Thread on the reality of living on slashed benefits.

Read this before you even think about pontificating on #benefits #UniversalCredit #UKPoverty #Foodbanks…

https://twitter.com/jeremyvineon5/status/1778681656041234860

I remember when the worst of the crisis hit. Seriously ill and still in the initial cope stage, I was both unable to work and not recognised as such for benefits. I had 2 kids in primary school and we suddenly couldn’t remain in our home, so had to rent another immediately.

I’m too sick to be here tonight, but we need all hands on deck for the call to #ExposeME now.

I’m not allowed to give blood because it is known that M.E can be transferred in plasma (it is a cellular level physical illness) and at the same time I am told it’s all in my head?

1/ I’m told I am not sick I just don’t have the balls to stand up for myself as a woman. I just don’t want dick, or kids, or domestic chores and don’t dare say so lest you think me not nice!

I’m a working class, bisexual, Gen-X battle-axe. This is a ludicrous stereotype on me!

2/

For 40 years Drs have insisted ME patients are mad & medically tortured us. Refusing to be tortured gets you locked up. The torture injures or kills >80% of patients subject to it.

Today a study dropped proving ME is what science proved it was in the 80s: virus damage to cells. They wanted to do the torture to me. It goes by the name of GET. It causes you to damage more and more of your cells until you lose key abilities, like walking.

I don’t mean like I have issues walking most days, I mean at all, never walk again levels of harm. Or bedbound…

Undercover journalists have impersonated every kind of human you can imagine, at some point: Hunt sabs, Indonesian businessmen, Amazon warehouse staff, pregnant women, combatants in a war, everything...

If faking disability for huge payoffs was so easy Parris would have done it. The reason you don't have undercover exposes of how easy it is to live lavishly on state benefits just from saying the magic words you found on Google, is because that doesn't exist.

Isn't a thing.

Might as well write a dispatch from Narnia.

It's fucking bullshit.

Can't sleep so here's a thread about what *actually* would help with getting the long term unemployed, or sick and disabled back into work.

As you read this remember, any or all of these only help *some* of us. Many aren't able to work under *any* circumstances... 2. Meaningful discrimination legislation: Many people simply need employers with a better attitude to make available the reasonable adjustments mandated in law. It might be the law but it means nothing because it's fiendishly hard to enforce.

Reading the tweets on #UPF / #UltraProcessedFood and someone's calling it a "culture war".

Nah.

It's not.

Let me put this into layman's as far as I can...

Food companies don't give a shit about you. They give a shit about profits and how much they can get away with... 🧵 They're doing stuff to the food that wasn't food at any point in millions of years of human evolution, until like, within my lifetime.

They are rendering chemicals from coal, for example. That's a real thing. You may have been eating coal extract. Coal obviously isn't food...

Just now learning of the loss of @TraumaPhDandMe to #suicide.

She was failed by statutory and non-profit agencies she reached out to for support. The same ones everyone tells people to reach out to.

Let me be clear, I am alive now specifically because I know not to try those...

https://twitter.com/RoadsideMum/status/1704400303754281132

First, I need you to understand that I have been unwell, at varying degrees, on & off, for years.

I've been sectioned in different decades, with different diagnoses.

I've survived suicide attempts.

I still live with a degree of suicidal ideation.

I ain't guessing...

There's this one friend I have who for 20 or 30 years or something insane had all these horrible chronic illness symptoms and she found herself pushed back again and again by the GPs, like it was all in her head. Then one day a friend of a friend said, oh no, girl, you have X... And X was testable, so she got tests, and like fireworks going off there were all the markers. And she was angry and depressed and validated and confused and all of the things... And then she got the right strategy down and she is doing fine, has been for years, she manages...

The Telegraph is at it again with more of the same scroungers assault on disabled people. I swear this amounts to incitement to hatred against a protected characteristic, but I will have that out with the press complaints people later. First, to debunk this shit...

#Motability Starting from the middle and working out in whatever catches my eye first... primary condition? You what? I don't remember being asked my primary condition at any point applying for PIP, where are the DWP getting this from?

From themselves, it transpires...

With all the rhetoric about scroungers living off fountains of welfare state cash and still grasping for free this and free that, soup kitchens, whatever... I decided to test one out.

Happened I parked my car beside one during opening hours and I ain't any kind of minted, so... First thing was, me and the preteen (the one we call N here) were immediately out of place.

We shouldn't be. Lord knows we are skint enough for almost any poverty metric to count us, including "food insecure" and "free school meals", so we aren't taking the piss...

Here's a little game... how much are things now?

Feel free to guess.

