The way the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has treated disabled people in the last 15 years “will go down in history as a terrible and inexcusable crime”, MPs were told this week during a debate on the new government’s budget.
Independent MP Apsana Begum told fellow MP’s during a debate on the Labour government’s budget that there was “extensive evidence about the serious harm caused to people subjected to dehumanising assessments and sanctions, including reports of deaths (as highlighted in John Pring’s book ‘The Department’) directly related to the social security regime”.
She called for a “long-term overhaul of the social security system”, which she said was “not fit for purpose”.
Begum was not the only MP to refer to the impact of the last government’s welfare reforms on disabled people.
Labour’s Emily Darlington, MP for Milton Keynes Central, reminded MPs on Monday that under previous Conservative governments, disabled people had taken their own lives due to welfare reform.
She said that 14 years of “failure” had also led to “three million people using food banks, more than 700,000 children plunged into poverty, mortgage costs nearly doubled, the worst pay rises since the 1950s… mental health worse than at any time on record, more people sleeping rough and more families without their own home”.
She said the Conservative party continued “to deny, to justify and to refuse to apologise to those people right across the country and in my constituency”.
You can read the full story in the Disability News Service article by John Pring
Description of cartoon for those using screen reading software
The setting is the Crown Court with all of the Tory MP’s who have been associated with DWP benefit changes crammed into the dock. On the floor in front of the judge and the jury are copies of Disability News Service. They each bare a headline telling of Tory and DWP complicity in subjecting disabled claimants to dehuminising assessments, sometimes leading to their deaths. Members of the jury are pointing at the ‘the accused’ with angry expressions. The judge is saying to them: “I think you’ll find that guilty is sufficient – rather than HANG THE TORY BASTARDS!!
Crippen Cartoons 