Despair: people with long-term illnesses and disabilities are being driven towards suicide because they can’t afford to live in Tory Britain.
You just know the Department for Work and Pensions is already considering this a “positive benefit outcome”:
More people are contemplating suicide as they “cannot cope” as a result of rising costs, charities have said.
Charities supporting those with chronic diseases or disabilities have called for an overhaul of the benefits system.
One woman who has multiple sclerosis (MS) said her costs had almost trebled.
MS Society Wales, said many who come to them were “at the end of their tether”, with the stress often affecting their condition and exacerbating their symptoms.
Disability Wales said it had also seen an increase in mental health issues resulting from the cost of living crisis.
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Who, exactly, are the Tories helping with the hundreds of billions of pounds they have borrowed?
According to the latest projections, the government is likely to have borrowed £316.4 billion more than last year, mostly on Covid-19-related measures.
That’s about £5,000 per person and This Writer can’t help thinking the money would have been better-spent if the Tories had just given it to each of us and told us to stay at home.
Instead, they devised a series of financial packages to fit people in certain circumstances – and to ignore others.
That’s the reason the Liverpool Echo is reporting that four people in Merseyside were known to have committed suicide after hearing Rishi Sunak’s most recent financial statement.
The Echo quotes Anneka Hicks of Excluded UK, an organisation to help a large proportion of the workforce who have been cut out of any ‘meaningful government support schemes’:
Over the past eight months many of our members have had to sell their homes, their cars – they have depleted their entire life savings.
They’ve lost their dignity. Many of them have been forced to take state benefits (if they can) and use food banks to feed their families, they’ve lost their businesses or made redundancies.
They are expected to start again with nothing, or less than nothing.
Sadly, we lost four members to suicide within 72 hours of the chancellor’s latest financial statement, but they are only the people we know about.
There are more details in the Echo article but look at the heartlessness of the government response:
We’ve acknowledged that not everyone has been helped in the way they would have wanted, but overall the Government has provided a huge amount to help businesses and families through this crisis.
The scheme’s eligibility criteria are designed to most effectively target support to low earners and prevent fraud.
It seems clear that it isn’t working.
And now Sunak wants people like these to pay increased taxes. One of them points out
I pay my taxes every year, I expected something back from that.
How can Sunak expect money from people he deliberately locked out of any help – or the families of people who have died as a result of his policies?
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[Yes, this article comes with a trigger warning as it discusses matters which some people may find extremely upsetting.]
Dear Ms Coffey,
Please take a good, long look at the image accompanying this. It is the last photograph of Phillip Herron, taken minutes before he took his own life.
Mr Herron died because your employees at the Department for Work and Pensions could not be bothered to take their fingers out of their collective posteriors long enough to pay him the Universal Credit he was owed. He would undoubtedly be alive now if they had.
No doubt the DWP officers concerned would say they did not need to pay Mr Herron as Universal Credit is paid in arrears and his five-week wait had not yet ended. They were “only following orders”, they will say, echoing the so-called Nuremberg Defence that did not protect any German soldiers who were prosecuted for ensuring the deaths of so many people during World War II.
You, together with previous Work and Pensions secretaries, and many other Conservative MPs past and present, justify the wait with the mantra that delaying payment for more than a month prepares claimants for the world of work, but we all know that is not true.
It attacks their mental health. It causes depression and despair, and ultimately can lead to suicidal thoughts. Mr Herron’s death is a matter of Conservative government policy.
When he died, he had just £4.61 in his bank account and debts of more than £20,000 that were escalating due to that five-week wait for Universal Credit.
£20,000 is not a substantial sum of money in this day and age. I know you have said it is in interviews, but just take a look at your own bank balance. You probably consider that to be small change; the kind of pocket money you might spend on a night out.
It is one-sixth of the pay rise you will receive next year, just for being a member of Parliament.
It could have been handled. There are ways to ensure debt can be paid off within a reasonable period of time, no matter what the debtor’s means. But Mr Herron could not see that because your system forced him to concentrate on the negative aspects of his situation.
