Tag Archives: benefits

Since 2019: here’s how the Tories DIDN’T make the benefits system better

This didn’t happen: But you can bet the Tories would have wanted it.

Days after the Tories won their landslide in December 2019, Mrs Mike wrote the following:

“Basically now we are all buggered.

“No hope left for me as I’m disabled and they’ve messed me about so much already.

“I don’t see any compassion for people like myself and all the others like me out there – and to all the ones who have already taken their lives because of cuts cuts cuts cuts n more cuts.

“I’m so disappointed in people in general because of all the hatred towards different groups of people.

“And it’s now going to get worse. Thanks a bunch.”

She wrote it, and so it came to pass.

But at that point, all I did was point out what I thought the Tories would not do. Now I can modify that by telling you what they didn’t do.

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They didn’t

… give us reform of the Department for Work and Pensions. Labour would have scrapped the DWP because the culture of persecution had become so ingrained into it that the only responsible choice was to dissolve the entire department and replace it with a new Department of Social Security. That did not happen under the Conservatives and the culture of persecution continued to kill people – your relatives, maybe.

…reform the benefit system and scrap Universal Credit. UC had been a hugely-expensive ‘white elephant’ from the start – but it did exactly what the Conservatives wanted: It killed benefit claimants.

…reform the so-called “digital barrier” that obstructs people who have trouble coping with computers and the internet from claiming benefits. Telephone, face-to-face and outreach support cost money and might result in people actually being able to claim the benefits they deserve and no Tory MP wanted that.

…end the five-week wait for Universal Credit payments. This plunged people into crushing poverty which is exactly where the Tories wanted them.

…reintroduce fortnightly payments, to help people manage their money. Tories wanted benefit claimants to be in a permanent state of panic, poverty and – ultimately – despair. Look at what Mrs Mike said, above.

…end the evil sanction regime. It is unfair and harsh for a reason – to harm poor people.

…scrap the benefit cap. Tories are about denying money to the people who really need it.

…end the two-child limit on benefits and scrap the so-called ‘rape clause’. Despite being described as “immoral and outrageous”, Tories love it because it humiliates women.

…pay the child element of benefits to the primary carer, to ensure that women are no longer forced to stay in abusive relationships by the system. Tories like keeping women in abusive relationships.

…end the Bedroom Tax and increase the Local Housing Allowance to protect people against the threat of eviction. Tories wanted to pitch poor people into the street. Their homes could then be redeveloped into high-cost dwellings for the very rich, “gentrifying” – and socially-cleansing – whole towns.

…stop benefit assessments being contracted-out to private companies and ensure that all benefit assessments were carried out by government employees in future. Privatisation is a Tory mantra. While it encourages corruption, it also puts any harm caused to claimants at arms’-length from the Tory government itself.

In the run-up to the next election, be sure to check what each party and candidate has to say about the benefit system. You might think you’re perfectly healthy and will never need it – but accidents and illnesses happen by surprise all the time.

Think about what happens to people on the benefit system – what really happens; don’t listen to all the silly stories about scroungers and spongers because they are nonsense. I refer to the real horror stories about seriously ill people who were denied benefits and died – either because their very real conditions killed them or because they were pushed to despair and took their own lives.

You don’t want that to happen to you. So be sure to check those manifesto booklets and policy documents in the run-up to the next election and vote for your own protection.


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Boris Johnson was elected in 2019 to ‘Get Brexit Done’. Why are we still waiting for the benefits?

Cliffhanger: The Leave campaign infamously claimed Brexit would result in a £350m a week dividend for the UK. We never received it. Instead, Brexit has shrunk the UK economy by at least 4%, costing a huge amount of working time simply to do the new paperwork it has foisted on us.

Brexit – that was a huge con, wasn’t it?

The Conservatives swept to a landslide victory in December 2019 under the slogan “Get Brexit Done” – and we are still waiting for it to happen.

Instead of the massive boost to the economy that we were promised, along with a bonfire of bureaucratic paperwork, UK importers and exporters have been deluged with such a mountain of new documentation to fill out, simply to get goods across the Channel, that the then-new government has had to “stagger” its implementation and some of it has still not started to affect us.

