Dangerous times for disabled people

As with last week's post, if you don’t have a disability or you don’t work with people who do, you’ll be largely unfamiliar with the content of this post, in which I'm mostly covering the disability benefits system. 

It’s already a mess, with people on Disability Living Allowance having been forced to move over to Personal Independence Payment, with half of claimants seeing their money reduced or withdrawn altogether. Tories at the time claimed this was to make the benefits more accessible. Of course, the opposite was the reality. The Telegraph now report that ‘it will become harder for people to claim disability benefits and more new claimants will be required to show they are trying to find a job.’ 

Of course, the Telegraph fail to mention that many disabled people are already in work, and can claim certain benefits at the same time. And believe me, disabled people want to work. We just want to be given jobs that match our ability level, and an employer and support system in which the staff have a decent comprehension of the disability, our strengths, and our weaknesses. 

Not a big ask, you would think. But not only have the Tories removed a lot of the schemes that would support disabled people to do so, The Big Issue reports the government are now attempting to push 2.5m sick and disabled people into work. This is despite the fact they’ve been declared unfit for work. 

Their plan is also to snoop on disabled people’s bank accounts. Not on the offshore tax havens or COVID fraud, but the most vulnerable people in society. 

This is sick. Good, moral people do not vote for a party that does this to its own citizens. 

Furthermore, Daily Echo reports that Universal Credit claimants who use social media have been issued a warning by the Department of Work and Pensions. (I haven’t personally received this. Are they just informing us by the press now, and hope that we read it?) ‘The 'Fighting Fraud in the Welfare System' plan is being put in place by the government department in the hope of stopping approximately £2 billion in losses over the next five years.’ In contrast, COVID Business fraud cost £21 billion. 

Some good news: cross-party MPs say cost-of-living payments to disabled people should have been higher. Of course, if the Tories would just tax their oil buddies and the ultra-rich, then publicly funded services could bring down essential costs meaning these one-off dole-outs wouldn’t be so necessary. 

But they won’t. So here we are.