Cartoon of IDS as Serial Killer from a Joke by Bill Hicks

This is another of my cartoons of the Tory party and their lackeys in the media. This time it’s of Iain Duncan Smith, the former head of the Tory party before David Cameron, and head of the DWP in Cameron’s government. I’ve drawn him as a serial killer, lying dead in his bath, surrounded by the skins and corpses of his victims.

It’s based on a joke the American comedian, Bill Hicks, made about Jesse Helms, a member of Reagan’s administration way back in the 1980s. Hicks said that when you had somebody as right-wing as Helms, they had to be hiding a very dark secret. In Meese’s case, it was that he was probably a serial killer. One day they’d find him dead in his bath, after having cut his wrists. On the wall they’d find the words ‘Ah bin a bad boy’ written in his blood.

Then they’d find the skins of all the children he’d murdered up in his attic, with flies going in and out. His mother would at last remark that she’d wondered what the pile of children’s shoes were doing there.

It’s strong stuff, but it is appropriate to apply it to Iain Duncan Smith. He has never killed anyone personally, no matter how toxic his personality is. But under him, the Department of Work and Pensions has been responsible for tens of thousands of deaths.

I’ve blogged before about the struggle Mike and other disability bloggers and organisations, including the Independent newspaper, had getting the figures for the number of people, who had died after they were thrown off benefits by the DWP. Often this was done for the most trivial of reasons. Seriously ill people, who should never have been called to a fitness to work test in the first place, were told they were ‘fit for work’. They included terminal cancer patients. The numbskulls at Atos also asked amputees when they expected their severed limbs to grow back.

The DWP stalled and prevaricated, doing everything it could not to reveal these figures. They turned down the requests as vexatious, and when this was overturned by the Information Commissioner, they waited until the very last moment before they had to release the information, and then appealed. When they were ordered to release it again, they deliberately misinterpreted the request to give a set of figures slightly different to those requested by Mike. Even so, the figures showed that in the period in question, 13,000-14,000 people had died after having their benefits removed.

Mike and his commenters, like Jeffrey Davies, have called this a genocide of the disabled.

Johnny Void, DPAC – Disabled People Against Cuts, Stilloaks and others have compiled lists of some of the victims, putting names to faces and with brief biographies explaining who they were and why they died. Many died of starvation, while others took their lives in utter despair, wondering how they could ever cope. Their deaths formed the basis for a piece by a socially engaged and enraged artist, and a memorial video I’ve also posed on this blog.

The victims of this callous policy have included an elderly couple, who ended it all with hardly anything to eat in their house; a diabetic soldier; and a young woman in her twenties who leapt to her death with her baby.

And a few days ago Mike posted up news of another victim: Jodie Whiting, a middle-aged mother of nine.

The number of such individual cases recorded by Stilloaks and DPAC has reached somewhere around 500-600 plus.

And the total figures are much, much higher. Oxford University reported that in 2015, austerity killed 30,000 people in this country.

This is 30,000 people, who died in despair and poverty, in one year, in the sixth richest nation on Earth. In a country that has decided it is rich enough to give tax cuts to billionaires.

IDS left office a few years ago, whining about how he was getting the blame for the sanctions system, while it was Tony Blair and New Labour who had invented. Well, they did. But IDS and the Tories didn’t have to retain and expand it.

And IDS and his crew cannot claim ignorance of the immense harm their policies are causing. Oh, they do, of course, but then, Tories are inveterate liars. And the fact that they did not want to release the mortality figures shows exactly that they knew it was killing tens of thousands of people. They just didn’t want the British public to know.

And so its quite appropriate to show IDS as a psychopathic serial killer.

And because they were the architects of austerity, I’ve drawn the flies with David Cameron’s and George Osborne’s faces.

Unfortunately, the carnage hasn’t stopped. Theresa May’s carried on with it, with Damian Green the new head of the DWP.

Jeremy Corbyn has promised to stop it, however. So we must have fresh elections, and get him into No. 10. Before the Tories kill again.

Jodie Whiting: Another Victim of the Murderous DWP

Mike yesterday put up a piece about the tragic death of another unemployed person, Jodie Whiting. Whiting, a 42 year old mother of nine, committed suicide after the DWP stopped her benefits, according to the coroner’s inquest. She was sanctioned because she missed an appointment for a ‘health assessment’, though she later said she knew nothing about it, because she was in hospital at the time.

DWP staff have now issued an apology, and the sanction was overturned after she died.

