THE Tory work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith yesterday launched yet another vitriolic attack on the unemployed, the sick and disabled.
On Sunday he appeared on the BBC Andrew Marr Show to try and defend the cuts to the welfare system and in particular the cuts that have been made to those forced to exist on disability benefit.
Smith claimed of his ‘reforms’: ‘We haven’t introduced this to hurt or to harm disabled people. The purpose is to try to support disabled people’. Smith supports disabled people on benefits in much the same way a rope supports a hanging man.
The reforms that Smith is talking about include much tougher criteria for anyone seeking disability benefit or allowance with claimants assessed on a regular basis to determine whether they are entitled to benefit and whether they can be forced off the register and labelled ‘fit for work’.
One of the examples of making the criteria tougher is the reduction in the distance a person can walk from 50 metres to 20m. How managing an extra 30m makes you fit to work has never been explained by Smith or his ministry.
These criteria are simply plucked out of the air to justify throwing the disabled off benefit and making ‘savings’ that can be ploughed into the black hole of government debt, caused by the collapse of the banking system and the trillions spent in keeping bankrupt capitalism afloat.
Smith boasted on the Marr show that government cuts to benefits would ‘save’ £50 billion by next year. He was less boastful about the success of private contractors employed by the government to carry out the assessments of those claiming benefits.
Last February, it was revealed that the government’s favourite privateer, Atos, was trying to jump ship and leave its £500 million contract to carry out ‘medical’ assessments before the contract expires.
Facing a barrage of criticism about the huge number of people successfully appealing against its decisions to drop them from disability benefits, and its complete inability to actually deal with the number of cases that all these reforms have created, Atos decided to bail out.
It quickly turned out that Atos is not the only privateer, making a fortune out of driving the sick and disabled off benefit, to be in trouble.
Yesterday, it emerged that Capita, the other private company contracted to process medical assessments, is in such a state that the government has been forced to draft in civil servants to clear the backlog. Waiting times for assessment have been so long that a number of people with terminal illnesses have died before they received any benefit to which they were eligible.
In February the National Audit Office reported that a backlog of 92,000 claims had built up causing ‘distress and financial difficulties’ because of the mismanagement by the DWP, Atos and Capita.
In a speech yesterday, Smith made it clear that this war on the most vulnerable sections of society will only intensify in the immediate future, claiming he will put an end to the ‘signing on culture’ and make life a living hell for anyone claiming any benefit until they are all forced off benefit entirely and onto the streets, or the 21st century equivalent of the workhouse.
Smith and the coalition want a return to the days of the 1834 Poor Laws, when poverty and unemployment was regarded as a moral failing and the working class needed the whip of oppression to cure it.
This attempt to completely smash the welfare state and return the working class to the conditions of the 19th century must be answered by demanding the TUC stop all their prevarications and immediately call a general strike to kick this government out and replace it with a workers government that will advance to socialism.
Those leaders who refuse to carry out this demand must be removed and replaced with a leadership prepared to wage this struggle.
