Aung San Suu Kyi stripped of Amnesty International's highest honour over 'shameful betrayal '

Amnesty International has withdrawn its most prestigious human rights award from Aung San Suu Kyi, following what it described as a “shameful betrayal” of the values she once stood for.
It is the latest in a series of accolades to be withdrawn from Aung San Suu Kyi, including the US Holocaust Museum’s Elie Weisel award and Freedom of the City awards, which were revoked by Edinburgh, Oxford, Glasgow and Newcastle. Canada revoked her honorary citizenship last month.  Calls to revoke Suu Kyi’s 1991 Nobel Peace Prize have so far been rebuffed by the committee that oversees it.
 Aung San Suu Kyi received the ambassador of conscience award in 2009, while under house arrest, for her role in championing peace and democracy,after spearheading the opposition movement to the feared military junta..She was described as “a symbol of hope, courage and the undying defence of human rights” by Irene Khan, Amnesty International’s then secretary general.
On 11 November, Amnesty's General Secretary General Kumi Naidoo wrote to  inform her the organisation is revoking the award. Half way through her term in office and eight years after her release from house arrest, Naidoo expressed the organisations disappointment that she had not used her political and moral authority to safeguard human rights, justice or  equality in Myanmar, citing her apparent indifference to atrocities committed by the Myanmar military and increasing intolerance to freedom of expression. Saying in the letter that her ambassador title could no longer be justified.
“Our expectation was that you would continue to use your moral authority to speak out against injustice wherever you saw it, not least within Myanmar itself,” Naidoo wrote in the letter.
Today the Myamar authorities and citizens leapt to her defence calling the move 'childish.' But institutions that once showered Suu Kyi with titles are rapidly distancing themselves from a leader they argue is doing little in the face of the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya  muslim minority. Suu Kyi has also  been widely accused of being apathetic or complicit in the plight.
More than 700,000 Rohingya people remain in Bangladesh, having fled a brutal military crackdown that began in August 2017. UN investigators said that during the campaign, Myanmar’s military carried out killings and gang rapes and arson with “genocidal intent”, and called for the commander-in-chief and five generals to be prosecuted for the gravest crimes under international law.
Yanghee Lee, the UN special investigator on human rights in Myanmar, said she believed Aung San Suu Kyi was in “total denial” about accusations of violence.
 “Without acknowledgement of the horrific crimes against the community, it is hard to see how the government can take steps to protect them from future atrocities,” said Naidoo.
Amnesty International added that Aung San Suu Kyi’s administration had stirred up hatred against Rohingya by labelling them “terrorists”, obstructed international investigations into abuses, and failed to repeal repressive laws used to silence critics. ''Her government has sgielded the secrity forces from accontability, stirred up racial hatred and denied the scale of the atrocities.
In September, Aung San Suu Kyi defended the imprisonment of two Reuters journalists who were given seven-year jail terms after investigating the massacre of Rohingya Muslims in Rahkine state. The sentences were widely condemned by international governments, human rights groups and the UN as a miscarriage of justice and a symbol of the major regression of freedom of expression in Myanmar. She is yet to comment on Amnesty’s decision herself but has in the past arrogantly  shrugged off questions about withdrawn awards.

https://www.amnestyusa.org/press-releases/aung-san-suu-kyi-stripped-of-amnestys-highest-honor/

https://www.amnestyusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Letter-from-Kumi-Naidoo-to-Aung-San-Suu-Kyi-EMBARGOED-13-Nov.pdf

Time to strip her off her Nobel Peace Prize too. Please sign the following petition.

https://www.change.org/p/take-back-aung-san-suu-kyi-s-nobel-peace-prize

The Universal Credit Crisis: Panaroma

I'd urge you to watch BBC Panorama's The Universal Credit Crisis , especially  if you’re a Tory that’s hellbent on forcing through Universal Credit. Some revelations will shock people outside of their normal political bubble. Hard to watch and upsetting. A complicated system leaving the vulnerable behind, mission accomplished as far as the government is concerned. These decisions will come back and hant them and  cost them more votes than they think.
Universal Credit combines six benefits, including housing benefit, into one monthly payment.