Mike points out that despite his campaign a few years ago to get the DWP to release the figures for the number of people, who have died after having their benefits stopped, the DWP are still sanctioning people. And the results are deaths like these.

Mike also points out that Ms Whiting’s death fits Friedrich Engel’s concept of ‘social murder’, as described in his The Condition of the Working Class in England:

“When society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.”

Mike in his conclusion makes clear the poor woman’s suicide is exactly what Engels called such deaths – murder it remains.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/06/20/this-was-not-suicide-it-was-social-murder-by-the-tory-dwp/

Ms Whiting’s death is just one of many tens of thousands of people, who have died in misery and poverty due to the Tories’ sanctions regime. Johnny Void, Stilloaks, Mike, DPAC and many, many others have put up posts reporting the deaths, and naming the individuals, who have died and the circumstances of their deaths. The last time I looked, the number of disabled people, who had starved to death or committed suicide after having their benefits taken away was about 500-600 +. And the above blogs and organisations have published lists and short biographies of these tragic victims.

But the actual numbers of people, who have died in total, is much, much larger. From the figures Mike was able to wrestle out of Iain Duncan Smith’s mendacious and obstructive DWP, the figures are in the tens of the thousands. Mike and other bloggers and news organisations, have had to struggle to get these figures. The DWP repeatedly turned down the requests for them under the Freedom of Information Act on the grounds that they were ‘vexatious’. When the Information Commissioner finally forced them to reveal the stats, the DWP did nothing until the very last minute, when it repealed against the decision. When they finally did release the figures, it wasn’t quite those Mike had requested. Even so, these showed that for the period in question, something like 13-14,000 of people had died after the DWP found them ‘fit for work’.

And researchers at Oxford University reported that in 2015 30,000 people were killed by austerity.

An austerity Theresa May is still pursuing, despite her widely reported comment in the papers that it was dead.

This is carnage. This is mass murder. It is what Mike and other bloggers have called it, including Jeffrey Davies, one of the many great bloggers on Mike’s and my websites: the genocide of the disabled.

But the Tories are getting away with it, because those killed are dying in their own homes, by their own hand, or simply through starvation. They have not been herded into death camps, or physically shot or murdered by the DWP. They have simply been allowed to die, in misery and despair.

There are upwards of 100,000 people using food banks, and something like 7 million plus people living in ‘food insecurity’ – that is, they don’t know if their next meal is going to be their last. Or if they will have a next meal. Hard-pressed working mothers, who need benefits to make ends meet thanks to very poor wages, are starving themselves just to feed their children.

This is a national disgrace.
It has to end. Now.
We need another election and a Corbyn victory to end the Tory regime of fear, despair and organised, corporate murder.

Starvation: the Latest Part in the Tories Long Campaign against Young Mothers

Mike this evening put up a piece reporting that a survey of 300 young mothers found that they were experiencing severe financial problems. Two-thirds of those questioned said that they were only just managing, and a quarter had been forced to use food banks.

This is disgusting, and Mike takes apart the equally revolting attempts of the DWP to put a positive spin on these statistics. They claimed that it was ‘encouraging’ that more children were living in ‘working households’. Mike points out the obvious: this has absolutely nothing to do with child poverty. Similarly, doubling free childcare for three and four years may look like an improvement, but it’s questionable how many this will actually help.

And he also shoots down the lie that ‘work coaches’ are ‘encouraging people into jobs’. They don’t encourage. They just bully, adding more stress to people already under considerable financial strain.

See: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/03/28/young-mothers-are-starving-because-they-are-shortchanged-on-benefits-and-cant-find-paying-work/

Mike makes clear the reasons why these young women are starving: they’re being short-changed on benefits, and can’t find paying work. This is, of course, all part of the Tories long campaign to create a cowed, impoverished workforce willing to accept any job, no matter how poor the conditions and pay.

But it’s also part of the deeper Tory hostility to young mothers. Mike acknowledges this in his article, stating that the Tories’ hidden policy here is to prevent people having children at a young age. He’s right, and some of them have expressed their hatred of young mums in particularly grotesque rhetoric. Way back in the 1970s Maggie’s mentor, Keith Joseph, declared that unmarried teen mothers were ‘a threat to our stock’ – a nasty eugenicist turn of phrase, for which he was rightly pilloried. It’s even more sinister when you realise that Sweden continued sterilising people on eugenics grounds right into the 1970s. Among those targeted for sterilisation as a threat to Swedish genetic stock were promiscuous young women. I don’t know if Joseph wanted to see such legislation introduced here, so he could sterilise a few British unmarried mothers. Given his comments, it really wouldn’t surprise me.

