The Cost Of Living: Why Are Singles Ignored By Supermarkets?

This is the transcript of my YouTube video "The Cost Of Living: Why Are Singles Ignored By Supermarkets?".

Supermarkets regularly offer deals in store on different items.  They say it’s because they care about their customers but the real reason is that they get a boost in sales whenever they do a 2 for 1 deal or other deals that require you to buy in bulk.  They might even be able to attract customers who usually shop with their competitors for the duration of the deals they offer.  However, the only people who benefit from these deals are the supermarkets themselves and large families or households.

Only large families or households can either afford to buy in bulk or, with food items, eat the bulk bought food quick enough before it goes off.  Some people may not have the space to store large amounts of non-perishable grocery items either so buying them in bulk isn’t an option either.

My local Morrisons used to sell some packs of pre-prepared salad on a two for £1 deal which was great for me because I could have a side salad for four meals, half a bag of salad each, and I would be able to finish off the salad before it went off.  Now, however, the deal is ‘buy four packs for the price of three’.  I have to cut down on the amount of food I eat anyway these days but I couldn’t have eaten four bags of salad in time to stop at least some of the produce to perish.

The same applies to many other food items – bread, fruit, fresh meat or fish – whenever there’s a deal, it tends to be aimed towards those who can store or afford to bulk buy their groceries.

So why are people who live alone being ignored?  If a supermarket can afford to sell items on bulk buy deals, doesn’t that mean that they could simply reduce the price of the items instead.  Rather than doing a ‘2 for 1’ deal, they could simply reduce the price of a single item by 20%.  Reducing their per item prices would be better for the customers who can’t afford to buy in bulk or for whom buying in bulk would result in wastage.

Being diabetic means I have to cut down on my carbohydrate intake so I have to reduce the amount of bread I consume but I still have to buy full-sized loaves of bread.  Yes, some brands do smaller sized loaves but not, unfortunately, the ones with the lowest carbohydrate content which are already usually more expensive anyway and so I end up either eating too much bread so I haven’t wasted money on it or I end up throwing away half a loaf of bread because I don’t have room in my freezer for the other half and it goes mouldy.

I can’t be the only person in the country who sees this and is negatively affected by this obsession with bulk buy deals in supermarkets.  The cost-of-living crisis isn’t one that just affects large families or households and, although individually single people may not spend as much on groceries as families do, collectively our purchasing power must at least be worth considering.

And, although I’m only talking about single people, I realise that some elderly people, singles or couples, would benefit from a reduced unit price rather than a concentration on bulk buy deals in supermarkets too.

Supermarkets might get a sales boost from these bulk buy deals but a permanent reduction in unit prices on a wide range of products might provide a steady raised income as people could save money on the essentials and be able to afford the odd luxury item.

Disabled? Think You Have Rights? You’re Wrong!

This is the transcript of my YouTube video "Disabled? Think You Have Rights? You’re Wrong!".

As regular viewers of this channel know, I tried to report the 335 Starmer MPs who voted for the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payments Bill on its second reading on July 1^st.  The report I submitted was rejected by the Metropolitan Police within an hour of the submission.

This was, of course, a major blow for me personally as I had felt that I’d stuck my neck out for nothing but I decided to continue to pursue this path now I’m on it so I did what the rejection email from the Met Police suggested I should do – go to the Citizen’s Advice Bureau.

On the 16^th July, I went to my local CAB for a separate issue but decided to see what help I might be able to get to try to hold those 335 MPs to account for the disability hate crime they committed.  The young lady was appalled as I gave her the details of the Bill the MPs voted for and how it constitutes a disability hate crime.  She even agreed that it seemed to her to be the hate crime I have maintained it is.  She was not, however, legally trained so she took the details of the two cases my ex-wife and I had discussed with her to someone in another room who, I assume, did have some level of legal training.

When she came back to the room we were in, she gave my ex-wife some paperwork to help with her case although, to be completely honest, she had stated that there wasn’t much hope for a positive resolution so our expectations weren’t high. 

On the matter of my disability hate crime case, however, she said that there was nothing they could do at all.  I asked how that could possibly be the case.  The Bill breaches The Equality Act 2010 and the Rights of Disabled People that are enshrined in The Human Rights Act 1998 and, as the anti-fraud defence and economic rationale for the Bill have been discredited, the only possible motivation for the Bill is hatred of the disabled which makes it a disability hate crime.  Although MPs are protected from prosecution for what they say in Parliament, they are not protected for any acts they perform and voting on bills in Parliament is a conscious act. 

