Another Poison-Pen Letter from IDS

So on Saturday IDS escalated the hate. His boss, David Cameron, crossed the line into direct attacks on disabled people last month with his open attempt to demonise those whose disabilities lead to addiction or obesity, attacks which led Scope and the Guardian to point out that government attacks were leading to increasing rates of Disability Hate Crime, but on Saturday his pet attack-dog ramped up the attack with more hate-filled articles from the sockpuppets at the Tory Rags. This time it isn’t just disabled people with addictions or obesity who are being openly derided as frauds and not worthy of benefits, the new target is DLA recipients, and particularly disabled people whose disability manifests through long-term spinal conditions, or as IDS’s anonymous source would have us believe, a mere ‘bad back’.

I talked about the myth of the ‘bad back’ a few weeks ago in That Proverbial ‘Bad Back’ , the myth that ‘bad-backs’ are some kind of scrounger’s charter or somehow less than other disabilities that is. My ‘bad back’ has destroyed my career and seriously limited the life I can live, even as I lie here to write this (sitting would be unbearable) it is causing me a noticeable amount of pain. No amount of money could compensate me for the pain I experience, and ESA, DLA HRM and DLA HRC combined wouldn’t come close to replacing the salary I have lost because of my ‘bad back’, even if I actually received them all – of those three benefits I only actually get ESA, the thought of putting myself through the ATOS ordeal again for DLA HRM is simply too much to face right now (DLA HRC, even LRC, I clearly have no hope of claiming). I did apply for DLA several years ago, but not knowing how to navigate the labyrinth didn’t get past the first hurdle of using the appropriate terms on the form rather than simply naively explaining how disabled I am (yes, there are hurdles, no matter what the Tories, the DWP and the attack-hacks in the tabloids would have us believe). I have been trying to gather the evidence to support another claim for several years now, side-by-side with trying to get myself the treatment to get back into the workforce, but the cuts to the NHS are making that a dreadfully slow process (so slow I’m actually going backwards), not helped when my local rheumatology department tell me that my ‘bad back’ is so complex that they don’t actually have anyone qualified to look at it in its entirety…

Yes, you didn’t read that wrong, even after having gone through the horror of the WCA test, and passing, even with my local rheumatology department struggling to cope, my disability is not clearly severe enough to entitle me to the benefit the Tories are trying to convince people is handed out like Smarties at a kid’s party.

But let’s get back to the tabloids, IDS, and their ‘anonymous source’. It’s amazing the courage that comes from having a tame journalist willing to quote you anonymously as ‘a source close to the reforms’, no need to hold back on the vitriol you can turn on disabled people. What we see here is demonization by insinuation. No direct statements, just the nudge-nudge, wink-wink, they’re all at it you know of your friendly neighbourhood poison-pen letter. Phrases like ‘a huge increase’ and ‘cash payments’ are clearly designed to imply that the sums involved are significant and somehow akin to backhanders, not the less than £20 a week that DLA is for many people, not the £51.40 per week that HRM claimants are expected to sacrifice for those ‘free’ Motability cars that provoke so much bitter jealousy against us (nope, I don’t get one of those either).

The ‘anonymous source’ then goes on to say “We are going to bring in a new assessment and regular checks to make sure support is getting to those who need it.” There’s a term to describe this, lying. DLA already has an assessment and regular checks, with stressful three-yearly renewals regularly terrorising disabled people, but the Tories and their tame attack dogs are trying, successfully, to mislead the tabloids’ core readership into believing that disability benefits are handed out just for the asking to people who fake their disabilities in order to scrounge from the State. The fact that seriously disabled people live in terror of losing their DLA in the Kafka-esque lottery of renewal, the intrusive medical checking, the thuggery of ATOS, these are inconvenient truths that they work to hide from their readership, treating them with precisely the same contempt they display towards us.

The Tories aren’t interested in seeing that support is getting to those who need it, if they were then they would never have closed the Independent Living Fund that provides for people with the most profound disabilities of all, it is just one more big lie to hide the truth from people by claiming the absolute opposite. The replacement for DLA, PIP, is simply an excuse to harden the rules and exclude 25% of the people currently in receipt of DLA, no matter their level of disability. Claims that it is meant to replace a broken system are simply more lies, DLA works, the aim is not to fix it, but to cut the numbers able to claim it, the predetermined percentage betrays that for all to see, yet the Tories lack the guts to admit it. Easier by far to demonise disabled people and convince the country that we deserve the cuts, after all, we’re only disabled, we probably vote Labour, what does it matter to the Tories if we’re attacked in the street as a result.

