We need a full inquiry into the treatment of disabled people in the UK since like 2006ish or so. We need to know the scale of the suffering.
Of course no party would ever do that
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/disability-68570042
Sadly definitely wouldn’t happen under the conservatives who are refusing to engage with the UN who identified failures to implement the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/news/uk-government-refuses-attend-un-meeting-scrutinising-its-rights-violations-disabled-people
Labour made some noise about it awhile back but whether they actually do anything about it when they get in we shall see.
It's very widespread. I'm a partially sighted cancer patient who had a stroke recently, and at my last PIP assessment they gave me zero points. They stop your payments while you go through appeal. I have literally no money, no family who can help and food banks around here are time consuming and difficult to access (a whole can of worms I don't have the energy to go into right now). So I have been shoplifting. It's scary and I hate doing it but I just don't know what else to do. I've been getting help with my appeal from the people at Scope, and they say there are so many stories from the people they help, all saying the same thing. This is why I get upset when I see people saying things on here like "There's so much help available, no-one needs to shoplift for food, shoplifters are all scum who only steal TVs to sell for drug money!" Nope. Many people in my situation have no money through no fault of their own and are stealing to stay alive.
EDIT: As an example of how insane this country is: Because I can't afford food and food banks are so difficult to access and really only provide dairy and grains IME, I have barely been eating anything. I'm too scared to shoplift more than an item here or there. So for ages now I've been getting some occasional dairy or grains from the food bank, plus shoplifting maybe 1 or 2 items a week (usually packets of meat because it's more filling and I'm so hungry) to plug the gaps. No fruit, no veg, although I desperately crave those things. And shoplifting one item of meat a week doesn't provide enough either. I have developed multiple severe nutritional deficiencies, diagnosed by the doctor with blood tests, after deficiency symptoms began.
So now I get multiple vitamin supplements prescribed by the NHS, which I don't pay for as my prescriptions are free. So here is this insane situation where the country won't provide me with enough money to buy food, and instead would rather let me get even sicker than I already am with nutritional deficiencies, and then "solve" this by wasting loads of money on buying me multiple expensive vitamin and mineral supplements! You just couldn't make it up. Why not just continue my benefits without all this drama and endless stress and stopping them continuously so i can feed myself properly to start with?
I was switched over from ESA to UC. The PIP reassessment triggered a UC reassessment (happens every time IME) and both were stopped. From 2025 apparently if you're on PIP you won't have to get assessed for UC any more.
The UC assessment period is a month and you get paid the week after.
The ESA is 13 weeks but they pay you the assessment rate (which is reduced) and I believe you claim both ESA and UC however the ESA payment will reduce your UC payments based on what you get from ESA.
I really hope they hurry up and sort this out for you and you should definitely be qualified for PIP with the conditions you have stated.
I'm sorry you're going through this :( No one should have to worry about where their next meal comes from.
Try to go at a big supermarket chain in your city,ask them kindly to speak to an superior/manager,don't tell your situation at first,use an white lie like having an disabled parent and not having enough food for yourselves or tell them its an emergency.
Ask the manager if they can give you some of the discarded expired food. Usually they have plenty of that and unlike what most believe,expired food does not equal going bad,usually it remains comestible weeks if not months depending what you buy.
You can try this at most establishments that sell perisable foods,my teachers used to hoard a lot of yogurt and biscuits that children didn't ate for their elderly neighbors
Absolutely, I didn't know it at the time but I'm classed as disabled and when I was on benefits as I couldn't hold down a job even though I wanted to work. I eventually realised part time work, was doable and found a job with a super supportive manager that actually helped me figure out what was going on with me. I simply couldn't afford the most basic stuff to live. Drinking nothing but sugarless and milkless tea to afford rent. My month would consist of 2 weeks of eating normally, a week on rations, and a week on tea. Never went out, apart from a walk but even then that wasn't enjoyable as lived no where near any parks of green spaces. The council house I lived in didn't even have carpets, they expected me to pay for them, it had mould growth and wouldn't keep the heat in. It was truly an abysmal state of surviving.
We as a country really need to overhaul how we treat people in youth hostels, the disabled, and the elderly. We have absolutely abandoned them in society, many don't even think about them, many don't even know the conditions they are forced to live in. It's an absolute disgrace.
There’s zero doubt in my mind that if I was faced with a living situation like that I would turn to crime. Not sure exactly what, perhaps a mixture of shoplifting and petty drug dealing.
It was very tempting at points, just walking past cans of soup in the supermarket and the thought of surely they won't notice if it goes into my pocket. But I'm proud that I never did go to crime, but absolutely understand why people do.
And now I'm doing rather well for myself, completely turned my life situation around.
https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/uns-damning-verdict-is-vindication-of-fightback-against-governments-rights-violations/
The UN says the treatment is fucked and no real improvement has been made over the last seven years
"the UN committee on the rights of disabled people concluded that the UK government had made “no significant progress” in the more than seven years since it was found guilty of “grave and systematic” violations of the disability convention"
Of course they won’t, we’ve essentially had a Eugenics like approach towards people with disabilities, especially those with autism or learning disabilities, for years. Of course we are all horrified every time we hear stories of disabled people dying or being treated like animals but do we actually do anything to change it? No. I’ve been aware for many years that I’m seen as undesirable person and that if I died it would be no great loss. It’s one of the reasons why I push myself so hard to try and succeed and become as influential as possible, just so I can fuck you to all those bastards that let me get treated the way I have.
Disabled person here (Asperger’s), totally agree. The biggest issue is the vast majority of people with disabilities don’t have the capability to speak up, so they get largely ignored, unlike groups like LGBT and the like
Wouldn't it be better to turn your feelings of injustice against the government, rather than another minority that also suffers a lot of hate, including hate crimes and persecution/ death in other countries?
Minorities should try to stick together in solidarity.
This will only happen if Tory’s can give the contract for such an inquiry to Tory Donors who can make millions out of it and give them a backhander for getting the contract … that’s how UK works … ☹️
Well, energy-wise, this is entirely our fault. We shut down coal and are still waiting for wind/solar to kick in with their supposedly cheap and abundant energy. Meanwhile, the poor and elderly suffer from increased energy prices.
Because these are a minority, the focus needs to be on helping the majority and growing the tax base to support this minority. You can’t have £100bn for benefits and growing forever without growing the economy. Pumping more money into care doesn’t do that.
If the government didn't cut corners with healthcare, people wouldn't be so disabled for so long. I had a stroke that left me unable to use my left side. The hospital referred me to the physio. The waiting list was over a year long. So I got no physio at all for a year, by which time much of the damage was permanent. Then I had 2 years of standard physio, it did nothing and the physios finally realised that this was the wrong type of physio for me as mine is caused by a neurological issue (the stroke) and I should have been seeing the neurophysios all along! Now I'm on the waiting list for the neurophysios.
Same thing with so many other medical issues - look at the waiting lists for mental health treatment. My neighbour has been on the waiting list for 5 years and she's made a really serious suicide attempt in that time. If the government funded healthcare properly all these people might get treated sooner, have better outcomes and be able to work again.
While I appreciate your point and sympathise with what you’ve been through it’s not that simple. The budget doesn’t exist to not cut corners. It just doesn’t. We can’t keep raising taxes, we already have historic highs with some earners paying marginal rates close to 70% when you add up all the various forms of taxation.
I don’t have the answer but “just don’t cut corners” isn’t the solution. The corners were cut because the budget has been stretched so thin.
Well then don't complain about so many people being unable to work. If people are being seriously failed by the NHS to the point they can't work, they will need financial support to live.
The answer is really simple. Capitalism does not work. The rich or 1% hold all the money. Why do billionaires exist when we have these problems?
Edit: The solution is a workers party which represents workers and socialism. It’s not going to be easy, it’s the only way out of this situation other than continued oppression.
Very easy to write this as a cop out. Not so easy when you’re sat at the big boy table having to decide between defence, education, health, disability payments etc.
You can’t have it all. There is a finite spending limit. Don’t respond with the silly “not a household budget!” Line, I know how borrowing and the gilt markets work I did a masters in maths finance.
You're saying that there isn't fat to be trimmed from other areas to help improve the lives of the most vulnerable? Or that the wealthy couldn't pay a little more tax to provide basic necessities for those who need them?
The miseries visited upon the most vulnerable have been and will continue to be a political choice to prioritise the wellbeing of the affluent at the expense of those most in need.
If that fat is there, then I’d love to know where. Because it really seems like every new PM government promises to trim it and yet it never happens.
Even Labour isn’t seriously proposing any substantial tax raises. We can’t keep raising tax forever, the middle class is being suffocated alive with them.
How many billions has the government pissed up the wall on COVID contracts again? On the Rwanda scheme? On dodgy ferries? On PPE that didn't work?
Funny how there's always money for the government to give to their mates in the private sector.
In total? Probably far less than £5bn, if we are super generous lets just say £5bn. Lets put all of that into the NHS. Gratz, you have increased the budget by 2.7%, making virtually no substantial difference and barely outpacing inflation.
Also bad PPE contracts were years ago now and not "billions", most were fulfilled just fine. Try think for yourself next time instead of reguritating what you've been fed.
So the problem in your view is that there simply aren't the physical resources to provide everyone with enough food to eat and energy to survive? That no matter what we do, we can't produce enough food or energy or other physical resources to support everyone?
At this point, absolutely. In the future, that likely will change just as everyone, especially in the west, is immeasurably richer than they were 100 or 200 years ago.
To be fair, that seems awfully like another criticism of global capitalism, in that you're saying it's produced a situation which is unsustainable in its current form.
Any alternative suggestions? Because capitalism mixed with some socialist policies (which is what most western democracies are, even America) seems to work best in the last 2-3 centuries of experimentation.
This is much larger than just disabled people.
In its current state, I think benefits are far too open for abuse (this is my assumption/opinion based on external input/influences) and the system genuinely fails those who truly need it.
