Lord Freud (Sigmund's g-great grandson & welfare 'reformer') says disabled should work for £2/hr

[ND-Dem]

The prompt for this piece is of course Lord Freud’s musings on whether people with disabilities should work for £2 an hour....The comments are just the smallest injury Freud has dealt disabled people. Under the benefit reforms and spending cuts brought in by Freud and his colleagues Iain Duncan Smith, George Osborne and David Cameron, people with disabilities have been hit harder by austerity than any other group you might think of.

To be disabled in post-2010 Britain is to be unsure when and whether your benefits will be paid because the new system keeps chopping and changing and growing historic backlogs – so that even a parliamentary select committee describes the switch-over as a “fiasco”. It’s to be constantly monitored on whether you really are disabled, because the Department for Work and Pensions is animated by only one idea: that someone, somewhere, is claiming something to which they’re not entitled.

It’s also to hear that the private firm doing the assessments declares as fit for work people on the verge of death, such as Linda Wootton, whose employment and support allowance (ESA) was cut off while she lay in a hospital bed, drowning in her own body fluids. It’s to rely on social care, which is now just someone popping by on a flying visit, forever on their way to the next “client”. It’s to see your benefits slashed and to hear of more cuts to come. And it’s to be classified as a scrounger – for the cardinal sin of not being as well as other people.

Anyone who relies on public services and welfare – the unemployed, the young and very elderly and the low-paid – will recognise some of the above. But the point about people with disabilities is that they often rely on a range of services from the welfare state. The worse your impairments, the more you’ll need public support – not just specific disability benefits such as ESA, but housing benefit and social care too...

A relatively small group is being whacked again and again by Cameron and co. Researchers at the thinktank Demos last year observed that 120,000 faced a “triple whammy” of losing a number of core disability benefits all at once...the Centre for Welfare Reform estimated that, compared with the average, people with disabilities would be hit nine times harder by austerity; the total hit for those with severe disabilities would be 19 times greater.

Going by GDP data, this country has never been so wealthy... Indeed, just a few weeks ago, the PM announced that, if re-elected, he would find the cash to cut tax bills for high earners.

Which leads me to the conclusion that the reason coalition ministers don’t mind slashing entitlements for disabled people, are quite happy to use them as guinea pigs for new benefits that don’t work, and to chuck them at incompetents such as Atos, is because they couldn’t care less. That’s also the most generous interpretation one can put on the comments made by Freud...

The coalition has so thoroughly vilified “scroungers” that hate crimes against people with disabilities are rising year on year: up 13% since 2011. Forty per cent of incidents are violent. Take the visually impaired man walking in Brighton last year, who was asked by a stranger what it was like to be blind – before being set on fire. Campaigner Paula Peters tells me she’s been spat at in the street, while friends in wheelchairs have been shoved into oncoming traffic...

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/20/disabled-lord-freud-austerity


Oh, no, assisted suicide could *never* be used to force or coerce people into killing themselves. Never, never never....

[Newest Reality]

1. All the while,

the pathological extents to which those who think they are truly entitled, (and I emphasize think) are becoming a dominant paradigm where reality is being defined by what the people who own the most think, say and do.

If we continue to conflate wealth with sanity and pragmatism, we are most certainly on the same road to total chaos and doom that has brought about the fall of so called "civilizations", (we really should try it sometime) before us. We are now on that road and the results may make some of those dystopian sci-fi movies treating the subject seem like a comedy, especially when we consider the impact of technology on this debacle in progress.

[ND-Dem]

2. yes, it's sick pathology and its ubiquitiousness is becoming frightening.

[DonCoquixote]

3. Honestly

The whole Anglos saxon sphere seems to be looking for someone to punish for the fact that the oligarchs ate everything. The fact this in the UK tells me this isn't the "only in america" problem, I thought it was.

[ND-Dem]

4. UK and even canada are on the same path. canada a bit slower. australia too, just slower.

[daredtowork]

5. This sounds curiously similar to the astroturf talking points against welfare in the US

There is a regular lie that people on welfare are getting free money (false) to use on alcohol and drugs (mostly false) and are lying (false) about having family who want to take them in (definitely false) and they are living like "welfare queens" (false) - these are *wink wink nudge nudge* black people (false) - who can and should be working (false)...

And the person spreading the propaganda PERSONALLY knows this alcoholic lying welfare queen that's getting away with gaming the system (biggest lie of all).

The fact that the same thing is going on in Britain leads me to believe that there is an International Conspiracy among the oligarchic classes to destroy the "welfare state", and they are paying social media astroturfers in both the US and England to to rile up the public into outright violence against the weakest and most vulnerable members of society.

[ND-Dem]

6. US & UK are usually on the same page in these matters. I agree it's like there's some grand

strategy at work.

[Euphoria]

7. The grand strategy is called fascism. n/t

[ND-Dem]

8. yes