Video Commemorating the Victims of this Tory Government

I’ve reblogged many articles and videos commemorating the people, who’ve died in hunger and misery thanks to the Tories’ wretched welfare policies. There have been pieces by Johnny Void, Mike, Another Angry Voice, Stilloaks and many, many others, which have given the names of some of these victims and brief descriptions of the circumstances in which they died.

This is another of these videos. It was originally produced by Jack back on YouTube, and then reposted by Democratic Socialist, an Aussie YouTuber, who argues with various right-wing idiots about socialism and the nature of capitalism. And some of them are truly mind-boggling stupid. One British Conservative, who put up a video attacking a pro-socialist video, stated in his own that he didn’t know, who Nye Bevin was. Democratic Socialist in his own critique of the Tory’s video pointed out how ridiculous it was that he, an Australian, should have to point out to him that Nye Bevan was the founder of the British NHS.

The video begins with this quote from Theresa May

‘We will make Britain a country that works not for the privileged few, but for everyone of us. That will be the mission of the government I lead, and together we will build a better Britain’.

This is then followed by the brief descriptions of some of the victims of the Tories’ welfare reforms, which has seen seriously and even terminally ill women and men thrown off their benefits after being assessed as ‘fit for work’, first by ATOS and then by their successor, Maximus. It has also resulted in desperately poor people being sanctioned and denied benefits by the Jobcentre for the most trivial of reasons. Many of the people in the video died by their own hand, unable to bear the misery and starvation any more. Although they killed themselves, the ultimate responsibility for their deaths lies with Conservatives, who instituted the policies that created their desperate poverty.

The people listed in the video as having been killed by these murderous welfare policies, which Mike and others have rightly described as the genocide of the disabled, include

Neil Groves
Brian McArdle
Mark Wood
David Clapson
David Coupe
Linda Wootton
Stephanie Bottrill
Annette Francis

The video ends with the statement

‘These are some of the people who got the media’s attention. There are many more that didn’t’.

Quite. The last thing I read, it was heading for around 700, though I can’t remember the precise figure. And there are many more, who are keeping body and soul together only through food banks.

Enough’s enough. The time’s long past that this government should have been forced out. It’s time an election was called and the Tories voted out of office before they murder any more of the poor, sick and disabled.

The Punishment of Starving Thieves: The Barbarism of Modern Britain

A 15th century law court

One of the commenter’s to Mike’s blog, Vox Political, R. Jim Edge, reported an appalling miscarriage of British justice. The comment is on Mike’s post, reblogged from Pride’s Purge, about the death of a mentally ill man, Mark Wood, from starvation. Wood had been sanctioned by Atos, and this exacerbated his mental illness. He developed an eating disorder, and refused money his family gave to spend on food. He died weighing just over 5 stone, with a body mass index of 11.5. The full details are on Pride’s Purge and the Void. R. Jim Edge commented

Its going to get worse, just this week in Chester a woman who stole some groceries from TESCO because she had had her benefits stopped was (and this is the good bit) fined £30 and ordered to pay £80 compensation to tesco.

This is actually a more unjust legal decision than the notoriously harsh punishments associated with medieval law. The popular image of the medieval punishment for theft was that thieves had their hands amputated. In England the punishment depended on the amount stolen. If it was over a certain number of shillings, then the thief was fined. If it was over the amount, he was hanged. However, theologians argued that if someone stole bread because they were starving, then that person had done so out of necessity, not wickedness. In their opinion, they should not be punished.

The woman in Chester was clearly motivated from hunger, if she had had her benefit stopped. By the standards of medieval law, therefore, she should not have been fined, nor had to give compensation to Tesco. By this standard, the law now is worse than that of the Middle Ages. IDS and the Coalition really are leading us back to barbarism.