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Housing benefit now goes directly to the claimant, but the Local Government Association is calling for it to be paid directly to landlords – as it was under the old system.
The programme finds people owe two and a half times more than on existing benefits. Universal Credit claimants are forced to sell their possessions in order to survive. Universal Credit was introduced in 2013 and continues to cause hardship, debt and food bank use across Britain - while the Tories and DWP remain in denial.
As the government's controversial new benefits system, universal credit, is rolled out, Panorama is with families as they struggle with their claims. The programme follows one council as it deals with mounting rent arrears and tenants in crisis. The government has responded to criticism of the new system by announcing more funding, but is it too little too late?
I don’t think there’s any question  that it is, food bank use has already  gone up 13% due to problems with universal credit. And the top reason for people using food banks has been delays and problems with getting benefits. lets be honest  nobody seems to know what's going on anymore. Claimants across the country are finding their payments being arbitrally cut month in, month out, with no explanation. Random debts  are imposed and retrieved with minimum information. Already as it is claimants, living on a shoestring, this process I fear will make things far worse.The Conservatives claim UC is designed to help help people into work by ensuring they are better off working than the unemployed  but whatever they say the number of families who are in work but still living below the poverty line is continuing to rise. As a result, inequality increases too, with the poorest among us being left behind. All because of their policies.
The programme reveals that in Flintshire in North Wales, one of the first areas in the UK to receive the new system, the amount of rent owed to the council by people on Universal Credit is £1,424 in average – or six times the amount owed by those on the existing system.
The local authority says evictions in the county are up by 55% compared to the same time last year, and it has spent an extra £270,000 on advice staff to cope with the increasing numbers of people needing help. The figures were based on Freedom of Information responses from around 130 councils that manage social housing.
The programme really scraped the surface on the design faults within this policy, many things are changed as an after thought because the policy wasn't properly thought through and the administration is so bad as is the training which means that those that should be helping have not got a clue  about the constant changes and are misinforming claimants causing further chaos with long waits on the phone which campaigners call the 'Vivaldi Line.'
Currently too.Esther McVey and her department  are trying to make charities and private contractors that work with the DWP sign gagging orders preventing them from criticising McVey or damaging her reputation, but Universal Credit is a disgrace especially as we are one of the richest countries in the world.It is simply a recipe for disaster that is only fit for the waste basket.The government is coming under very serious pressure because of universal credit, and I hope this programme adds to it even more.
If you missed the programme, here it is.

Earlier post on Universal Credit here  https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-real-impact-of-universal-credit.html

In Memorium : Lest We Forget

In fields of horror
the poppy flower now grows,
as superficial patriotic threads spread
profiteers fill their bellies on the dead,
bereft of life, cruel futility flows
cities of blood built, destruction grows,
fresh graves tended, full of nameless corpses
peaceful branches torn, children left as orphans,
salted tears soak the earth on the edge of memory
in every sense of direction, the screaming roars,
on fields of slaughter, visceral anathema shed
but the white bird of peace flies, lest we forget,
fluttering on the winds, it's seed will always blossom
showering the world with gentleness,
high above the ruins, reason grows strong
choruses sing in unity, embracing humanity,
touching, stirring beyond the futility of it all
an enduring battle of survival, to make us secure,
away from indiscriminate killing, the slaughter of war
primal forces degenerating, a new age is born,
lessons learnt, history provides the ammunition
with hope we can turn swords into plowshares.

Above poem can also be found here:-  https://iamnotasilentpoet.wordpress.com/2018/11/10/in-memorium-lest-we-forget-by-dave-rendle/

The Vision Of Jacob Epstein (10/11/1880 - 19/8/1959)

 