When it’s time to cast their vote, an MP must make a conscious decision to walk into either the ‘Aye’ lobby or the ‘No’ lobby and then, according to the MPs’ Guide to Procedure, the MP must “place your pass flat against the middle or lower half of the pass reader for 1-2 seconds. The left-hand side of the screen will say "Name recorded" and the right-hand side will display your name and photograph”, another conscious act.

The fact is that, while voting for a bill is not in itself a criminal act, voting for a bill that breaks the laws of the country most certainly is, in my opinion at least and that of a number of people I’ve discussed this with in person or online.

The lady suggested that I consider starting a class action suit against the Starmer regime which would be a brilliant idea except where’s the money going to come from to start with and how many people would actually willingly put a target on their back by helping to bring the case to court?

She said that I could report them again but I asked what the point of that would be because it was rejected the first time round and I was pointed in the direction of the CAB who say they can’t help.

So, the result of my trip to the CAB is the revelation that disabled people have no Rights at all in the UK.  Our Rights have been eroded over the last 15 years, first by the Tories and now the Starmer regime.  We are treated like criminals, guilty of fraud until we can prove ourselves innocent during the disability benefit assessments.  We have our bank accounts monitored now, taking away our Right to a private life and to spend our money how we please and giving the DWP the power to take money from our bank accounts if there has been an overpayment, even if that overpayment was an error on the DWP’s part.  We can’t even have a say in the legislation that affects us or define what is and is not disabling.  If we complain, we are ignored at best, actively silenced at worst.  And now it seems as though we only have the Right to report a disability hate crime, no matter the size or number of perpetrators, but we don’t have the Right to have the crime investigated or get justice.

I reported the 335 Starmer MPs because I believe what they did constitutes a disability hate crime and because I, and thousands of disabled people, have been personally injured by the consciously cruel act committed by those MPs, not physically damaged but psychologically.  The stress and anxiety that they have caused has and will continue to affect us, making those of us with mental ill-health even worse and bringing on stress-related mental health conditions in those formally mentally healthy.  And let’s not forget the effects of long-term stress on a person’s physical health.

So, I genuinely ask the disabled community – where are the Rights we’re supposed to have?  Can you find one Right that we have and that is actually still enforced?

The Hierarchy of Disability

This is the transcript of my YouTube video "The Hierarchy of Disability".

Society is filled with hierarchies and usually these hierarchies help to provide some kind of structure to help smooth the working of the various organisations that make up the fabric of human existence – workplaces, armed services, political institutions and even families have a type of hierarchical structure.  Unfortunately, new pernicious hierarchies have been created that have nothing to do with any form of useful structural context for society and are, in fact, starting to break down societal cohesion.

Before I cover the main subject of this video, I feel I need to touch on one of the other pernicious hierarchies first.

Anyone who’s been paying attention will have heard of one of these new hierarchies when the discussion turns to the current governmental administration – the hierarchy of racism.  Keir Starmer has embedded this new type of hierarchy into what was once called The Labour Party by treating anti-Semitism much more forcefully than any other type of racism within his party and in society as a whole.  Now, let’s ignore the fact that Starmer equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism for a moment and just say, here and now, that anti-Semitism is a truly bad thing but is it any worse than any other type of racism?  I would say that it categorically isn’t.  Racism is racism and it doesn’t matter who the target is, it’s wrong.  However, that’s not how it’s being treated.  One form of racism has been placed above another to form a basic hierarchy of racism.

What some people don’t realise is that there is a form of hierarchy within the disabled community.  In fact, some disabled people don’t even realise that they have internalised this hierarchy into their thinking.  Before I continue, I will state that not every member of the disabled community has succumbed to this hierarchical thinking but there is a definite structure that has been allowed to form.

This hierarchy of disability is quite simple and, whether acknowledged by the disabled community or not, puts people with physical and/or sensory impairments above those with psychological issues.  I have seen this hierarchy in action when a physically disabled person, a member of the DPAC Facebook group, actually suggested that I shouldn’t have been a member of the group because I only had mental health issues and intimated that mental ill-health isn’t a real disability.  I was actually forced out of the Facebook group for another reason but I would’ve left of my own volition given such a hostile attitude to the mentally unwell.  The fact that a hierarchy of disability has been allowed to form has split the disabled community at a time when solidarity is desperately needed.

I haven’t worked out where the neurodivergent and educationally challenged individuals are placed on the hierarchy of disability because those groups tend to be less vocal due to the complexities of their challenges with social interactions.  However, I’ve noticed that those groups tend to be less judgemental of others disabilities so they wouldn’t place themselves anywhere on the hierarchy of disability, leaving it for the people with physical, sensory or psychological disabilities to do the placement for them.

