Yesterday saw the introduction of changes to the benefits available to the disabled that will leave hundreds of thousands facing cuts of between £20.55 a week rising to a staggering £131.50 a week for some of the most vulnerable.
The change from the existing Disability Living Allowance (DLA) to Personal Independence Payments (PIP) has been touted by its architect, the Tory minister Iain Duncan Smith, as being ‘fairer’ than the old system and aimed at targeting the most needy.
It is not, he emphatically claims, a cost-cutting exercise.
This claim has been effectively blown out of the water by the disabled charity Scope which has pointed out that the changes are specifically designed to just save money and that 600,000 disabled people will eventually lose all financial support – support that is essential for them to live any kind of reasonable life.
The DLA made it possible for the disabled to achieve mobility through its wheelchair and car purchasing schemes and to live in their own homes through modifications to living and sleeping accommodation and even to eat through the provision of help and cooking facilities.
The DLA was designed to help with extra costs borne by the disabled just to survive and lead as normal a life as possible.
Now at a stroke this help is to be swept away by a government intent on savaging the benefits in order to pay back the debt accrued by the collapsing bank system.
Scope estimated that the total savings to be made on the backs of the 600,000 losing their benefits amounts to £2.62 billion over five years.
As for Duncan Smith’s claim that the PIP represents an attempt at ‘fairness’ in that it targets the most needy and, by implication, the rest are just ‘scroungers’ faking their disability, this is shown up as a vile slander by the simple fact that before the new system has been introduced the government had announced how many people would be thrown off the PIP.
In December 2012 they announced that ‘in 2018 we estimate that the number of 16-64 year olds receiving PIP will be 1,575,000’.
That is 607,000 fewer people than received the old DLA.
How can the government predict so accurately how many disabled people will be slung off benefits?
The answer, of course, is that this is the target that the private companies, Atos and Capita, who will be administering the new fitness to work assessments of the disabled, have been set by the government.
The Chief Executive of Scope, Richard Hawkes, said: ‘For months now we have been saying the government’s assessment for the new Personal Independence Payment is deeply flawed. It looks set to repeat the mistakes of the Work Capability Assessment.’
Where Hawkes is wrong is to suppose that the work capability assessment, administered by the same private companies and used to strip the sick and disabled of their sickness benefits, was in any way a ‘mistake’ by the government.
These assessments carried out by untrained staff, who merely ticked boxes rather than carry out any meaningful medical assessment, resulted in even the terminally ill being declared fit for work in order to fulfil the remit of these companies to achieve targets set by the government or lose their lucrative contracts.
It is no ‘mistake’ on the part of the government, these assessments are deliberately flawed to enable the maximum number of claimants to be denied what they are entitled to and desperately need.
The plain fact is that to be disabled under this bankrupt capitalist system is to be condemned to a life of absolute poverty and degradation, and the only solution is the removal of this government through the general strike and replacing it with a workers government that will have human need as its only priority.