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A government minister defended the DWP against a book exposing ‘violence’ against claimants of benefits.

This Writer previously had a lot of respect for Sir Stephen Timms, who is currently minister for social security and disability – but much of that has evaporated now.

This is because he tried to attack John Pring’s book The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence during a Parliamentary debate.

Mr Pring’s book describes how DWP ignored pleas to correct flaws within the social security system and covered up its role in the deaths of hundreds, and probably thousands, of deaths.

Timms has tried to deflect blame for what happened onto ministers of the previous – Conservative – government, saying it was them rather than civil servants in the department who were responsible for ordering any wrongdoing.

In an article on his site Disability News Service, Mr Pring writes:

[Sir Stephen] claimed that The Department “doesn’t produce any evidence of the conspiracy which is implied by the ‘violent government bureaucracy’ point”.

He said: “I was a shadow for five years, I’ve chaired this committee for four years, and I’ve never seen anything that makes me think there’s a conspiracy going on in the department.”

He said that “it wasn’t the department that hid it, ministers chose that things ought not to be open”.

He added: “The trouble is, if you think it’s a conspiracy, that sort of means you don’t have to bother with the hard graft of working out how to solve these problems, in the way the committee now is and the department is as well.”

Isn’t this reminiscent of the Nuremberg Defence – that the people who caused the deaths were “only following orders”?

And what happened to those who used that defence during the Nazi war crime trials?

The defence was rejected. Those who used it had their own personal moral responsibility, and a duty to disobey unlawful orders.

This Writer would suggest that DWP staff who received orders to reject benefit claims, resulting in the deaths of claimants, had a personal moral responsibility to disobey those orders – and if they didn’t, then they stand as guilty as the ministers who gave those orders.

Mr Pring stated:

The word ‘conspiracy’ is not used in my book, apart from a fleeting reference to the conspiracy theories of David Icke.

And he stated that he will be publishing a detailed rebuttal of Sir Stephen’s claims in the future:

“This will show clearly, with irrefutable evidence, how the countless deaths of disabled claimants, particularly over the last 15 years, were not solely due to the actions of DSS and DWP ministers in successive governments, but were largely the result of the ‘slow bureaucratic violence’ that has developed within this toxic government department over the last 30 years.”

Source: Minister hijacks Commons inquiry to defend DWP, as he attacks book that exposed its violence – Disability News Service

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