A SKWAWKBOX announcement. Please read.

It’s with considerable hesitation that I decided to write this post. As you’ll have noticed if you’re a regular reader, the SKWAWKBOX has been very quiet this month.

Some months ago, I set up a company along with an old colleague – with the aim of making a living for my family and me while gaining more freedom to write this blog.

That’s the theory, at any rate. The reality has been that the process of getting a new business up and running, and the need to make it pay sooner rather than later, have been almost all-consuming. Add to that the imperative to get to know my new grand-daughter, and to invest in my family relationships, and it’s been almost impossible to find the time to write.

The articles I write here take a lot of research – and then a lot of time to try to turn the research into something readable and relevant. I have no intention of giving up on the blog – I couldn’t, while this government is in office, intent on impoverishing and persecuting ordinary people, dismantling our NHS and routinely lying about it all. But it kills me to see things that need to be written and not be able to do it.

So I’m going, with some trepidation, to ask for your help.

I’ve never asked for a penny for writing this blog – and I don’t intend to start now. It’s important that nobody can (justly) accuse me of writing for profit, or of any kind of undue influence by those with money. There’s already far too much of that around.

But I will ask that, if you think this blog has value in exposing what’s going on and in the attempt to maintain some kind of just society, that you take a look at the services page of my company.

If – and only if – my company offers something which is of use to you, please fill in a contact form to let us know what it is. If it’s something that might be useful to someone you know, please tell them.

And please do so only if it’s something that you genuinely need, and you feel that you will get value for it. This is not about asking for charity, but about a business transaction – an opportunity for me to support the blog and my family myself by providing you with something that will be useful for you (and should save you money).

That and using the system intelligently to help support exposing the darker parts of it.

Plus I think our services are pretty good – if they’re the kind of thing that will be of use to you.

Whether this works or not, I’ll continue to do my best to provide good, well-researched information here on The SKWAWKBOX so that we’re all that bit better informed about what this government is doing and trying to hide.

If you made it this far, thank you! Hopefully you won’t think it was a bad decision.

Reblogged from A SKWAWKBOX announcement. Please read..

No, up YOUR coding! Why the ‘45% more NHS deaths’ is nonsense

How many people died in the US because they couldn’t afford treatment in the first place?

It was claimed – predictably enough by the right-wing media, but shamefully also by Channel 4, who usually do a better job on the NHS – that a patient’s chances of dying in the NHS are an astonishing 45% higher in the NHS than in the US healthcare system.

Even more shamefully, Professor Sir Brian Jarman – the man behind the HSMR system – has been up to his usual tricks.

The professor has been doing a nifty two-step: distancing himself from the headlines and saying his findings are

no more than a trigger to further see whether the large differences in adjusted death rates … indicate possible differences in the quality of hospital care in the two countries

while also playing up to the headlines by declaring himself

quite frankly shocked

by the findings. Neat footwork.

Read more No, up YOUR coding! Why the ‘45% more NHS deaths’ is nonsense 1,447 words.

Another excellent and revealing article from the Skwawkbox; however, I’d like to add statistics are, as evidenced here, akin to a drunk leaning on a lampost; more for support than illumination.

One must also remember that the HSMRs are based on hospital deaths; how many people died in the US because they couldn’t afford treatment in the first place? Think on that before you condemn the NHS based on, as Skwawkbox says, apples and oranges comparisons.

Brazen: private health exploits NHS smears

There can be no more despicable economic act than to play on folks health fears for profit. This is why we must fight for our NHS and refuse private health companies access to the NHS. If I had my way, private provision of health care would be outlawed, just as the Tories are trying to outlaw the NHS through economics and lies.

If any clearer demonstration of the reasons behind the government’s and media’s strategy of escalating, negative NHS coverage was needed, it has been provided by a particularly shameless private health insurance website.

So sure of themselves are private health providers under this deeply, instinctively and intentionally anti-NHS government that this site doesn’t even attempt to be subtle. Instead it brazenly plays on the fear created by the barrage of skewed NHS smear stories to attempt to harvest cash from gullible or ill-informed people:

Reblogged from Brazen: private health exploits NHS smears. 660 words.