And Brexit jeopardised the whole Northern Ireland peace process by putting a trade border with the province in the middle of the Irish Sea – an imaginary barrier that will remain there even after the latest attempt to forge agreement over it between the disparate political organisations that have a stake in the matter.

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Brexit was the first subject This Site discussed after the general election and I was justifiably disparaging:

The Tories – not just under Boris Johnson, but going back through Theresa May’s nightmare leadership and right back to David Cameron’s horror show – have used their puppets in the mass media to change it from a debate on our future relationship with the European Union into a divisive standoff, pitting family against family, old against young, cosmopolitan against parochial.

And they succeeded, I think partly because they had dragged the process out so long that people were sick of the whole thing.

Labour’s promise to have a decisive answer within six months was unpalatable compared with Johnson’s lie that he’ll have it all sewn up by the end of January. People want it to be over now.

And I made a prediction that proved to be exactly right – didn’t it? See:

Well, I’ve got news for those people: it won’t be.

Johnson might be promising a vote in Parliament on his Withdrawal Bill on Friday, which will enable to UK to leave the EU on January 31, but of course that’s not the end of the saga. The country’s decoupling will take many years.

How right I was!

But the deal on which MPs will be voting will put us into a “transition” period, with the UK assumed to be clear of the EU by December 31, 2020 – and a top EU official says that won’t happen.

In a leaked recording, Michel Barnier said it would be “unrealistic” to expect a “global negotiation” on trade to be completed within 11 months, meaning that in fact we are likely to leave the EU with no deal.

How right he was!

It will make it possible for Johnson to sell off our remaining national assets. And the nearly 14 million people who voted Conservative on December 12? They’ll be remembered as the patsies who made it possible.

Well, they haven’t all gone – yet.

But the Tories will keep trying. And we know what privatisation brings: corruption, greed and profiteering, a sharp drop in the quality of service, and increasing demand on the public purse to pay for it all.

You can look forward to that under either a returned Tory government under Rishi Sunak or a new New Labour government under Keir Starmer and his Tories-in-red-ties.

That’s why This Site is campaigning for voters to do something different at this year’s general election – and actually engage your brains.

I’ve said it before and I’ll probably repeat it many times:

You simply cannot vote tribally – for the party you think represents you (none of them do; they’re all about enriching their MPs and nothing else) – at the next general election.

Instead – and I cannot stress this strongly enough – if you want your vote to mean anything, you have to actually find out what the candidates in your constituency are planning to do, if they are lucky enough to be elected.

That is what party manifestos are for. Independent candidates also have policy documents and they will all be online for you to find and read.

You need to find and read these policy documents, and then you need to make a dispassionate choice, based on what you have read.

Which of the candidates offers the most policies that fit what you need? And, by that, I mean: who will improve your own life the most?

Do not consider how other people will vote, either in your constituency or the other 649 around the UK. That is not your concern.

It is not for you to worry about which party will get enough votes to actually enact its policies. This will lead you down the usual garden path to voting in a government that won’t do anything at all for the good of the country, like the one we’ve had since 2010.

BE SELFISH. Bizarrely, it might be the only way to get the kind of government that all of us need. It might even help us climb out of the Brexit pit into which Johnson, Cameron and all the other Tory twits dumped us.


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Gordon Brown calls for overhaul of benefits system? What did HE do to it?

Gordon Brown: his government started the erosion of benefits that he’s complaining about now.

For the record: This Writer didn’t hate Gordon Brown. In fact, I sent him a lot of letters when he was PM and received a card with his signature stamp on it from one of his aides when he quit.

But it was under Brown that the wholesale messing with the benefits of sick and disabled people really started to bite. Employment and Support Allowance – with the hated Work Capability Assessment administered by private contractor Atos – was introduced in 2008.

So his recent call for Rishi Sunak to “implement a root and branch reform of the benefits system” because “many families on benefits can no longer make ends meet”.

That was the whole intention of the changes to benefits that Brown’s ‘New Labour’ government put in motion!

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Still, there’s more rejoicing in Heaven for a sinner that repentheth, and all that.

He was quoting from an unpublished briefing paper by Prof Donald Hirsch, titled The UK’s Inadequate and Unfair Safety Net, concluding that Britain’s benefit system no longer provides the basic amount needed “to function day-to-day and have healthy lives”.