A little while ago I posted up here episodes I found on YouTube of a BBC series broadcast in the 1980s investigating government secret and the way this undermined democracy. In one edition of the programme, they discussed the way the police had compiled secret reports and records of ordinary people they found suspicious, even though they had committed no crime. These included young people simply following the latest fashions in dress and music, like punks. In one area, they were also writing down the names of young pregnant women, who did not appear to have boyfriends.

And then in the 1990 there was the unsavoury spectacle of Peter Lilley prancing about the stage at the Tory conference one year, reading out his ‘little list’ in what he thought was a parody of the Mikado. On it, amongst all the other people, like the unemployed and welfare recipients he and the rest of the attendees hated were unmarried mothers.

This is why so many young mothers are finding it so difficult to cope now. The Tories have always despised them as part of the ‘undeserving’ poor, to use the language of the Victorians that Maggie thought was so ‘virtuous’. And so I doubt very much whether they are at all sorry to see these poor young women starve. In fact, given the eugenicist views expressed by Keith Joseph, I can imagine some are probably only too delighted.

Which raises the question whether these women are also part of those targeted for ‘chequebook genocide’ – the term Mike has coined for those the Tories seem happy to see starve to death after having their benefits removed. Mike coined the term in response to the deaths and mass poverty caused by the DWP and their wretched Work Capability Assessment. As Jeffrey Davies on here has pointed out, the congenitally disabled were the subject of Nazi extermination as well as the Jews, Gypsies and others they considered subhuman. Mike and many other bloggers from the Left and disability rights movements have speculated whether the Tories have the same policy, but heavily disguised. The news that a quarter of young mothers now have to use food banks makes you wonder if they’re also targeted for extermination as a threat to ‘our stock’, in the same way that the Swedes also forcibly sterilised promiscuous young women.

YouTube Video on the Nazi Murder of the Disabled

This video was posted by Jeffrey Davies in his comment on my piece, ‘The Culpable Silence over the Genocide of the Disabled’. Jeffrey’s frequently commented on this blog about the parallels between the government’s policy of throwing the disabled off benefits to die in starvation and despair, and Aktion T4. This was the Nazi eugenic campaign to kill the mentally ill and educationally subnormal, as well as the physically congenitally disabled. I’ve blogged about it before. The victims were rounded up and sent to special insane asylums, where they were murdered. They were killed using poison gas, and the programme prepared the Nazis for their mass murder of the Jews.

This is another film, which some may find difficult to watch. It includes a former SS officer, Reinhard Spitzy, saying that he personally heard Hitler make the comment that it would be better to use the money supporting an incurably ill person on the child of a poor peasant. The film also includes the account of one of the relatives of one of the victims, Marie Rau. This lady’s mother was placed in a mental hospital suffering from anxiety and depression over her husband. She was then diagnosed incurably insane, and sent to one of the clinics, Hadomar, which was one of the institutions for their murder. They were gassed with carbon monoxide in the clinic’s cellars in groups of 60. Over 10,000 were killed at Hadomar alone. There was an outcry about this, and the policy was ostensibly abandoned. However, it continued in secret. Instead of poison gas, the Nazis now either killed them with lethal injection, or starved them to death.

I knew the Nazis used poison gas to murder the disabled, but did not know that they starved them to death. This seems to me to be a very strong parallel to the tactics the Tories are using against the disabled today. As Mike, Johnny Void, Stilloaks, ATOS Miracles, DPAC, Benefit Tales and so many other sites are pointing out, hundreds if not thousands of disabled people have died of starvation after being found fit for work and their benefits cut off. The only difference, it seems, is that Tories haven’t rounded them up. Yet.

Because they haven’t incarcerated the disabled in death camps or murder clinics, like the unfortunates in the Third Reich, the government can now claim that it isn’t responsible for their deaths. They know, however, that this is a lie. It is clearly demonstrated in their refusal to give the numbers of people, who have died after being declared fit for work.

They are well aware their policy is killing people.

They just don’t want you to know.

Just like they want to whip up anger against the disabled and unemployed as scroungers and malingerers, in order to justify further cuts.

