The ultimate cost of economic warfare is death

21_april_2016 A letter a day to number 10. No 1,409

Thursday 21 April 2016.

Dear Mr Cameron,

A terminally ill woman with cancer has been denied PIP on appeal. So much brutality, so many people dead. I know it’s not the sort of thing you’d put in your manifesto, a thing that has never been burdened with anything approximating the truth, but really, culling the poor, the sick, disabled, the elderly, in fact anyone who is unable to slave for a crust of bread?

You don’t have room for plausible deniability and you don’t even try. Cut off the means of survival and you procure people’s deaths, not in tens, or hundreds, or thousands, but tens, even hundreds, of thousands. Of course the DWP denies any ‘causal effect between benefits and mortality’ and yet it’s own guide lines acknowledge that loss of benefits causes health deterioration.

When considering stopping benefits for vulnerable people, the guidance says: “It would be usual for a normal healthy adult to suffer some deterioration in their health if they were without: 1. essential items such as food, clothing, heating and accommodation, or 2. sufficient money to buy essential items for a period of two weeks. The DM (Decision Maker) must determine if a person with a medical condition would suffer a greater decline in health than a normal healthy adult and would suffer hardship.”

It’s there in black and white and sanctions can be imposed for as long as three years. The causal relationship between benefits and health deterioration is written in the bloody guidelines and it doesn’t take a genius to work out that the ultimate in health deterioration is death.

There is a heart rending testimony from a woman caught in the pension debacle which has seen hundreds of thousands of women born in the fifties losing out on their pensions, without notification. In her own words she writes, “I guess we all have to die of something….but…I never, in my wildest dreams, ever imagined that I might die from having my pension removed for SIX YEARS by the most brutal, evil and repugnant government, nay, not government, but ‘regime’, ever to have ruled Britain in my lifetime.”

Women who have worked all their lives are now the abandoned victims of economic warfare, struggling for their lives and, of course, just like those suffering under the DWP sanctions regime, on top of the sheer burden of physical hardship is the untold distress that inevitably accompanies the brutal imposition of hardship. And what are you doing about any of this? Nothing, it has your full support and backing.