He saw no way out because you denied it to him. So he took his own life. His blood is on your hands. I understand DWP jargon describes that as a “positive benefit outcome”.
Now his three young children must go through life without a father – because that is what you demanded.
Their upbringing is likely to be a much greater burden on public funds than paying his Universal Credit claim – because that is what you demanded.
And there are countless others in the same predicament right now – because that is what you demand.
Your system does not help anybody. It pressurises them; it brutalises them; it forces them to consider the unthinkable – because that is what you demand.
It does not matter whether you spoke the words. You ordered the death of this man.
Please make a copy of his photograph and put it on your wall. Then, every day, when you come into work, you can spend time looking at it – and try to find a way to justify the fact that you caused him to die.
You can find more information – and more than 18,000 comments from members of the public – in this Facebook post.
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Smug little liar: when Matt Hancock opens his mouth to make a claim, it will probably be wrong.
There was a time when lying to Parliament meant immediate expulsion but don’t expect to see deceitful health secretary Matt Hancock thrown out on his ear.
When the whole government is corrupt, he is merely one liar among many.
His latest attempt to mislead us is in the number of people committing suicide.
He told the Commons that figures for England showed a decrease but this is not true.
Here’s Full Fact:
“Some cautiously positive news announced today by the Office for National Statistics shows that the number of suicides during the peak of the pandemic was down from 10.3 per 100,000 to 6.9 per 100,000”. – Matt Hancock MP, 1 September 2020
While the figures quoted by Mr Hancock are the latest reported by the ONS, it has clearly said that this data “cannot be used to show the number of suicides with a date of death in 2020, including those that occurred during the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic”.
The provisional data, released on 1 September, shows the rate and number of suicide deaths registered up to June 2020. This data reported 10.3 suicides per 100,000 people between January and March (equivalent to 1,262 registered deaths), and 6.9 suicide deaths per 100,000 people between April and June, equivalent to 845 registered deaths.
It is important to note that these figures show when these deaths were registered, not when they happened.
The 845 suicides registered in the second quarter of 2020 is the lowest number of any quarter since the figures began in 2001, and the ONS said it is “unlikely that the reduction in registered deaths reflects a genuine reduction in the number of suicides”.
Mr Hancock was wrong to say that suicide deaths fell during the peak of the pandemic, as it is too early for the evidence to show what happened.
Hancock’s lie was all the more blatant when we remember that the ONS – the same organisation whose figures he quoted so wrongly – has reported that suicides in England and Wales last year were at their highest in nearly two decades:
Men accounted for around three-quarters of suicide deaths registered in 2019 – 4,303 compared with 1,388 women.
The male suicide rate of 16.9 deaths per 100,000 people was the highest since 2000, but is in line with 2018’s figures.
For women, the rate was 5.3 deaths per 100,000 – the highest since 2004, but again consistent with the previous year.
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Pauline Hammerton, a long-term Labour activist from Hulme, in Manchester, had been expelled on February 4 under one of the fast-track processes I described in my article.
It seems she had been unaware that the party had been planning to expel her, and was left distraught by the decision.
It is believed that the shock triggered a haemorrhage that killed her.
Those who knew Ms Hammerton (I did not) have described her in glowing terms.
Here‘s The Critique Archives: “I had met Pauline a few times at demos and other meetings, and so, although I did not know her well, her death has come as a shock, to me personally, and to other activists across the north-west. Her dedication to justice was tremendous, and the callous mistreatment she received from a party that she had given so much to must have been the bitterest blow imaginable.”
And this is from Tony Greenstein’s blog: “A cursory look at Pauline Hammerton’s Facebook page shows that she was anything but a racist. She was a decent, kind, concerned person who hated all kinds of oppression. Pauline was Chair of Manchester Socialist Health Association… Pauline was the kind of person who should be welcomed and respected.”
Mr Greenstein has also been expelled from the Labour Party on trumped-up charges of anti-Semitism, as has This Writer.
I can’t speak for him, but I have had more than a quarter of a century’s experience as a reporter, and know the kind of backstabbing that can take place.
