P5114733
"The Hardest Hit" March & Parliamentary Lobby - 11.05.2011
Part (1) The Prelude to the March
Between 8,000 and 10,000 disabled people with long-term conditions, their families, carers and many trade union supporters assembled on London's Victoria Embankment to protest against the punitive cuts to welfare spending implimented by David Cameron's "Caring Conservatives", which are specifically aimed at the sick and the disabled. Using French IT company ATOS Origin to do the government's dirtiest work, the disabled are being summoned to "Work Capability Assessments" at ATOS Regional offices up and down the country, and are then subjected to a twenty minute examination by often medically unqualified staff who ask a series of questions and then try fill in tick boxes on their completely inflexible computerised forms, which are inadequate for coping with the very serious complexities which go with long-term disabilities. These accumulated scores then form that disabled person's Work Capability score. Input from Doctors, Carers and Senior Consultants is not allowed to be considered when going through this sham exercise designed to force people off Disablity benefits and mobility allowances - crucial to many working disabled people, many of whom have had to stop work because they cannot get there any more thanks to this incompetent process. Instead they become trapped in their homes, unable to shop for themselves or socialise.
The ATOS assessors are paid a bounty of around £70 for every person they instruct the Department of Work and Pensions to be thrown off their benefits, and those assessors with medical qualifications are instructed by the government when they sign contracts to do assessment work with ATOS that the normal medical code of conduct regarding their innate responsibility for the well-being of the patient is waived!
Since the introduction of this punitive and intensely cruel process several disabled people have committed suicide, having had their support ripped away from them, with many disabled people becoming homeless. There are also many instances where people with terminal illnesses have been told they are fit for work, their benefits stopped, and have died within weeks in absolute abject misery because the State has treated them monstrously.
Many previously independent disabled people in their own homes have had to be institutionalised in homes run by private comanies who are egging the government forward because they make a huge profit from running these homes. The sickest irony is that it costs around £10,000 per year to keep a disabled person living in their own home, independent and contributing to society, yet it costs the taxpayer between £30/40,000 to put them in a care home where they may be neglected or even worse abused.
Assaults and threats against the disabled has increased sharply over the last year as a direct result of the government's insulting press campaigns which have painted the sick and disabled as workshy scroungers. Nothing could be further from the truth, but as long as those in power have the ability to behave so appallingly towards the very weakest and most vulnerable members of our society just to score cheap political points, then that is what an increasing number of people in this country want to believe.
In December of last year Iain Duncan Smith, the minister for Work and Pensions, said of the disabled in Rupert Murcoch's Sun Newspaper interview:
"It embarrasses me. I think this is the greatest country on earth.
“What I cannot bear is the idea that this country was the workshop of the world. It gave everybody the free market, the industrial revolution. You think what we did to change the world. This was the place that everyone looked to.
“Yet we have managed to create a block of people in Britain who do not add anything to the greatness of this country.
“They have become conditioned to be users of services, not providers of money. This is a huge part of the reason we have this massive deficit. We have had to borrow vast sums of money. We went on this inflated spending spree."
Ever since that statement by Iain Duncan Smith the Sun, the Daily Express and the Telegraph have run continual lie-filled campaigns in their pages stating that around 75% of the disabled are fully able to work but because they are little more than complaining parasites who just want to sit at home enjoying themselves at "Our" expense. The rapid consequence of this disgusting, immoral slur which could be easily mistaken for the propaganda campaigns of the National Socialist Party in pre-war Germany.
Because the government has picked on the Disabled first, they are getting away with it. Most people in this country are unable to even begin to understand what it is like living with a severe disability. Most people in this country are too stupid and dull to have the intelligence to question what they are being told to think by the right-wing press who serve the Global Capitalists hiding 'round the curtain waiting to get the nod to start taking over huge parts of our National Health Service using the appalling American model which is all about profit and not about the patient's actual needs.
This is what David Cameron has planned for Great Britain, and he's starting with the disabled because disability makes most people uncomfortable because they're so self-obsessed and shallow that human empathy is too rich an emotion for them to grasp. Instead they are turning against the disabled, and talking to many disabled people it is very clear that a lot of them are now living in a climate of fear, hounded by bullies in their local communities, taunted in the streets, often physically abused or spat at, their homes broken into, their meagre possessions stolen.
And all this human misery because David Cameron's Conservatives will not punish the banks and hedge funds which caused the recession which has wrecked our economy, and he will not close down the corporate tax loopholes, shut down the tax havens and start throwing corrupt, greedy financiers in prison where they belong. All this human pain because Conservatives think that the State should stop providing services cheaply and reasonably efficiently, and instead services should be run by completely unaccountable private comanies whose only masters are the shareholders. This is all about profit, nothing else. profit at the expense of human pain and fear.
