” people are “worth less” to an employer, they should have to work for less than the minimum wage, at least until they have “proved themselves” in order to level up the playing field, because apparently this is how things should work in the “real world”.

I've just had a look at this geezer's declarations on the register of members' interests and I see he declares (inter alia) that he earned:

£600 for writing article for Mail on Sunday. Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, Kensington, London W8 5TT. Hours: 2 hrs. (Registered 29 November 2010)

I make that £300 per hour. Tell you what, I think a slightly more stupid MP could have done that for £250 per hour. If they could have found one. Such a level of part-time income (which I am assuming he declared and paid tax on) says to me that his familiarity with the difficulties faced by people already on the minimum wage may be er... less than nodding. He also claimed (2008/09)£23,886 for staying away from his main home, and a further £11,878 for travelling to and fro.

But yes, I mean, good idea, Davies old chap: why *not* put everyone on performance related pay, and only pay them pro rata according to their productivity and usefulness to the Tory master plan. After all, it sits quite nicely with their *existing* policy on the deserving and undeserving poor... and it's another step down the road to British Air plc, where your oxygen supply is regulated according to how little they can get away with giving you to breathe, and British Families plc, where your mum invoices you for cooking your breakfast. We've already got “thought crimes” and "cracking down" on people who don't espouse "traditional British values" (one of which I thought was freedom of speech, but hey, that's just me). We've already got "work til you drop" if you are lucky enough to still have a job. Why not go the whole hog. After all, it’s much easier to pick up litter in a wheelchair, you don’t have so far to bend!

The only *problem* with a completely unregulated market that only pays people according to what they are "worth" to an employer, instead of treating people with equaity and dignity, is that - if you are looking for “usefulness” and “productivity”, for instance - many of our MPs are among the most useless part- timers, wastrels and oxygen thieves. Motes and beams, mate, motes and beams.
Actually, thinking about it...I can write articles, I am in a wheelchair, so by his argument, *I* could write it instead of him, for say, oooh £500 a pop - just until I have "proved myself", you understand.

I think I might ring them up. After all, the repetitive xenophobic claptrap that fills the pages of the Maily Dail could *probably* be randomly generated by a program*, and it's got to be better than having him wittering on about his opposition to gays and his views in favour of smoking.

I'm gonna spend the weekend looking for a monkey and a typewriter - subcontacting, outsourcing, it's the Tory way, folks. Sorry Mr MP, you've just been downsized and replaced by a chimp on a Remington. For the benefit of Mr Davies, and other hard-of-thinking heartless bastards, I am not knocking the NHS here, they saved my life, it's what happens after you fall off the end of the system that could be better.

This time last year, I was a director of two companies, one of which I owned. I had worked continuously from 1976 to 2010, paid into the system, paid corporation tax in the good years when we were making money. Latterly, since a spat with Barclays bank in 2005/2006, the company I actually owned has had to divert any spare cash to paying those corporate leeches, so I have not been taking drawings from it. But that was OK, while I still had the other directorship, because I was doing well enough to cover the Barclays money out of that if need be. And come 2012, we would be free of them at last.

Bang! Life shook me a seven. July 2010, rushed into hospital for an emergency operation and came out on 7th December in a wheelchair as one of “the disabled”. Will probably never walk again, apparently. In the meantime, I (or rather my post, har har…) has been made redundant, leaving me as the sole director of a company that owes a lot of money under personal guarantee to Barclays Bank, oh, and of course the Halifax still want their £402.66 a month for the mortgage as well.

Yes, I do qualify for benefits, specifically DLA and ESA. The DLA is meant to be for coping with "disability" and motability and stuff like that, but to be honest, it's much more use to us at the moment in its raw form as "money" that can be exchanged for "food" at the "shops".

As for ESA, that has to be levered out of the DWP with a crowbar, because they have a habit of paying it a month or so in arrears or when they get round to it, presumably because it helps the government's cash flow to keep us on tenterhooks about whether or not we're going to be able to hold out for another month.

The council has just decided, after six months of dithering, that because we have too many "assets" (aka millstones) they *won't* after all be building a ramp to help me get in and out of my own house, so in effect, unless I prevail on someone to heave me down the temporary ramps like a sack of spuds, I am confined to two rooms. People in jail have more quality of life and freedom of movement.

I've also found out, during the course of my stay in hospital, that the underlying cause of my previous mobility issues, which didn't actually prevent me from leading an active and useful life up to that point, was facioscapularhumeral muscular dystrophy, which is progressive, and incurable. but, as the physio so cheerfully advised me, at my age (56), "something else will probably finish you off first".

Now, the thing is, life can do this to any of us. It would be a good thing if it happened to Philip Davies for instance. If he carries on smoking, it probably will. I have been doing a bit more research on Mr Davies. He is also a supporter of a movement called Interlibertarians, in fact they paid over £1000 for him to attend their conference last year, according to the register of members' interests. I have had a look on their web site, and they appear to be some sort of global alliance of scary, right wing whirly-eyed fundamentalists.

A lot of their web site is in Italian, and I don't speak fascist, so I am struggling a bit, but they have links to the Ausralian Liberal Party for instance, which believes that the disabled should work for "negative income tax", ie there should be no benefits structure at all, and that the gaps in such provision should be filled by a patchwork of "friends, family, private care and charities" - welcome back to Victorian Britain. I suppose as a last resort there is always the Workhouse. So this is the sort of people we are up against here.

People who think that just because you are "disabled" you are "worth" less to an employer and who think that your "worth" as a person, a human being, is the same as your "earning potential".

Well, Mr Davies, I am more than just a tick in a millionaire's ledger, thank you very much, I utterly reject your doctrinaire reduction of my "worth" to a calculation of what I can earn versus what the state provides for people who are unfortunate enough to be ill, and it is the attitude of you and people like you that means I have now applied for over 100 jobs and none of them wants a 56 year old hairbag in a wheelchair, because, thanks to the efforts of Mr Davies and those like him, people only see the wheelchair. His solution is that I accept the situation and agree to be treated as a second-class citizen.

My solution is that he goes and sticks his head in a dead bear's bottom. Except that he'd probably want to put the dead bear on expenses.