A letter a day to number 10. No 1,257
Saturday 14 November 2015.
Dear Mr Cameron,
I really have to wonder how this country is ever going to recover from your brutal and increasingly dysfunctional government. You might not be interested in personal cases but I am going to give you one any way, mine.
A few weeks ago the DWP wrote to me to inform me that in less than three months time, on January 27 2016, I am due to retire and would get in contact nearer that date to sort out my pension.
Imagine my surprise then to receive, a week later, an appointment for a Work Capability Assessment. Despite filling the long and difficult ESA50 assessment form in which I detailed what acute social phobia is like to live with and how it affects my life and requesting a home visit, which I have always had in the past, a home visit was rejected, ‘A home visit could not be authorised (their emphasis) by a Healthcare Professional based on the medical evidence we have received’. I am not sure what kind of Healthcare Professionals Maximus employ at the Bristol Centre for Health and Disability Assessments but it clearly isn’t in human physical or mental health care. In their letter they said they would provide a taxi to and from the assessment. I wrote to them to explain that a taxi makes my situation worse, not better and I also informed them of a recent serious medical condition for which I am due an operation on Friday 20th November and for which treatment will be ongoing for some time.
I heard nothing from them and the taxi duly turned up and I had to inform the driver that I was unable to attend the appointment. After the driver left I was overcome with uncontrollable shaking and in acute distress in the certain knowledge that the outcome from all this is likely to be the loss of all social security support and that is the power of life and death that the DWP have and abuse over our lives.
I have no desire to become just another statistic in the very long list of those who have suffered and died under Iain Duncan Smith’s brutal regime. This is a pointless and senseless attack in the closing weeks to my retirement, just another story of blind belligerence forcing people to jump through hoops when it would be obvious to a stone dinosaur they are neither fit nor capable of work and yet sanctions against people with mental health problems have risen 600% over the last four years. Now there’s a statistic for you that you can’t blame on Labour.
Fear and Loathing in Great Britain 
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