But not everybody is made of such stern stuff. False allegations alone can cause a huge amount of stress, especially on people whose health is not the best – and tangible harm as a result of such lies, like expulsion from a political party to which one has devoted a large amount of one’s life, can end a life. That is what we have seen.
But we cannot expect the Labour Party to own up and apologise. Nor can we expect any of Ms Hammerton’s false accusers to take anything like the honourable course of action.
They’ll be covering their tracks. If you don’t believe me, consider The Sun and the way that publication rushed to delete a story attacking the late TV presenter Caroline Flack after her apparent suicide (again on February 15).
Ms Flack had been under huge pressure after being removed as the host of a piece of ITV fluff called Love Island amid allegations that she had assaulted her boyfriend.
She had been due to go on trial in March. She had called the period after her arrest and departure from the TV show “the worst time of my life” and had since admitted that she was still having a “really rough time”.
But that didn’t stop content providers like The Sun from hounding her. The headline on the deleted story was “Brutal Caroline Flack Valentine’s Day card mocks troubled star with ‘I’ll f*** lamp you’ message”.
I don’t personally know what happened between Ms Flack and her significant other and I’m not the kind of person to rush to judgement, but I’m sure many people seeing that headline would have believed that it depicted her as a woman of extreme violence and that this was the impression it was seeking to give.
Put yourself in the position of a woman at the sharp end of messages like that – and who had been subjected to a constant stream of them for many months.
And now at least one candidate to be leader of the Labour Party (remember Labour?) is threatening to open up a new set of floodgates for false accusations, by supporting a call to expel members who express transphobic views.
And just who would decide whether these views were transphobic or not? The same kind of people who decided that simply being accused of anti-Semitism meant members had to be guilty of it?
Labour has a piss-poor record on disciplinary matters and this will make it much, much worse.
Yes, I know that there is a huge argument raging between the so-called TERFs (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists) and people who, as I understand it, are demanding a widening of the definition of transsexual people.
Neither side seems to have much to recommend it. I fell foul of some particularly odious people who claimed to be representative of the trans community on (again) February 15; they seemed to be just as bigoted and intolerant as those they claimed to be defending against.
And Rebecca Long-Bailey is taking their side.
Wouldn’t it be better to tell both gangs to pipe down, and follow a policy that ensures the maximum protection for everyone?
Beastrabban has written an extremely informative piece on this matter, which is not simple and it is vulnerable to takeover by agents of malice and hate.
Coming back to the fact that people are dying over false anti-Semitism allegations, I can say that I wish to raise this when my own case against the Labour Party comes to court on May 26.
It’s a long time to wait, because justice is a slow process, and I’m sure that Labour will try to obstruct my case as much as possible (those who were at the hearing earlier this month will know what I mean).
But it’s the best I can offer. What will you do?
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Mims Davies: Not only does she not know the effect of benefit sanctions on claimant’s mental health; she doesn’t care.
This isn’t the first time the Department for Work and Pensions and the Tory ministers running it have turned down a demand to assess the impact of benefit sanctions on claimants.
They’ve been doing it for years.
But it’s nice to see that public disgust with the implication behind it is growing.
Employment minister Mims Davies responded to a Parliamentary question on the subject, said no assessment has been made of any link between benefit sanctions and mental health problems in claimants, including suicidal tendencies.
But look at the reactions – like this, from Manzoor Ali, director of Barakah Food Aid, which offers donated goods to people struggling to make ends meet:
“People are committing suicide, or on the verge of suicide. Once this sanction comes in, they’re left with no money. It becomes this rollercoaster of a journey. It creates more problems for them,” he said.
“Their benefits are completely cancelled so they’ve got literally nothing coming in. It can take four to six weeks. Sometimes they’ll get an emergency loan, but that is then immediately taken out of their benefits once it’s reinstated. It’s a vicious cycle.
“Some of the people tell me they’re on the verge of calling it a day they don’t know how much longer they can take it. It’s unbelievable.
“The number of children I’m seeing who are just silent. Many are going to school without breakfast. This issue is going to have a future impact – the children will grow up with mental health issues.”
