Sentencing has begun this week on the 10 A4e employees who were convicted of fraud last year. And, at last, the mainstream media have decided to take notice. The Guardian's report is restrained. The Independent goes into more detail, and reports a defendant's barrister as accusing the company of fostering "a culture of dishonesty". Perhaps the writer, Emily Dugan, has been reading this blog. She ends with a list of "previous A4e scandals", including a contract it lost in Teeside after forging signatures; the laptop containing personal data of clients stolen from an employee's home; and the Edinburgh case where a tribunal ruled that A4e were wrong to sanction a client who wanted to be accompanied by a representative.
The Mail, as we might expect, goes to town on the story, bringing Emma Harrison into it. Unfortunately, they get it wrong, saying that Harrison "was forced to step down from her role after fraud allegations first came to light in 2012". As we know, Harrison's downfall was nothing to do with the fraud.
Sentencing continues this week, and perhaps the papers won't bother to report the outcomes. But this is a bad way to get a decent price for the company as Harrison tries to sell it.
Showing posts with label Mail. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mail. Show all posts
Monday, 30 March 2015
Thursday, 21 August 2014
Negativity
I was brought up to believe that the worst thing you could ever call anybody was a liar. Even when they clearly were. Even when it was Iain Duncan Smith. But (I'm sorry, Mum) I have to say it. Esther McVey lied today in the Mail and the Express. Since the quote is the same in both I have to assume that it's her lie, not the papers'. "‘I meet with thousands of young people a year and they all say the negative picture painted by opposition politicians about young people and their bleak future has a very negative effect on them."
You can imagine it. She's got a captive audience of unemployed kids in a jobcentre or somewhere, and every single one of them says, "Well, it's Labour telling us how bad things are, and there's no future."
You may say it was just exaggeration. But what about the substance of this mendacious piece? Try the Mail's lengthy version. Count the number of assertions which are simply not true. The Express resorts to quoting the Mail, but at least it gives Rachel Reeves the chance to describe the comments as "pathetic".
We could dismiss all this as tripe, and rather desperate tripe at that, were it not for a piece on the Huffington Post site which makes it look like part of a concerted effort directed by Lynton Crosby, the Tories' campaign guru. We heard this week that self-employment is at its highest level since records began, and that of the 1.1 million people who have started a job since January 2008, two thirds are self-employed. (The figures are on the BBC news site.) Over the last year it's over half of new "jobs". But all is wonderful according to scary Tory MP Matthew (call me Matt) Hancock. "There are more jobs available than ever before in this country, the vast majority of the jobs are full-time contracts of employment, and there has also been a very strong growth in self-employment. " [my italics] This is simply not true. The article gives plenty of space to voices refuting Hancock's claims.
But it seems that the tactic is simple. Get out there and lie. Blame Labour. Deny the figures. Just lie.
You can imagine it. She's got a captive audience of unemployed kids in a jobcentre or somewhere, and every single one of them says, "Well, it's Labour telling us how bad things are, and there's no future."
You may say it was just exaggeration. But what about the substance of this mendacious piece? Try the Mail's lengthy version. Count the number of assertions which are simply not true. The Express resorts to quoting the Mail, but at least it gives Rachel Reeves the chance to describe the comments as "pathetic".
We could dismiss all this as tripe, and rather desperate tripe at that, were it not for a piece on the Huffington Post site which makes it look like part of a concerted effort directed by Lynton Crosby, the Tories' campaign guru. We heard this week that self-employment is at its highest level since records began, and that of the 1.1 million people who have started a job since January 2008, two thirds are self-employed. (The figures are on the BBC news site.) Over the last year it's over half of new "jobs". But all is wonderful according to scary Tory MP Matthew (call me Matt) Hancock. "There are more jobs available than ever before in this country, the vast majority of the jobs are full-time contracts of employment, and there has also been a very strong growth in self-employment. " [my italics] This is simply not true. The article gives plenty of space to voices refuting Hancock's claims.
But it seems that the tactic is simple. Get out there and lie. Blame Labour. Deny the figures. Just lie.
Monday, 12 August 2013
Confusion - and a rant from IDS
Are Tesco and Next importing foreign workers because they cost less than British ones? It's the claim by Labour MP Chris Bryant, indignantly denied by the firms concerned, and it's all a bit confused at the moment. Many of us have little doubt that Bryant is right in general; but it's necessary to get the details absolutely right.