These are some super ordinary things I bought within the last 2 weeks, from a national supermarket chain with a cheaper reputation. What price seems right to you?

A cucumber. How much was that? 2 Litres of skimmed milk

Having the most stressful moment of my life, financially, and that's saying something.

Chose reconditioned phone on reputable website (4.5 rating on Trustpilot with thousands of reviews).

Paid on credit card. Declined. Fraud team rang.

Is this legit, they wanted to know?... Yeah it's legit, I said, out of character I know but that's me, trying to buy a phone. Approve it?

Well if it's not legit it's on you, they said. We may not refund it if its fraudulent. You need to check.

What do you mean, I said, they are linked to reputable awards & all?...

Was over an hour from home, visiting, when the host ran out of milk. This would be my fault, I drink coffee like it'sgoing out of style.

Buoyed by false confidence from having had more good days than usual this month with my chronic illness, I said I would pop to the shop...

https://twitter.com/RoadsideMum/status/1646226456396038146

I thought, if I did have a problem it would be exhaustion, which while awful is solved fairly easily by calling someone who drives to come get me. This happens to me sometimes, it's not dramatic, it's pretty simple to sort (call a taxi if it comes to that innit)...

A report the Tories tried to suppress says exactly what I and everyone else in poverty have said all along.

Sanctions make you LESS likely to find work.

Thread...

theguardian.com/society/2023/a… Imagine you have a child or two, you have to think about rent, bills, getting to school on time, what's for tea, finding a job, etc and its very, very hard. You can just about keep it all going if you cut every corner.

Then boom, out of nowhere, you are hundreds of quid down...

The following stills are from advertising for a @netflix item from @InvestorMelDave and I shall work through, calling it all out. Slide by slide.

The rich people mindset thing is, and always was, a scam (in my honestly held opinion), no matter who (of many) peddles it.

Thread. Lies.

The poor are the best seekers of value going! I won't buy budget coffee- I won't drink it. Cheapest biscuits though? If I want good coffee, needs must.

You can "want" away, full choice being out of reach is the definition of poverty! We aren't senseless, we are skint!

The right wing claim that the working class of this country demand immigration is halted and it's only the pampered activist lawyer set that are kicking off.

I'm very much of that poor demographic. Everyone I know thinks the government are fascists.

Don't believe the hype. As usual, we are better people than they make us out to be. They'll pump the poverty porn media at you, making us out to be all loud, stupid, angry weathervanes, incapable of appreciating culture, politics or global economics.

It's not true. Everything you see, we see too.

Good morning.

If you have been watching the issue of my power company @UtilitaEnergy cutting me off as punishment you might like to know, it's now been 12h, and I still don't have gas.

No heat. No hot water.

To be clear that's 12h AFTER they were paid. This is brutal. So prepay meters are meant to update immediately when money is added. Generally they do. Except if you are with @UtilitaEnergy and let the meter run out.

Because Utilita run a dirty business with a brutal strategy of having the meters oh so coinincidentally fail right then.

With what @leeandersonmp?

What does an MP have to "really really help" a family with?

It's homelessness isn't it. You are picking political points out of shaming a family who cannot be in their B&B aren't you?

Man you are low.

(For everyone else reading, I'll explain below) So if a family are homeless then they will be in emergency accommodation. This is typically a run down former B&B and there are not often any cooking facilities provided, or permitted. If you are even allowed to put your own microwave in your room is hit and miss...

Gove says if children miss school their child benefit should be cut.

If this is ever implemented, it will make school absences worse, not better.

How poverty keeps kids off school.

Thread.

bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politi… If either parent earns over £50k a year, child benefit is already not payable. This means that these rules effectively won't apply to high earners.

As soon as you make something a privilege only for the wealthy, you make it desirable, which is no way to deter a behaviour.

Welcome to the semi finally the search for the ugliest shoes!

The final 8 are all massively minging (well, mostly all but I am admitting to nothing)

Roll up, roll up!

Simply look at the pics (through your fingers is fine), and then vote for the horridest of all in the poll. Beige, not beige but with beige body part on show, beige again, extra beige. Great. Not.

Least great of all is...?

Problem solved!

The tooth is out!

So this morning we went to get Ns tooth out because when you go years without a dentist small problems get out of hand, and now oh look, poor Ns tooth broke...

But the dentist couldn't do it because N was in pain even after painkiller...

https://twitter.com/RoadsideMum/status/1623630343453523969

But even after the painkiller jabs N was still in nasty sharp pain. Dentist gave more painkiller, but it was bad, N couldn't stick it.

The thing is the stupid tooth crumbled in the process.

Cut to this afternoon when the drugs wore off and N was rating the pain at 8/10...