Wow.
Research by Salford City Council in 2016 found that sanctions were “devastating” for claimants and could lead to suicide. It was ignored.
Leading psychologists urged ministers to immediately stop the practice or risk soaring rates of mental health problems – in 2017. They were ignored.
A report by the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute in March 2019 found that universal credit was “ruining lives” with burdensome red tape for people with mental health issues, and called for an end to sanctions for those in crisis who can’t attend job interviews. It was ignored.
The DWP did pledge in 2013 to review the policy of suspending benefits “on an ongoing basis”, but a report by the Work and Pensions Committee in 2018 found that no such evaluation had been carried out and the government subsequently had “no idea how many people were suffering” as a result of the policy.
The only possible conclusion is that the policy is doing exactly what the Tories want and that mental suffering leading to suicide is the intended aim.
That is not the policy of a government that has the interests of its people at heart.
I wonder how anybody could ever believe that.
Fortunately, it seems only a dwindling number of people still do.
So, I’ll tell you what.
Why not share this article, and see if we can increase the number of people who don’t believe the Tories any more?
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Pushed too far: How many people have been driven to consider taking their own lives because of brutal DWP policies? How many have actually done so?
The National Audit Office (NAO) is to investigate the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) over its refusal to provide figures on the number of benefit claimants who have committed suicide.
It seems the situation at the DWP is so bad that the NAO may attempt to collate the figures itself, if the government department fails to co-operate.
Ministers denied a request from Frank Field MP, who chairs the Commons Work and Pensions committee. In a letter to the NAO, he stated: “I struggle to believe that, given the time it must take to put together evidence for inquests, attend court hearings, and internally review the decisions, that there is no record of such.
“It shocks me even more that the DWP is apparently unconcerned with the most drastic efforts [sic; I think he meant “effects”] of its policies and conducts no internal monitoring of the tragedies in which it is complicit.”
“The tragedies in which it is complicit.” What a damning line from the chairman of the MP committee tasked with scrutinising the DWP. He was stating the belief that the DWP, its ministers, controllers and workers, are all knowingly involved in an activity that they are aware is morally wrong – that leads to the deaths of claimants.
There have been many studies linking with suicide the so-called “reforms” of DWP benefits since the Conservatives came back into office in 2010 and I do not propose to go over that old ground here.
I practically kicked off these investigations myself, when I forced the DWP to publish figures on the number of people who had died after being denied sickness benefits in 2015 – after a two-year struggle.
So I welcome this intervention by the NAO.
I hope it will include in its investigations all benefit claimants who may have taken their own lives as a result of the DWP meddling with their claims.
For example: the figures I extracted from the department in 2015 related only to those who died within a two week period of being denied their benefits. No effort had been made to discover the fate of those who survived beyond that point – although we have a multitude of news stories about people who died weeks or months afterward. They should be included in the NAO’s work.
I find myself in agreement with Sue Jones, who wrote, on her own website:
“An inquiry is long overdue.
“How many people with chronic illness and disability have simply died because they can’t meet their most fundamental survival needs in light of austerity cuts?
“What kind of government shows no concern or remorse that its policies are destroying some citizens’ lives?
“And continually denies that this is happening?
“Does the government intentionally disregard us as economically “surplus to requirements” and ultimately disposable? When the evidence points so clearly to the relationship between austerity cuts, which have disproportionately been targeted at the poorest and most fragile citizens, and suicide, it’s hard to reason otherwise. Especially when the government shows nothing but supreme indifference to those of us raising these serious concerns.”
Exactly.
The Tories’ attitude suggests that they regard benefit claimants as “useless eaters” – in just the same way the Nazis viewed people with long-term illnesses and disabilities in Germany between 1933 and 1945.
The only difference between their policies is that the Nazis took direct action to “euthanize” their “useless eaters”, while the DWP seems to prefer pushing UK-based benefit claimants to suicide, starvation, or death due to illnesses they can no longer afford to treat.
We have long suspected that the consequences of DWP – Conservative government – policy were far more serious than we had been led to believe, and we already have evidence that they are extremely serious.
