Remembering the Victims of Cameron’s Benefit Cuts

Mike has an excellent post up over on Vox Political, urging us to remember the poor, disabled and vulnerable this Christmas. It ain’t an original message. Indeed, it’s been at the moral centre of Christmas, whether or not you are a Christian or merely keep it as a secular festival, ever since Charles Dickens effectively re-invented the holiday in A Christmas Carol.

Mike’s piece, however, gives it added urgency, because of the hidden cost in human lives of the government’s disastrous cuts to welfare benefits. These have meant that the poor, destitute and disabled are dying of their infirmities after being found ‘fit for work’ by ATOS, soon to be replaced by the equally scabrous and excremental Maximus. However, the government is determined to cover up these statistics. The official reason is that the statistics alone won’t tell you if the person dying would have passed away naturally from their illness, regardless of what help was given. Mike’s article shows exactly how this claim is sheer nonsense.

He also points out that another set of victims, whose deaths will also go unrecorded, will be those, who have taken their lives in desperation. He states

Some claimants take their own lives while on the benefit. This could be due to many reasons including the hopelessness of a situation where they foresee themselves being pushed off-benefit (this goes for people in both the WRAG and the Support Group because they are all under the threat of continual reassessment), or suffering more and more cuts to the amount received (in comparison with inflation) that their quality of life will suffer, or they’ll be kicked out of their homes, or they won’t be able to afford the necessities of their lives. The government does not record the number of people who do this and pays no attention to the verdicts of coroners performing inquests on them.

Apart from the well-known statistic that most suicides occur at Christmas, which is fine if you’re affluent, in good health and surrounded by friends and family, but terribly lone and depressing if you aren’t, Mike also reports the appalling statistic that more people decide to end their lives under Tory than Labour governments.

Hence the article strongly recommends that we all look out for people we know, who may be vulnerable and in danger this Christmas.

The article’s This Christmas, remember the hidden casualties of the Coalition years, and it’s at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2014/12/04/this-christmas-remember-the-hidden-casualties-of-the-coalition-years/.

One of the most fascinating pieces in the article is Mike’s statement that he recently had the pleasure of talking to a journalist from Russia Today about the problems of the poor in Britain, and the way the British government does not report the true extent of the suffering. He states that is truly something when a foreign news corporation takes more of an interest in this issue than the British press.

Absolutely. And it’s a complete reversal of the BBC’s boast that it is somehow a more trusted source of information than foreign news agencies, tightly controlled by the state.

You’ve probably seen the Beeb’s advert for itself, in which someone from the foreign service or an activist from a repressive regime talks about how they and their fellows used to listen to the BBC World Service as the only source of objective news about their country.

Now the tables have been turned. In the West, the Soviet Union and its satellites were the archetypal repressive dictatorships after the Fascist states of the Second World War. The news media in those nations were looked down upon – rightly – as just instruments of state propaganda. There was an old Soviet joke about the names of the two major Soviet papers, Izvestia, ‘News’, and the Communist Party paper, Pravda. The joke went that there was no Truth in the News, and no news in the Truth.

Even now, after the fall of Communism, there are still extremely strict limits on press reporting in Russia. Journalists have been beaten and murdered for reporting facts the authorities find inconvenient. Yet with all the restrictions, their media may be a more trustworthy source of news about the true state of our own society than the Beeb, which so proudly boasts of its impartiality and objectivity.

In which case, all I can say is ‘Slava Rossiskii zhurnali’ – Glory to the Russian newspapers. And apologies for my poor schoolboy Russian.

Tags: 'Izvestia', A Christmas Carol, Atos, BBC, Charles Dickens, christmas, Coalition, Conservatives, Freedom of Speech, Labour, Maximus, Pravda, Russia Today, Suicide, Support Group, Vox Political, WRAG