That's never been a consideration for Iain Duncan Smith. He has penned an extraordinary rant in the Mail today. The headline is: "For those eyeballing benefits as a one-way ticket to easy street, I have a wake-up call for you: those days are over! Says IAIN DUNCAN SMITH". That in itself is enough to get jaws dropping among benefits claimants. But the bizarre statements have yet to come. Did you know that "there are 4,000 single people making more in benefits than many individual people would earn from work"? Just try working out what that means. You'll notice that there's no mention of the fact that this is all down to the cost of rents. But IDS wants Mail readers to know that by the end of September those people will be subject to a new cap of £18,200. Then there's the Claimant Commitment" which "transforms the relationship between the claimant and the system. Claimants will sign an agreement to undertake certain activities in order to get their benefits in return. Our advisers have the power to sanction people who don't uphold their part of the bargain. No longer can people just turn up to claim benefits with no onus on them to better their situation."
What can one say to that? Does he not know that the current system is already exactly what he describes? And why won't he publish the sanctions figures? Well, probably, but it's not truth or accuracy which matter, it's feeding the prejudices of the public at large. And that seems to be the case with yet another poverty entertainment show tonight. Channel 4, which once did such a good job with Benefit Busters, now prefers to give us a series which harks back to the start of the welfare state in 1949 and see how today's unemployed would fare. The Mail, of course, has no doubt. It uses the term "handouts", which had no place in 1940s thinking. It says that "benefits were originally conceived as a temporary helping hand in times of trouble, not a lifestyle choice". There's that phrase again, the lie which says that all unemployed people have made a choice to be so. I won't be watching.
Duncan Smith's past is coming back to haunt him, and I'm starting to understand why he hates the BBC so much. Well before the scandal broke over MPs' expenses, there was a lesser scandal of MPs employing their relatives on the government payroll, often for doing nothing at all. One of the MPs caught up in this was IDS himself, who was leader of his party at the time. The BBC's Michael Crick discovered that he was paying his wife, Betsy, £15k a year. "Betsygate" was uncomfortable for IDS, but it was worse for some of his staff. A blog points us to evidence given to Parliament by his aide Dr Vanessa Gearson in October 2003. It's long and detailed, but well worth a read.
That's never been a consideration for Iain Duncan Smith. He has penned an extraordinary rant in the Mail today. The headline is: "For those eyeballing benefits as a one-way ticket to easy street, I have a wake-up call for you: those days are over! Says IAIN DUNCAN SMITH". That in itself is enough to get jaws dropping among benefits claimants. But the bizarre statements have yet to come. Did you know that "there are 4,000 single people making more in benefits than many individual people would earn from work"? Just try working out what that means. You'll notice that there's no mention of the fact that this is all down to the cost of rents. But IDS wants Mail readers to know that by the end of September those people will be subject to a new cap of £18,200. Then there's the Claimant Commitment" which "transforms the relationship between the claimant and the system. Claimants will sign an agreement to undertake certain activities in order to get their benefits in return. Our advisers have the power to sanction people who don't uphold their part of the bargain. No longer can people just turn up to claim benefits with no onus on them to better their situation."
What can one say to that? Does he not know that the current system is already exactly what he describes? And why won't he publish the sanctions figures? Well, probably, but it's not truth or accuracy which matter, it's feeding the prejudices of the public at large. And that seems to be the case with yet another poverty entertainment show tonight. Channel 4, which once did such a good job with Benefit Busters, now prefers to give us a series which harks back to the start of the welfare state in 1949 and see how today's unemployed would fare. The Mail, of course, has no doubt. It uses the term "handouts", which had no place in 1940s thinking. It says that "benefits were originally conceived as a temporary helping hand in times of trouble, not a lifestyle choice". There's that phrase again, the lie which says that all unemployed people have made a choice to be so. I won't be watching.
Duncan Smith's past is coming back to haunt him, and I'm starting to understand why he hates the BBC so much. Well before the scandal broke over MPs' expenses, there was a lesser scandal of MPs employing their relatives on the government payroll, often for doing nothing at all. One of the MPs caught up in this was IDS himself, who was leader of his party at the time. The BBC's Michael Crick discovered that he was paying his wife, Betsy, £15k a year. "Betsygate" was uncomfortable for IDS, but it was worse for some of his staff. A blog points us to evidence given to Parliament by his aide Dr Vanessa Gearson in October 2003. It's long and detailed, but well worth a read.
Wednesday, 24 April 2013
When does spinning turn into lying?
Two versions of the same story appeared in the news feeds this morning, and I had to read them carefully to work out what was going on.