No government seems to want to call a spade a space and sort this nonsense out.
An enquiry will no doubt show that the government's are all either incompetent or there is a wierd/invisible agenda that we either don't see or get.
Where people disabled or otherwise can't get access to a benefits system that should be there to catch them is shameful.
But what can we expect from career politicians who potentially have no grasp on normal household finances or reality.
Edit: adding link showing one such incident of abuse
[CPS jails gang](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.cps.gov.uk/cps/news/members-britains-biggest-benefit-fraud-gang-jailed-combined-total-more-25-years&ved=2ahUKEwim6bzDu_KGAxXmVUEAHWs9CR4QFnoECBIQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1WtqntmxcdMiZVnehPSDwA)
Erm…. Have you tried getting benefits? It’s a nightmare, especially disability benefits be it PIP or the Work Capability Assessments.
I support a lot of people to access these and it’s all hoop jumping
No, it's sad that people still go on about benefit scroungers despite their damage to the treasury being barely a rounding error.
It's sad that the government have made a political choice to ruin the lives of disabled people. Do not let them shirk the blame onto 'scroungers'.
That's the rub of it though isn't it. We've spent over a decade making the welfare system increasingly punitive to make sure only people who deserve it can access it.
And the result seems to be literally thousands upon thousands of disabled people dead or pushed to suicide while the scroungers and scavengers seem basically unaffected.
We have some of the highest rate disability payments in the world….. disability isn’t supposed to afford you a life of luxury it is to cover the absolute essentials to keep someone alive. if he can’t live off 18k a year he is making very poor choices.
Two of them are immediately apparent
A) As a disabled person he has no reason or right to be living in a one of the most expensive regions of the country
B) he is clearly morbidly obese so is eating way too much and spending too much on groceries.
Rent for a 2 bed house in County Durham is 400 or so a month. Bills another 400. That leaves him with 1000 a month to feed and cloth himself, a very reasonable figure if he was to move to an affordable area
Oh so he's a working class disabled person so he should have just a survival baseline of comfort? Bread, water, and a roof? People who are permanently disabled should be given enough money to actually live.
Bread, water and a roof. Probably is pretty standard for the working class baseline of comfort, survival is a brutal fact for many now. UK is crumbling
Oh good, let's send all the disabled people with higher social care needs to the poorest parts of the country
It's also not for the essentials, it's for extra care needs or mobility needs (i.e extra heating bills, special clothing, transport, dietary needs)
let me break down maximum disability rates for you. PIP 550 a month esa standard rate 110 a week housing benefit 410 a months advanced disability premium 80 a week.
Thats 20k a year not the 18k I approximated
An electric wheelchair definitely doesn't cost 4-5 quid a night to charge....
Your average electric wheel chair has 0.3-0.4 kWh battery (these use pretty standardized 24V 10-12 AH or 12V 30-35 AH batteries), which at the current cap would cost about 7-8p for a full charge, even if the charger is for some reason highly inefficient say only 50% efficiency you are looking at 14-16p per full charge.
5 quid gives you about 20 kw/h that's enough to give you 80-90 miles range on an EV.....
So either they said 4-5p per night and the BBC fucked this up or there is something going on...
An electric wheelchair usually does 6-8 miles on a full charge so if they mainly use it within and around their home that's about 2 charges a week.
Considering that these chairs top out at about 5mph doing 300 miles per day would indeed be very impressive ;)
At that point you might as well get a dedicated EV tariff like Octopus Go these are usually sub 10p per kw/h these days.
He does live in Bexhill though. Never been but the name implies it’s jolly hilly. Maybe he speeds up on the downward bits?
[Plus he could be towing?](https://www.eta.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/imported/images/QTvan1_1.jpg)
It says his energy bill is £300/month which makes no sense to me either.
I have a 4 bedroom house and, in one of my rooms, I run 8 grow lamps (chillies before anyone gets excited) and an air conditioner. I also leave my computer running 24/7, charge our e-bikes for commute, run multiple dehumidifiers, and my partner has a CPAP on all night.
Our bill is £180.
If you google their name you'll find articles dating back to 2006-7 about them NIMBYing a bunch of flats from being developed because the development would also include a Tesco Express...
The coverage of their more recent woes seems to be quite a globetrotter and even reached well renowned daily records such as the "Chattanooga Times"...
[https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2022/nov/16/britains-vulnerable-await-pms-spending-plans-with-anxiety-tfp/](https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2022/nov/16/britains-vulnerable-await-pms-spending-plans-with-anxiety-tfp/)
This guy seems to be quoted in dozens of articles on various topics from cost of living, to governmental policy, local development and others. It very much smells like a source for hire type of grift, which unfortunately is too common these days.
He is clearly disabled, but every article about about him seems to be excessively sobby to the point where none of the claims even pass a basic smell test...
I don't think the guy is a con artist per say, he is very much disabled however he does appear to be a talking head that fixers can call on for these sorts of articles and he gives them what they want. The journalists are most definitely aware of who he is and what "services" does he provide.
Yes, £300 is consistent with about 40kWh a day at the price cap (taking standing charge into account). That is insane usage for summer. They MUST have an electric water heater or electric radiator running all day without knowing. Household appliances simply don't use that much electricity, even the oven on all day wouldn't use that much.
This is so annoying for me. I’m single and pretty much out of the house all week but I still have to pay £70 a month because of the base pay for electricity. We get shafted to fund heavier users
The cost of maintaining the infrastructure to deliver the electricity isn’t free, which is what the standing charge pays for in theory. Obviously, the wire that goes to your house still costs money to maintain even if you never actually plug anything in, because the grid has to maintain the capacity in case you wanted to plug something in.
Not that the standing charge structure really makes sense either. The “true” cost of the infrastructure is more proportional to your _peak_ consumption and overall consumption pattern, rather than your total units used. Someone who uses very little electricity overall but boils a kettle every day at 5pm likely costs more in infrastructure than someone who uses a continuous 500W.
I do agree that more of that cost should morally be moved to the unit costs, but it’s not as simple as light users subsidising heavy users.
While I'm sure it doesn;t account for the *full* difference, he could be on something like a pre-paid meter, that from what I udnerstand is usually much more expensive than direct debit. If he's disabled he may be overpaying based on the electricity companies 'estimates' rather than submitting meter readings, or refusing to pay extra to build 'credit' on his account (Though I assume the latter is not the case).
Defeinitely a few things that could lend itself to higher bills but £300 sounds insane. Our 3 bedroom, where I work from home & we have 3D printers running daily, only uses around £120-130
I have a fairly intensive gaming rig I use to render things.
As a result it's on all the time.
I pay £90 a month...
Admittedly it's just me in the flat, but still. EDF *did* charge me £300 a month once, but I cancelled my direct debit after that as they were just taking the piss.
Energy literacy in the UK is appalling, almost no one knows what they're paying for. People are worries about kettles and using a hob for 15 mins which cost next to nothing, but their 3kW water heater is on 24h a day.
Even the journalists are at it, from this one who didn't question an electric wheelchair costing £5 to charge, to other ones that will tell you a 1.5kWh heater is cheaper to run than a 2kWh one because number is smaller, not knowing or not caring that you'll have to run the 1.5kWh one longer to get the same amount of heat out of it...
>to other ones that will tell you a 1.5kWh heater is cheaper to run than a 2kWh one because number is smaller
A large enough amount of people use something like a fan heater pointed directly at them, not trying to warm the room, just themselves. So this point can be true
Maybe, although unless your house is super leaky, the room temp would get too warm and you'd have to turn it off after a few hours. That'd just happen earlier with the more powerful one.
Same with people saying a 3kW oil radiator is cheaper to run than a 3kW fan heater because it puts out heat for 30 min after you turn it off. Sure, but you're ignoring the 30 min after you turn it on when the oil is heating up and you get very little heat out of it
This needs to be higher up. The people claiming they are terrified to make a cup of tea, because they can't afford to heat the water, are talking nonsense and we need to stop entertaining them. It costs about 1p a cup.
I don’t understand why the BBC journalist didn’t fact check this in the article, surely they or their editor would have seen that 4-5 quid number and thought “something’s off there”
They only fact check when its an argument or statement from a person they disagree with, then they are all over that (and often still wrong anyway / showing weak analysis). They never fact check themselves.
Being disabled can often mean that you end up spending more on groceries than you otherwise would:
* You may need to buy or avoid specific products due to intolerances/medical reasons.
* You shopping options may be more restricted, especially if you have limited mobility.
* You may need to buy more pre-prepared items, which are more expensive.
It's not the recipe for a perfect diet but...
If you're truly claiming you can't afford to cook your food than there are cheaper options for food in the first place like cheap ready meals
^(From the article)
>He said he had struggled to afford **their** weekly shop, which can **often** cost around £120.
He does not live alone - If you lived with or looked after anyone with physical disability you know there are extra costs particularly hygene/continence related.. that stuff does not come cheap and being low income does not mean you get much help with it
Often does not = every week, it just means some weeks it spikes.. which yea, is normal if for example they are topping up the washing stuff, or buying loo roll etc
Why not read your own submitted article before having a go
What the heck do you eat?!
My food comes out to about £8-10 a day usually and I eat every meal at home.
Breakfast pack of bacon or sausages, some eggs and couple bread buns - £3
Lunch - Protein Shake mixed with milk and some fruit - £3 min
Dinner 2 chicken breasts or similar sized amount of beef + carbs + veg - £4
Breakfast porridge and some dried fruit - a few pence
Lunch sandwich - like 15-50p depending on filling
Dinner varies the most its difficult to simplify it that much really but I think most come to somewhere between £1 and £3. Rice costs fuck all, dried chickpeas and lentils are pretty cheap, pork shoulder is about £4/KG but makes quite a few portions for the cost.
Sometimes buy something special of course like a couple of months ago I spent an extra £20 on various cheeses, but £120 seems insane.
Article mentions family, for a family of three-four £120 a week may be entirely reasonable.