Video of DPAC’s Westminster Bridge Protest against Benefit Cuts

This is another video I found on YouTube, this time of the protest DPAC (Disabled People Against Cuts) held on Wednesday, which closed down Westminster Bridge. It shows them moving along one of the roads to the Bridge and then crossing it with their banner proclaiming ‘No More Deaths From Benefit Cuts’, and chanting the same. One of the organisers, a large lady in a motorised wheelchair, gives a ‘hello’ to Theresa May, pointing out that she is now in Prime Minister’s Questions. She then reads out a message from another woman, Chrisman, who couldn’t be there, about the death of yet another disabled person, a man, who was put on the work group, despite the fact that he was so ill he could hardly walk. Apart from the speaker, several of the protesters are in motorised wheelchairs. There is a group from a women’s disability organisation, Winvision, which is for women with invisible visible disabilities. Someone else is banging a drum, and there is also a man carrying around a fake coffin, obviously to symbolise the huge numbers of people that have been killed by New Labour and Tory benefit cuts.

The video also shows the rozzers turning up to tell the protesters, who sat down on the Bridge to hold their protest, that they are causing an obstruction. They don’t want to arrest them, but if they continue, then the police will do so. Several people were arrested, including one young man, who is seen being taken away with a police officer holding both his arms.

Mike over at Vox Political blogged about this protest earlier this week, and I also wrote something. DPAC have been very active campaigning against the cuts for quite a few years now. While I’ve no doubt that travellers on the bridge were cussing them that morning, DPAC had every right and reason to protest. The work capability test and the cuts to benefits are forcing millions into mass poverty. Mike spent something like two years fighting with the government to get the figures for the number of people, who have died as a result of being found ‘fit for work’. I’ve forgotten the precise figure, but it’s several thousand. And well over 500 people have died of starvation, or killed themselves in despair, after being thrown off benefit. These victims have included an elderly couple, a young mother, and a diabetic man. Stilloaks over on his blog has compiled a comprehensive list, with accompanying biographies, of the victims.

The government’s repeated refusal to give the correct figures for the numbers of people, who’ve died and their suppression of repeated internal reports showing that their policies are literally killing thousands has given many disabled people, carers and ordinary members of the public the impression that the government is consciously committing mass murder comparable to the Nazis’ campaign against the severely disabled in Germany. Mike over at Vox Political has called it ‘chequebook genocide’. Jeffrey Davies, one of the commenters on this blog, has referred to it as ‘Aktion T4’, using the Nazi codename for their mass murder of the disabled.

The work capability test was introduced by Tony Blair and New Labour, using a scientifically discredited model of disability, under the explicit view that people claiming disability benefit and long-term sickness were ‘malingerers’. Blair and Brown should also share some of the blame for these deaths. Ed Miliband told his shadow cabinet that they should abstain on a vote on benefit cuts, so the Labour party wouldn’t be attacked by the press for being soft on welfare scrounging. Jeremy Corbyn gave his support to the protesters. Owen Smith, unsurprisingly, refused.

And as so much of the hate against the poor, the unemployed and the disabled for being on benefits is driven by the vile right-wing press in this country, we should also have no hesitation in blaming Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail, his proprietor, Lord Rothermere; Richard Desmond, the owner of the Express and his editors; and Rupert Murdoch and the editors of the Scum and the Times, for their part in causing the organised deaths of so many vulnerable people. Thanks to their hysterical lies and abuse, the majority of people in this country really believe that the majority of people on benefits are frauds, despite the fact that the real figure, as revealed by the government itself, is just 0.67 per cent.

May and the Tories should not be in government, and Smudger, Bomber Benn and the rest of New Labour should not be in any positions of power in the Labour party. If there was any justice, those responsible for this toxic policy and the deaths it has caused should be in the dock being prosecuted for their crimes against humanity, as should Murdoch, Dacre, Desmond, Rothermere and their assembled hacks as their willing collaborators.

Denis Thatcher’s Anger at BBC Skit on Tory ‘Culling the Poor’

Mike over at Vox Political and many other bloggers have criticised the Tory party’s attacks on the poor, the disabled and the unemployed by comparing them to the Nazis’ genocide of the disabled. Jeffrey Davies, one of the great commenters on this site, has often referred to the Tories’ anti-disability agenda by the Nazi’s own name for their programme: Aktion T4. Mike refers to it as ‘chequebook genocide’.

It seems that Mike’s and the other’s view of the Tories’ attempt to kill off the poor and weak through denying them benefits was shared in the 1980s by the BBC. This was the era of Maggie Thatcher’s jackbooted occupation of No. 10, and the comments by the BBC about her killing the poor sent her husband, Denis, into a ‘fearful bate’, as Nigel Molesworth would sa.