First, there was the Daily Mail's "One million people who are fit to work have been on benefits for three years". Then, in the Express, "The one million who are FIT TO WORK but live on benefits". That one, not surprisingly, is the more disgusting. It goes on: "A MILLION welfare claimants have lived on working-age benefits for three out of the last four years, despite being judged capable of trying to find a job, shocking figures revealed last night." You might have worked it out by now. Yes, about a million of the out-of-work are long-term unemployed. Do we read on to find out how the Work Programme is helping them, or is going to be changed to help them? Don't bother, there's no mention of it. This is from a report to be published by Iain Duncan Smith. He's more interested in family breakdown, and asserts that "local authorities have already turned around the lives of 1,675 troubled families." This is the outsourcing of the "troubled families" intervention scheme. Note that there is no indication of what "turned around the lives" actually means. Someone got a job? Who knows. But the Mail has a pretty graph showing "How Britain's benefits bill has risen" with never a mention of the fact that a huge chunk of the benefits bill consists of pensions.
So these rags intend their readers to infer that a million people out there are too lazy to work, and add to the clamour for a clampdown. That isn't spin; that's lying.
For a more truthful account, the Guardian looks at a report by the Fawcett Society which shows that since 2010 almost three times as many women as men have become long-term unemployed. Men have got 60% of the new private sector jobs. A big factor in this trend is that women are suffering most from the public sector cuts, losing the low wage, often part-time jobs. Of course, IDS has nothing to say about this.
Another disturbing story appeared in the Observer on Sunday. The social fund grew out of the long-standing practice of giving emergency grants to people on benefits to pay for necessary items such as beds or cookers (second-hand, of course) which they didn't have the money to buy. Labour turned these into loans. Now, local councils are complaining that more and more people are coming to them for emergency loans, because the jobcentres haven't mentioned the availability of the money. Indeed, it appears that jobcentre workers have been issued with explicit guidance by the DWP that they should not advertise the existence of the loans so as not to "encourage dependency on the benefits system", and simply pass the buck to the councils. And it seems that the emergencies which cause the need for short-term loans are no longer the one-off large items but such mundane things as food.
We're now told that the publication of performance data for the WP has been put back. It was due on 28 May but will now be published on 27 June, and will cover the period to March 2013. The vow of silence on the whole subject of the WP doesn't augur well for the figures.
On a more general note, I want to recommend a book. Michael Sandel is an economist, but one who writes in a very lucid way about economics in the real world. His book What Money Can't Buy - the moral limits of markets (pub. Allen Lane, 2012) is an excellent introduction to thinking about the issue of private profit, ethics and the public arena.
First, there was the Daily Mail's "One million people who are fit to work have been on benefits for three years". Then, in the Express, "The one million who are FIT TO WORK but live on benefits". That one, not surprisingly, is the more disgusting. It goes on: "A MILLION welfare claimants have lived on working-age benefits for three out of the last four years, despite being judged capable of trying to find a job, shocking figures revealed last night." You might have worked it out by now. Yes, about a million of the out-of-work are long-term unemployed. Do we read on to find out how the Work Programme is helping them, or is going to be changed to help them? Don't bother, there's no mention of it. This is from a report to be published by Iain Duncan Smith. He's more interested in family breakdown, and asserts that "local authorities have already turned around the lives of 1,675 troubled families." This is the outsourcing of the "troubled families" intervention scheme. Note that there is no indication of what "turned around the lives" actually means. Someone got a job? Who knows. But the Mail has a pretty graph showing "How Britain's benefits bill has risen" with never a mention of the fact that a huge chunk of the benefits bill consists of pensions.
So these rags intend their readers to infer that a million people out there are too lazy to work, and add to the clamour for a clampdown. That isn't spin; that's lying.
For a more truthful account, the Guardian looks at a report by the Fawcett Society which shows that since 2010 almost three times as many women as men have become long-term unemployed. Men have got 60% of the new private sector jobs. A big factor in this trend is that women are suffering most from the public sector cuts, losing the low wage, often part-time jobs. Of course, IDS has nothing to say about this.
Another disturbing story appeared in the Observer on Sunday. The social fund grew out of the long-standing practice of giving emergency grants to people on benefits to pay for necessary items such as beds or cookers (second-hand, of course) which they didn't have the money to buy. Labour turned these into loans. Now, local councils are complaining that more and more people are coming to them for emergency loans, because the jobcentres haven't mentioned the availability of the money. Indeed, it appears that jobcentre workers have been issued with explicit guidance by the DWP that they should not advertise the existence of the loans so as not to "encourage dependency on the benefits system", and simply pass the buck to the councils. And it seems that the emergencies which cause the need for short-term loans are no longer the one-off large items but such mundane things as food.
We're now told that the publication of performance data for the WP has been put back. It was due on 28 May but will now be published on 27 June, and will cover the period to March 2013. The vow of silence on the whole subject of the WP doesn't augur well for the figures.
On a more general note, I want to recommend a book. Michael Sandel is an economist, but one who writes in a very lucid way about economics in the real world. His book What Money Can't Buy - the moral limits of markets (pub. Allen Lane, 2012) is an excellent introduction to thinking about the issue of private profit, ethics and the public arena.
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