Here’s what he said:

Speaking to the Guardian, Brown said: “Britain needs to face up to the fact that it is in the throes of a poverty crisis. Donald Hirsch’s important and path-breaking research reveals the arithmetic of poverty, showing just why so many families on benefits can no longer make ends meet.

“It is an evidence based wake-up call to the chancellor to use his March budget to implement a root and branch reform of the benefits system.”

According to the Graun, for single adults on benefits in 2012, minimum basic food and energy costs ate up 73 per cent of their weekly income, whereas in 2023 those costs amounted to 22 per cent more than their benefits provided – leaving them unable to afford to eat properly, let alone meet clothes, toiletries and transport costs.

The poorest families must now spend an average of 63p in each pound to meet basic food and energy needs – nearly 50 per cent more of their income on food and energy than they did in 2012, when the figure was 46p.

The equivalent spend by the average UK family is roughly 20p in each pound earned, the report says.

This is due to the precipitous fall in real-terms value of benefits. Working-age benefits have fallen to 13 per cent below their 2009 peak – their real-terms value falling most dramatically when the government froze benefit levels between 2016 and 2019.

But this has been worsened by holes designed into the safety net that mean most claimants now receive even less money than their entitlement.

These include the Bedroom Tax, two-child limit on Child Benefit and the Benefit Cap, and deductions used to pay back loan advances made to Universal Credit claimants waiting five weeks for a first benefit payment.

And the response from the Department for Work and Pensions? Pathetic.

The Graun reported it as follows:

“The best thing we can do to help those who are struggling is put money back in people’s pockets. That’s why we’ve cut taxes and brought inflation down by more than half while providing support to those who need it most.”

Cutting taxes is no help to people who don’t earn enough money to pay them!

And halving inflation means prices are still rising, as any fool knows!

So we see a serious threat to the lives of people on benefits – especially those who are single.

The best thing the government is doing for them is a rise of 6.7 per cent in the value of benefits from April.

But that’s no help if it still means the cost of essential food and energy is 15.3 per cent more than your entire benefit entitlement.

Remember it. Even if you’re not on benefits now, it doesn’t mean you’ll never need them.

Source: Gordon Brown calls for overhaul of benefits system as study reveals ‘crisis’


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Benefit cap means CUT, not rise, in benefits from April [Tory lie of the day]

A new level of cruelty: failing to increase the benefit cap in line with inflation forces more households into poverty. It doesn’t help them.

What a great example of Tories giving with one hand while taking with the other.

In April this year, the Conservative government is claiming that it will give benefit claimants an inflation-matching 6.7 per cent increase in payments.

But this will not count for people whose entitlement will exceed the benefit cap – or already does.

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This is because Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, has not raised the threshold of the cap in line with entitlements.

The cap itself is simply a limit on the maximum amount of benefit payments a household is allowed to receive – regardless of whether it is enough for those households to make ends meet.

More than 85,000 households already affected by the benefit cap will not receive a single penny more in benefit, despite continuing steep rises in the cost of living. Who knows how many more will be affected from April onwards?

According to the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG),

“The benefit cap severs the link between need and entitlement in our social security system: a household will have their total need for support assessed, and if this comes out above the level of the cap (currently £22,020 per year for families with children, or £25,323 for families in London) they will simply receive less than they need.

“There are wide variations in the amounts that households are capped, but the average is £53 a week, a loss keenly felt by those already struggling to survive below the poverty line.”

The DWP has provided this line to The Independent:

“We are supporting the most vulnerable with a record £94bn cost of living support package – worth around £3,700 per household – and have halved inflation to make everyone’s money go further.

“On top of this we’ve raised benefits by 10.1 per cent and are investing £3.5bn to help thousands into jobs – the best way to help people secure long term financial security.”

None of these points mean anything.

The £3,700 per household is actually spread over the four years between 2022 and 2025 – so it doesn’t come close to covering the £2,756 that households whose benefits are capped will lose.

Halving inflation doesn’t make anybody’s money go further; it means their money won’t go as far as it used to. If inflation is halved, it just means the speed at which prices rise has slowed down. Nobody’s money is going further because inflation is halved.

Raised benefits don’t matter to households that are already capped.

And “helping” (forcing?) people into jobs won’t do any good if the jobs are so low-paid that they have to claim Universal Credit anyway – like the 40 per cent of people in work who already do. Jobs are not the best way to help people secure long-term financial security and haven’t been for decades.

