A letter a day to number 10. No 1,300
Tuesday 29 December 2015.
Dear Mr Cameron,
Since 2010 you have successfully worked to demonise and then punish the poor, ably assisted by the media. George Osborne even included an attack on the poor in his 2012 conference speech, “Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits?”
You have accused the poor of having a culture of entitlement.
Writer John Wright had this to say about your war on the poor in 2013: “The assault on the unemployed by the government constitutes a hate crime. In fact, the cynical attempt to stigmatise, demonise, and dehumanise millions of people up and down the country, regardless of their personal or individual circumstances, surely ranks as one of the most vicious and brutal acts of any British government in living memory. It leaves us in no doubt that in 2013 the nation is being governed by a clutch of extreme right wing, rich, privileged, dangerous sociopaths, people who are completely out of touch with reality and whose conception of fairness is founded in Darwin’s theory of natural selection.”
I have my doubts that Iain Duncan Smith’s sanctions regime would have been tolerated without the orchestrated campaign to demonise the poor. No court in the land would ever pass a sentence that would remove the means of survival from a convicted criminal, yet that is what sanctions do on a routine basis causing hardship and suffering to hundreds of thousands of people, including children whose only crime was being born about which growing numbers of people even have the attitude that the poor shouldn’t breed.
The poor have been widely portrayed as a subhuman underclass, stripped of all humanity, regarded as little more than vermin and this has come right from the top.
The introduction of a yellow card system giving people a two week warning of a sanction will do nothing to add any fairness or justice to a system that so brutally punishes people for the least infraction of compulsory, onerous, demands imposed by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). The entire DWP system is brutality by design. You claimed that the welfare system is causing deep social divisions, it is not, those divisions which now exist have been manufactured by you and your government, and the media, for self serving reasons: an all out attack on the social safety net that exists to protect the most vulnerable through which people are not falling, they are being obsessively pushed and beaten down.
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2015/12/z-political-year
http://news.sky.com/story/952248/pm-we-must-end-culture-of-entitlement
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/john-wight/tory-attacks-on-the-unemployed-_b_2455655.html
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/17/cant-afford-kids-hardline-tories
http://www.welfareweekly.com/benefits-sanction-yellow-card-will-not-resolve-deeply-flawed-system/
Fear and Loathing in Great Britain 
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