The only thing that surprises me about this is that I had thought that depression would be the next disability to be attacked, piggybacking on society’s poorly hidden fear of mental illness, with spinal conditions following afterwards. There is a clear strategy behind the attacks on us since the turn of the year. Before that the focus was simply on demonising us all as scroungers, but then opposition started to cohere and find a voice, whether from disabled people themselves, as seen in WTB, DPAC and the Broken of Britain, or from charities, campaigning groups, the Guardian alone amongst the national dailies, and even from members of the general public who had realised what the propaganda campaign really amounted to. Faced with a potential backlash, the Tory campaign has taken a new tack, seeking not just to undermine us en masse, but to divide and rule by targeting and demonising individual sectors of the disability community, implying that the people who fall within those sectors aren’t really disabled, and actively deserve everything that happens to them. Obesity and addiction have already had their turn in the stocks, on Saturday it was the turn of spinal conditions, I suspect depression and mental health will see their turn soon enough. We actually have a term for this in the disability community, we call it the Hierarchy of Disability and I have written before on why it is such a divisive, dangerous idea even in normal disabled life, but now we see someone actively seeking to use it against us for political ends and I am unavoidably reminded of the (sadly forgotten) earliest form of Pastor Martin Neimoller’s poem:

First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the sick, the so-called incurables, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't mentally ill.

Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me

Together we stand, divided we fall.

Rounding out Saturday’s diatribe of hate is the contemptible disdain of Martin Sinclair, the mouthpiece of the ‘Tax Payer’s Alliance’ who states DLA claimants are “a particularly unwelcome burden” on taxpayers, failing to acknowledge that a great many DLA recipients are taxpayers. Apparently Mr Sinclair doesn’t agree that part of the role of the state, the very reason we pay it tax, is to support those of us who, through disability, face extra financial burdens. I was a taxpayer for twenty-three years, Mr Sinclair, given my choices I still would be, and there are several million more disabled people like me who either pay taxes, have paid taxes, or would love to have the opportunity to pay taxes. Doesn’t your organisation feel an obligation to represent us too, or does the fact that we are who we are make us beneath your notice, too likely to vote for the wrong party, ultimately just unspeakably disabled?

There is one final name I haven’t talked about in this catalogue of shame, the Liberal-Democrats. This is the party that, even more than Labour, has traditionally portrayed itself as the party that puts Social Justice first, ahead even of political power, the party that currently shares in the government of the country alongside the Tories. So where exactly does your party stand on this, Mr Clegg? People like Danny Alexander were vocal enough about the problems arising from ATOS assessments in Opposition, but as soon as a ministerial position was wafted under their noses they became strangely silent. Less than three months ago your party’s Spring Conference, specifically addressing DLA Mobility Component, made it clear to the parliamentary party that attacks on disabled people had gone too far, finding it necessary to remind you of your obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Your party has spoken, Mr Clegg, but they, and we, are still waiting for your reply….

That Proverbial 'Bad Back'

Goldfish has already had one pop at this BBC article, but I want to pick it up on a specific point and look at it on a little more personal a basis than I would normally use for WTB.

"during that time there was a widespread belief that back pain could be long-term and could seriously incapacitate people.

Now, people are aware that if they strain a muscle they can be better in a few weeks, Professor Coggon said."

Alleluia! Praise the Lord! I'm cured!

Or maybe not. Maybe there's more to it than the 'good' Professor Coggon is letting on.

We've been seeing a lot of this in the past few months, disabling conditions deliberately undermined to outrage the Tabloidigentsia. Cystic Fibrosis - cough. Epidermylosis Bullosa - blisters. Prader-Willi Syndrome - obese. It's bad enough when they target the rarer conditions without the weight of numbers to enable the people with them to fight back, but a constant in the background statistics when people with these conditions are derided are the far larger figures for 'depression' and 'bad back', with the unspoken intimation that these are just as false. I don't really have the background to discuss clinical depression beyond being sadly aware of how badly skewed are the opinions of the vast majority in our society towards it, but 'a bad back' I have known intimately for twenty-odd years.