To many people the very name  of Jacob Epstein is synonymous with controversy. He was seen as an untamed man systematically destroying all that was traditional in art. No sculpture of the twentieth century in England aroused so much interest, certainly none articulated such vehement discussion and opposition to his work. His work was such that even the  most untrained were unable to see his work without a definite reaction. Eccentricity alone could not produce such an emotion. I t is the test of great art. Epsteins work imprints itself vividly on the imagination. It is disturbing. It cases the artistically lazy to readjust their values. You either like Epsteins' work, or hated  it. Neutrality  was out out of the question.
Born in 1880, on the East Side of New York to Polish-Jewish parents who had escaped anti-Semitic pogroms in Poland. When the family moved to a more respectable neighbourhood, he chose to remain amongst the ‘Russian, Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Chinese’ who clustered in what was then a very unfashionable part of the city.It was here that the earliest formative influences  made themselves felt  on his art. He attended the School of Students League, and did modelling in the evening. His first work was a book dealing with Jewish types in New York.
In 1902, he moved to Paris, then the world capital of art. to study at the city's famous art schools/ Yet in 1905 a trip to the British museum in London, with its treasure trove of art from all parts of the globe, persuaded him to settle in Britain. The country became his home, and in 1911 he acquired British citizenship.
 His first two years in London remain relatively obscure, but in 1907 the architect Charles Holden invited him to execute a major commission for the new headquarters of the British Medical Association in The Strand (now Zimbabwe House). He was given forteen months to do eighteen colossal figures. This was the first time his work was described as dangerous and immoral. the BMA apparently had envisaged decorative, allegorical figures or famous names in medical history. However Holden and Epstein were united by their enthusiasm for Walt Whitman’s poetry, and they agreed that 18 large figures celebrating the seven ages of man should be carved for the building’s façade, celebrating nakedness in the spirit of Whitman’s poems. Epstein himself announced that the scheme would celebrate ‘the great primal facts of man and woman’, and he managed to fuse the ‘medical’ side of the commission with his own most personal preoccupations: erotic delight, mortality, motherhood, virility and above all an uninhibited celebration of humanity in dignified nakedness.He was ever an outsider, as one critic described him "a sculptor in revolt."

It’s hard to track down images of the originals but above is a shot taken at the Henry Moore Institute, where the plaster casts were exhibited.

The statue representing Maternity  came in for severe criticism.One Father Bernard Vaughan, a member of the moralistic National Vigilance Society, led the attack against the statues, a member of the moralistic National Vigilance Society, led the attack against the statues. ‘As a Christian citizen in a Christian city’, he pontificated in the Evening Standard, ‘I claim the right to say that I object most emphatically to such indecent and inartistic statuary being thrust upon my view’. While ‘the sacred subject of maternity has been treated a thousand time with idealistic beauty’, he complained in another article, the Strand mother (shown here) suggests ‘merely brutal commonplace’. With tabloid self-righteousness, the Evening Standard warned that Epstein had erected ‘a form of statuary which no careful father would wish his daughter, or no discriminating young man, his fiancée, to see’. Inevitably, people came flocking to see it . London, declared Epstein, ‘had become sculpture-conscious’. Most people deemed them immoral, with the fact they were nude being one of the main  provocations. The complaints also disliked the fact they were too sexual, but at the same time too ugly, the depictions were humans at different stages of life so it seemed that the image of sagging skin was too much to bear. The sculptor himself wanted to portray figures with realism, to have them contain deep human feeling rather than just being decoration on architecture.
He said “The Study of the human being is frightfully important.”
However an equally vehement press campaign in Epstein’s defence saved the statues from immediate demolition. Eminent artists and critics praised his innovations, and after some deliberation, the British Medical Association decided to stand by him and preserve them, but a combination of two events sealed their fates.In the 1930s The Rhodesian High Commission bought the building and were not fans of their new home’s decoration and in 1937 a section of the Portland Stone (worn by acid rain and London’s smog) fell onto the street, conveniently giving a pretext to destroy the sculptures. They could undoubtedly have been repaired, but in  the reactionary political mood of the 1930s, Epstein’s Jewishess, and his reputation for outlandishness, weighed against him. The art establishment may not deliberately have persecuted him, but nonetheless, they washed their hands of him. Now to our loss,we can only see the butchered remains.
The resulting scandal damaged his reputation, discouraged potential employers, and threatened the very works themselves. It disrupted Epstein’s life, forcing the persona of provocateur on a man who preferred, as he claimed, to work in peace. Yet the volcanic eruptions of disapproval also deposited a fertile soil for the growth of a British school of avant-garde sculpture, sown with Epstein’s pioneering ideas, and sheltered by his willingness to face the critics first. His originality made sculpture newsworthy in Britain to an extent it had never been before. The vandalism still visible on the front of Zimbabwe House serves now as a prominent warning against artistic censorship, and a reproach against the British for their failure to cherish Epstein’s work.

