It’s been a busy old week…

Good morning everyone!

I just wanted to drop by and remind everyone about two things - 

1) Don’t forget to start putting the story about your PIP experience together to either send to your MP or pipprocess@itslawesome.Co.uk ahead of the Westminster Hall debate on 4/9/23. Remember to ask your MP to take part, if you’re contacting them. Don’t forget that if you’re contacting the PIP Process email (in bold) you can state whether or not you want to be anonymous. If you’re a keyworker with Long Covid, we would also appreciate hearing from anyone willing to give us a cast study for the same debate - we are happy for this to be anonymous as well and you can copy us into the same email you send to your MP or Keely.

2) The keyworker campaign is still really interested to hear from anyone in the U.K. about your Industrial Illness Disablement Benefit experience, whether you qualified or not (both equally important) and any issues you had, whether it was caused by employer denial of infection or anything else. You can email us at keyworkerpetitionuk@gmail.com (which would be the same email for PIP stories).  This is mainly for the Scottish Employment Injuries Advisory a council Bill coming in the next session of the Scottish Parliament, for which we are preparing a submission and briefing.

It has been a long road so far, but with this week and lots of breaking news (at least in Scotland), it would seem we are getting a little closer to proper recognition of the devastating impact of the Covid pandemic on Keyworkers. As always, we remain committed to telling the stories of all Keyworkers, so we would love to share yours - healthcare, teaching, military, police, transport, communications (including postal service), key retail (including supermarkets) - if you had to go to work and caught Covid as a result, we believe you should be taken care of properly and not have to face the serious financial issues on top of the health ones.

We would also like to take a moment to say hello and thank you to the new supporters who have joined us in the last few days - we appreciate you. 

AND FINALLY - we can always do with people working on our team! Whether you have Long Covid or not, we would appreciate anyone who can help with social media, setting up Link tree, amending and drafting documents, helping set up a website (we have no money), emailing parliamentarians, preparing press releases and contacting media as needed. Currently, it’s only a very small group of people involved, with most of us having fluctuating energy and symptoms. Allies are very much appreciated in this respect!

Until next time… I have a lot of articles and reading to do today ahead of September.

Cass