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 theĀ 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”:
TheĀ Telegraph article states: “Of the 5.2 million people claiming out-of-work benefits, roughly 3.7 million have beenĀ 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.”
TheĀ Mary Sue piece responds [boldings mine]: “As a propaganda piece, itās not subtle. āRoughly 3.7 million have beenĀ granted indefinite exemptions from finding a jobā is a funny way of saying that 3.7 million disabled people, who cannot work due to their disabilities, have been awarded up to Ā£515.40 a month (maybe going all the way up to Ā£782.35 if theyāre severely disabled) in order to keep them from starving to death on the streets.
“Putting this number down to āa surge in claims of mental health issues and joint pain during the pandemicā is derisive and clearly intended to diminish the readerās perception of what are, in fact, disabling conditions to live with that, yes, actually were caused by the pandemicāeither 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.”
TheĀ Torygraph continues: “On top of this, the controversial decision toĀ maintain the state pension triple lockĀ is estimated to cost taxpayers Ā£1,000 each over the next four years, according to calculations by the TaxPayersā 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,Ā 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 theĀ Torygraph‘s argument.
Back toĀ Mary Sue: “Note the emphasis on ādo not workā 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 governmentās 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, thereās more.”
TheĀ TorygraphĀ states: “Despite Rishi Sunakās insistence that he is a ālow tax conservativeā who wants to ābring peopleās taxes downā, his chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, has implemented a combination of frozen thresholds, removed investment incentives, and increased corporation tax ā all while keeping welfare spending close to Ā£300bn a year.
“Economists now predict it will beĀ 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 Ā£298.7bn out of a total of Ā£952.3bn. For the typical taxpayer, this amounts to close to a third of their annual tax bill of Ā£6,500 paid directly towards benefits.
“Using the latest public spending data, our analysis shows someone with the average UK salary of Ā£33,000 sees Ā£2,000 a year spent on welfare.”
Mary SueĀ 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 theĀ 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 arenāt getting a tax cut), and the fact that this didnāt 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 individualās tax bill going toward itāthis despite acknowledging that the percentage of public spending that goes toward welfare benefits has actually gone down while overall spending has gone up.”
TheĀ Torygraph: “Many high earners are now paying relatively more towards the welfare state because of theĀ lowering of the 45p tax threshold in 2023-24,Ā which now stands at Ā£125,000, down from Ā£150,000 before. Telegraph analysis shows 6pc of the average salary goes towards paying for benefits, compared to 13pc of a high earnerās salary.
“Someone earning Ā£150,000, five times the average salary, contributes close to Ā£19,000 towards the welfare state ā 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 bracketās threshold was lowered from Ā£150,000 pa to Ā£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 isnāt the entire point of staggered tax rates and how the system is supposed to work.”
Mary Sue then makes a hugely important pointĀ [boldings mine, again]: “Itās incredibly difficult to successfully apply for disability benefits of any kind in the U.K.Ā According to a recent government study, the release of which is suspiciously close this particularĀ TelegraphĀ articleās publication, āthe health assessment system for deciding if someone can claim disability benefits is grueling and often incorrect.āĀ 90% of PIP (the most common benefit) claimants are denied on their first attemptĀ 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 toĀ a significant number of disabled people giving up, not because they donāt 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 assessorĀ wrote down and submitted completely different information than they providedāmisinformation 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,Ā 12.1 million, it suddenly seems a lot more reasonable. There arenāt too many people in receipt of benefits, or capable of working but given a pass not toāitās 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, wasĀ 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 āuseless eaters,ā 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 elseāa burden that prevented āgood Germans,ā 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 childrenās maths books.
“How many steps is a calculatorādesigned to let you know exactly how much enabling disabled peopleās continued survival costs you personallyāremoved 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 SueĀ article doesn’t believe those who wrote theĀ 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. Iām 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.
“Itās 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 thatĀ The TelegraphĀ and its readers stand for, and thatās why itās so dangerous: Thatās 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 thatĀ The TelegraphĀ felt comfortable publishing an article that so openly expresses these sentiments.
“I wonder how many peopleās disability benefits the coronation could have paid for instead. Funny how papers like The Telegraph didnāt 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,Ā 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 toĀ Mary Sue‘s “Nazi” motif, everybody know by now (don’t they?) that before World War II theĀ Daily Mail actually supported Hitler’s regime in its articles.
Now it seems to be theĀ Telegraph that has taken up the baton of the fascists.
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