I have a paranoid delusion: Iain Duncan Smith (IDS) is out to get me. He will have my disability benefits reassessed and I will be taken off Tax Credits and forced to take Universal Credit, and be bullied by a Jobcentre Plus worker into giving up journalism to earn better money stacking shelves at Tesco…
What do you mean? I’m not psychotic, and a millionaire in Whitehall is actually out to get me? Sadly this really is the case. Like millions of people with mental health issues who were given Disability Living Allowance (DLA) for life, I face ‘reassessment,’ in the much the same way Soviet dissidents faced ‘re-education’.
Like that oppressive state, we have people the state dislikes dying in their thousands. According to The Mirror (Sommerlad, 2012), about 32 people a week die due to this so-called welfare reform. Over five years under the coalition, that will be 8,320 people who will have died indirectly by IDS’ hand.
If you’re reading this column then you’re likely to be up on the numbers and rhetoric. You’ll know of the Black Triangle, Tom Pride and Another Angry Voice blogs. You’ll know how people live in fear of brown envelopes arriving through the post from the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP). You’ll be aware too that there is a warped perception of welfare fraud – it is actually 0.7% of the total bill whereas the public believes it to be around 20% due to biased media coverage. And that after saving £3 billion through DLA reassessments, IDS has spent £5 billion with the disastrous Universal Credit programme, according to Radio 4’s Analysis.
It isn’t just about welfare cuts though – they began in mental health a long time ago. When I went into hospital in 1999, wards were a good place to chill out for a while. Now due to cuts they are only a place for the very disturbed. Psychiatrists tell me how service users are too ill to go outside until they are forced to go to the Jobcentre on threat of losing their benefits, and because they make it are deemed fit for work. The Work Capability Assessment and Employment and Support Allowance was started by Labour and they hired Atos to do it. The rot started long before IDS got his office at the DWP.
Labour are out of touch. During the Scottish referendum campaign, Ed Miliband promised to be ‘even tougher’ on welfare recipients than the Tories! This is news to you? Yes, a few of their MPs lived in council flats as youngsters but they are no more in touch with reality on the ground than your average new admission to a secure psychiatric unit.
This is a closed feedback loop. National newspapers look for the very worst and present it as normality. The politicians of Westminster believe what they read in the papers. They act on what they read. The editors of those papers are comfortably off middle-class types who don’t want taxes raised to pay the national debt, and instead feel it better to cut the NHS and welfare, neither of which they use personally.
Within this concept, there is a general delusion in Westminster that you can pay off the national debt by cutting taxes. The Chancellor, George Osborne, thinks this but has managed to increase the national debt from £800 billion to £1.2 trillion in his four years in office (Nelson, 2013). I’m not sure about you, but if I had better public services, I would happily pay more tax. Rather than cut the NHS and welfare, we could pay for better mental health services and give people a better, less pressured life in recovery. My view isn’t shared with tabloid editors or their billionaire bosses.
But there is hope: there are antiestablishment parties – no, I don’t mean UKIP – that offer genuine solutions. For instance, the Green Party argue for wealth redistribution through a Living Wage of nearly £9 an hour (Green Party, 2010). The party also promotes the concept of the Citizen’s Income whereby no one can live in poverty no matter their circumstances. They want to raise taxes to pay for the national debt. In the 2010 election, there was a poll of policies which had no reference to the parties that suggested them. The Greens got 26% of the vote, with Labour second at 20% and the Tories a distant 4th with 14% (Vote for Policies, 2010).
Those that see the world as it is, not through the silly lenses of Westminster Village have only one option – to support parties that make a sensible argument as opposed to the mad rhetoric of almost everyone in the House of Commons…
References
BBC Radio 4 Analysis transmission: November 2, 2014 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04mc1hv
Green Party (2010) Green Party Manifesto. Available at: https://greenparty.org.uk/values/policies-2010/2010manifesto-economy.html
Nelson F ‘Osborne increases debt more than Labour did over 13 years’ The Spectator, November 21, 2013. Available at: https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2013/11/the-tories-have-piled-on-more-debt-than-labour/
Sommerlad N ‘32 die a week after failing test for new incapacity benefit’ The Mirror, April 4, 2012.
Vote for Policies (2010) Available at: https://voteforpolicies.org.uk/
Article originally published in this month’s Mental Health Today…
Richard Shrubb