There’s a piece by Cahal Milmo in today’s I newspaper, reporting that Denis Thatcher sent off an angry letter to the Beeb’s chairman, Marmaduke Hussey, demanding that he sack the producer of the Radio 4 Today programme, after it broadcast a piece satirising Thatcher’s policies as a way of killing off the weak. The piece was broadcast in 1988, and its title explicitly compared Thatcher to the Nazis: ‘Thatcherism: Final Solution’. Apparently, Thatcher was so annoyed that she consulted legal advice, before deciding to abandon that avenue. Denis, however, whined to Hussey that

The extent and depth of political bias in the BBC is a matter of opinion, but this is a disgrace judged by any standard, however low. I cannot believe that a public broadcasting system can continue to employ a producer who published so foul and deliberate an untruth. Such gross professional misconduct can neither be excused nor condoned. (I, Thursday 21 July 2016, p. 20).

If the criticism was relevant then, it is even more so now. 590 people at least have died of hunger and poverty due benefit sanctions. 3.7 million are in ‘food poverty’, hundreds of thousands are being forced to use food banks, and 290,000 sufferers from poor mental health have seen their condition worsen due the pressure of constant testing. Thatcher was always accusing the BBC of ‘left-wing bias’, in the same way that modern Republicans in American whine and moan about the ‘liberal media’. It reveals her fundamental intolerance to independent criticism.

Unfortunately, it has had an effect. Jacky Davis and Raymond Tallis argue in the NHS-SOS that one reason why the Beeb has not reported the extensive privatisation of the NHS, or at least, not to any great extent, is because successive government have tried to bully and weaken it because of its ability to criticise. And so we now have a supine Beeb cheerleading for the Tories with Laura Kuenssberg as political editor of the news.

So far, the Tories haven’t tried to censor Mike and the other bloggers comparing the Tories’ killing of benefit claimants with Nazi policies towards the poor and disabled. The standard Tory approach to these criticisms seems to be to deny that any such thing is going on, and you must be wicked and ignorant for saying that it is. But this little snippet suggests that it must still sting them.

Jeffrey Davies on the Death of a Friend while on the WRAG

Jeffrey Davies is a frequent commenter to this blog. Here he describes how one of his friends died after being placed on the WRAG.

yet my mate died a Richard Thomas who we were lifelong friends only to find that hed been placed into the wrag by the atossers well he thought he sort it all out Thursday this was a sunday and I had shouted at him why o why hadn’t you told me about it weds ttime came he died at his kitchen table around 15 hrs before his jcp visit to see whot work he could do yes there are many who died and this il take to my grave the anger at how and why they treated us so jeff3

Unfortunately, this isn’t the only case in which someone has died after having been declared ‘fit for work’ by Atos. They run into the tens of thousands, though the true figure is unknown, as the DWP refuses to release them. The Coalition have justified their refusal to do so by saying that it would create public opposition to their policy of getting people back into work, and prevent that policy from being implemented. In other words, they know it would be massively unpopular and that the British people would oppose it, and they just don’t care. As for requests for the information to be released under the Freedom of Information Act, this has been repeatedly turned down. When one blogger requested it, it was too much for the Department to do and did not justify the cost. When several other bloggers, including my brother, Mike, over at Vox Political, made the same request, it was also turned down. This time the excuse was that the request was ‘vexatious’. When Mike appealed against the decision, it was upheld, partly because Mike had been critical about the government on his blog.

This shows you just how far this government is opposed to open government and transparency. I’ve compared IDS’ workfare several times to the system of forced labour used in Stalin’s USSR. The government’s concerted refusal to allow any opposing scrutiny of its policies by opposing groups or individuals is also very much like that of the former Communist dictatorship. The lecturer in Russian history at my old college told us t5hat if you placed a request to examine sensitive documents in the state archives, you would find when you turned up that they were all out. Which is better than having a visit from the KGB, but still a blank refusal from the Soviet authorities to permit any kind of critical examination. The same mentality exists in the Coalition.

Millions were killed in the artificial famines in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1950s, but you never heard about it due to the complete control of the Soviet media. This show Western visitors only staged propaganda of happy, prosperous peasants living in a land flowing with food of every kind. IDS’ polices are resulting in the deaths of as many as 38,000 people per year, but you’d never know from the consistent refusal of much of the major media to report this, and the government’s own rejection of any demands to do so.

No wonder Khruschev said, when he was faced with criticism from members of the Labour party for his imprisonment of Soviet Socialists, ‘If I was an Englishman, I would be a Conservative’.