I totally understand your anger about this, the persistent range of mistruths, double-speak and downright lies by the staff of DWP, its Ministers and its partners is, as you know, a topic very close to my heart.
The lack of media coverage to the damage the toxic misrepresentations and fag-packet policies have caused is astounding; from death to bare survival, the numbers whose lives have been blighted by politicians, civil servants and related private co staff must be innumerable.
As a side point, the detrimental effects of campaigning on these issues is something I had not accounted for when I began, but the pressure has severely damaged both my mental & physical health; making it nigh impossible to continue pushing on.
I welcome your return to the fight Mike x

Sometimes you have to take a step back to preserve what remains of your health and sanity. You’ve done far far more than most for which I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Welcome back!

I was driven to fury by this article this morning
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3869182/Why-Lefties-misty-eyed-movie-romanticises-Benefits-Britain-says-TOBY-YOUNG.html?login#readerCommentsCommand-message-field
and need to settle down [if only for my blood pressure’s sake]
I will add more later, when I’m calmer!
Suffice to say: I’m a carer of two disabled relatives that have been through this “unbelievable” WCA hell.

All of these deaths winding back to greedy unregulated overpaid bwankers gambling and losing the plot and the Government using our tax money to bail them out…..Dramatic austerity measures were then needed, and taken, not on those that created the financial mess, but on the working plebs and taken from the benefits pot of the needy.. Today bwankers still receive ludicrous salaries and bonus payments and carry as if nothing ever happened and the rich continue to salt away their money in tax havens and cruise on their luxury boats with immunity. No action was ever taken from the so called lessons learnt, recovering funds or putting anyone behind bars apart from the usual token minor fall guys. Yup we’re still all in it together apart from those poor lost souls who were taken from us as a direct result of this continuing untrustworthy broken austerity system.

From the time the revised WCA, overseen by Atos, using the LIMA tickbox software, was introduced in October 2008, concerns were raised, following many very poorly people suddenly getting 0 points, and centres being nicknamed Lourdes, for their ability to cure so many of the sick and fix the disabled, just like that. The DWP it seemed were able to perform many more miraculous cures than Jesus Christ ever reputedly attempted.

The test isn’t about the condition, but the person’s ability to perform various tasks, however unrelated to the reality of the workplace. Still, it found that the majority of applicants could do just about anything, whatever their condition. When people see their LIMA-produced reports they can’t believe how fabricated they are, with so much added that didn’t happen, and so much that was said not appearing, or twisted back-to-front.

The concerns and comments about this started to appear online soon after October 2008, and many were placed in Guardian Comments. Some people did the investigative work for them, looking into the background and exposing the influences of Unum and their invention, so as to avoid giving financial support, that all conditions are the fault of the sufferer, for having faulty thinking, and most are simply an invention of the claimant. Thus the biopsychophysiological model of illness. Presumably when people then die, that is deserved for not having the right attitudes about their illness or incapacity.

That then is Eight Years of it being known what was happening and very little of it formerly filtering through to the public. Eight Years of the Guardian generally ignoring most of the informative comments of their readers, and any articles produced about the subject far from hard hitting, and those mostly tucked away in the Opinion section. While nearly all of the rest of the press, controlled by a small number of very wealthy extreme right-wingers, whose avoided taxes could feed the hunger they are helping to cause; constantly producing headlines of invention about how all of those skivers and scroungers are being discovered. When we have had in clear sight the real abusers – a right-wing media coroborating with an increasingly vicious DWP to feed false facts to the public, while the DWP increasingly distances itself from any respionsibility for their actions.

In parliament, a few lone voices attempted to challenge the government over the rising number of injustices. People like Meachen, Skinner, McDonnell, Corbyn… They would win motions, followed by the government not doing anything about it. At every exposure of unjust cruelties to the sick and disabled (many of which were met with laughter and jeers from the government benches, if they attended at all), the response was to tighten the screws. With too many people winning their appeals, it was decided to make it more difficult to appeal, not to do away with a WCA process so obviously flawed. After all, they had designed it to fail as many people as possible. So it’s the more honest appeal tribunals which are the problem.

Now there’s a compulsory reconsideration period, which can be as long as they like, with no money paid until the appeal, over what can be long months. Those who are then signing on, often forced to lie about their ability to work, just for the sake of a few pounds for life; can be sanctioned at any time, for insignificant or invented reasons, and this is more likely to happen to them. Some disappear and the DWP do not care what happens to them. Some die, but then people do die. It’s not the fault of the DWP that they were unable successively to traverse an increasingly kafesque sucsession of hurdles, purposedly set up to make it increasingly difficult, if not nearly impossible, for them to get through it successfully.

Still too many people have been gaining ESA, so now they are pushing to stop people going to the appeal tribunals at all, deciding who should be allowed to appeal, having the judgement made quietly away from the applicant or anyone, and having appilcations going entirely online or decisions by phone. This knowing that many people are not confident with these medias. That is, knowing even more people will not succeed in getting through it, however deserving their case. (While PIP is similiarily stripping many people of their disability benefits, and therefore many carers are losing their pitiful carer allowance, without any less need for the caring.)

This process was planned, though since further honed, for some years before 2008, and to say it was created in three weeks is humbug. The only statement about it by Freud likely to be the truth is that he knew nothing about how social security worked. The proffered policies of Labour and Conservatives before 2008 were as good as the same. They were created in a time of fairly full employment, and enacted after the financial crash, when it was obvious that in a shrunken employment market many sick and disabled people wouldn’t have a chance of getting viable employment. They did not care. They went ahead with it anyway.

Besides hardened right-wingers, often when people find out what is really happening, they are appalled. This usually happens when it effects themselves, or someone within their family or circle. It does not happen through the media. If our so-called balanced BBC, or any channel (instead of benefit-bashing programmes), had given accurate repeated reports about this at any time, then the nation would have rebelled. Instead for Eight Years we have had gross misinformation and obscurification, and for Eight Years people have been helplessly dying, out of sight, in more numbers than we will ever know. We do Know thousands have died after being found fit for work, or being put in the WRAG group, where they are officially getting better.

A government that designs and then tightens policies that it knows are killing a part of its population is not a good government. It is a government that considers only those who are a financial success, however crookedly achieved, to have worth; and the rest to be disposable, if they will not sufficiently labour for them, often without a viable wage or any real chances of escaping from their poverty. As a nation we need to judge worth in another way. We can judge that we have a government that is far less fit than anyone who has been found fit by their designed trickery and not by honest processes.

This is why this country needs a Corbyn-type government, with its right-wing element affectively challenged and exposed and negated.