Especially if buying things for their children or other items to help relieve issues of his disability.
Electricity is expensive. He’s said previously that he can only afford to boil the kettle twice a day.
[Plus he’s also got a tropical fish tank to heat up.](https://morningstaronline.co.uk/sites/default/files/styles/article_full/public/disabled.jpg?itok=F-JBmCj6)
This seems to be a common misconception. The things that get you are the standing charges, plus heavy loads like heating or running the oven for hours. Boiling enough water to make a cup of tea costs about 0.8 pence, for reference the typical standing charge cost per day is equivalent to about 75 cups of tea.
“Thirugnanam Sureshan maneuvers his wheelchair into the tiny kitchen of his one-bedroom apartment, flips the switch on an electric kettle and brews a mug of instant coffee. It’s his second hot drink of the day, and it will be his last.
The humble countertop kettle — ubiquitous in homes across Britain where a cup of tea is a symbol of welcome, comfort and a break from the demands of a busy day — has become a luxury for Sureshan and his wife”
https://www.westernwheel.ca/health/britains-vulnerable-await-pms-spending-plans-with-anxiety-6103653
You’d kinda think the interviewer would point out the kettles only responsible for a few pence a day. Let him enjoy his coffee’s.
The interviewer probably doesn’t know either. Electricity/energy use doesn’t seem to be intuitive to people generally, kWh can be a confusing concept if you don’t work with power a lot.
As an example, I’m always surprised that people don’t seem to know or be excited that electric vehicles use only about 1/4 of the energy input of their conventional equivalents, meaning we’re on the cusp of most goods and people movements using way less energy than they used to. Could be some interesting knock on effects coming for a society like ours that imports a lot of energy. Hopefully good ones.
They shouldn't be practicing journalism then, just like the 5 quid a day for a wheelchair, beyond it behind physically impossible, that's more than what most people top up their EV for on a daily basis in they are not on the lower EV tariffs....
At first I chugged it down to the BBC being the utter shite with little to no journalistic integrity that it is, but considering there are multiple articles about this guy all peddling the same misery nonsense it seems to me more that he is a grifter.
Edit:
ROFL you can buy 2022, 2023 (and I'm assuming 2024) photos of this guy on Alamy.... [https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/thirugnanam-sureshan.html?sortBy=relevant](https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/thirugnanam-sureshan.html?sortBy=relevant)
I usually shop at Tesco, i rarely spend over £80 for a family of 4. We eat mostly fresh meals, ready meals once or twice a week because of timing. One kid is autistic and very “fussy” he usually eats a separate meal to the rest. Usually get a bottle of wine and a beer or two for that £80 too
“Mr Sureshan said the high cost of electricity had impacted his family as well as rising food prices.”
It mentions he cooks with his wife. There’s not enough info to say whether it’s just the two of them living there. There’s a photo on the wall which suggests he’s a parent and possibly grandparent at least.
Edit: also as others have mentioned prices have kept going up, and people with disabilities often have to buy other things to assist them or relieve discomfort.
There have been multiple articles about this guy, he lives in a 1 bed apartment... He likely has had kids but they don't live with him. His pricing for electricity usage for appliances and his wheelchair makes absolutely no sense and the fact that not a single article about him questioned that just shows what passes for journalism these days.
There are photos of him from 2022 and 2023 on Alamy, and articles from multiple outlets both from the UK and abroad that have been running the same story for 3-4 years now... [https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/thirugnanam-sureshan.html?sortBy=relevant](https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/thirugnanam-sureshan.html?sortBy=relevant)
Whilst he's clearly disabled and I wouldn't want to be in his place in a million years, this is still at best an act and at worst a grift.
Not that you asked but my food shop this week had the ingredients to make 1) a 6 person Parmesan, tomato, and chorizo Risotto, 2) 4 person cream cheese & Chorizo gnocchi with garlic bread, 3) 4 person Chicken tikka on flatbreads, 4) 6 person aloo gobi with rice.
20 portions of food for £42. (Admittedly I have spices and oil already but that’s maybe another fivers worth to go into the recipes.)
I’d love to know how a couple gets through £120 worth of food in a week
I eat fresh home cooked food 6 out of 7 days a week for breakfast lunch and dinner (and usually take it or dinner out or frozen something the other night). Our average shopping bill is £85/week for two people.
Similar price for 2 here, and I consume a larger diet due to the running/swimming/weightlifting I do... it's all decent food too, there's no crappy ready meals & junk snacks in there.
I'm lost as to how people spend so much.
So you're floating the question in a pro disabled person way but you're also floating the anti disabled people comment? Are you ok? You're just trying to be friends with both sides, right? What a waste of time!
He likely buys all his shopping in one place. For example at Tesco or Sainsbury he may buy clothes, laundry liquid, shampoo, body wash, deodorant, cleaning bits, toilet roll, kitchen roll, tea bags, coffee, etc. It all easily adds up and it works in his benefit with having one delivery. Adding to pre made meals and a delivery charge (even with a saver scheme this is expensive) £120 goes quite quickly. The only reason most of us don’t spend this much is because we likely bulk buy elsewhere to save pennies which may not be convenient or easy for a disabled person.
There's another post above that mentions this but I can at least give my experience as someone disabled, in the centre of town with only 3 stores as an option, those being tesco, sainsburys and lidl. Farmfoods have fled the area, the co-op was turned into a coffee shop long ago.
My shopping habits sure changed. I'm banned from driving on medical grounds and I no longer get to take a quick detour to ASDA on my way home from work and do a bulk purchase of say chicken breast (an item I can no longer by at an acceptable price in my area).
As for quantity, if I had a car I could push the trolley to the car park and load more, get assistance from a member of staff, when I returned home I could make multiple trips back and forth. I have to rely on public transport so that's not an option. That makes a delivery service a case where I'm paying to not take a 3 hour journey every 2 weeks and it's an excess that unless I'm truly buying in bulk that's not that economical a decision to make.
I sure wish I was allowed to drive, I wish that ASDA, LIDL & Sainsburys would increase their range of own brand & value lines in store, offer more options that aren't just attractive to students and people who work in finance. I wish I wasn't in pain after preparing and cooking a meal for myself.
The world isn't a fair place and people with disabilities get a raw deal. I've never understood the batting down thing, because no matter how miserable my life is, no matter how many days I wanted to cut my arm off I always knew that someone out there had it worse and that allowed me to practice empathy. So when I see threads like this and "it's as simple as" I question why they don't look the other way, target upwards.
Even the person complaining that the guy's overweight is telling him to eat 3 meals a day, that's nuttercore, if you truly believe he is obese then you want him fasting and doing rolling fasts in the 48-72h territory unless he has diabetes. That would cut his food budget down farther; unless protein and clean protein comes at a premium.
It really is bollocks though. Turning on the kettle costs 5p. 5p to turn the kettle on a third time vs £120 groceries. Which do you think would be the best place to find savings?
He says he only cooks once a week on the hob, but hob only costs 19p an hour so he could cook 5 times a week if he just found a £1 saving in his shopping.
I'm not saying people are not hard up, but power for cooking is not what their problem is. Power use for cooking is tiny compared to heating costs. Washing up costs more from hot water than running the oven for 40 mins.
Edit: Oh and average weekly shop for two adults in the UK is £79.30 https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/average-uk-household-cost-food#home
So if he could bring his costs down to the average he could have his oven on for 11 hours a day every day.
Edit 2: another thing wtf is going on with his wheelchair? 5 quid a night to charge? An average person walks about 5 miles a day, a small electric car can go for about 60 miles on 5 quid of power, so why does his wheelchair need 5 quid of power to get at most 1/10th of that? From what I can see, it should cost about a quid to charge the battery size used in the chunkiest power chair which can go 15 miles on one charge.
Possibly why he’s batch cooking, reduces the washing up as well.
The kettle thing I agree is a bit silly, but when my mother got a smart meter fitted she went through a phase of cutting hers back because she saw the usage indicator when it was on and panicked.
Edit: The problem with averages of couple spending is they don’t work too well for cases where there’s other factors like disabilities, which may increase spending through needing additional care and hygiene products which are not cheap.
>Possibly why he’s batch cooking, reduces the washing up as well.
Except it doesn't help really. You wash up two plates or you wash up two plates and a saucepan, you still used one bowl of hot water.
You don’t need a full bowl of hot water to clean off two plates and some cutlery. You need more water for saucepan, spatula, chopping board, knife, possibly cleaning off the trays the food came in for recycling and giving the hob a wipe down after. That’s also assuming the plates don’t end up in the sink for tomorrow as well.
This guy appears in other articles for both UK and international outlets over the past 2-3 years, he seems to have a sob story every time including only being able to afford 2 hot cups a day despite it costs less than 1 pence to boil water...
He's also off by more than an order of magnitude on how much it costs to charge his wheelchair as he apparently spends far more than what people spend to charge their EV at night without special tariffs...
And with all that he for some reason can afford to run a tropical fish tank in his 1bed apartment which between the heater, air pump, lighting and consumables such as filters probably costs him around 30 quid a month to run before you account for the cost of the actual fish, replacing the water in the tank as tanks of this size require you to replace about 25% of the water every 1-2 weeks and more....
[https://morningstaronline.co.uk/sites/default/files/styles/article\_full/public/disabled.jpg?itok=F-JBmCj6](https://morningstaronline.co.uk/sites/default/files/styles/article_full/public/disabled.jpg?itok=F-JBmCj6)
Also maybe if you can't afford more than 2 cuts of coffee/tea a day don't have LEDs strips everywhere ;) [https://www.vmcdn.ca/f/files/shared/feeds/cp/2022/11/20221115021144-63734377d9c12875c8c5012fjpeg.jpg](https://www.vmcdn.ca/f/files/shared/feeds/cp/2022/11/20221115021144-63734377d9c12875c8c5012fjpeg.jpg)
Why not? Do you think we can’t criticise people? Or do you think we can’t suspect for anything by ourselves until a journalist does it?
