Tory Welfare Policy Is Killing People

Five years after they first came to power as part of a coalition government with the Lib Dems, there is no doubting the passion for making the poorest and most vulnerable in society suffer torment and despair to the point of suicide and premature death which resides in the heart of every Tory.

Five years after they first came to power as part of a coalition government with the Lib Dems, there is no doubting the passion for making the poorest and most vulnerable in society suffer torment and despair to the point of suicide and premature death which resides in the heart of every Tory.

Mortality figures, released only after repeated freedom of information requests to the DWP, reveal that 2,380 people have died within a fortnight of being taken off Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) between December 2011 and February 2014, which works out at nearly ninety a month. These controversial assessments have been blamed by campaigners for wrongly and unjustly dumping tense of thousands of disabled and ill people onto Jobseekers Allowance, curtailing their benefits and exposing them to a punitive regimen involving the widespread sanctioning of claimants for even the most minor of infractions, such as being unavailable for a scheduled appointment at the Jobcentre due to a bereavement, illness, or job interview.

The sheer barbarity of the Government's welfare policy is tantamount to a wilful attempt to eradicate the poor rather than poverty, driven by a mendacious and brutal mindset which blames poverty on personal and moral failing instead of an economic system that breeds it, along with the emotional and psychological battering it produces.

A willing accomplice in this campaign of demonisation, dehumanisation, and stigmitisation of those on benefits is the right wing media, which has extended itself in using its reach to isolate and traduce untold thousands of British citizens as scroungers and work shy reprobates, living high on the hog of taxpayers hard earned money.

In years to come social historians will look back on British society in 2015 and consider it in the same way we look back on and consider the Dark Ages today, staggered by the primitive nature of the cruelty and inhumanity that underpinned it. For make no mistake, we are living in a new Dark Age wherein austerity is employed as a benign-sounding word to justify reducing the lives and well being of a demographic already enduring hardship to a condition of unremitting despair.

As for those on the front line of this war against the poor - the men and women carrying out these Auschwitz-style medical inspections or who are delivering people into destitution in Jobcentres, sanctioning them at the push of a button on a computer keyboard - a special place in hell surely awaits. That many of them are trade union members, specifically the PCS, merely confirms that solidarity has become a word from a foreign language even within the trade union movement in recent times.

Where is the resistance to this brutaity? Where is the direct action, the civil disobedience, the occupation of Jobcentres and/or the offices where the disabled and sick are subjected to such punitive treatment? What kind of society are we living in that tolerates such wanton disregard for the basic human rights of thousands of our fellow citizens?

In a civilised society callous indifference to human suffering would be considered a crime rather than a virtue. We have allowed ourselves, with our inaction, to become complicit in this monstrous state of affairs. Moderation in pursuit of justice is nothing to be proud of.

Every premature death or suicide is on our conscience - and if not it certainly should be - as we slide slowly but inexorably towards the point of no return when it comes to salvaging what remains of social cohesion and the common good.

We are being governed by a clutch of rich, privately educated sociopaths who are beyond the pale. The damage they are inflicting on society cannot be measured in statistics. It is measured in human suffering and despair on a grand scale, taking place in every town and city across the country on a daily basis.

The time to reason has passed. The time to rage has come.

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