This was the headline for one of the videos pasted up by GB News this morning, and it’s one where I felt I didn’t need to watch the item itself. Because Mike and the other great left-wing bloggers and YouTubers have covered this issue before, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, and Private Eye would say. The Tories and Blairites – ’caused it was Blair who introduced the vile Work Capability Tests – are convinced and would like you to believe that a large portion of claims for disability benefit are fraudulent. Thanks to right-wing rags like the Heil, the British public believes that 25% of all disability claims are fake. In fact the opposite is true: the overwhelming number of claims for disability benefits are genuine. Only a vanishingly small number, less than 1 per cent, are attempts to defraud the benefits system. But obviously, this detracts from the Tory desire to punish the poor for not working or being able to work, while they could be gainfully exploited by all the rich industrialists they want to give massive tax cuts to. And so we have suffered 40 odd years of Thatcherite cuts to the benefits system while Tory and Blairite mouthpieces have told us that such cuts are ‘self-help’, encouraging self-reliance, going to revive proper Christian charity and private initiative without the safety net of the state. I’ve put up a number of posts about how Thatcher viewed the principle of less eligibility – how the whole process of claiming state support was to be as unpleasant as possible in order to deter people from doing so – was one of her ‘Victorian Values’ that she wished to reintroduce into the welfare system. So did Blair, who created the Work Capability Tests because of pseudoscientific, discredited research on behalf of US insurance fraudster Unum. This assumed that most disability claims were fake, and that getting people back into work would do them good.
Complete, destructive bilge.
The assumption that a certain percentage of all disability claims were fake has led, according to whistleblowers, to the imposition of quotas inside the DHSS which demand that a set percentage of disability claims should be turned down. This has led to severely ill, even terminally so patients, being judged fit for work. It has led to moronic D.H.S.S. clerks asking amputees when their absent limbs are expected to grow back. And it has led to hundreds, if not thousands of genuinely sick and disabled people dying from poverty and hunger because they were denied an income. This included people with serious mental health problems and conditions like diabetes, who were found starved to death.
It’s been denounced by disability activists as a genocide. Harsh words, but this is mass murder by governments who know exactly what the consequences of these sanctions are. They just don’t want you to know.
And whatever money has been saved by overturning benefit claims, has been massively outweighed by the cost to the government of challenging them in the courts. And the courts have upheld British law to the point where the overwhelming number of disability claims have been upheld.
This is a government that wasted nigh on nearly half a billion on a vindictive persecution of those who genuinely cannot work. It shows the real sadism at the heart of Tory attitudes to the poor.
Scrap Thatcherism, ditch Johnson and get rid of Starmer, who I believe will also do absolutely nothing to overturn this vile, murderous policy.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 