What, then, is the result of this decision to keep benefits capped at the same level, despite price rises across the board?

Simple.

It will impoverish thousands upon thousands of families across the UK. As intended by Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak.
Source: DWP benefit claimants face payments cut next year | The Independent


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Chris Philp: the UK benefit system is FAR from generous! (Tory lie of the day)

Chris Philp: looking at the expression on his face, you could be forgiven for thinking his head zips up at the back.

Tory Policing Minister Chris Philp says there is no excuse for shoplifting in the UK because we all have plenty of money.

He reckons wages are plentiful and we have a “very generous” benefit system. See for yourself:

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Let’s examine that statement:

Ah – he was talking about the generosity of benefits for MPs like himself!

Right!

In that case, the only people who shouldn’t be shoplifting are people whose rear ends warm the Green Benches of the House of Commons (and the Red Benches of the House of Lords) – people like Philp himself.

Got it.

If poverty drives anyone else to desperation in a supermarket, let’s see what they have to say about it if they end up in court, shall we?


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Keir Starmer’s bizarre definition of ‘working-class’ people will astonish you

Keir Starmer: yet another own goal.

Even Owen Jones is wrong on this one – although less so than Keir Starmer, the leader of the so-called Party of the Workers.

Starmer got totally lost on this question because he doesn’t understand the difference between working-class and middle-class people.

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Let’s look at what he said, coupled with Jones’s response:

Starmer’s failure to distinguish between working- and middle-class people may be partially attributed to political ambition; he was trying to talk about “aspiration” – the desire for people to climb the so-called ladder of success and cross the boundary between one class and the other.

In that, he is selling Snake Oil; it is harder to cross the class boundaries now than at any time in the last 40-50 years, due to political policies that he supports.

Jones is more accurate. Both working- and middle-class people need to work if they want to make a decent living, but the difference is that working-class people do not have a choice about the work they do.

If you are middle-class, you are part of a profession. This Writer is a journalist, so I am middle-class. My mother was a teacher, so she was middle-class. My father was a mechanic in a garage – skilled work, to be sure, but then lost his job and had to take one in a brewery; so he was working-class.

The extra element that Jones missed was that most jobs taken by working-class people are now so poorly-paid that they have to claim benefits in order to make ends meet,

This makes nonsense of a much-repeated Tory line, that “work is the best way out of poverty”. It isn’t.

It might be more accurate to say “middle-class work may get you out of poverty” – but no politician (middle-class) is going to tell you that because they’re basically saying that much of their work over the past half-century has been to elevate themselves to safety and then pull up the ladder so that you cannot do the same.

If you believe that Keir Starmer really has a working-class background, then he is one of the worst offenders. Do you really want to vote for this class traitor?


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Millions of benefits will be halted ‘if you refuse’ says Scrooge Stride. Refuse? To do what?

Persecution: the Tories are up to their usual tricks – claiming that benefit claimants are refusing to look for jobs.

Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride is courting “Scrooge” comparisons by wheeling out an old Tory attack line against benefit claimants – at Christmas.

The line is that benefit claimants refuse to look for work:

The Department for Work and Pensions could stop your payments next year – if claimants refuse to look for work. Ahead of Christmas, a renewed warning from the DWP has been circulating with claimants tasked with more strident attempts to get into work next year.

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Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride warned: “These back-to-work reforms strike at the heart of the quid pro quo that defines the contract between the state and the individual. The government will provide you with the support you need to move into work but if you fail to keep your side of the bargain, if you refuse to engage or ignore available job opportunities, we will stop your job benefits.”

Experience suggests this may be a renewed attempt to force jobseekers into employment that pays less than they would receive on benefits – making a mockery of the claim that work is the best way out of poverty.

But who actually refuses to look for work? Very few people. If there is a glut of jobs that aren’t being filled, it’s probably because they simply aren’t worth taking.

Then again, the Tories have been making big speeches that employers should offer more pay to workers. If anything comes of that, they may see jobless figures falling.

But if they want to save money – or take money for the government – then they should be cracking down on tax avoidance and evasion rather than benefit fraud. And that is something the Tories will never do.