Perhaps this investigation will prove it.
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If you’re like me, you can hear the mealy-mouthed justifications from the lying Tories already.
“Any suicide is a tragedy and the reasons for them are complex, however it would be inaccurate and misleading to link it solely to government policy,” they would most likely say.
“There is no evidence to suggest any causal link.”
That is what the Tories have said about benefit-related suicide for the last few years – even after causal links were established.
But that’s the joy of a really big lie; repeat it often enough and people will believe it.
Well, that’s the theory, anyway.
And it’s the reason the Tories will shrug at this:
More than 300 nurses have taken their own lives in just seven years, shocking new figures reveal.
During the worst year, one was committing suicide EVERY WEEK as Tory cuts began to bite deep into the NHS.
Today victims’ families call for vital early mental health training and support for young nurses – and an end to a “bullying and toxic culture” in the health service which leaves them afraid to ask for help in their darkest moments.
As for the facts… Here’s Samuel Miller:
[Comment from Samuel] The underfunding of the NHS by successive Tory governments has made life very difficult and challenging for nurses, with respect to salaries, working conditions, and the elimination of bursaries for nursing students. Some nurses are dependent on food banks.
Indeed. Lucy de Oliveira (pictured above) committed suicide in 2017 while training to become a nurse in Liverpool. She received no pay during her training and her bursary covered only accommodation, leaving her to live on £6 per month. In an attempt to make ends meet, she was working at a pizza restaurant and a care home on top of three 12-hour shifts at hospitals.
But the Tories want you to think it’s nothing to do with them. Don’t.
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It isn’t often I disagree with John Pring of the Disability News Service, but I think he’s being far too charitable to the Department for Work and Pensions.
A report on the DNS website has suggested that the DWP destroyed a report on failures by Job Centre staff to have proper regard for the safety of benefit claimants because the government doesn’t want the facts to get out.
I have a simpler suggestion: The Conservatives simply don’t want benefit claimants to benefit from important information that could save them from serious harm or even death.
Failure to provide this information indicates a serious breach of the government’s duty of care to people claiming benefits.
The DNS report shows that the DWP illegally delayed its response to a Freedom of Information request demanding copies of all reports written by “Community Partners” in London in 2017 and 2018.
The report in question had been created by three disabled people who had joined the “Community Partners” initiative that had been set up to improve relations between the DWP and local communities.
They wrote it only weeks after joining, after becoming increasingly alarmed by the failure of 18 Job Centres to take basic actions that would protect people claiming benefits such as universal credit, employment and support allowance and jobseeker’s allowance.
DNS described some of the incidents, as recorded by one of the “Community Partners” going under the pseudonym “Rachel”:
On one occasion, Rachel heard a member of staff explain that a claimant with cancer of the spine, who needed his dressing changed every day, should be found fit for work “so he’s looking forward to the future”.
She also remembers sitting in on an interview with a universal credit claimant, who was 55 and not disabled and had just been made redundant.
He had been hit by the bedroom tax and said repeatedly that he was hungry because he was so short of money, but the DWP civil servant failed to tell him that he could request foodbank vouchers.
When Rachel asked the civil servant after the interview why she had not told him he could ask for vouchers, she was told: “Because he didn’t ask.”
Rachel said: “He said four times that he was hungry and couldn’t afford to go shopping and didn’t have enough money for food.
“That is just dangerous. That person is going to end up with malnutrition and depression.
“It was just a regular guy who was doing his best and did not know how the system worked, let alone that the magic word was ‘foodbank’.”
On another occasion, a man in extreme mental distress who had previously self-harmed in the Brixton jobcentre after being found fit for work, returned to the jobcentre and again began self-harming by banging his head against a window.
Staff were standing around watching, said Rachel, who had to take control, find a manager and tell them to contact the council’s social services department.
Despite her intervention, no report on the incident was written, despite her repeatedly asking for an incident report form.
She believes her insistence that the incident needed to be written up was one of the reasons she was eventually sacked, although DWP claimed it was because she had retweeted a social media post criticising Iain Duncan Smith, even though she believes the tweet was sent before she started working for DWP.