The first thing to notice is the labelling, always 'bad back', never 'spinal injury', because that deliberately taps into the undercurrent of belief that we are all shirkers and fakers. Most people have had some experience with back pain, some will even proclaim that they 'suffer with their back', but almost always there will be the implied 'but I cope and so should they'. Then along come tame experts like Professor Coggon, proclaiming that back pain can be cured, if you really want to be cured.

Strangely enough the hired guns always seem to be occupational health doctors, the ones whose bread and butter comes from saying what industry or government wants of them, you never seem to see a spinal surgeon or a pain management specialist up there rubbishing the reality of these disabilities.

A soft tissue spinal injury may have a good chance of healing in a few months, but for many people that healing never occurs, because it isn't simply a pulled muscle - thanks for that one, Professor Coggon! Let's really undermine the shirkers with the most trivial injury imaginable - it's a much more complex situation involving injuries to muscle, bone, nerves and discs. There's a wonderful phenomenon called 'neuroplastic remodelling' in which the spinal cord rewires itself to make pain normal, even if the original injury is gone. Then there's Chronic Pain Syndrome, which is a label for pain that continues longer than 3 months without clear physical cause. Or Facet Joint Syndrome, which is pain from damage to the facet joints at the tip of the wings of the vertebrae, Or Degenerative Disc Disease, in which the discs slowly narrow and can burst, while the vertebrae grow arthritic spurs of new bone, all of the changes constricting the space through which the nerves are meant to pass. And so on. A whole medical speciality's worth of long term conditions that won't magically go away in three months because some hired gun who specialises in 'Occupational Health' says that they should. Even 20 years on I don't really have a clear diagnosis for everything that's going on, my local rheumatology department recently told me they don't actually have anyone qualified to assess my complete set of spinal issues. And I'm far from alone in that. The absence of a definitive diagnosis even after decades of seeing specialists is not a cause for suspicion, it is a recognition of the sheer range and complexity of spinal injuries.

"If it was real it would show up on an x-ray, or an MRI" the self-proclaimed expert in the pub or the office will often claim. Unfortunately self-proclaimed is not the same as actual. I had so many x-rays in the years after I initially became disabled that I was starting to worry about glowing in the dark, never mind cumulative dosage, yet they showed nothing and my consultant was visibly stressed at his failure to isolate the cause because he could see my disability was very real. It finally took a full body bone scan with radioactive tracer to get even a hint of what was going on, and if the problem had been solely neurological, for instance through neuroplastic remodelling, then not even that would have been true. My more recent c-spine problems do show up on MRI, but it was four years from onset of C-spine problems to getting that MRI, 21 years on from first presenting with a clear spinal injury. After 22 years of spinal problems that remains the only spinal MRI I have had, and the analysis makes no reference whatsoever to my still very disabling lumbar spine problems (though it does point out incipient problems in four other major joints). Scans and X-rays are not magical, they do not automatically locate every possible form of spinal injury, sometimes spinal problems are only apparent during dynamic movement or at certain positions, not the neutral postures used for scans and x-rays, and often we have to fight for anything more than the most basic x-ray, and sometimes even that.

Even if we can get people to accept that our disabilities are real, we then face the difficulty of getting them to admit that they are actually disabling. Auntie Agatha may 'suffer terribly' with their back and run three marathons before breakfast, and everyone with an opinion is delighted to explain how they had a bad back once but worked through it, but the reality of long term spinal injuries is in an entirely different dimension to anything most people will ever have encountered. The problem we face is that pain is invisible and that long term pain doesn't go away, it's there one damned day after another. If you're dealing with it every day then whinging about being ill and in pain isn't an option, life goes on and I look the same whether I'm pain free or whether it feels like someone has rammed a dagger into my spine and is laying into it with a sledgehammer. We are often talking about degrees of pain that most people never imagine, never mind encounter, about feeling like bones are sheering apart, or like you have a second degree burn across substantial (and sensitive!) parts of your anatomy. Yes, there are painkillers we can take, all with their own side-effects, but they aren't a solution, when I talk about hammering daggers and extensive burns, those are the sensations with the opiates, not without!