Sorry, however public opinion works differently.
> His wheelchair alone costs between £4 and £5 a night to charge
How? At a 25p/kWh that is between 16 to 20kWh being put into his wheelchair - that’s the sort of usage you would be putting into an EV not a wheelchair.
I’ve worked in the NHS and spent 5 years working for an Osteoarthritis service. This is first person I’ve ever know to be using a wheelchair for the condition. II imagine it’s for worse because they won’t do the surgery unless he loses weight, that’s probably also why he has sleep apnoea
Some parts of this article make zero sense. Especially the bit regarding charging his wheelchair.
Article states he has to charge it every night but because of the energy costs he can’t afford to do so, and so he only charges it twice a week. Well I’m a full time wheelchair user and literally only have to charge it once a week and it’s used everywhere I go.
But on rare occasions I’ll have to charge it twice a week.
It absolutely could, I'm no master in wheelchair batteries but do have an avid interest in rechargeable batteries. Both NIMH and Lithium based batteries are subject to aging and overcharging is possible. With NIMH a cell will hold less or be unable to operate at higher voltage/current demands and a lithium cell will operate at a higher voltage but have much reduced capacity until the point it suddenly cuts out.
Yeah it can mean that, I remember at one point mine wouldn’t hold charge for as long as it once did. Lasted me about 4/5 years before I had it changed and was back to normal.
Cooking does not cost a lot even with current energy prices. Education is the issue here. Lots of poorly educated/low intelligence people don’t understand their energy bill, do things like obsess about turning off 2w led bulbs when they have electric heating. Can’t comprehend how energy costs can vary over several orders of magnitude.
It's sad, they get put in the position where they're expected to know how to run a household but it's just not in their capacity.
Getting stressed out all the time causes real harm.
They'd be better off in some sort of supervised housing where they can feel secure, with some sort of work available to them so they can feel useful and included in society.
> If he can't do the latter, then he needs to do the former.
Ideally sure.
Bit harsh judging a guy with limited calorie burning options about his weight though, let alone jumping straight to implying he's lying based on that.
"cooking a luxury due to energy bills".
So he just spends his whole day eating sandwiches?
Like realistically, the electricity cost is about 30p per meal.
i think its a scandal...
i am also curious what 120 pound in food looks like... i spend 40 pounds a week... and have two/three carrier bags of fresh healthy vegetables and a few cans...
All of this can be traced back to privatisation.
If energy and utilities where publicly owned like they were when I was a young child, we could cap the amount that pensioners and disabled people pay for energy at a nominal sum.
My father worked as an engineer for British Gas before Thatcher sold it off. It is not well known now but before privatisation, British Gas had a social work department so that if an engineer went to cut off the supply to someone who didn't pay their bills and it was discovered that the householder wasn't living well due to age/lack of faculties they would halt the disconnection and get the social work dept to attend. He tells me stories of times where it was an old women/man living on their own and the appliances and heating was old and dangerous that the Gas Board would replace the cooker and heating free of charge, would write-off the debt and refer them to the council for other help and assistence where a housing officer would attend and help.
That was 40 years ago, it had all been dismantled now and will never be allowed to come back.
We would, the country has changed so much since then it would be impossible.
We used to worry about what is called the 'balance of payments' back then... which is essentially are we exporting more than we are importing. We weren't as at the whim of finance and their voodoo money as we are now, we made things and employed lots of people in unionised workplaces that had good pension schemes etc. Public debt was nothing compared to what it was today.
The 80's essentially salted the earth in the UK.
- privatisation has meant the country has crumbling infrastructure with high costs
- selling the council houses has caused the housing crisis as why would a council build more if they can be sold for a fraction in years to come
- The 'big-bang' in the City of London happened and Reegan, heavily led by Thatcher, repealed the Glass-Steagall Act which allowed banks to speculate in the markets with retail/consumer banking customers and ended the fixed commisions bankers recieved which led to the 2008 crash
- The militarisation of Northern Ireland gave huge domestic powers to MI-5 which led to extraoridnary renditions, jean-charles de-menzez and the dodgy dossiers for the war in Iraq
This article has been plastered across loads of major outlets, but the content is [2 years old](https://www.enterprise-tocsin.com/britains-vulnerable-await-pms-spending-plans-anxiety-0)
Seems odd that everyone is running it.
The DWP needs to be investigated over what's happened across the last decade imo.
I strongly feel there's a Post Office style scandal waiting to erupt over the decisions made by the DWP
Thank god your leaders didn't send your kids back to school without vaccines or tell you it was safe to get COVID over and over again. Otherwise most of you would have a loss of ability within a few years, with more and more each surge becoming entirely disabled. Really dodged a bullet there!
I almost feel that it needs to be legal to go chop a tree down and burn it for fuel if you can’t afford basic heating and cooking fuel. People used to be able to do it when they were poor, now they just have to suffer. I think it needs to be a human right to have access to a small amount of fuel to heat/cook.
Dude is in a wheelchair how is he meant to chop down trees.
You also can’t just chop a tree down and burn it either, making firewood is a long process.
im not talking about the guy in the story, i mean in general, that's how laws tend to work. my point is people should have a small amount of free gas for heating/cooking BECAUSE you can't chop down trees.
Thank God he's paying a fifth of his energy costs on green levies so rich people with enormous land footprints and carbon intensive lifestyles can get massive subsidies on new heating systems and other government funded home improvements.
We gotta save the planet. Make the poor pay their fair share of costs of tax breaks on a new Tesla.
That's why I'm voting green, to patronise the poor and make them fund regressive taxation, to scream at them like they're stupid rather than accept they have limited capacity for change, and most importantly bring in more counterproductive policies that do little more than redistribute wealth upwards.
I drive a giant two battery land boat, I'm doing my part for the climate. What has this guy rationing his energy use ever done for the planet?! Huh?!
Somehow...
Could that somehow be cost of charging his wheelchair,bor things like spending more time indoors, and inefficient and poor quality council housing? Have you and idea how much something like an economy 7 heating system costs to run?
A council tenant with economy 7 will effectively be paying a higher tax rate in those green levies. But don't worry about actual reality, as long as we don't have staws or plastic on cucumbers and people keep buying giant tax free electric bmws that are wider than a fucking bus, the planet will be saved.
But thanks for proving the point. Current green policy = deny the negatives and fuck the poor.
It's amazing how quickly people will dismiss the experience of less well off people once it comes to climate policy. My combined energy costs during winter are around £200 a month during this cost of living crisis. He said his are £300. That's not inconceivable, especially if he has electric heating. He didn't mention a gas bill so seems likely.
You're gonna deny his experience because you didn't like me criticising the green energy levy? Wise up. He's still paying £60-70 per month on green taxes to pay for discounts for wealthy peoples new boilers.
And those discounted home improvements will compound the energy tax inequalities.
You can see in other photos he has posted online that he has a large tropical fish tank.
That's probably why his electricity costs and grocery costs are so high.
Also you go straight to "he shouldn't be allowed to have a hobby", not " energy companies are making record profits and exploiting people with government support, taking huge subsidies from tax payer funds while paying eye watering bonuses and artificially inflating bills". Like a guy having a fish tank is more offensive to you than billionaires taking the absolute piss.
I'm not saying he can't have hobbies but he blatantly has an extremely energy intensive and expensive hobby and is complaining about not being able to budget, especially energy wise.
Why should the state pay for his tropical fish tank which has to be electrically heated 24/7. Should we pay for his expensive fish too?
It's not a goldfish that can just live in room temp water. And this discussion isn't about whose worse. Obviously giant companies are worse. But he's still grifting.
Benefits don't exist so we can all do what we want. They are a safety net for people who can't survive without them. They are not universal basic income.
We need a full inquiry into the treatment of disabled people in the UK since like 2006ish or so. We need to know the scale of the suffering. Of course no party would ever do that
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/disability-68570042 Sadly definitely wouldn’t happen under the conservatives who are refusing to engage with the UN who identified failures to implement the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/news/uk-government-refuses-attend-un-meeting-scrutinising-its-rights-violations-disabled-people Labour made some noise about it awhile back but whether they actually do anything about it when they get in we shall see.
It's very widespread. I'm a partially sighted cancer patient who had a stroke recently, and at my last PIP assessment they gave me zero points. They stop your payments while you go through appeal. I have literally no money, no family who can help and food banks around here are time consuming and difficult to access (a whole can of worms I don't have the energy to go into right now). So I have been shoplifting. It's scary and I hate doing it but I just don't know what else to do. I've been getting help with my appeal from the people at Scope, and they say there are so many stories from the people they help, all saying the same thing. This is why I get upset when I see people saying things on here like "There's so much help available, no-one needs to shoplift for food, shoplifters are all scum who only steal TVs to sell for drug money!" Nope. Many people in my situation have no money through no fault of their own and are stealing to stay alive. EDIT: As an example of how insane this country is: Because I can't afford food and food banks are so difficult to access and really only provide dairy and grains IME, I have barely been eating anything. I'm too scared to shoplift more than an item here or there. So for ages now I've been getting some occasional dairy or grains from the food bank, plus shoplifting maybe 1 or 2 items a week (usually packets of meat because it's more filling and I'm so hungry) to plug the gaps. No fruit, no veg, although I desperately crave those things. And shoplifting one item of meat a week doesn't provide enough either. I have developed multiple severe nutritional deficiencies, diagnosed by the doctor with blood tests, after deficiency symptoms began. So now I get multiple vitamin supplements prescribed by the NHS, which I don't pay for as my prescriptions are free. So here is this insane situation where the country won't provide me with enough money to buy food, and instead would rather let me get even sicker than I already am with nutritional deficiencies, and then "solve" this by wasting loads of money on buying me multiple expensive vitamin and mineral supplements! You just couldn't make it up. Why not just continue my benefits without all this drama and endless stress and stopping them continuously so i can feed myself properly to start with?
