Latest post on Left Futures

Persecuting the poor on an industrial scale is the only card the Tories have left

First they hired Atos, the French IT firm, to hack down the recipients of Incapacity Benefit by up to 70% – regardless of the human consequences for those with serious disability.

Then Jobcentre staff confirmed that it is widespread practice to set targets for removing benefits, though the DWP spin uses the much more delicate language of ‘benchmarks’ or ‘expectations for the number of sanctions levied’.

League tables are in operation to chivvy reluctant jobcentres into achieving a higher number of ‘hits’ against the unemployed – a leaked email showed that Walthamstow was doing very badly, 95th out of only 109 jobcentres in London and the Home Counties in the sanctions hierarchy against the jobless.

Now the disabled, 3.2 million of them, are being shunted off DLA into an alternative system called ‘personal independence payments’ (PIP), the stated aim of which is to cut the cost of the benefit by 20% by 2015-6 – again regardless of the impact on the disabled.

They are being put through the DWP wringer at the rate of 11,000 a week which can only mean that the assessments will be cursory and in many cases wrong.

The government has already decided what the result will be because they have already announced that by 2018 about 607,000 fewer people will be getting DLA or PIPs.

2 Comments

  1. Richard Bowyer says:

    It’s heartbreaking, isn’t it! And the LibDems could pull the plug on it any time if they had the courage. When the election comes we must make sure that they are fully blamed for allowing all this to continue unchecked.

  2. peter batty says:

    what the disgusting tories and lilly livered lib-dems are doing to the weakest in society is on par with the Nazi’s 1933 euthanasia bill..they wont be happy until every last sick person has committed suicide…

© 2024 Left Futures | Powered by WordPress | theme originated from PrimePress by Ravi Varma