Source: DWP warns millions of benefits will be halted ‘if you refuse’


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National newspaper incites hatred against disabled people, low-paid workers and pensioners

Targeted: this poster appeared in 2019 so the number of sick and disabled people who have died is likely to be far higher – especially after the Covid-19 pandemic. Papers like the Telegraph seem to be trying to make that number skyrocket.

What’s going on at the Daily Telegraph? First we find that the paper has been spreading falsehoods that the boss of a supermarket chain that keeps its groceries as cheap as possible and pays its workers more than most has blamed the minimum wage for inflation (he hasn’t); now this:

Prem Sikka has archived the article so you can read it for yourself:

And the website to which Samuel Miller links, here, pulls no punches – claiming the tool to calculate “how much of your salary bankrolls the welfare state” is “straight out of the Nazi handbook”:

The Telegraph article states: “Of the 5.2 million people claiming out-of-work benefits, roughly 3.7 million have been granted indefinite exemptions from finding a job, following a surge in claims of mental health issues and joint pain during the pandemic, it emerged last week.”

The Mary Sue piece responds [boldings mine]: “As a propaganda piece, it’s not subtle. “Roughly 3.7 million have been granted indefinite exemptions from finding a job” is a funny way of saying that 3.7 million disabled people, who cannot work due to their disabilities, have been awarded up to £515.40 a month (maybe going all the way up to £782.35 if they’re severely disabled) in order to keep them from starving to death on the streets.

“Putting this number down to “a surge in claims of mental health issues and joint pain during the pandemic” is derisive and clearly intended to diminish the reader’s perception of what are, in fact, disabling conditions to live with that, yes, actually were caused by the pandemic—either a result of infection with the virus itself or the psychological impacts of lockdown, mass death, and the other sociological effects of a global pandemic.”

The Torygraph continues: “On top of this, the controversial decision to maintain the state pension triple lock is estimated to cost taxpayers £1,000 each over the next four years, according to calculations by the TaxPayers’ Alliance, a think tank.

“It raises the question, just how much of our hard-won salaries are spent on the benefits of those who do not work? With the calculator below, Telegraph Money can now reveal how much of your salary goes towards bankrolling the welfare state.”

In fact, none of our salaries are spent on benefits. The system doesn’t work that way. The government of the day sets its spending levels and then taxes us enough to keep that spending from pushing inflation too high (not accounting for interference from external influences like foreign wars and Brexit).

But let’s not allow trifles like the facts to get in the way of the Torygraph‘s argument.

Back to Mary Sue: “Note the emphasis on “do not work” and how it conflates the people who cannot work due to age or disability with the fantasy figure of the refusenik, who lounges around at home, wilfully choosing not to work, all on the government’s tab. It should be clear by now that the purpose of this article is to raise outrage against both the welfare system itself and the most vulnerable people who are dependent on it, but still, there’s more.”

The Torygraph states: “Despite Rishi Sunak’s insistence that he is a “low tax conservative” who wants to “bring people’s taxes down”, his chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, has implemented a combination of frozen thresholds, removed investment incentives, and increased corporation tax – all while keeping welfare spending close to £300bn a year.

“Economists now predict it will be decades before the tax burden returns to pre-pandemic levels.

“At the same time, welfare spending was the single biggest component of public sector expenditure in the financial year 2021-22, at £298.7bn out of a total of £952.3bn. For the typical taxpayer, this amounts to close to a third of their annual tax bill of £6,500 paid directly towards benefits.

“Using the latest public spending data, our analysis shows someone with the average UK salary of £33,000 sees £2,000 a year spent on welfare.”

Mary Sue responds: “The authors of the piece, Alex Clark and Tom Haynes, go on to object to the marginal and long overdue increase of corporation tax (even though the U.K. still has the joint highest uncapped headline rate of tax relief among G7 countries), the freeze on higher rate tax thresholds (meaning the wealthiest aren’t getting a tax cut), and the fact that this didn’t coincide with a lowering of government welfare spending, as if the former requires the latter as a form of penance.

“They seem outraged that most public sector spending goes toward the welfare state, with around a third of the average individual’s tax bill going toward it—this despite acknowledging that the percentage of public spending that goes toward welfare benefits has actually gone down while overall spending has gone up.”

