NAC website is still blocked
As I said in the previous blog “NAC website has been blocked”, on 11 November NAC Honorary Associate Dr. Jim Fetzer, who funds the NAC website – and by some sort of miracle found us a roof over our heads on 13 July (see blog of 12 July “Police threaten us with physical force at the place we sleep, Salters”) – paid our web host SiteGround $150 to clean up the damage to the NAC website, as well as to give maximum (“99.99%”) protection to the site. Then two days later we discovered that Google had reported the entire website an “attack site” despite that Google Webmaster Tools for religionandmorality.net stated: “Status of the latest badware review for this site: A review for this site has finished. The site was found clean. The badware warnings from web search are being removed.” Well, NAC is still blocked! (An account of the three distinct occasions when NAC has been removed from the internet, including this one, is documented for posterity in “About us”.)
Prison Planet.com reported on 9 August that “Increasingly, Google and its properties — the vastly popular video site YouTube and equally popular Blogger — are tools for shutting down opposition to the government ... Google has worked closely with the governments of the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Japan, and most notoriously China to censor content on its websites.” Prison Planet reported that Google shut down the blog of former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds as she was about to provide, in her own words, “deposition on Foreign US government illegal operations in the United States!” I think the tactic backfired: Edmonds now has a new great blog at http://www.boilingfrogspost.com, which is being endorsed by James Bamford, one of the US’s leading writers on intelligence and national security issues.
The harassment of NAC by using warning notices to discourage visitors and give NAC a bad name by deceit and deception is not the only difficulty we are experiencing: our local jobcentre, Highgate Jobcentre Plus, notified us on 5 November that Declan and I have been selected to be interviewed for six consecutive Thursdays about the jobs we are applying for – Highgate Jobcentre Plus is part of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). We have some history with the DWP: We came to England in 2003 and for two years attempted to get NAC up and running; we went on benefits in July 2005; the DWP terminated Declan's joint claim for Jobseker's Allownce (JSA) on 27 September 2006 because he did not “sign on” two days before he was due to do so on 29 September. Declan exhausted the appeals process from the street: his case was dismissed by the High Court (Judicial Review), Court of Appeal and European Court of Human Rights in spite of the fact that we were denied the internal appeal process by procedural impropriety on the part of the enforcement authority (see blog of 21 October 2008 “European Court of Human Rights declares application inadmissible”).
Last Thursday, we had interviews at different times and I was told to attend the interview tomorrow with Declan at 10.15am; that is, until I asked for the usual confirmation in writing. Having waited 45 minutes for my appointment in writing, I was then told that we couldn't be interviewed together and that the earliest appointment time for me would be in the afternoon. So for the next four weeks we will be particularly vigilant for the “clerical error” because if for whatever reason I am not interviewed on each of the remaining four Thursdays, I may very well be told that it will not be possible for me to “sign on” (which I must do every second Thursday) and therefore my benefits will be suspended.
Some of the clerical errors we have been subjected to by the DWP have been quite stunning. When we came off the street in July, my benefits were suspended for three months from the outset of Declan's joint claim JSA of 17 July because the DWP lost my National Insurance number from their database (see Declan's letter to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in the blog of 7 October “After a huge run-around, the Department for Work and Pensions denies me a Crisis Loan”)! Just a few months prior to being unceremoniously put to the street, we had our benefits suspended because the DWP lost our address (see graphic here)! On that occasion it actually took a High Court order from the Honourable Mr. Justice Keith on 11 April 2006 to sort things out (see graphic here):
If it is accepted that the claimant’s job-seeker’s allowance was wrongly suspended, the defendant would be well advised to cause it to be reinstated immediately and to pay the accumulated arrears to the claimant.
Two days later, as Declan informed the then Secretary of State for Work and Pensions John Hutton (see graphic here), the claim was reinstated and we were paid accumulated arrears of £528.90 on 20 April 2006 for the period 4 March to 14 April 2006!
