THE leaking of new guidelines to staff working with the unemployed exposes the barbarity of the coalition government’s onslaught on the sick, vulnerable and the unemployed.
The document sets out what is called a ‘new policy for all DWP businesses to help them manage suicide and self-harm declarations from customers’.
These guidelines, which were leaked to a national newspaper, were issued to all staff including private contractors last month and contain a ‘six-point plan’ for staff to follow when confronted by a desperate unemployed person driven to the edge of suicide or self-harm.
The senior Jobcentre employee who leaked the internal document said that in 20 years working for the Department of Works and Pensions they had never seen guidance like this before, and that this has led staff ‘to believe it has been put together ahead of the incapacity benefits and disability allowance cuts’.
The fact that such guidelines have never before been required has, in the words of this whistleblower, ‘made people a bit fearful about what is coming’.
Jobcentre staff and the disabled have every reason to be not just a ‘bit fearful’ but absolutely outraged at the benefit slashing about to be introduced, cuts that will inevitably hit the disabled particularly hard and create the conditions where they simply will not be able to live.
Central to this attack on the benefit rights of those at present on disability benefit is the introduction of Work Capability Assessments.
These assessments will be carried out by private contractors paid by results, in other words their profit depends on how many people they can force off disability benefits and throw on to the Jobseekers Allowance.
Studies have revealed that in trials carried out of the new system one half of those in receipt of the benefit were told they were fit for work.
This included one person suffering from leukaemia who was just about to start chemotherapy and another suffering from severe clinical depression who was informed that because they were able to attend the assessment interview it meant that they were not really depressed and therefore able to work.
Once thrown off incapacity benefit people then face going on Jobseekers Allowance where targets have also been set for withholding benefit.
Commenting on the ‘suicide guidelines’ a woman who represents claimants at incapacity appeals said that two of her clients have made real attempts on their lives, not ‘cries for help’ but serious suicide attempts because of the huge strain and pressure brought about by a government determined to make every section of the working class, including the most vulnerable, pay for the crisis caused by the bankers.
This coalition government is determined to completely smash the benefit system and it clearly recognises that there will be casualties along the way.
The issuing of suicide guidelines is a revoltingly cynical ploy by the Tory-LibDem coalition to try and wash its hands of responsibility for these casualties.
At a time when unemployment is facing millions of workers, when benefits are being cut to ribbons and workers are facing the very real prospects of being unable to feed their families and having their homes repossessed, living conditions for the entire class are becoming intolerable.
This is driving the working class along the road to revolution as it becomes clear that a bankrupt capitalist system can only survive through the pauperisation and degradation of workers.
The answer to the intolerable pressure of propping up the banks is to organise the general strike to bring down this coalition and replace it with a workers government that will go forward to socialism.