She said: “They all know they are putting people at risk but all they are concerned about is ticking boxes.”
Note the claim that “Rachel” was sacked for criticising Iain Duncan Smith – tacit confirmation that the Conservatives coerce employees into silence about their harmful policies and practices.
According to DNS, the DWP illegally delayed releasing the documents that had been requested, then said the report by “Rachel” and the other two “Community Partners” had been destroyed under a rule that such documents should not be kept longer than 12 months.
This is an unconvincing argument because the DNS Freedom of Information request had been made four months before that period had expired.
The evidence is clear: The Department for Work and Pensions will never willingly help benefit claimants whose safety is in danger.
There are moves to force the department support its own safeguarding rules: The Justice for Jodey Whiting petition demands an independent inquiry into deaths linked to the DWP.
The petition was set up because the department failed five times to follow its own safeguarding rules in the weeks leading up to her suicide in February 2017.
It has been signed 25,000 times in three weeks. If it reaches 100,000 signatures, it may be debated in Parliament.
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Imagine there’s a pit full of bodies beneath the falling wheelchair-user, totalling at least 120,000 people [Image: Black Triangle Campaign].
Here’s a great Twitter thread from Rachael Swindon, listing only some of the vile treatment endured by sick and disabled people at the will of the Conservative government led by Theresa May (and formerly David Cameron).
It isn’t entirely accurate, of course. Nobody in their right mind thinks MS or Parkinson’s Disease is curable; it’s just something that they said, to justify victimising the poor sufferers of those illnesses. What were these benefit claimants going to do? Take them to court? Impossible. They would have needed Legal Aid to do so and legal aid for this purpose has been banned by the Conservatives.
It’s the policy of the Nazi, but with an extra layer of pretence; the Nazis pretended that disabled people were “useless eaters” who were to expensive – too much a drain on the state – to be allowed to live, while the Conservatives pretend that people with illnesses and disabilities are not ill at all, before going on to say that they do not merit the expense borne by the state in paying benefits to them.
The gas chambers (the Nazis piloted them on disabled people before proceeding to their better-known genocides) aren’t needed because experience shows that those who are very ill, deprived of the wherewithal to make their way in the world, either die of their own illnesses or take their own lives. It’s cheaper than gas.
But the whole process isn’t.
The expense of hiring private firms to deny medical evidence and steal their livelihood from the deserving poor, of holding tribunals at huge cost that end up ordering that the victims of this Tory persecution are paid everything they were owed… of a system of oppression that costs much, much more than simply paying benefits to the sick and disabled, can only mean one thing.
Conservatives like Iain Duncan Smith, Damian Green, David Gauke, Esther McVey, Chris Grayling, Maria Miller, and all the others who have been involved, directly or indirectly – right up to the one who resigned last week, whatever her name was – haven’t been victimising the sick and disabled to their deaths because they think it is an economic necessity.
They do it because they like to hurt people who cannot retaliate. That is all.
They even thought Parkinson’s could be cured at one point. This government have issued more than 1m benefit sanctions against disabled people. Sanctions against mental health sufferers increased by 668%. They target vulnerable people in the hoping they won’t fight back. 2/10
This government spent £200 million trying to stop sick and disabled people getting benefits. A record 72% of their decisions are overturned on appeal. I was told a tribunal costs around £16,000. A criminal waste of money. 4/10
This government press ahead with punitive sanctions, despite them costing hundreds of millions more than what they actually save. The Tories know this, yet they carry on. A criminal court can’t leave you hungry, but benefit sanctions can and will. 6/10
This government have had more than 120,000 deaths linked to their austerity policies. It goes without saying, they also dismissed this. They’ve stolen more than 75,000 mobility vehicles from disabled people, taking away their independence. 8/10
Now is the time to engage with people, show them why they can’t keep the Tories in power any longer. I didn’t even cover Universal Credit. Much of this will resonate with people, because they’ve suffered. And there’s only one way we can end this suffering. 10/10
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