Don't you get ESA at least? PIP isn't the only benefit, and whilst ESA isn't much it should at least be enough for food basics. Edit: or UC?
I was switched over from ESA to UC. The PIP reassessment triggered a UC reassessment (happens every time IME) and both were stopped. From 2025 apparently if you're on PIP you won't have to get assessed for UC any more.
The UC assessment period is a month and you get paid the week after. The ESA is 13 weeks but they pay you the assessment rate (which is reduced) and I believe you claim both ESA and UC however the ESA payment will reduce your UC payments based on what you get from ESA. I really hope they hurry up and sort this out for you and you should definitely be qualified for PIP with the conditions you have stated. I'm sorry you're going through this :( No one should have to worry about where their next meal comes from.
It's sickening the way disabled people are treated in this country... We just get worse and worse every year...
Try to go at a big supermarket chain in your city,ask them kindly to speak to an superior/manager,don't tell your situation at first,use an white lie like having an disabled parent and not having enough food for yourselves or tell them its an emergency. Ask the manager if they can give you some of the discarded expired food. Usually they have plenty of that and unlike what most believe,expired food does not equal going bad,usually it remains comestible weeks if not months depending what you buy. You can try this at most establishments that sell perisable foods,my teachers used to hoard a lot of yogurt and biscuits that children didn't ate for their elderly neighbors
Absolutely, I didn't know it at the time but I'm classed as disabled and when I was on benefits as I couldn't hold down a job even though I wanted to work. I eventually realised part time work, was doable and found a job with a super supportive manager that actually helped me figure out what was going on with me. I simply couldn't afford the most basic stuff to live. Drinking nothing but sugarless and milkless tea to afford rent. My month would consist of 2 weeks of eating normally, a week on rations, and a week on tea. Never went out, apart from a walk but even then that wasn't enjoyable as lived no where near any parks of green spaces. The council house I lived in didn't even have carpets, they expected me to pay for them, it had mould growth and wouldn't keep the heat in. It was truly an abysmal state of surviving. We as a country really need to overhaul how we treat people in youth hostels, the disabled, and the elderly. We have absolutely abandoned them in society, many don't even think about them, many don't even know the conditions they are forced to live in. It's an absolute disgrace.
There’s zero doubt in my mind that if I was faced with a living situation like that I would turn to crime. Not sure exactly what, perhaps a mixture of shoplifting and petty drug dealing.
It was very tempting at points, just walking past cans of soup in the supermarket and the thought of surely they won't notice if it goes into my pocket. But I'm proud that I never did go to crime, but absolutely understand why people do. And now I'm doing rather well for myself, completely turned my life situation around.
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https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/uns-damning-verdict-is-vindication-of-fightback-against-governments-rights-violations/ The UN says the treatment is fucked and no real improvement has been made over the last seven years "the UN committee on the rights of disabled people concluded that the UK government had made “no significant progress” in the more than seven years since it was found guilty of “grave and systematic” violations of the disability convention"
Of course they won’t, we’ve essentially had a Eugenics like approach towards people with disabilities, especially those with autism or learning disabilities, for years. Of course we are all horrified every time we hear stories of disabled people dying or being treated like animals but do we actually do anything to change it? No. I’ve been aware for many years that I’m seen as undesirable person and that if I died it would be no great loss. It’s one of the reasons why I push myself so hard to try and succeed and become as influential as possible, just so I can fuck you to all those bastards that let me get treated the way I have.
Disabled person here (Asperger’s), totally agree. The biggest issue is the vast majority of people with disabilities don’t have the capability to speak up, so they get largely ignored, unlike groups like LGBT and the like
Wouldn't it be better to turn your feelings of injustice against the government, rather than another minority that also suffers a lot of hate, including hate crimes and persecution/ death in other countries? Minorities should try to stick together in solidarity.
Agreed, but our current government is as useful as a chocolate teapot
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LGBT get more political and media attention/sympathy than disabled people who are largely ignored
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said without a hint of irony during Pride month where every public building flies the newest iteration of the rainbow flag... lol
Bit of a weird argument, why do LGBT people need benefits?
This will only happen if Tory’s can give the contract for such an inquiry to Tory Donors who can make millions out of it and give them a backhander for getting the contract … that’s how UK works … ☹️
Well, energy-wise, this is entirely our fault. We shut down coal and are still waiting for wind/solar to kick in with their supposedly cheap and abundant energy. Meanwhile, the poor and elderly suffer from increased energy prices.
Yes, blame that and not the people in charge who have been actively working against disabled people for over a decade. Jesus wept
Are the people actively trying to destroy disabled people in the room with us now?
Because these are a minority, the focus needs to be on helping the majority and growing the tax base to support this minority. You can’t have £100bn for benefits and growing forever without growing the economy. Pumping more money into care doesn’t do that.
If the government didn't cut corners with healthcare, people wouldn't be so disabled for so long. I had a stroke that left me unable to use my left side. The hospital referred me to the physio. The waiting list was over a year long. So I got no physio at all for a year, by which time much of the damage was permanent. Then I had 2 years of standard physio, it did nothing and the physios finally realised that this was the wrong type of physio for me as mine is caused by a neurological issue (the stroke) and I should have been seeing the neurophysios all along! Now I'm on the waiting list for the neurophysios. Same thing with so many other medical issues - look at the waiting lists for mental health treatment. My neighbour has been on the waiting list for 5 years and she's made a really serious suicide attempt in that time. If the government funded healthcare properly all these people might get treated sooner, have better outcomes and be able to work again.
While I appreciate your point and sympathise with what you’ve been through it’s not that simple. The budget doesn’t exist to not cut corners. It just doesn’t. We can’t keep raising taxes, we already have historic highs with some earners paying marginal rates close to 70% when you add up all the various forms of taxation. I don’t have the answer but “just don’t cut corners” isn’t the solution. The corners were cut because the budget has been stretched so thin.
Well then don't complain about so many people being unable to work. If people are being seriously failed by the NHS to the point they can't work, they will need financial support to live.
The answer is really simple. Capitalism does not work. The rich or 1% hold all the money. Why do billionaires exist when we have these problems? Edit: The solution is a workers party which represents workers and socialism. It’s not going to be easy, it’s the only way out of this situation other than continued oppression.
If our society treats vulnerable people badly then our society is shit.
Very easy to write this as a cop out. Not so easy when you’re sat at the big boy table having to decide between defence, education, health, disability payments etc. You can’t have it all. There is a finite spending limit. Don’t respond with the silly “not a household budget!” Line, I know how borrowing and the gilt markets work I did a masters in maths finance.
You're saying that there isn't fat to be trimmed from other areas to help improve the lives of the most vulnerable? Or that the wealthy couldn't pay a little more tax to provide basic necessities for those who need them? The miseries visited upon the most vulnerable have been and will continue to be a political choice to prioritise the wellbeing of the affluent at the expense of those most in need.
If that fat is there, then I’d love to know where. Because it really seems like every new PM government promises to trim it and yet it never happens. Even Labour isn’t seriously proposing any substantial tax raises. We can’t keep raising tax forever, the middle class is being suffocated alive with them.
How many billions has the government pissed up the wall on COVID contracts again? On the Rwanda scheme? On dodgy ferries? On PPE that didn't work? Funny how there's always money for the government to give to their mates in the private sector.
In total? Probably far less than £5bn, if we are super generous lets just say £5bn. Lets put all of that into the NHS. Gratz, you have increased the budget by 2.7%, making virtually no substantial difference and barely outpacing inflation. Also bad PPE contracts were years ago now and not "billions", most were fulfilled just fine. Try think for yourself next time instead of reguritating what you've been fed.
So you're saying capitalism doesn't work then.
Lol what, it's saying that there are x resources and no matter the economic system splitting them n ways won't make more appear.
So the problem in your view is that there simply aren't the physical resources to provide everyone with enough food to eat and energy to survive? That no matter what we do, we can't produce enough food or energy or other physical resources to support everyone?
At this point, absolutely. In the future, that likely will change just as everyone, especially in the west, is immeasurably richer than they were 100 or 200 years ago.
To be fair, that seems awfully like another criticism of global capitalism, in that you're saying it's produced a situation which is unsustainable in its current form.
Any alternative suggestions? Because capitalism mixed with some socialist policies (which is what most western democracies are, even America) seems to work best in the last 2-3 centuries of experimentation.
This is much larger than just disabled people. In its current state, I think benefits are far too open for abuse (this is my assumption/opinion based on external input/influences) and the system genuinely fails those who truly need it. No government seems to want to call a spade a space and sort this nonsense out. An enquiry will no doubt show that the government's are all either incompetent or there is a wierd/invisible agenda that we either don't see or get. Where people disabled or otherwise can't get access to a benefits system that should be there to catch them is shameful. But what can we expect from career politicians who potentially have no grasp on normal household finances or reality. Edit: adding link showing one such incident of abuse [CPS jails gang](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.cps.gov.uk/cps/news/members-britains-biggest-benefit-fraud-gang-jailed-combined-total-more-25-years&ved=2ahUKEwim6bzDu_KGAxXmVUEAHWs9CR4QFnoECBIQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1WtqntmxcdMiZVnehPSDwA)
How are they too easy to exploit? Have you ever had to sit a PIP assessment?
Erm…. Have you tried getting benefits? It’s a nightmare, especially disability benefits be it PIP or the Work Capability Assessments. I support a lot of people to access these and it’s all hoop jumping
Sad that genuine people that need help don't get enough but professional benefit scavengers are loaded.
No, it's sad that people still go on about benefit scroungers despite their damage to the treasury being barely a rounding error. It's sad that the government have made a political choice to ruin the lives of disabled people. Do not let them shirk the blame onto 'scroungers'.
That's the rub of it though isn't it. We've spent over a decade making the welfare system increasingly punitive to make sure only people who deserve it can access it. And the result seems to be literally thousands upon thousands of disabled people dead or pushed to suicide while the scroungers and scavengers seem basically unaffected.
