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Iain Duncan Smith demands as many disabled people work as able-bodied

IDSAs part of the government’s plan to extract £12bn from social security benefits, IDS has announced his latest target is “the disability employment gap”. According to analysis of official ONS figures, this represents the difference between the number of disabled people who are in employment (48%) and the figure for the general population (73%). The implication is that IDS expects the same proportion of disabled people to work as those who are able-bodied! Just what does he believe disability means? There is a long and aggravated Tory history behind this latest announcement, beginning with Thatcher’s attempt to conceal the true unemployment figures by switching applicants en masse to the category of disability and making them subject to incapacity benefit rather than unemployment benefit.

This legerdemain was prompted by unemployment spiking at 3.1 million in 1986. It led to 1.6 million claimants being badged as incapacitated rather than jobless. As soon as the unemployment crisis passed, the Tory government changed course and did all it could to cut back the numbers who could be classified as disabled. The Blair continued the action, but did not get far. The really big cutbacks only took off with the Cameron government which took on the big French IT firm, Atos, to carry out ‘work capability assessments’ on a systematic and relentless basis to force disabled persons back to work by declaring they were fit to work and therefore if they failed to get work they would be liable to loss of benefit for anything between 4 weeks and 3 years. This infamous system generated massive complaints, but the government carried on regardless.

The objections were mainly that the examinations by Atos were often perfunctory and the questions asked largely irrelevant, and leaks from DWP staff indicated that the government had set targets for the removal of claimants from the benefit lists. DWP of course denied this, but that can be taken with a pinch of salt from a department so desperate to conceal the truth as to now being found out using invented stories from fictional claimants, not just once but at least twice, to pretend that benefit sanctions were actually positive and beneficial! In fact the Information Commissioner has now overruled attempts by DWP to withhold statistics of the number of claimants of incapacity benefit and employment and support allowance who died after being declared fit for work and then had their benefits stopped. DWP then said it had always intended to publish these figures! It seems impossible for a government department to stoop any lower than these constant lies, subterfuges and chicaneries, and since they are all politically driven IDS, if he had any integrity, ought to resign. But of course he won’t.

 

5 Comments

  1. J.P. Craig-Weston says:

    It’s a cull, there’s really no other word for it and the fact that this is really happening here and now in a self styled advanced country is sickening to me beyond my powers of expression.

    We’re encouraged feel anger and outrage when a group violent extremists cut of someone’s head in the Middle East or North Africa, but where is the same reaction to our own sick and disabled citizens being stripped of their entitlement to support and left die in pain and sickness and poverty even ending up homeless and destitute and left die of exposure or starvation.

    Anyone who doubts that that’s what’s really happening needs to get out of their cars and take a walk round the back streets of Manchester or any major city in the UK.

  2. jeffrey davies says:

    sieg heil mine herr in by the summer of forty one the nazi party had put to death by its action t4 plan many many peoples who couldnt work through illnesses fast forward today it seems rtu ids been to germany studying up on the gas chanbers ops jeff3

    1. Robert says:

      T4 was mostly what they called deviant types those with illnesses from birth not so much those who had legs blown off in WW1.

      But some died of course other died because they may have been mental ill with shell shock incurable and a waste of space.

      Using T4 to using ATOS with news that 92,000 people died or took their lives from the DWP and ATOS and labour WCA and use of the medical from Unum Provident, which basically say most disabilities are all in the mind get the mind right the disability is gone.

      We live in a world which see perfection as the way to go people use doctors to make them look younger plastic surgery , people want babies that are blond blue eyes and perfect now like the man they married .

      The UK was great as mental ill people we thought they should be sterilized so they cannot breed and have kids , lunatic and funny face syndrome or as we now call them Down syndrome must be removed. It was belived if you were born disabled then your children would be disabled, if you had your legs blown off in WW1 they you were ok given the help you need a seat at the train station so you could beg.

      I do not know is ity much different today with ATOS and Maximus, I doubt it.

  3. J.P. Craig-Weston says:

    I think that by far the most damning aspect of all this is the complete indifference of most people, (only 3 people have even bothered to comment here,) to these policies, (it was muc the same in pre war WWII Germany,) possibly driven by the belief that working people might somehow benefit from this; when if fact if this follows the pattern of the other countries where this policy has been inflicted the money will simply be used to fund additional corporate welfare.

    This country is well buggered.

    1. Robert says:

      It is well and truly.

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