Bailey ‘hounding’ investigation dropped. Now there’s a surprise..

So, the police have dropped the investigation into the alleged ‘hounding’ of ‘Cure the NHS’ founder Julie Bailey because of lack of evidence.

Lack of evidence. The police unable to find enough evidence that any of the ‘hounding’ actually happened – despite having conducted an investigation that included interviewing ‘witnesses’ and examining CCTV footage, according to the Express and Star newspaper.

Excerpt from Bailey ‘hounding’ investigation dropped. Now there’s a surprise... Full story 577 words

DWP minister Hoban gets JSA amount WRONG – and jobseeking unaffordable

DWP minister Hoban gets JSA amount WRONG

What I’m about to share with you demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt the reckless, couldn’t-give-a-**** attitude of the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) toward the people it is supposed to be supporting.

It also demonstrates (yet again):

• that the DWP’s concept of the the cost of living, the cost of jobseeking and the reality of life on benefits is utterly divorced from the daily experience of those for whom it is responsible (remember IDS’ ludicrous claim that he could live on £53 a week if he had to?);
• the way in which the DWP, which has become thoroughly malignant under Secretary of State Iain (Duncan) Smith and other ministers, redefines benign words as their polar opposite in their attempt to disguise the attitudes and behaviours that are pushing millions into poverty, and making it harder for the unemployed to get work or even get by, as ‘help’ and ‘support’.

Reblogged from DWP minister Hoban gets JSA amount WRONG – and jobseeking unaffordable 1,478 words.

DWP’s straw-grasping and contortions prove fake psych ‘test’ guilt

 

Regular visitors to this blog [The SKWAWKBOX Blog] (and any Guardian reader) will be familiar with the fake psychometric ‘test’ the DWP and Cabinet Office were inflicting on unemployed people under threat of benefit sanction.

This ‘test’, devised by a US ‘torture guru’, which asked a series of disturbing questions resulting in meaningless answers, was forced on jobseekers without any of the safeguards required of proper psychological experiments, and has resulted in complaints from many qualified psychologists. An investigation into the DWP’s leading psychologist has been initiated by the care professions’ oversight body.

Reblogged from DWP’s straw-grasping and contortions prove fake psych ‘test’ guilt. (1,118 words)

Hoban’s letter on benefit ‘reforms’ rewrites history and the lexicon

Back again, following last nights excellent contribution from a reader with their email to David Cameron and Treasury Minister Sajid Javid, to the theme of responses from MPs and government ministers on so-called benefit ‘reforms’.Another reader wrote to her MP David Rutley, member for Macclesfield, asking the same questions about the government’s flagrant abuse of statistics to mislead the public. To his credit, Rutley did act on her request to take the matter up with the government.He wrote to the Minister for Welfare Reform, Lord Freud. In a move which is entirely typical of Freud’s dismissive, contemptuous attitude to people needing benefits, Freud clearly backheeled the question, because Rutley received a reply from Mark Hoban, the Minister for Employment, who claimed to be the ‘appropriate Minister’.

Reblogged from Hoban’s letter on benefit ‘reforms’ rewrites history and the lexicon. 799 more words

International recognition of what we always knew: ‘inherited mess’ = myth

The Observer published a very interesting article on Sunday, in which its senior economic correspondent, William Keegan, noted that two economists of world renown have recently assessed the economic performance of the last Labour government and come to similar conclusions:The ‘inherited mess’ – that most worn-out of Tory accusations against the Labour party – is a complete myth.

Reblogged from International recognition of what we always knew: 'inherited mess' = myth. 941 more words.

National media: Keogh says 13k NHS deaths! Keogh: er, no I don’t

Please share widely, as this is huge and needs to become well-known before the report is published tomorrow.As I wrote yesterday, the national media is running massive headlines claiming that a report by Sir Bruce Keogh, Medical Director of the NHS, will state that 13,000 people died ‘needlessly’ in the 14 NHS hospitals currently under special investigation for supposed high mortality rates.

via National media: Keogh says 13k NHS deaths! Keogh: er, no I don’t.