Yesterday, more than two million people on Incapacity Benefit found themselves officially labelled by the Tory-LibDem coalition as scroungers and parasites living off the ‘most abused benefit’ in the land.
From that day those unable to work through ill-health will find their Incapacity Benefit scrapped and replaced with an Employment Support Allowance.
In order to qualify for this new benefit the sick will have to undergo what is called a Work Capability Assessment.
In the past, incapacity claimants were required to undergo regular interviews, conducted by doctors, to assess whether their condition had changed sufficiently to enable them to take up employment of some kind.
Under successive governments these assessments have become more oppressive especially with the introduction of private health companies to run them, and the growth of a target-based system – that is targets for the removal of people from Incapacity Benefit.
Now the coalition is stepping up this drive against the physically sick and those with mental health problems in what they describe as the biggest crack-down on the ‘benefit culture’.
In order to get the new Employment Support Allowance claimants will have to go through a Work Capability Assessment.
This assessment, conducted naturally by a private company, will be carried out not exclusively by doctors but by occupational therapists or nurses. In fact, given that it is purely a computer-based system it could be carried out by anyone able to tick boxes on a computer screen.
Trials of this new system have taken place across the country and the results have been predictable.
Nearly half those in the trials have been slung off Incapacity Benefit and told to go out and find work.
Among those deemed fit for work was one person suffering from leukaemia who was just about to start chemotherapy.
Another suffering from severe clinical depression 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.
This classic Catch-22 situation epitomises the savagery of the attacks against the sick by this government.
Turn up for the interview and you are fit for work and lose your benefit; don’t turn up and you are breaking the rules and you lose the benefit.
The government has already stated in advance exactly how many people it intends to remove from the sickness benefit or allowance.
The Employment Minister, Chris Grayling, has announced that 500,000 are ‘fit to work immediately’.
This is the target that the private vultures who operate the companies administering the new assessment will be expected to achieve to earn the vast profits they intend to make out of the sick.
After being thrown off Incapacity Benefit and deemed fit to work immediately, people will have to go onto Jobseekers Allowance where they will be expected to apply for non-existent jobs which they cannot even perform.
This inevitably leads to them being thrown off this allowance and reduced to begging for hardship payments which are so low as to be impossible to live on.
Workers cannot live under these intolerable conditions and millions are being forced to the conclusion that revolution is the only way forward.
The welfare state was huge gain for the working class and it must be defended in the only way possible, through the mobilisation of the massive strength of the class and its organisations in a general strike to kick the government out and replace it with a workers government that will go forward to socialism.
Only the overthrow of this bankrupt capitalist system that puts profit and the banks above everything can provide a future for workers and their families.