The government is waging economic warfare and it must end

21_february_2016 A letter a day to number 10. No 1,349

Sunday 21 February 2016.

Dear Mr Cameron,

Since 2010 you have embarked on a ruthless crusade against the people of this country, the unemployed, the young, the disabled, nurses, the fire service, police, people in social housing including the bedroom tax, children, the working poor, the public sector, junior doctors, the NHS, teaching and schools, legal aid, flood protection, employment protection, human rights, care services, pensions, Unions, immigration and refugees, privacy, the prison service. That is not even an exhaustive list, it is pretty much straight off the top of my head. I am sure my readers could come up with many more from their personal experiences.

What is incredible is that none of those mentioned had any hand in the financial crisis caused by the banks and which gave rise to your ideological austerity and the ensuing economic warfare relentlessly pursued against us by you and your government.

Iain Duncan Smith has claimed that there is no causal link between the death of an individual and their benefit claim. Smith dismissed calls in 2013 for him to prove he could live on £53 a week, calling it a ‘complete stunt’.

I am sure he would also refuse to prove he could live on nothing as sanctioned claimants are expected to do. Three months of living on zero income would find the causal link between absolute poverty and death beating him over the head. Within three weeks he’d be on deaths door step, that is if he could survive that long knowing that he was in for three unforgiving and unrelenting months of zero income. Even knowing that if he could survive a return to his life of plenty awaited at the end of his sentence, I am sure that a noose would prove very appealing as hunger crippled his body and mind.

This country is in the grip of a national disaster and that disaster is your government. Nothing in living memory compares to your wanton destruction of the state. Harry Leslie Smith is of an age to remember what life was like without our NHS, but even in his youth the brutality he experienced was not a wholesale government attack, but rather the violence of abject poverty, brutally ignored by governments perhaps, but what we are seeing today is driving us back there and beyond as a matter of policy, an ideological destruction without precedent.

There are no possible excuses, no mitigating factors, all that remains is how we end it. That, and that only, is the driving issue facing this generation.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/john-wight/tory-attacks-on-the-unemployed-_b_2455655.html

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/16/government-young-people-student-loans-housing

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/welfare/2015/09/art-cruelty-why-conservative-attack-disabled-people-harms-us-all

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/nhs-facing-worst-ever-winter-6611011

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/11/25/george-osborne-cuts-grants-for-student-nurses-replaces-them-with-loans_n_8646538.html

http://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/2015/sep/16/tories-fire-and-rescue-authorities-cuts-abolish

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/top-cop-warns-tory-cuts-6821701

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/07/governments-plans-are-nothing-short-attack-social-housing

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2016/01/28/iain-duncan-smith-accused-of-dodging-scrutiny-of-vindictive-bedroom-tax_n_9096546.html

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jul/07/benefit-cap-pitch-children-poverty-12bn-cuts-tory-budget

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tax-credit-cuts-george-osborne-u-turn-only-delays-squeeze-on-working-poor-a6750641.html

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/aug/25/public-sector-workers-pay-rise-greg-hands-treasury