Epstein's friends campaigned for him to become a government war artist during the First World War This idea was rejected by the authorities and in 1917 he was conscripted and became a private in the Jewish 38th battalion of the Royal Fusiliers. He was discharged in 1918 without leaving England, having suffered a mental breakdown.
The Risen Christ, produced as a result of his experiences in the war caused problems when it was exhibited in 1920. Epstein considered the figure to be an anti-war statement and declared that he would ideally like it to be remodelled and made hundreds of feet high as a "mighty symbolic warning to all lands." In his autobiography Epstein wrote :"It stands and accses the world for its grossness, inhumanity, cruelness and beastliness, for the First World War...The Jew- the Galilean - condemns our wars, and warns us that Shalom, Shalom, must still be the watchword between man and man. By pointing a finger towards the stigma on his palm, he brings the viewers attention to the idea of suffering, Neither his face, nor his body, bears any emotion. The Christ depicted here could be any human being. In a metaphorical way, the "Risen" Christ here "rises" against the cruelty of war.

                                                        The Risen Christ

The Oscar Wilde memorial at Pere La Chaise Paris, was his next difficult task, for cemetery sculpture imposes severe restrictions. Epstein  worked in England on a 20-ton block of Horston wood stone, and conceived a vast winged figure, a messenger swiftly moving with vertical wings, giving the feeling of forward flight.
 

                                 Jacob Epstein - The Tomb of Oscar Wilde
 
One might expect the city of the can-can, a city teeming with sex traffic, to be more open-minded than the uptight metropolis of London. However, nothing causes the upright authorities to take quick action than the sight of an uncovered male member. The order of the Préfet of the Seine and the head of the École des Beaux-Arts was sent out to fashion some kind of  fig leaf and someone was given the unenviable task of slathering the exposed genitalia with plaster, covering the offensive sight. The act of censorship happened even before Epstein had completed the finishing touches on the memorial. The eighteen figures of 1908 had been protected from such incursions by their height from the street, but the Winged Sphinx was at ground level, easily reached. Epstein had to witness at first hand the fear of full frontal male nudity, a fear still present in society today. He said, “Imagine my horror when arriving to the cemetery to find that the sex parts of the figure had been swaddled in plaster! and horribly.” Worse was to come, the tomb was covered with a tarpaulin, with a gendarme on patrol to prevent its removal. Although Epstein attempted to complete his work, he was not allowed to remove the cover. Without the artist’s consent, a bronze fig leaf was fixed to the offending member and the tarp was whisked away.  The bronze butterfly covering did not last long, stolen by “a band of artists and poets from the Latin Quarter,” and the penis and testicles were soon revealed to the world, at which point, the Great War began and the authorities had better things to do with their time.
After the War, the world had changed and Epstein’s statue was now quaint and old-fashioned and receded from art world concern. The tomb became a place of pilgrimage and thousands of fond fans of Wilde fondled the now exposed parts until they shone like jewels. According to urban legend, two (English) ladies, offended by the unseemly shine, attacked the hanging genitals of the unfortunate Sphinx and severed the penis, a strange impulse for 1960. Existing photographs of the original sculpture indicates that there was nothing offensive or even remotely obscene, but this sculpture had the power to move people very powerfully. Now shorn of its proud possession, the statue’s appeal only increased–coincidentally or not–and over the years, thousands of visitors began kissing its surfaces.
 In 1922  Epstein was commissioned to create the Hyde Park memorial to the naturalist writer W.H. Hudson. The memorial was unveiled to the public in 1925; carved in Portland Stone the relief represented Rima, a character from Hudson's book Green Mansions who was both human and bird.
Rima highlights Epstein's thoughts on humanity, sexuality, and gender as well as his ideas on how the concept of 'beauty' was subjective and often restrictive.  The panel  likewise was roused in a storm of contoversy, though today it's difficlt to see what people found wrong with it. At the time Rima was the subject of hostility from those opposed to what they viewed as his 'ugly' and 'unfeminine' portrayal of the female body. His sculpture was defaced and the Daily Mail campaigned for the removal of the sculpture. Epstein was also subjected to antisemitic abuse and in 1935 the Independent Fascist League defaced Rima with swastikas. Much of the opposition to Rima as a piece of artwork went hand-in-hand with racist formulations of Epstein as an 'alien' outsider and his artwork as unEnglish. The storm of abuse eventually died away and the strange elusive beauty of this small panel blends perfectly in its green sanctuary.