Unfortunately, it’s not just within the disabled community as a whole that a hierarchy has formed.  There’s a hierarchy of mental illness too, a hierarchy that has come into being though, like the hierarchy of disability, not necessarily consciously constructed.  I have seen this in action too.  Years ago, I was part of a mental health service user research project and I met many mentally unwell people as I helped gather the data the project was looking to compile.  I started to notice that people with the less common mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, tend to view people with “just depression” as less severely affected by their condition.

The truth is, society as a whole, views depression as the ‘common cold of mental health’ because it’s the most common mental health condition and this is reflected in the overuse of the word ‘depression’ in common parlance to describe when someone is a bit sad.  Depression is, however, far more serious than people are led to believe and can be a lot more disabling than one would first believe.

I’m a depressive so, under the hierarchies that I am forced to live, I am at the very bottom according to those who have internalised these structures into their thinking.  According to some of the people with physical or sensory impairments, I am considered either not disabled at all or less deserving of the epithet ‘disabled’ and amongst my own community, the mentally unwell, I am considered by some to be less severely afflicted than them because I suffer with mental health’s common cold.

This wouldn’t be such a problem if the hierarchies of disability and mental illness hadn’t been adopted as current government policy when it comes to disability benefits.  Mental ill-health has always been harder to claim disability benefits for and was the target of the changes to the eligibility criteria for Personal Independence Payments by making depression and anxiety ineligible conditions which reinforces the hierarchy of mental illness that I have described.

These hierarchies are dangerous to the disabled community because it makes it harder to come together as a collective to fight for the justice we all deserve.  Society is fractured enough as it is.  We need to destroy these hierarchical structures that divide the disabled community before it’s too late because the only people who benefit from the divisions are the people in Starmer’s regime.  Do we really want them to win?

Disabled People STILL Deserve Better

Below is the transcript for my YouTube video "Disabled People Still Deserve Better":

I can’t believe that it was 31 Jan 2019 when I posted a video called “Disabled people deserve better” and, unfortunately, things still haven’t gotten any better for us.  Indeed, the war against the sick and disabled has entered a new phase, given that the anti-migrant message isn’t cutting through as well as the Tories have hoped.  With nothing to offer the ordinary citizens of the UK, the Tories have decided to scapegoat the sick and disabled again because they are cruel, cowardly and totally without conscience.

I would like to say that things might get better under an alternative government but Mr Kid Starver’s party seems to want to punish the sick and disabled for being the victims of circumstance.  The rhetoric coming from the likes of Liz Kendall and Rachel Reeves is chilling, leaving the impression that the scapegoated vulnerable people of the UK would probably be better off under the Tories than under a government led by Tel Aviv Keith which is a horrible thought in its own right.

The UK is going to be having a General Election soon and the vulnerable people of the UK are going to have very little option in whom to vote for to improve our circumstances.  We have little hope for our future whichever major political party takes the reins of government as they seem intent on punishing us for the mistakes both parties have made.

We understand that the Tories are hostile to the sick and disabled and that we will always be treated as third class citizens by them when they are in power but we now have an opposition party that says “you think you’re hard on the disabled?  Hold our beer ‘cos you ain’t seen nothin’ yet”.

Disabled people deserve better treatment than this from a government that is meant to protect its citizens.  If we had better support, perhaps more disabled people could enter the workplace and become so-called “productive members of society”.  If we weren’t treated like criminals and fraudsters and forced to undergo humiliating assessments, we might become more able to cope with our disabilities, especially if those disabilities are of the poor mental health variety.  If the services we rely on weren’t cut to the bone we might have the slightest chance of recovery or simply coping.  If we were given hope we might not be so downtrodden and defeated.  We certainly don’t need the further indignity of not being able to use our Personal Independence Payments for whatever aids our ability to live with our disability by having our cash payments replaced by a voucher scheme which will, in the long run, cost more to administrate than it’ll save, much like the constant disability benefit assessments.

To put things in terms politicians can understand – good, well-funded public services create happier and more productive citizens, disabled and non-disabled alike and, if you provide concrete improvements to people’s lives, give them hope, it’s a definite vote winner.  The Prime Minister and party that delivers hope could stay in power indefinitely.

The current crop of politicians have to understand that the disabled vote is up for grabs and, in the current climate, could well help swing an election one way or another but to do that the parties have to offer something other than abuse and scapegoating of the sick and disabled.  Offer us hope, offer us a future where we are no longer looked down upon and, more importantly, deliver that future.  Disabled people deserve better and it’s about time we got it.