A letter a day to number 10. No 1,379
Tuesday 22 March 2016.
Dear Mr Cameron,
I see you’re backing George (we are all in this together) Osborne. I can’t believe he’s still banging that drum, it is long past its sell by date. A millionaire heir to the Anglo-Irish baronetcy of Ballintaylor and Ballylemon cannot possibly say to ordinary people, ‘we are all in this together’.
With all the hardship Osborne has inflicted on the UK, name one single effect austerity has had on his life, or yours for that matter.
Twitter has been on fire with people naming and shaming MPs who voted to cut ESA by £30, and in particular those, like you, who are patrons of disability charities. Several MPs have now been ousted by charities who have had enough of their bare faced hypocrisy.
As far back as 2012 Esther McVey announced, ‘More than 300,000 disabled people will have their benefits cut when Disability Living Allowance is replaced by a new benefit’. At that time the new benefit (PIP) didn’t appear to even have a name and yet already more than 300,000 disabled people would be arbitrarily deprived of support. But that isn’t the worst of it, not one of the people who would lose their benefits had even been tested, so this was an entirely ideological move which can best be described as a cull.
Of course Iain Duncan Smith explained that the changes to the Government’s Personal Independence Payment scheme (PIP) improved funds for “those who most need it”, which was just newspeak for a preplanned and premeditated cull. No matter how he tries to spin his compassionate credentials now that he’s resigned, the fact is that his cuts are written in blood on the lives and families who have reaped the devastation he is entirely responsible for causing.
Whilst you are busy trying to deal with the firestorm that’s currently gutting your government, the tyranny of austerity rages on across the UK and the one thing that can be stated with absolute certainty is that we are not all in this together.
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/budget-2016-george-osbornes-speech
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/nov/28/real-george-osborne
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/civil-war-iain-duncan-smith-7598791
Fear and Loathing in Great Britain 