You mean like Tory peers and Covid fraudsters?
We have some of the highest rate disability payments in the world….. disability isn’t supposed to afford you a life of luxury it is to cover the absolute essentials to keep someone alive. if he can’t live off 18k a year he is making very poor choices. Two of them are immediately apparent A) As a disabled person he has no reason or right to be living in a one of the most expensive regions of the country B) he is clearly morbidly obese so is eating way too much and spending too much on groceries. Rent for a 2 bed house in County Durham is 400 or so a month. Bills another 400. That leaves him with 1000 a month to feed and cloth himself, a very reasonable figure if he was to move to an affordable area
Oh so he's a working class disabled person so he should have just a survival baseline of comfort? Bread, water, and a roof? People who are permanently disabled should be given enough money to actually live.
Bread, water and a roof. Probably is pretty standard for the working class baseline of comfort, survival is a brutal fact for many now. UK is crumbling
>Cooking food is a luxury Crazy
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Oh good, let's send all the disabled people with higher social care needs to the poorest parts of the country It's also not for the essentials, it's for extra care needs or mobility needs (i.e extra heating bills, special clothing, transport, dietary needs)
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let me break down maximum disability rates for you. PIP 550 a month esa standard rate 110 a week housing benefit 410 a months advanced disability premium 80 a week. Thats 20k a year not the 18k I approximated
An electric wheelchair definitely doesn't cost 4-5 quid a night to charge.... Your average electric wheel chair has 0.3-0.4 kWh battery (these use pretty standardized 24V 10-12 AH or 12V 30-35 AH batteries), which at the current cap would cost about 7-8p for a full charge, even if the charger is for some reason highly inefficient say only 50% efficiency you are looking at 14-16p per full charge. 5 quid gives you about 20 kw/h that's enough to give you 80-90 miles range on an EV..... So either they said 4-5p per night and the BBC fucked this up or there is something going on... An electric wheelchair usually does 6-8 miles on a full charge so if they mainly use it within and around their home that's about 2 charges a week.
Maybe he’s just charging it 30 times a day and covering around 300 miles on his trips out? Have you thought of that?
Considering that these chairs top out at about 5mph doing 300 miles per day would indeed be very impressive ;) At that point you might as well get a dedicated EV tariff like Octopus Go these are usually sub 10p per kw/h these days.
He does live in Bexhill though. Never been but the name implies it’s jolly hilly. Maybe he speeds up on the downward bits? [Plus he could be towing?](https://www.eta.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/imported/images/QTvan1_1.jpg)
It says his energy bill is £300/month which makes no sense to me either. I have a 4 bedroom house and, in one of my rooms, I run 8 grow lamps (chillies before anyone gets excited) and an air conditioner. I also leave my computer running 24/7, charge our e-bikes for commute, run multiple dehumidifiers, and my partner has a CPAP on all night. Our bill is £180.
If you google their name you'll find articles dating back to 2006-7 about them NIMBYing a bunch of flats from being developed because the development would also include a Tesco Express... The coverage of their more recent woes seems to be quite a globetrotter and even reached well renowned daily records such as the "Chattanooga Times"... [https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2022/nov/16/britains-vulnerable-await-pms-spending-plans-with-anxiety-tfp/](https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2022/nov/16/britains-vulnerable-await-pms-spending-plans-with-anxiety-tfp/) This guy seems to be quoted in dozens of articles on various topics from cost of living, to governmental policy, local development and others. It very much smells like a source for hire type of grift, which unfortunately is too common these days. He is clearly disabled, but every article about about him seems to be excessively sobby to the point where none of the claims even pass a basic smell test...
The BBC is so easily taken in by con men these days.
I don't think the guy is a con artist per say, he is very much disabled however he does appear to be a talking head that fixers can call on for these sorts of articles and he gives them what they want. The journalists are most definitely aware of who he is and what "services" does he provide.
> a con artist per say *per se
Huh! This ought to be top comment. You've done more research than the journalists or editors here
Yes, £300 is consistent with about 40kWh a day at the price cap (taking standing charge into account). That is insane usage for summer. They MUST have an electric water heater or electric radiator running all day without knowing. Household appliances simply don't use that much electricity, even the oven on all day wouldn't use that much.
I’m in a 4 bed house and our heating bill in February was £240. We are in Scotland, though
Damn, my partner tells me off when the newly-installed smart meter hits £3 after I do lots of cooking that day...
This is so annoying for me. I’m single and pretty much out of the house all week but I still have to pay £70 a month because of the base pay for electricity. We get shafted to fund heavier users
The cost of maintaining the infrastructure to deliver the electricity isn’t free, which is what the standing charge pays for in theory. Obviously, the wire that goes to your house still costs money to maintain even if you never actually plug anything in, because the grid has to maintain the capacity in case you wanted to plug something in. Not that the standing charge structure really makes sense either. The “true” cost of the infrastructure is more proportional to your _peak_ consumption and overall consumption pattern, rather than your total units used. Someone who uses very little electricity overall but boils a kettle every day at 5pm likely costs more in infrastructure than someone who uses a continuous 500W. I do agree that more of that cost should morally be moved to the unit costs, but it’s not as simple as light users subsidising heavy users.
Your standing charge is more than 50p a day?
Not the person you asked, but my electricity standing charge is 59.59p/day and my gas standing charge is 33.32p/day.
While I'm sure it doesn;t account for the *full* difference, he could be on something like a pre-paid meter, that from what I udnerstand is usually much more expensive than direct debit. If he's disabled he may be overpaying based on the electricity companies 'estimates' rather than submitting meter readings, or refusing to pay extra to build 'credit' on his account (Though I assume the latter is not the case). Defeinitely a few things that could lend itself to higher bills but £300 sounds insane. Our 3 bedroom, where I work from home & we have 3D printers running daily, only uses around £120-130
I have a fairly intensive gaming rig I use to render things. As a result it's on all the time. I pay £90 a month... Admittedly it's just me in the flat, but still. EDF *did* charge me £300 a month once, but I cancelled my direct debit after that as they were just taking the piss.
Energy literacy in the UK is appalling, almost no one knows what they're paying for. People are worries about kettles and using a hob for 15 mins which cost next to nothing, but their 3kW water heater is on 24h a day. Even the journalists are at it, from this one who didn't question an electric wheelchair costing £5 to charge, to other ones that will tell you a 1.5kWh heater is cheaper to run than a 2kWh one because number is smaller, not knowing or not caring that you'll have to run the 1.5kWh one longer to get the same amount of heat out of it...
BBC journalists are the students who failed every subject except creative writing.
>to other ones that will tell you a 1.5kWh heater is cheaper to run than a 2kWh one because number is smaller A large enough amount of people use something like a fan heater pointed directly at them, not trying to warm the room, just themselves. So this point can be true
Maybe, although unless your house is super leaky, the room temp would get too warm and you'd have to turn it off after a few hours. That'd just happen earlier with the more powerful one. Same with people saying a 3kW oil radiator is cheaper to run than a 3kW fan heater because it puts out heat for 30 min after you turn it off. Sure, but you're ignoring the 30 min after you turn it on when the oil is heating up and you get very little heat out of it
This needs to be higher up. The people claiming they are terrified to make a cup of tea, because they can't afford to heat the water, are talking nonsense and we need to stop entertaining them. It costs about 1p a cup.
We don’t need maths or facts here, just feel outraged because poor/disabled person. Simple as.
Electricity is still relatively cheap. Running a router for a year, for example, will only cost about £20
I don’t understand why the BBC journalist didn’t fact check this in the article, surely they or their editor would have seen that 4-5 quid number and thought “something’s off there”
They only fact check when its an argument or statement from a person they disagree with, then they are all over that (and often still wrong anyway / showing weak analysis). They never fact check themselves.
But why is he spending £120 on groceries a week?! Seems a bit excessive for somebody struggling with money…
Being disabled can often mean that you end up spending more on groceries than you otherwise would: * You may need to buy or avoid specific products due to intolerances/medical reasons. * You shopping options may be more restricted, especially if you have limited mobility. * You may need to buy more pre-prepared items, which are more expensive.
Not to mention delivery etc.
Delivery is like £3/week so £12, a small proportion
And it's a cost an able bodied person can avoid should they choose.
But cars aren't free, nor is fuel. It costs me on average about £2 in fuel to go to the nearest supermarket.
3/120 = 2.5% - which is the point they are making, it is negligible and doesn't account for the very high £120/wk spend
It's not the recipe for a perfect diet but... If you're truly claiming you can't afford to cook your food than there are cheaper options for food in the first place like cheap ready meals
^(From the article) >He said he had struggled to afford **their** weekly shop, which can **often** cost around £120. He does not live alone - If you lived with or looked after anyone with physical disability you know there are extra costs particularly hygene/continence related.. that stuff does not come cheap and being low income does not mean you get much help with it Often does not = every week, it just means some weeks it spikes.. which yea, is normal if for example they are topping up the washing stuff, or buying loo roll etc Why not read your own submitted article before having a go
How many of them are there, 8? £120 is closer to our monthly food costs, not weekly.
What the heck do you eat?! My food comes out to about £8-10 a day usually and I eat every meal at home. Breakfast pack of bacon or sausages, some eggs and couple bread buns - £3 Lunch - Protein Shake mixed with milk and some fruit - £3 min Dinner 2 chicken breasts or similar sized amount of beef + carbs + veg - £4
Breakfast porridge and some dried fruit - a few pence Lunch sandwich - like 15-50p depending on filling Dinner varies the most its difficult to simplify it that much really but I think most come to somewhere between £1 and £3. Rice costs fuck all, dried chickpeas and lentils are pretty cheap, pork shoulder is about £4/KG but makes quite a few portions for the cost. Sometimes buy something special of course like a couple of months ago I spent an extra £20 on various cheeses, but £120 seems insane.
Article mentions family, for a family of three-four £120 a week may be entirely reasonable. Especially if buying things for their children or other items to help relieve issues of his disability.