'Surely there's an operation for that?' people ask. Not necessarily, is the unfortunate answer. There's that inconvenient absence of clear diagnoses, for one thing, it is difficult to know what to cut if you don't know what's causing the problem. Then there is the unfortunate reality that cutting may make it worse -- 'Failed Back-Surgery Syndrome' is a very real diagnostic label -- or cause problems at a different level of the spine - a common treatment is to fuse two or more vertebrae into a solid lump, but that simply causes extra stress to the joints on either side of the fusion. Then there are neuroplastic remodelling and Chronic Pain Syndrome, which are by definition independent of any musculo-skeletal clause. Similar problems occur with physiotherapy, which tends to be focussed on those simple pulled muscles and thrashes about in the dark when faced with any more complex problem. Over the years I've had back classes, traction, bracing, manipulation, hydrotherapy, you name it, they've tried it with me, but with no evidence of any joined-up thinking to link one set of treatment to another and try and work out a systematic approach. Eventually those of us who are lucky end up being referred to Chronic Pain Management teams. That is an explicit acknowledgement that the pain isn't going away, that the disability is here to stay and that no more active intervention is envisaged. Forget cure, hello coping.

So the next time Cameron, or Clegg, or Grayling are ranting about how ridiculous it is that people have dared to be disabled for more than 3 minutes without being cured, and there's that big set of statistics on the screen behind him, with 'depression' and 'bad back' highlighted for all to see, remember that the reality you need to consider isn't the one they're painting, it's mine.

The WCA: Sick Joke, or National Disgrace?

The migration from Incapacity Benefit to ESA is now underway, a migration the Con-Dems and the rabid press trumpet as a step towards getting all those indolent fraudsters on disability benefits into work. If only anything of that was true. The truth is a system that has been deliberately designed to fail a significant proportion of clearly disabled people and assessment criteria that have already been identified as unacceptable by the independent assessor. Then that system, with its built-in failures, is handed over to the contractor ATOS Origin to operate, and they set out to deliberately overstress it in order to process as many people as possible, in as little time as possible, and at as low a cost as possible, all in the name of the Great God Profit; no matter the inadequacy of the process delivered, no matter the huge percentage of claims overturned at appeal, no matter a failure rate that would be unacceptable in any other industry. And then there are the medics who conduct their inadequate assessments, happily claiming they don’t need to meet their normal standards of care, because they aren’t acting as doctors or whatever – um, isn’t that the very reason ATOS crossed your palm with 30 pieces of silver?

I'm that rare bird, the ESA claimant who actually passed the WCA without needing to appeal, in theory I have no axe to grind from having an application refused. However the process fell so far short of an acceptable level of competence that I have to stand my ground alongside those unjustly failed by the system.

I became unemployed just after ESA and the WCA were introduced, but initially elected to claim JSA, in large part because of the stories already coming out about the way the WCA system was failing disabled people. With an Employment Tribunal claim to manage I just didn’t have the energy available to fight for ESA if necessary. But ESA wasn’t that easy to avoid and it rapidly became clear (contrary to Professor Harrington’s complacent assurances in his review of the WCA) that JCP were utterly incapable of dealing with someone who was either disabled or highly qualified, and god help you if you were both. In fact the only way they could deal with me was by ignoring both qualifications and disability. That sad tale I’ve already described, but the end result was a complaint to ministerial level, abject apologies from JCP, and a request that I transfer onto ESA.

As an ESA claimant I was first expected to fill in the 28 page ESA50 form. The unavailability of an electronic version of this form from 2008 until the new version rolled out a few days ago speaks to an utter institutional contempt within DWP for disabled people and their needs. The paper form is not simply inaccessible to people with visual impairments, but also to anyone, like me, who is unable to write comfortably or legibly as a result of their disability. Equally the space provided in the form is utterly inadequate for anyone, again like me, who needs to discuss several decades of experience of a complex disability. And while someone could potentially fill it in for me, there are details of how my disability affects me that I’m not even comfortable discussing with my specialists, never mind anyone else.

My first WCA assessment was scheduled for May 6^th, 2010 at the local ATOS Assessment Centre, and what an ill-omened day that turned out to be! The building is located in the centre of town and has no on-site disabled parking, so is utterly unfit for purpose before you even get to the door. There is a public disabled car park some 150m away, but that regularly requires a wait of over 30 minutes to find a space in it and like many disabled people I cannot walk even 50m without experiencing significant pain. The next nearest disabled parking is 350m away. If you can manage to get to the building, then access at the door is via intercom, so how someone deaf and/or without speech is supposed to manage is a mystery. The DDA and the Equality Act both require service providers to make provisions based on the likely needs of their clientele, so a building whose entire clientele is disabled should make a significantly greater degree of access provision than most, yet ATOS continue to operate centres, and even open new ones, that fail to meet even the most basic standards of accessibility.