The Torygraph: “Many high earners are now paying relatively more towards the welfare state because of the lowering of the 45p tax threshold in 2023-24, which now stands at £125,000, down from £150,000 before. Telegraph analysis shows 6pc of the average salary goes towards paying for benefits, compared to 13pc of a high earner’s salary.

“Someone earning £150,000, five times the average salary, contributes close to £19,000 towards the welfare state – more than nine times the contribution of someone on the average salary.”

Mary Sue: “But of course, the greatest outrage in this piece is reserved for the very wealthiest, who, due to earning significantly more than people in lower tax brackets, accordingly pay more tax and therefore contribute more to the welfare system. Leaning heavily on the fact that the highest tax bracket’s threshold was lowered from £150,000 pa to £125,140 this year, requiring the people in that gap to pay a whole 5% more on anything they earn above that limit, Clark and Haynes bemoan that a larger percentage of their tax bill goes towards maintaining the welfare system than lower earners. Someone earning five times the average U.K. salary pays up to nine times the amount towards the welfare system, we are told, as if this isn’t the entire point of staggered tax rates and how the system is supposed to work.”

Mary Sue then makes a hugely important point [boldings mine, again]: “It’s incredibly difficult to successfully apply for disability benefits of any kind in the U.K. According to a recent government study, the release of which is suspiciously close this particular Telegraph article’s publication, “the health assessment system for deciding if someone can claim disability benefits is grueling and often incorrect.” 90% of PIP (the most common benefit) claimants are denied on their first attempt with 89% of them denied again on their second round.

“The difficulty and sheer mental and physical stress involved in first applying and then attempting an appeal has led to a significant number of disabled people giving up, not because they don’t need the help after all but because the process is simply impossible for them to navigate with their disabilities. Reasons for denial are frequently absurd, and many disabled people have been reporting for years now that their assessor wrote down and submitted completely different information than they providedmisinformation that led to their claim being denied.

“While 3.7 million people considered too disabled to work may seem like a lot, when the total number of disabled people across the country is taken into consideration, 12.1 million, it suddenly seems a lot more reasonable. There aren’t too many people in receipt of benefits, or capable of working but given a pass not to—it’s the exact opposite, and the amount of money disabled people are awarded by the government is, in most cases, barely enough to live on.”

Mary Sue then goes on to consider the comparison it has made with Nazism: “This kind of rhetoric is dangerous, and comparing this calculator, and the article that accompanied it, to Nazism is neither figurative nor hyperbole. One of the very first things that the Nazis did, as a deliberate first step on their path to the Holocaust, was stir up hatred and resentment of disabled people based on the idea that their continued existence is a financial burden to the state.

“Labelling them as “useless eaters,” people who required care and support while being unable to contribute to the state, the Nazis distributed a flurry of propaganda focused on presenting disabled people as a financial burden to everyone else—a burden that prevented “good Germans,” who worked and paid taxes, from being able to access the resources they needed. This propaganda was so ubiquitous that it even made its way into children’s maths books.

How many steps is a calculator—designed to let you know exactly how much enabling disabled people’s continued survival costs you personally—removed from this? How far off is an article dedicated to decrying the expense of disabled lives as an undue burden, especially on the upper classes?”

Charitably, the author of the Mary Sue article doesn’t believe those who wrote the Torygraph piece were deliberately trying to stir up hatred: “it seems very likely that the authors have bought into the British right wing cultural obsessions of benefit frauds and disability fakers, a group of people that are vanishingly rare but which conservatives see as boogeymen around every corner. I’m sure they believe all those people now experiencing joint pain and mental health problems, as a result of a mass disabling event which caused those specific medical problems on a large scale, are just lying to get out of having to work.

“It’s a very convenient thing to believe if you want to pay lower taxes and are resentful of having to share even a fraction of your wealth with people less fortunate than yourself. It ties in very nicely with all the other conservative ideals that The Telegraph and its readers stand for, and that’s why it’s so dangerous: That’s exactly how and why it worked so well the last time.

Painting a group of people as too expensive to keep alive is literally the first step to genocide, and given the political environment, in which hate speech against a number of groups as well as legislation targeting them has become normalized, in both the press and parliament, its very concerning that The Telegraph felt comfortable publishing an article that so openly expresses these sentiments.