                
                               Rima

Night and Day likewise set the critics baying.  The entire work merged easily  into the horizontal courses of St James' Park Station. They were not meant to be seen in isolation. Divorced from their context and viewed at a wrong angle, it was natural for them to appear distorted. Night came in for major criticism through the poplar naturalistic conception that Epstein should have portrayed it by an attractive lady with a sad face and dressed in flowing black drapery.
Epstein commented that he always turned to Egypt for inspiration for architectural or monumental sculpture and the influence of Egypt and other cultures is clear in these abstract figures. Egyptologist Flinders Petrie protested about the style of the sculptures, denouncing them as 'part of the modern system of Jazz' and racialising them as a 'primitive product of a race'. Petrie was only one of a number of people who publicly protested; the classical archaeologist Percy Gardner felt the sculptures lacked 'morality' and there was consternation about the length of the boy's penis on Day.

                                  Night and Day

 His religious subjects, including the Madonna and Child, 1927; Riverside Church, New York, Jacob and the Angel, 1940-1; Tate, Genesis, 1929-31; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, and Adam, 1938; Harewood House, provoked particular ire as being created by a Jewish sculptor.
Genesis  flooded the art world with comment. The statue carved in a block of Servezza marble, portrayd the symbolic truth of the eternal primeval feminine, the mother of the race. A storm of protest rose from women who complained that their sex had been insulted. It was tantamount to saying that art should be clad in the demure habilments of a Mother Superior. To refuse Epstein the right to create Genesis in the way he did would have denied sculpture the right to exist. In elementary terms, sclpture is the form given to a thought... the sculpture's thought, not that of the moralist or the art critic.

                                                         Genesis
 It is amazing to recall the virulent hostility (and anti-Semitism) that his work aroused. Even the Royal Academy participated in the mutilation of his public commissions. Following the exhibition of his controversial Adam (1938) the statue was sold off for next to nothing and later displayed in a Blackpool funfair. Visitors were charged a shilling entry to view its enlarged genitals as a form of pornographic amusement. It is now a prime possession of the Tate Gallery. As history has shown us, that which is ridiculed in one era is hailed in another.
 

  
                                 Adam
 
The same fate befell his next major work, Jacob and the Angel (1941), his most famous creation. Rendered in glowing alabaster, streaked with veins of pink and brown, it depicts two muscular figures locked in a sensual embrace, it  has since been rescued and is now in the relative safety of the Tate Gallery.

                                           Jacob and the Angel 

 From 1912 onwards, Epstein was inundated with portrait commissions, and portrayed distinguished subjects throughout his career including Albert Einstein, Joseph Conrad, Winston Churchill, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Lucian Freud.He participated in the Festival of Britain 1951 but by this time he was being outflanked by younger contemporaries such as Henry Moore, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Lynn Chadwick.

 When Jacob Epstein completed the following  sculpture in 1928, Paul Robeson was enjoying huge success in London, both in the English production of Show Boat and in a series of triumphant concerts. Lionized by English society, he was experiencing an acceptance hardly imaginable by blacks in America: "Everyone wanted to know Paul and to be seen with him," said a fellow cast member, "especially some of our so-called society ladies." His wife wrote to a friend that they both were feeling "as though at last we are at the end of a long journey. Paul . . . is tickled to death and greatly relieved."

   

                                               Paul Robeson

 Epstein was a  pacifist and he joined with other left-wing artists and writers, including David Low, Henry Moore and Eric Gill  to form a National Congress organised by the British section of the International Peace Campaign. He was also involved in the Artists' International Association's efforts on behalf of the Poplar Front government during theSpanish Civil War. He was furious when the Foreign Office refused Epstein a visa when he wanted to visit Spain in 1937.

 He completed further commissions for religious figures, notably on the re-built Coventry Cathedral, but his final secular work was the magnificent war memorial that stands in front of TUC headquarters at Congress House in London. The work is a memorial to Trade Union victims of the two World Wars A mournful evocation of loss, a lone woman supports the limp naked body of a dead soldier. It was carved from a 10 ton block of Roman stone and was originally backed by green Carrara marble running up to the roof; this decayed and has been replaced by green tiles as an economy measure. The statue was unveiled and the building opened on 27th March 1958. 

  
 Despite being married to and continuing to live with Margaret Dunlop, whome he had wed in 1906, Epstein had a number of relationships with other women that brought him his five children: Peggy Jean (born 1918),Theo (1924–1954), Kathleen (1926–2011), Esther (1929–1954) and Jackie (1934–2009). Margaret generally tolerated these relationships – even to the extent of bringing up his first and last children. In 1921, Epstein began the longest of these relationships, with Kathleen Garman, one of the Garman sisters, mother of his three middle children, which continued until his death. Margaret "tolerated Epstein's infidelities, allowed his models and lovers to live in the family home and raised Epstein's first child, Peggy Jean, who was the daughter of Meum Lindsell, one of Epstein's previous lovers. Evidently, Margaret's tolerance did not extend to Epstein's relationship with Kathleen Garman, as in 1923 Margaret shot and wounded Kathleen in the shoulder.