I had informed ATOS in advance via the ESA50 form that I would require adjustable seating because of the difficulty in sitting that results from my disability, which is in fact the core of my problems regarding working, so pretty much fundamental to the whole assessment process. None had been provided. The tattily-dressed individual who checked my ID led me into a waiting room filled with cheap, non-adjustable seating completely inappropriate to the needs of a client population containing a high proportion of people with musculo-skeletal and pain and fatigue based disorders. Within seconds of trying the seating I had realised that I was completely unable to sit on it in any comfort, only by rolling sideways onto my hip was I able to tolerate it at all. By the time I was called through, something over 10 minutes later (despite apparently being the only client in the building), I was in considerable distress, which only deepened when I reached the examination room and found that the seating there was actually worse. It was at this point that I discovered the tattily-dressed individual was actually the doctor who was supposed to assess me, not the caretaker as I had first assumed. I pointed out that I had told ATOS I needed an adjustable seat and his reaction was ‘Oh, you’ll just have to book another appointment’. He then admitted that this was not the first time this problem had occurred, that they had asked for adjustable seating to be supplied and that they had been told by their regional management to ‘make do with what you have’. In my opinion this is a clear indication of an active contempt by ATOS management for both their client population and for the reasonable adjustment provisions of the Disability Discrimination Act and now the Equality Act.

I returned home having wasted my time and experienced major amounts of pain as a result. This pain then served to trigger a massive flare-up in my condition and I spent the following week on the floor of my bathroom as I was wracked by one muscle-spasm after another, not knowing even what day it was. I eventually managed to get to my GP, who doubled the strength of my opiate painkillers, which brought the flare-up under control, but at the cost of my wandering around in a daze for several months with no energy or volition. The loss of control in this kind of flare-up is extremely distressing both physically and mentally and I was completely unable to deal with mail during this period, simply the thought of a letter from ATOS or DWP being sufficient to send my pain levels sky-rocketing. Ultimately it took me six months to completely catch up with my mail, at which point I discovered a letter from ATOS dated a week after my initial WCA date and calling me for another WCA a few days later, which needless to say I had not attended, being barely conscious at the time.

So, knowing that I had a major problem with their centre environment, having failed to provide a requested reasonable adjustment, and having visibly caused me considerable distress, ATOS didn’t even think it was worth ringing me to ensure that my appointment was rearranged for a convenient time and to assure me that the needed reasonable adjustment would be there this time. Their response was actually worse than this, but it would be several months before I realised quite how bad.

In late-August I received a letter from DWP stating that my ESA payments had been stopped, from the week before my initial appointment, owing to my failure to attend the WCA. I called the office the letter had originated with and the person I spoke to was perhaps the only DWP employee ever to have impressed me with competence and common sense. She immediately accepted my inability to attend a WCA I was not aware of and noted that ATOS had made no mention of their failure to provide a required reasonable adjustment, but had simply stated that I had not completed the initial WCA. When ATOS set out to deliberately portray their own error as a failing by the victim of that error, and a failing with fiscal consequences, then there is no way to interpret their actions as anything less than actively and deliberately dishonest.

Thanks to an unusual outbreak of common sense at DWP, my claim was eventually reinstated and a further WCA was arranged for mid-October, again at the local assessment centre. This time I was met at the door with an adjustable chair. Unfortunately I could not even raise the seat of the chair to an appropriate level and at five feet eight I am not exactly tall, nor did the seat angle adjust, the only hope I have of a usable position if the seat isn’t high enough. Again I was reduced to rolling sideways onto my hip. This time the delay was not 10 minutes, it was something over 45 minutes. By the time I was called through (with the receptionist bringing the useless adjustable seat through after me) I was physically shaking. It was a different doctor to my first appointment, but again he was scruffily dressed in a tatty anorak. It is impossible to conclude that this reflects anything other than a profound lack of respect for their clientele on the part of ATOS medical staff.

My pain-management consultant has told me that is almost impossible to get doctors who are not specialists in pain-management to comprehend just how disabling pain is, and I was therefore concerned about how much of a background the assessor had in chronic-pain based disabilities, unfortunately his manner instantly convinced me that any question would be interpreted negatively and I did not feel able to make my point. As the session started I rapidly became aware that I was in so much pain that I was not answering effectively and was making a case for myself that was not as strong as it should have been. It also became rapidly apparent that the doctor was profoundly irritated by my refusal to give yes or no answers. He may have found it irritating, but any understanding of my condition required that he listen to the details and I would not be swayed on this, though undoubtedly many people who are less able to express themselves will have been browbeaten into less than complete answers by his manner. It was also extremely apparent that he was reading from a computer-based script, his eyes fixed on the screen, and less than pleased with answers that did not fit the format its questions mandated. As a result of this there was an almost complete refusal to make eye contact, destroying any sense that he was truly engaging with me.