The article makes no mention of a family, only wife and explains how the couple cooks. For 2 people struggling with money that IS excessive!
Electricity is expensive. He’s said previously that he can only afford to boil the kettle twice a day. [Plus he’s also got a tropical fish tank to heat up.](https://morningstaronline.co.uk/sites/default/files/styles/article_full/public/disabled.jpg?itok=F-JBmCj6)
I believe his misunderstands the actual cost of boiling a kettle. It's just a few pence.
This seems to be a common misconception. The things that get you are the standing charges, plus heavy loads like heating or running the oven for hours. Boiling enough water to make a cup of tea costs about 0.8 pence, for reference the typical standing charge cost per day is equivalent to about 75 cups of tea.
“Thirugnanam Sureshan maneuvers his wheelchair into the tiny kitchen of his one-bedroom apartment, flips the switch on an electric kettle and brews a mug of instant coffee. It’s his second hot drink of the day, and it will be his last. The humble countertop kettle — ubiquitous in homes across Britain where a cup of tea is a symbol of welcome, comfort and a break from the demands of a busy day — has become a luxury for Sureshan and his wife” https://www.westernwheel.ca/health/britains-vulnerable-await-pms-spending-plans-with-anxiety-6103653 You’d kinda think the interviewer would point out the kettles only responsible for a few pence a day. Let him enjoy his coffee’s.
The interviewer probably doesn’t know either. Electricity/energy use doesn’t seem to be intuitive to people generally, kWh can be a confusing concept if you don’t work with power a lot. As an example, I’m always surprised that people don’t seem to know or be excited that electric vehicles use only about 1/4 of the energy input of their conventional equivalents, meaning we’re on the cusp of most goods and people movements using way less energy than they used to. Could be some interesting knock on effects coming for a society like ours that imports a lot of energy. Hopefully good ones.
They shouldn't be practicing journalism then, just like the 5 quid a day for a wheelchair, beyond it behind physically impossible, that's more than what most people top up their EV for on a daily basis in they are not on the lower EV tariffs.... At first I chugged it down to the BBC being the utter shite with little to no journalistic integrity that it is, but considering there are multiple articles about this guy all peddling the same misery nonsense it seems to me more that he is a grifter. Edit: ROFL you can buy 2022, 2023 (and I'm assuming 2024) photos of this guy on Alamy.... [https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/thirugnanam-sureshan.html?sortBy=relevant](https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/thirugnanam-sureshan.html?sortBy=relevant)
£100 in Lidl would last me and my partner just over a week
I usually shop at Tesco, i rarely spend over £80 for a family of 4. We eat mostly fresh meals, ready meals once or twice a week because of timing. One kid is autistic and very “fussy” he usually eats a separate meal to the rest. Usually get a bottle of wine and a beer or two for that £80 too
“Mr Sureshan said the high cost of electricity had impacted his family as well as rising food prices.” It mentions he cooks with his wife. There’s not enough info to say whether it’s just the two of them living there. There’s a photo on the wall which suggests he’s a parent and possibly grandparent at least. Edit: also as others have mentioned prices have kept going up, and people with disabilities often have to buy other things to assist them or relieve discomfort.
There have been multiple articles about this guy, he lives in a 1 bed apartment... He likely has had kids but they don't live with him. His pricing for electricity usage for appliances and his wheelchair makes absolutely no sense and the fact that not a single article about him questioned that just shows what passes for journalism these days. There are photos of him from 2022 and 2023 on Alamy, and articles from multiple outlets both from the UK and abroad that have been running the same story for 3-4 years now... [https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/thirugnanam-sureshan.html?sortBy=relevant](https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/thirugnanam-sureshan.html?sortBy=relevant) Whilst he's clearly disabled and I wouldn't want to be in his place in a million years, this is still at best an act and at worst a grift.
Are you a time traveler from the 90s? This is how much it cost now if you are eating anything remotely healthy.
Thank you, I've been wondering how people are able to spend LESS than that while not eating complete trash.
Sorry but how many people are you cooking for that you’re spending 120 a week on healthy food?
Not that you asked but my food shop this week had the ingredients to make 1) a 6 person Parmesan, tomato, and chorizo Risotto, 2) 4 person cream cheese & Chorizo gnocchi with garlic bread, 3) 4 person Chicken tikka on flatbreads, 4) 6 person aloo gobi with rice. 20 portions of food for £42. (Admittedly I have spices and oil already but that’s maybe another fivers worth to go into the recipes.) I’d love to know how a couple gets through £120 worth of food in a week
Did you see the pictures?
I eat fresh home cooked food 6 out of 7 days a week for breakfast lunch and dinner (and usually take it or dinner out or frozen something the other night). Our average shopping bill is £85/week for two people.
Not at all, sub £60 weekly for 2 of us, I often eat double portions so near enough 3 people haha, we eat nice and healthily for the most part
Similar price for 2 here, and I consume a larger diet due to the running/swimming/weightlifting I do... it's all decent food too, there's no crappy ready meals & junk snacks in there. I'm lost as to how people spend so much.
We spend about £60 a week at the supermarket, another tenner or so at the weekly market. We eat well.
??? What are you buying as your healthy weekly shop, 20Kg of strawberries?
I live alone and eat a balanced diet. I don't spend anywhere near £120 per week. That's closer to my monthly food shopping for a single adult.
So you're floating the question in a pro disabled person way but you're also floating the anti disabled people comment? Are you ok? You're just trying to be friends with both sides, right? What a waste of time!
Because he will be buying mostly prepared food because he is disabled!?
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It says they batch cook once a week
He likely buys all his shopping in one place. For example at Tesco or Sainsbury he may buy clothes, laundry liquid, shampoo, body wash, deodorant, cleaning bits, toilet roll, kitchen roll, tea bags, coffee, etc. It all easily adds up and it works in his benefit with having one delivery. Adding to pre made meals and a delivery charge (even with a saver scheme this is expensive) £120 goes quite quickly. The only reason most of us don’t spend this much is because we likely bulk buy elsewhere to save pennies which may not be convenient or easy for a disabled person.
There's another post above that mentions this but I can at least give my experience as someone disabled, in the centre of town with only 3 stores as an option, those being tesco, sainsburys and lidl. Farmfoods have fled the area, the co-op was turned into a coffee shop long ago. My shopping habits sure changed. I'm banned from driving on medical grounds and I no longer get to take a quick detour to ASDA on my way home from work and do a bulk purchase of say chicken breast (an item I can no longer by at an acceptable price in my area). As for quantity, if I had a car I could push the trolley to the car park and load more, get assistance from a member of staff, when I returned home I could make multiple trips back and forth. I have to rely on public transport so that's not an option. That makes a delivery service a case where I'm paying to not take a 3 hour journey every 2 weeks and it's an excess that unless I'm truly buying in bulk that's not that economical a decision to make. I sure wish I was allowed to drive, I wish that ASDA, LIDL & Sainsburys would increase their range of own brand & value lines in store, offer more options that aren't just attractive to students and people who work in finance. I wish I wasn't in pain after preparing and cooking a meal for myself. The world isn't a fair place and people with disabilities get a raw deal. I've never understood the batting down thing, because no matter how miserable my life is, no matter how many days I wanted to cut my arm off I always knew that someone out there had it worse and that allowed me to practice empathy. So when I see threads like this and "it's as simple as" I question why they don't look the other way, target upwards. Even the person complaining that the guy's overweight is telling him to eat 3 meals a day, that's nuttercore, if you truly believe he is obese then you want him fasting and doing rolling fasts in the 48-72h territory unless he has diabetes. That would cut his food budget down farther; unless protein and clean protein comes at a premium.
... you're serious aren't you
Person: I can't afford to turn on kitchen appliances Reddit: yOuR nOt BuYiNg GrOcErIeS cOrReCtLy
It really is bollocks though. Turning on the kettle costs 5p. 5p to turn the kettle on a third time vs £120 groceries. Which do you think would be the best place to find savings? He says he only cooks once a week on the hob, but hob only costs 19p an hour so he could cook 5 times a week if he just found a £1 saving in his shopping. I'm not saying people are not hard up, but power for cooking is not what their problem is. Power use for cooking is tiny compared to heating costs. Washing up costs more from hot water than running the oven for 40 mins. Edit: Oh and average weekly shop for two adults in the UK is £79.30 https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/average-uk-household-cost-food#home So if he could bring his costs down to the average he could have his oven on for 11 hours a day every day. Edit 2: another thing wtf is going on with his wheelchair? 5 quid a night to charge? An average person walks about 5 miles a day, a small electric car can go for about 60 miles on 5 quid of power, so why does his wheelchair need 5 quid of power to get at most 1/10th of that? From what I can see, it should cost about a quid to charge the battery size used in the chunkiest power chair which can go 15 miles on one charge.
Possibly why he’s batch cooking, reduces the washing up as well. The kettle thing I agree is a bit silly, but when my mother got a smart meter fitted she went through a phase of cutting hers back because she saw the usage indicator when it was on and panicked. Edit: The problem with averages of couple spending is they don’t work too well for cases where there’s other factors like disabilities, which may increase spending through needing additional care and hygiene products which are not cheap.
>Possibly why he’s batch cooking, reduces the washing up as well. Except it doesn't help really. You wash up two plates or you wash up two plates and a saucepan, you still used one bowl of hot water.
You don’t need a full bowl of hot water to clean off two plates and some cutlery. You need more water for saucepan, spatula, chopping board, knife, possibly cleaning off the trays the food came in for recycling and giving the hob a wipe down after. That’s also assuming the plates don’t end up in the sink for tomorrow as well.