Jacob Epstein was knighted in 1954, but his later years were marked by personal loss. His son died of a heart attack in 1954, and his daughter committed suicide later the same year. 

 When Jacob Epstein died of a heart-attack on 19th August 1959 in Kensington, the sculptor Henry Moore wrote: " . . . I first met Jacob Epstein in the mid-Twenties, a time when I was unknown and he was the most famous sculptor in Britain . . . He took the brickbats, he took the insults, he faced the howls of derision with which artists since Rembrandt have learned to become familiar. And as far as sculpture in this century is concerned, he took them first."
He is buried  in Putney Vale Cemetery. Major retrospectives of his work have been held at the Tate, 1953, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, 1980, and a touring exhibition in 1987, which included Leeds City Art Galleries and the Whitechapel Art Gallery. His work is held in major public collections around the world including Tate, National Portrait Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and the Pompidou Centre.
Jacob Epstein remains one of the most significant British artists of the twentieth century; specialising in sculpture, particularly public sculpture, his pieces both challenged and influenced British art conventions. Despite having a number of supporters, Epstein's work though was often criticised by the public and the media; often this opposition was purely antisemitic and nationalist. Despite this his life, like his art, might have been the stuff of myth, but in his large works, shaping the endless struggle of human life, Jacob Epstein was at his best. Any attempt to gauge the full value of Epstein's art forces us to realise how imperfect a vehicle of expression is language when it attempts to explain the significance of another art medium. This much we can say. Epstein introduced a new creative intelligence with his uncompromising, radical sculptural vision. His art is still capable of provoking.

 I sum up in his own words : I rest silent in my work .... words superb in finality.

Banksy on Advertising

The above is from Banksys 2004 pamphlet Cut it Out  in which he lashes out at public advertising, condemning bullying advertisers for making their consumers feel inadequate and small, telling us and them we don't owe them everything, and we need our right to  choose  for ourselves.
Though I like his ideas and his work, I do find his message kinda ironic, after all he does also  thrive off the same thing that advertisers do on a daily basis. He copyrights his images, is a brand in his own right.A  marketing machine, that is just  doing it in a more subtle way than your average brand.
Advertising daily is simply used daily, as a tool of capitalism, to sell s things that we do not necessarily need , that simply reinforces a consumerist ideology, that for many cannot escape or afford. .Everywhere we go we are influenced by advertisements that have an ideological message to persuades us to 'buy  mass-produced commodities. It is clear that our capitalist society is shaping our culture, and identity, and  there seems to be no  aspect of our daily  lives that isn't being used in the ways it seeks to influence us...
Meanwhile however campaigns use advertising  to incorporate  messages of resistance creating parodies that help us reavaluate beyond this bomardmentand  of consmerist marketing.Working under the name ‘Brandalism’, a group of British street artists in Banksy's home city aims to subvert the consumer messages in advertising.According to the organisation’s website, the UK’s advertising industry pays out £16.1 billion each year to display a message or advert.
This works out as around £250 per person each year spent on sending messages or direct adverts to them.Brandalism says that advertising is not about catering to existing needs, but creating new desires. Not only desires, but insecurity as well, because we cannot desire without feeling like we lack something. This desire creates new kinds of people. Rather than the advert describing a product, we are now the product the advertiser is making. Advertising makes people feel insecure and unfulfilled when unable to access the products we’re told to desire. the subversion of advertising is developing into a political tool. It would be a strange irony if one day it were to become just another type of advertising.

