From theory, action.

Ten days ago Stephanie Bottrill sat in the redbrick terrace house which had been home for 18 years to write notes to her loved ones, the Sunday People reports .

She ripped the pages from a spiral-bound notebook and placed them neatly in little brown envelopes.

There was one for her son. Another for her daughter. Her mother. Friends. And a very special one for the year-old grandson she doted on.

Then in the early hours of last Saturday Stephanie, 53, left her home for the last time, leaving her cat Joey behind as the front-door clicked shut.

She crossed her road in Meriden Drive, Solihull, to drop one of her letters and her house keys through a neighbour’s letterbox. Then she walked 15 minutes through the sleeping estate to Junction 4 of the M6.

And at 6.15am she walked straight into the path of a northbound lorry and was killed instantly. Stephanie Bottrill had become the first known suicide victim of the hated Bedroom Tax.

In the letter to her son, Steven, 27, she had written: “Don’t blame yourself for me ending my life. The only people to blame are the Government.”

Click through the link to read the full article.

Fuck the government. In the last month I’ve read so many articles in the Daily Mail, The Sun and The Telegraph that echo Tory rhetoric about this imaginary sea of benefit fraudsters as some lowlifes who just don’t want to work and the system has to punish them for being inadequate.

The result of that attitude is exactly this. A disabled woman who can’t work, doesn’t go onto disability living allowance because the media and politicians tell them that to do so would make them a scrounger. Because Thatcher sold all the council houses there’s a massive shortage so people are suddenly told to find another £80 a month to live in their family home. And because society is told the purse has to be tightened, and that people on benefits are to blame, whilst bankers send the economy plummeting and carry on taking their bonuses, people at the bottom feel they have nowhere else to turn.

Suicides and deaths due to the emotional trauma caused by the austerity measures have been on the rise. This is the first report I’ve come across of someone in the UK who’s left a suicide note blaming the government, but it has been happening already whether or not a note is left.

Fuck this is awful.

The government’s cuts to welfare benefits are causing real harm to a lot of innocent people. Nevertheless, remarkable numbers seem willing to support them, and all too ready to justify them with extreme aberrations. You can probably put some of this down to our straitened times. People struggling to get by in their own lives will find it hard to sympathise with those they feel are getting a free ride. However, at bottom, a lot of the bad feeling towards people on benefits comes from the way we now see them as a distinct, separate social group. Different from the rest of us. Worse than.

This would’ve been so useful a month ago when I was writing about the exact same thing for my dissertation.

When police carried out a routine stop-and-search of her boyfriend on the London Underground, Gemma Atkinson filmed the incident. She was detained, handcuffed and threatened with arrest. She launched a legal battle, which ended with the police settling the case in 2010. With the money from the settlement she funded the production of this animated film, which she says shows how her story and highlights police misuse of counterterrorism powers to restrict photography

Video well worth a watch. I think there’s a lot to critique on the general subject matter, but it does demonstrate quite nicely how the police act without restraint and then the IPCC basically backs them up.

THE harrowing letter from 13-year-old Kieran McArdle is enough to break the hardest Atos heart.

Kieran has blamed the humiliating assessments for a new disability benefit for the death of his father Brian at the age of 57.

The test of whether disabled claimants are eligible for the new benefit are well known to be flawed and blunt instruments for measuring each person’s individual disability.

Now it appears Atos’s “humiliating” assessments insisting that Brian McArdle was no longer eligible for any disability benefits sent him to his grave.

It is the kind of letter that should make Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith hang his head in shame.

The former Tory leader has posed as some kind of compassionate friend of the poor since his so-called “road to Damascus” conversion to the effects of poverty.

Duncan Smith pitched up in Easterhouse in Glasgow once and was shocked by the poverty he saw.

He didn’t seem to realise that what he had witnessed was the legacy of 18 years of Tory government that sent Easterhouses all over Scotland and England into a 
downward spiral of joblessness.

Easterhouse has moved on since then – and is well rid of Duncan Smith, who has turned his donkey around and is hightailing it back from Damascus as fast as he can.

He has become as heartless as the company assessments that force the permanently ill back to work.

No one across the political spectrum disagrees with the proposal that those who can work do so – and that the bill for welfare must be brought down.

But the system the Tories have chosen, using the private French company Atos, is as cruel as it is hopeless.

The assessments simply do not take into account people’s individual disabilities and cause huge anxiety and strain.

That was enough to kill one man, and break his son’s heart.

That’s too high a price to pay for welfare reform.

It is the tests that needs reform, not the people they are applied to.

(Although I do disagree with that welfare bill being brought down bit)

Solidarity demonstration in support of Palestinians besieged by the latest attacks by the state of Israel.

Tomorrow (Friday 16th), 5pm, at The Fountains in Bristol.

Callout to all Bristol based activists and concerned citizens.  Please signal boost!