More disturbingly, he chose to take umbrage at certain of my points. I do not expect automatic complete agreement, but I do not expect to be told that I am wrong to have tried to search out information on the assessment process, particularly when his subsequent conduct proved the correctness of that information, nor do I expect to be criticised for the way I have described the effects of my disability on my walking, particularly when later events demonstrated that I was being absolutely accurate.

Some 20-odd minutes into the assessment I reached my limits on my pain tolerance, either I had to stand, or vomit. I spent the rest of the assessment balanced on one leg and crutches and it was only at this point, a cynic would say at the point he started to fear being found negligent in my treatment, that the doctor finally broke script and started to treat me as an individual. He asked several times whether I was able to continue, but by that point I just wanted the WCA over with, I certainly wasn’t about to put myself through the process for a third time. He completed the physical part of the assessment, but even then he criticised me for being unable to bend my leg so he could tap my knee with his hammer. Locking my leg extended is something my disability does when my pain levels are extremely high, I have no conscious control of it and I don’t expect anyone, certainly not a doctor acting in a medical capacity, to criticise me for it.

WCA thankfully over, I made it back to my car on one leg, and, even though it is a bare 5 minutes from the assessment centre to my house, my pain levels were so high, never mind the opiate painkillers, never mind the TENS machine, that I had to give serious thought to pulling over on the way home. I spent the rest of the day in bed, the first hour physically shaking.

In late-November I finally received the notification that I had been placed into the Work Related Activities Group, which is where I believe I should be, together with back-payment of all the ESA payments I had been due since May, but the process had taken 10 months and caused me a considerable amount of pain and physical distress, actually worsening my disability. The treatment I received has convinced me that ATOS have a complete and utter contempt for the needs of their clients that adds up to institutional disability discrimination and that their medical assessors are happily compliant in this. Sadly DWP is little better, my experience has been that the system only works when you complain.

I have a skill set that should make me an asset, I am making every effort I can to maximise my potential for employment, but to date the organs of state that are supposed to support me in this actually seem to be working against me. And at the start of the 2012 financial year, no matter that my disability is worsening, no matter the efforts I am making to find work, the 12 month limitation of eligibility for contributions-based ESA will kick in and cut my benefits to nothing.

So that’s my experience of WCA and ATOS, contempt for disabled people that amounts to deliberate abuse. They damned near turned me into one of those statistics for withdrawn or failed claims that Nick Clegg loves to claim are evidence of fraudulent intent, rather than what they really are, evidence of a system that is failing those who need it most. I got through the system because I’m too bloody-minded to give in when people erect barriers in front of me and because I’m too articulate and persistent to easily dismiss; but many people aren’t as bloody-minded, aren’t as articulate, aren’t as persistent and the system will be far more of a nightmare for them than it was for me. The system should assess you fairly whoever you are, at the moment it isn’t even doing that for the people it passes. The phrase ‘a national disgrace’ is often over-used, but it was never more appropriate than when describing ATOS and the WCA.

And lest we forget, this isn’t simply Con-Dem policy, but a policy that began under Labour and which Ed Milliband continues to support.

Clegg's Alarm Clock Britain

So Nick Clegg has stood in front of the Liberal Democrat's Spring Conference and told them that he stands for 'Alarm Clock Britain', a phrase repeated no less than five times in his speech. Apparently 'Alarm Clock Britain' stands for 'basic rate taxpayers who get up in the dark, get their children ready for school and then go out to work'. So presumably because my disability now means I can no longer work, because I can't sleep to any set pattern, because I no longer earn enough to pay basic rate tax, to the Liberal Democrats I no longer count, what happens to me and to the tens of thousands of disabled people in similar positions, does not concern them. The support we need can happily be gutted to make sure the alarm clock users don't feel the pinch.

Clegg promised his party faithful that "We will never lose our soul", but, Mr Clegg, the moment the Liberal Democrats stopped caring for every member of our society was the moment they sold their soul to the Devil.