The real impact of Universal Credit

We had small protest outside job centre today in Cardigan , handing out leaflets about the impact of Universal Credit. A job coach wandered past and fair play to this individual did at least engage with us. But what he said was incredible, he had the audacity to claim that UC is the best thing ever and seeing more people better off. Denying UC causes a rise in homelessness and increasing debt problems. Tougher sanctions and long waiting times leaving people hungry is nothing to do with the roll out of UC we were told,  and UC is not political. But it has a real human cost that is leaving thousands in hardship, in a monstrous Tory assault on the poor and the most vulnerable in our society. It is simply a policy of relentless calculated cruelty.
Even the Tory's mouthpiece on this issue Esther McVey;after being challenged over one estimate that three million people would be about £1,800 a year worse off, told the BBC "I have said we made tough decisions and some people will be worse off."
What Mr Job coach also did not say is that under UC, disabled claimants will face a controversial mandatory “health and work conversation” (HWC) in which they must provide information to a work coach like this guy about what jobs they can undertake, or have their benefits sanctioned. This will mean people who are often too ill to get out of bed forced into a jobcentre meeting. The DWP says not all disabled people will be required to do a “face to face” interview in the jobcentre when it is unreasonable to expect it, but campaign group Disabled People Against Cuts tells me it has already seen a case of a woman with a life-threatening illness and insufficient mental capacity being asked to attend an HWC.Expecting people with mental health problems, learning difficulties, or those battling illness to navigate a complex benefit system is particularly cruel – and early signs of universal credit so far are clearly worrying.
 Universal Credit (UC)  is supposed to simplify and modernise the income and employment support system for millions of households. The system’s implementation has, however, been punctuated by controvery over missed deadlines, botched IT development, and poor project management.  Across the country there are tales of payments being late, payments reduced, pushing people already on the breadline even further over the edge,whilst many are unable to pay their rent . UC is widely seen as being cruel, a clear result of the Tory's conscious ideological cruelty that has resulted in a rise in homelessness and people using foodbanks, and making people with precarious mental health conditions health even worse. People unable to pay essential bills  already suffering with anxiety and stress, a letter  arrives about being in arrears, even if it’s only the first stage is going to send them into a tail spin. Another major flaw is that council tax support isn’t included. People automatically assume when they put a claim in for housing benefit that council tax support is included. The next thing they know they are in council tax arrears. It’s a bureaucratic nightmare.
The Trussell Trust, which runs the UK's largest network of food banks, has also released a raft of new figures as part of its annual report, giving the first systematic look at what impact the roll-out of UC has had on usage.It says there has been an average increase of 13% in food bank use across the country in the last year.https://www.trusselltrust.org/what-we-do/research-advocacy/universal-credit-and-foodbank-use/
We are living in very troubling times, under an incredibly cruel system, in which the poorest, the sickest and most vulnerable  under the sheer pressure of trying to manage on nothing are plunged into poverty, causing stress, depression and in many peoples cases their tragic demise.
Well I'm sorry Mr job coach Universal Credit is political and it is clearly damaging peoples lives, you are justifying it because you are simply making a living from it. In addition, the government anticipates that up to a further one million UC claimants who are in low-paid work will be required to see a work coach like this person.  UC payments, Jobcentre support, and the extension of benefit conditionality to around a million low paid workers are supposed  to encourage more claimants to take up employment and increase their earnings. There is a risk, however, that rather than support ‘progression’, UC will encourage the growth of ‘mini jobs’ and further underpin the dramatic growth in part-time and low paid employment and also fuel in-work poverty.
 It is a simple fact that people are not getting the support they so genuinely need. It is more than time to stop it and scrap it, and face reality, UC is a mess, it is cruel, fundamentally flawed, vindictive, unfair and simply doesn't work. As a first step at least the government could at least have the grace to admit it has got universal credit wrong and  set about limiting the damage.
 I personally am dreading when I'm rolled over on to it, really do not know what I am going to do. I'm not angry though I'm bloody livid. Real political opposition to it is however growing stronger every single day.

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen, MC (18 March 1893 – 4 November 1918) - Dulce et Decorum Est / But I Was looking at the permanent Stars

Wilfred Owen was tragically killed 100 years ago to the day - just seven days before peace was declared in 1918.The centenary of the death of First World War poet Wilfred Owen has been marked at his graveside with the sound of a bugle he took from the battlefield.
The instrument, taken from a dead German soldier, was played in public for the first time at the ceremony in Ors, northern France, today..
Elizabeth Owen, widow of his nephew Peter, attended the “moving” ceremony in Ors communal cemetery today, following a dawn visit to the site of the soldier’s death along the Sambre-Oise canal.
French locals and members of the Wilfred Owen Association gathered to hear The Last Post played on a bugle Owen took from a dead German soldier during the First World War. Some of Owen’s poetry, focused on the brutal reality of war, was also recited. His final letter home was read and wreaths were laid in his memory in a service Fiona MacDonald of the Wilfred Owen Association, described as really moving.
“There is just something really special about being here and hearing Owen’s bugle played for the first time in public.”
 

