A letter a day to number 10. No 1,111
Monday 08 June 2015.
Dear Mr Cameron,
With sanctions to disabled people at 3,000 per month there is one figure that now dominates the minds of many disabled people, my own included, Iain Duncan Smith. Whilst the feelings that accompany the receipt of yet another brown envelope are often ones of fear and dread, the same cannot be said for the feelings engendered by Smith which, for many of us, are fury, revulsion and disgust.
Smith, probably now the most reviled man in Britain, claims that ‘sanctions are used as a last resort’ when nothing could be further from the truth. Sanctions against disabled people have increased four fold over two years and are the fastest growing area of Smith’s ‘sanctions regime’. People with disabilities cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered to be hardened and persistent abusers of the benefits system when they are, by definition, amongst the most vulnerable people in society.
Despite your personal assurance to parliament about the bedroom tax that, ‘Obviously, what we have done is to exempt disabled people who need an extra room’, what is glaringly obvious is that you have done no such thing and that disabled people are, in reality, disproportionately hit by the bedroom tax.
Writer and author, Tanya Marlow, wrote on the ‘Archbishop Cranmer’ blog site, “Disabled people have been cut so deep they are collectively bleeding”. Analysis by the Centre for Welfare Reform into cuts in public spending finds that welfare cuts target disabled people nine times more than the majority of citizens and that figure rises to 19 times for those needing social care.
Isn’t it astonishing that one of the most important bits of news reported recently was the Scottish Nationalist Party being rebuked, no less, for clapping in the ‘Chamber’, which sounds like a weird lavatory joke but, no, it was those churlish Scots shaming the hallowed ground of the House of Commons with their barbaric antics. Ye gods, thank goodness they held back on daubing their faces with woad.
Where’s all this going, Mr Cameron, as we suffer atrocities and wanton lies in the most egregious and relentless attacks by your government on the lives and well being of disabled people? Of the 49 claimant deaths peer reviewed by the DWP, 40 of which were suicides, 22 were claiming a disability related benefit. What we’ve got is a bloody man made humanitarian disaster on our hands and that man is Iain Duncan Smith but includes every minister of all parties who backs, or fails to speak out against, these atrocities, including you. It would be too easy to say shame on the lot of you, but that doesn’t even come close.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/benefit-sanctions-ending-the-something-for-nothing-culture–2
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/bedroom-tax-prime-minister-david-2874744
An open letter from a disabled Christian to Conservative voters
http://www.centreforwelfarereform.org/library/by-date/briefing-on-how-cuts-are-targeted.html
Fear and Loathing in Great Britain 