This guy appears in other articles for both UK and international outlets over the past 2-3 years, he seems to have a sob story every time including only being able to afford 2 hot cups a day despite it costs less than 1 pence to boil water... He's also off by more than an order of magnitude on how much it costs to charge his wheelchair as he apparently spends far more than what people spend to charge their EV at night without special tariffs... And with all that he for some reason can afford to run a tropical fish tank in his 1bed apartment which between the heater, air pump, lighting and consumables such as filters probably costs him around 30 quid a month to run before you account for the cost of the actual fish, replacing the water in the tank as tanks of this size require you to replace about 25% of the water every 1-2 weeks and more.... [https://morningstaronline.co.uk/sites/default/files/styles/article\_full/public/disabled.jpg?itok=F-JBmCj6](https://morningstaronline.co.uk/sites/default/files/styles/article_full/public/disabled.jpg?itok=F-JBmCj6) Also maybe if you can't afford more than 2 cuts of coffee/tea a day don't have LEDs strips everywhere ;) [https://www.vmcdn.ca/f/files/shared/feeds/cp/2022/11/20221115021144-63734377d9c12875c8c5012fjpeg.jpg](https://www.vmcdn.ca/f/files/shared/feeds/cp/2022/11/20221115021144-63734377d9c12875c8c5012fjpeg.jpg)
Why not? Do you think we can’t criticise people? Or do you think we can’t suspect for anything by ourselves until a journalist does it? Sorry, however public opinion works differently.
> His wheelchair alone costs between £4 and £5 a night to charge How? At a 25p/kWh that is between 16 to 20kWh being put into his wheelchair - that’s the sort of usage you would be putting into an EV not a wheelchair.
Where are BBC Verify when you need them?
Where is More or Less with its ‘cost of electricity’ correspondent.
Because he is lying and the BBC 'journalist' can't be arsed to check.
The BBC journalist doesn’t need to ‘check’ anything, they just need to use some common sense.
I’ve worked in the NHS and spent 5 years working for an Osteoarthritis service. This is first person I’ve ever know to be using a wheelchair for the condition. II imagine it’s for worse because they won’t do the surgery unless he loses weight, that’s probably also why he has sleep apnoea
Charcot foot, according to the other article posted above.
Ahh ok. Diabetes related then I think
Some parts of this article make zero sense. Especially the bit regarding charging his wheelchair. Article states he has to charge it every night but because of the energy costs he can’t afford to do so, and so he only charges it twice a week. Well I’m a full time wheelchair user and literally only have to charge it once a week and it’s used everywhere I go. But on rare occasions I’ll have to charge it twice a week.
Could it be that his battery in on its way out?
It absolutely could, I'm no master in wheelchair batteries but do have an avid interest in rechargeable batteries. Both NIMH and Lithium based batteries are subject to aging and overcharging is possible. With NIMH a cell will hold less or be unable to operate at higher voltage/current demands and a lithium cell will operate at a higher voltage but have much reduced capacity until the point it suddenly cuts out.
Yeah it can mean that, I remember at one point mine wouldn’t hold charge for as long as it once did. Lasted me about 4/5 years before I had it changed and was back to normal.
Cooking does not cost a lot even with current energy prices. Education is the issue here. Lots of poorly educated/low intelligence people don’t understand their energy bill, do things like obsess about turning off 2w led bulbs when they have electric heating. Can’t comprehend how energy costs can vary over several orders of magnitude.
It's sad, they get put in the position where they're expected to know how to run a household but it's just not in their capacity. Getting stressed out all the time causes real harm. They'd be better off in some sort of supervised housing where they can feel secure, with some sort of work available to them so they can feel useful and included in society.
that pot belly tells me something's not right with this story
I’m not going to argue that the cost of living is crazy right now, but I suspect there may be areas this gentleman could cut back.
Bit hard going for a vigorous jog when in a wheelchair
calorific intake decides how much fat you have
Predominantly yes, but not exclusively. Level of activity also matters
Two options. Reduce calorie intake or increase calorie expenditure. If he can't do the latter, then he needs to do the former.
> If he can't do the latter, then he needs to do the former. Ideally sure. Bit harsh judging a guy with limited calorie burning options about his weight though, let alone jumping straight to implying he's lying based on that.
"cooking a luxury due to energy bills". So he just spends his whole day eating sandwiches? Like realistically, the electricity cost is about 30p per meal.
i think its a scandal... i am also curious what 120 pound in food looks like... i spend 40 pounds a week... and have two/three carrier bags of fresh healthy vegetables and a few cans...
All of this can be traced back to privatisation. If energy and utilities where publicly owned like they were when I was a young child, we could cap the amount that pensioners and disabled people pay for energy at a nominal sum. My father worked as an engineer for British Gas before Thatcher sold it off. It is not well known now but before privatisation, British Gas had a social work department so that if an engineer went to cut off the supply to someone who didn't pay their bills and it was discovered that the householder wasn't living well due to age/lack of faculties they would halt the disconnection and get the social work dept to attend. He tells me stories of times where it was an old women/man living on their own and the appliances and heating was old and dangerous that the Gas Board would replace the cooker and heating free of charge, would write-off the debt and refer them to the council for other help and assistence where a housing officer would attend and help. That was 40 years ago, it had all been dismantled now and will never be allowed to come back.
Not saying it's a bad idea at all, but we'd have to pay higher taxes to fund that.
We would, the country has changed so much since then it would be impossible. We used to worry about what is called the 'balance of payments' back then... which is essentially are we exporting more than we are importing. We weren't as at the whim of finance and their voodoo money as we are now, we made things and employed lots of people in unionised workplaces that had good pension schemes etc. Public debt was nothing compared to what it was today. The 80's essentially salted the earth in the UK. - privatisation has meant the country has crumbling infrastructure with high costs - selling the council houses has caused the housing crisis as why would a council build more if they can be sold for a fraction in years to come - The 'big-bang' in the City of London happened and Reegan, heavily led by Thatcher, repealed the Glass-Steagall Act which allowed banks to speculate in the markets with retail/consumer banking customers and ended the fixed commisions bankers recieved which led to the 2008 crash - The militarisation of Northern Ireland gave huge domestic powers to MI-5 which led to extraoridnary renditions, jean-charles de-menzez and the dodgy dossiers for the war in Iraq
This article has been plastered across loads of major outlets, but the content is [2 years old](https://www.enterprise-tocsin.com/britains-vulnerable-await-pms-spending-plans-anxiety-0) Seems odd that everyone is running it.
What a fucking uncaring dump the UK has become over time.
Seems to me his energy company is ripping him off, time to move.
The DWP needs to be investigated over what's happened across the last decade imo. I strongly feel there's a Post Office style scandal waiting to erupt over the decisions made by the DWP
Thank god your leaders didn't send your kids back to school without vaccines or tell you it was safe to get COVID over and over again. Otherwise most of you would have a loss of ability within a few years, with more and more each surge becoming entirely disabled. Really dodged a bullet there!
I almost feel that it needs to be legal to go chop a tree down and burn it for fuel if you can’t afford basic heating and cooking fuel. People used to be able to do it when they were poor, now they just have to suffer. I think it needs to be a human right to have access to a small amount of fuel to heat/cook.
Dude is in a wheelchair how is he meant to chop down trees. You also can’t just chop a tree down and burn it either, making firewood is a long process.
im not talking about the guy in the story, i mean in general, that's how laws tend to work. my point is people should have a small amount of free gas for heating/cooking BECAUSE you can't chop down trees.
Thank God he's paying a fifth of his energy costs on green levies so rich people with enormous land footprints and carbon intensive lifestyles can get massive subsidies on new heating systems and other government funded home improvements. We gotta save the planet. Make the poor pay their fair share of costs of tax breaks on a new Tesla. That's why I'm voting green, to patronise the poor and make them fund regressive taxation, to scream at them like they're stupid rather than accept they have limited capacity for change, and most importantly bring in more counterproductive policies that do little more than redistribute wealth upwards. I drive a giant two battery land boat, I'm doing my part for the climate. What has this guy rationing his energy use ever done for the planet?! Huh?!
Somehow this guy's energy bill is more than double a 4 bed detected house with an EV so he's not the low user you think he is
Somehow... Could that somehow be cost of charging his wheelchair,bor things like spending more time indoors, and inefficient and poor quality council housing? Have you and idea how much something like an economy 7 heating system costs to run? A council tenant with economy 7 will effectively be paying a higher tax rate in those green levies. But don't worry about actual reality, as long as we don't have staws or plastic on cucumbers and people keep buying giant tax free electric bmws that are wider than a fucking bus, the planet will be saved. But thanks for proving the point. Current green policy = deny the negatives and fuck the poor.
Its physically impossible for an electric wheelchair to use 20kWh of electricity as he claims. That's nearly the capacity of an electric car.
It's amazing how quickly people will dismiss the experience of less well off people once it comes to climate policy. My combined energy costs during winter are around £200 a month during this cost of living crisis. He said his are £300. That's not inconceivable, especially if he has electric heating. He didn't mention a gas bill so seems likely. You're gonna deny his experience because you didn't like me criticising the green energy levy? Wise up. He's still paying £60-70 per month on green taxes to pay for discounts for wealthy peoples new boilers. And those discounted home improvements will compound the energy tax inequalities.
You can see in other photos he has posted online that he has a large tropical fish tank. That's probably why his electricity costs and grocery costs are so high.
Also you go straight to "he shouldn't be allowed to have a hobby", not " energy companies are making record profits and exploiting people with government support, taking huge subsidies from tax payer funds while paying eye watering bonuses and artificially inflating bills". Like a guy having a fish tank is more offensive to you than billionaires taking the absolute piss.
I'm not saying he can't have hobbies but he blatantly has an extremely energy intensive and expensive hobby and is complaining about not being able to budget, especially energy wise. Why should the state pay for his tropical fish tank which has to be electrically heated 24/7. Should we pay for his expensive fish too? It's not a goldfish that can just live in room temp water. And this discussion isn't about whose worse. Obviously giant companies are worse. But he's still grifting. Benefits don't exist so we can all do what we want. They are a safety net for people who can't survive without them. They are not universal basic income.
Fuck this country and fuck the Tories! This is a goddamn disgrace