 The bugle taken from the battlefield by Wilfred Owen, held by Grace Freeman from the Wilfred Owen Association

Musician Heather Madeira Ni said she was grateful to have the opportunity to play the instrument, which had never been sounded in public before, on such a historic occasion.
She said: “The bugle is such a piece of history and a great chance for me to get to know Owen and his poetry. It’s such an important part of British history.
“The more I learn about Wilfred Owen, the more grateful I am to have this opportunity.”
The Oswestry-born soldier was killed on November 4 1918 during the battle to cross the Sambre-Oise canal at Ors, just seven days before peace was declared,
He wrote about the bugle, referring to having got some “loot”, in a letter to his brother in 1917.
Born in Oswestry in 1893, Owen lived in Shrewsbury for much of his life and a blue plaque marks the site of his former home at 69 Monkmoor Road.
A life-size bronze statue of the poet was unveiled in Oswestry's Cae Glas Park two weeks ago, while numerous events are planned across Shropshire over the coming weeks to celebrate Owen's life.A specially commissioned Wilfred Owen poetry bench will be unveiled at Shrewsbury Library on Monday.

 Of all the poets to die in the first World War, the fate of  Wilfred  Owen may have been the most cruel, if only for his family. He survived until the last week, but was “killed while giving a hand with some duckboards” [wooden walkways] near Cambrai, northern Trance. The news took exactly a week to travel home to Shrewsbury when his  parents heard of William’s death on the 11^th of November, that most significant of days, heightening the tragedy of his loss all the more.

Back in 1914, the then 21-year-old Owen had been in no hurry to fight. He enlisted late the following year and only in mid-1916 reached the front.The horrors of the western front soon confronted him. On April 1, 1917, near the town of St. Quentin, Owen led his platoon through an artillery barrage to the German trenches, only to discover when they arrived that the enemy had already withdrawn. Severely shaken and disoriented by the bombardment, Owen  was soon blown into the air by a shell, landing on what remained of a dead comrade. He also spent days trapped in a trench, surrounded by corpses, and returned to his base camp confused and stammering. A doctor diagnosed shell-shock, a new term used to describe the physical and/or psychological damage suffered by soldiers in combat. Though his commanding officer was skeptical, Owen was sent to a French hospital and subsequently returned to Britain, where he was checked into the Craiglockhart War Hospital for Neurasthenic Officers near Edinburgh .
 He had been writing for some time at this point and what he saw of the war convinced him that this was no glorious conflict but one of sheer terror for those unlucky enough to experience it.  His writings were hard-hitting, telling the reader exactly how a soldier lived and died in this most brutal of environments.  His most famous poems included ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’.

During a lengthy convalescence, he met fellow war poet Siegfried Sassoon, the most influential friend of his short life. Under Sassoon’s guidance, he would write his best verse, which was bitterly critical of war, with none of the patriotic fervour of earlier front-line poets.If  Sassoon had had his way, Owen would never have returned to the trenches. The former once threatened to “stab [him] in the leg” if he tried.  But in the summer of 1918, Owen went back to war without telling him. In early October, he helped storm enemy positions at Joncourt, earning a Military Cross for his courage: something he had craved – paradoxically – as justification for the poetry. He didn’t live to receive the honour. 

Despite Wilfred Owen‘s prodigious writing, only five poems were ever published in his lifetime – probably because of his strong anti-war sentiment, which would not have been in line with British policy at the time.A promise made by Sassoon while in Edinburgh was fulfilled as an edited collection of his poignant war poems was published  postumously in 1920, thus establishing the name of William Owen among the country’s greatest poets.

Events are planned around the world on November 11, to mark Armistice Day – 100 years after the end of the First World War.

Dulce et Decorum Est - Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.


But I Was looking at the permanent Stars - Wilfred Owen


Bugles sang, saddening the evening air,
And bugles answered, sorrowful to hear.

Voices of boys were by the river-side.
Sleep mothered them; and left the twilight sad.
The shadow of the morrow weighed on men.

Voices of old despondency resigned,
Bowed by the shadow of the morrow, slept.

( ) dying tone
Of receding voices that will not return.
The wailing of the high far-travelling shells
And the deep cursing of the provoking ( )

The monstrous anger of our taciturn guns.
The majesty of the insults of their mouths.