“I wonder how many people’s disability benefits the coronation could have paid for instead. Funny how papers like The Telegraph didn’t have an issue with taxpayers funding that.”

In fact, some of us would suggest that the genocide has been happening, quietly, for more than a decade – since before the Conservatives came back into office in 2010, in fact.

Back in 2015, after This Writer (that’s me) forced the government to honour a Freedom of Information request I had submitted, we all learned that 2,400 people had died between dates in 2011 and 2014 – within two weeks of being denied the sickness benefit ESA on grounds of being “fit for work”.

Nobody knows how many have died over a longer period after being found “fit for work” because the Department for Work and Pensions has never bothered to check. But the newspapers have been full of stories telling how people have died of starvation, of ill-health due to their disabilities, or simply committed suicide in despair because of the cruelty of the system.

Changes to the way ESA is assessed – removing the admittedly-hated “Work Capability Assessment” in favour of the even-worse Personal Independence Payment assessment – are expected to deprive a million people of the benefits they need to survive.

And benefit sanctions – which have been proved to be useless in getting people with long-term illnesses and disabilities back to work – are to be stepped up, pushing more vulnerable people towards taking their own lives.

As This Writer has stated many times over more than a decade in which I’ve been writing about it, this is genocide by proxy. The government creates conditions that force sick and disabled people to die, and then claims to be totally innocent of causing the deaths.

And it is at a time when these changes are being introduced that bosses of a national, right-wing, newspaper decide to publish an article demonising the sick and disabled (together with other benefit claimants and pensioners).

Going back to Mary Sue‘s “Nazi” motif, everybody know by now (don’t they?) that before World War II the Daily Mail actually supported Hitler’s regime in its articles.

Now it seems to be the Telegraph that has taken up the baton of the fascists.


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DWP makes it easier to claim disability benefits – if you are dying – after a suspicious delay

Conditions under which people in Great Britain who are likely to die within a year may claim PIP, DLA and AA have been brought in line with those in Northern Ireland, and with UC and ESA. Were the Tories waiting for someone in particular to die in poverty beforehand?

The period of time over which you may claim the top rate of disability benefits (and Attendance Allowance) has been extended by six months… if you are expected to die within a year.

New regulations for the Department for Work and Pensions mean that, from April 3, the definition of “terminally ill” has been changed for the purposes of personal independence payment (PIP), disability living allowance (DLA), and attendance allowance (AA) in Great Britain.

The changes bring those benefits in line with Universal Credit and Employment and Support Allowance, for which they were put in place in April 2022. They were introduced for PIP, DLA and AA in Northern Ireland at the same time.

The definition now refers to someone who is suffering from a progressive disease, who can reasonably be expected to die of that disease within 12 months.

People thought to be in their final year of life may now receive financial support six months earlier than they could previously, under “special rules” that allow those nearing the end of life to get faster, easier access to the benefits, higher payments, and avoid a medical assessment.

In most cases, they will now receive the highest rate of PIP, DLA or AA.

So the question, for This Writer, is simple:

Why were people with terminal illnesses in England, Scotland and Wales required to wait an extra year for this, meaning they would have died before becoming eligible for it? Who did the Tories want to die in poverty?

Source: Changes to the definition of “terminally ill” for the purposes of PIP, DLA and AA | Disability Rights UK

Why are top-rate taxpayers able to claim benefits from April under means-testing Tories?

Rishi Sunak: he likes giving money to rich people who don’t need it as much as the poor people he ignores.

I have a question. Read what follows and when you get to the end, I’ll tell you what it is:

From next month, people will start to pay the 45p rate of income tax when they earn more than £125,000 – down from £150,000 at the moment.

The change was announced by the Chancellor in November.

The reduction means many people paying the top rate of tax will still be eligible for Universal Credit (UC), according to an analysis by Policy in Practice, a consultancy group.

They found that people earning up to £148,000 could technically be allowed to claim UC if they had children, rented and had high childcare costs.

My question refers to the fact that the Conservative government means-tests people claiming most benefits. Forgive me if there’s a really obvious reason that I’ve missed. It is this:

Why are people with £16k in savings denied money they need to live, but those earning almost as much per month can now claim benefits on top of that cash?

Source: Top rate taxpayers to be able to claim benefits from April after Jeremy Hunt reduced threshold


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