On appeal following an ATOS assessment around 70% of people win their cases, proving how incompetent ATOS' system is, but the cruellest part is that an appeal can take a year, during which that disabled person's mental and physical health has deteriorated. Many are driven to desperation and suicidal thinking. The government is just about to make it much, much harder to appeal against an ATOS decision by making it impossible to get any form of Legal Aid which would pay for a solicitor armed with the Law to represent you. It seems unbelievably wicked and cruel to me.
All photos © 2011 Pete Riches
Do not reproduce or reblog my images without my permission.
P5114733
"The Hardest Hit" March & Parliamentary Lobby - 11.05.2011
Part (1) The Prelude to the March
Between 8,000 and 10,000 disabled people with long-term conditions, their families, carers and many trade union supporters assembled on London's Victoria Embankment to protest against the punitive cuts to welfare spending implimented by David Cameron's "Caring Conservatives", which are specifically aimed at the sick and the disabled. Using French IT company ATOS Origin to do the government's dirtiest work, the disabled are being summoned to "Work Capability Assessments" at ATOS Regional offices up and down the country, and are then subjected to a twenty minute examination by often medically unqualified staff who ask a series of questions and then try fill in tick boxes on their completely inflexible computerised forms, which are inadequate for coping with the very serious complexities which go with long-term disabilities. These accumulated scores then form that disabled person's Work Capability score. Input from Doctors, Carers and Senior Consultants is not allowed to be considered when going through this sham exercise designed to force people off Disablity benefits and mobility allowances - crucial to many working disabled people, many of whom have had to stop work because they cannot get there any more thanks to this incompetent process. Instead they become trapped in their homes, unable to shop for themselves or socialise.
The ATOS assessors are paid a bounty of around £70 for every person they instruct the Department of Work and Pensions to be thrown off their benefits, and those assessors with medical qualifications are instructed by the government when they sign contracts to do assessment work with ATOS that the normal medical code of conduct regarding their innate responsibility for the well-being of the patient is waived!
Since the introduction of this punitive and intensely cruel process several disabled people have committed suicide, having had their support ripped away from them, with many disabled people becoming homeless. There are also many instances where people with terminal illnesses have been told they are fit for work, their benefits stopped, and have died within weeks in absolute abject misery because the State has treated them monstrously.
Many previously independent disabled people in their own homes have had to be institutionalised in homes run by private comanies who are egging the government forward because they make a huge profit from running these homes. The sickest irony is that it costs around £10,000 per year to keep a disabled person living in their own home, independent and contributing to society, yet it costs the taxpayer between £30/40,000 to put them in a care home where they may be neglected or even worse abused.
Assaults and threats against the disabled has increased sharply over the last year as a direct result of the government's insulting press campaigns which have painted the sick and disabled as workshy scroungers. Nothing could be further from the truth, but as long as those in power have the ability to behave so appallingly towards the very weakest and most vulnerable members of our society just to score cheap political points, then that is what an increasing number of people in this country want to believe.
In December of last year Iain Duncan Smith, the minister for Work and Pensions, said of the disabled in Rupert Murcoch's Sun Newspaper interview:
"It embarrasses me. I think this is the greatest country on earth.
“What I cannot bear is the idea that this country was the workshop of the world. It gave everybody the free market, the industrial revolution. You think what we did to change the world. This was the place that everyone looked to.
“Yet we have managed to create a block of people in Britain who do not add anything to the greatness of this country.
“They have become conditioned to be users of services, not providers of money. This is a huge part of the reason we have this massive deficit. We have had to borrow vast sums of money. We went on this inflated spending spree."
Ever since that statement by Iain Duncan Smith the Sun, the Daily Express and the Telegraph have run continual lie-filled campaigns in their pages stating that around 75% of the disabled are fully able to work but because they are little more than complaining parasites who just want to sit at home enjoying themselves at "Our" expense. The rapid consequence of this disgusting, immoral slur which could be easily mistaken for the propaganda campaigns of the National Socialist Party in pre-war Germany.
Because the government has picked on the Disabled first, they are getting away with it. Most people in this country are unable to even begin to understand what it is like living with a severe disability. Most people in this country are too stupid and dull to have the intelligence to question what they are being told to think by the right-wing press who serve the Global Capitalists hiding 'round the curtain waiting to get the nod to start taking over huge parts of our National Health Service using the appalling American model which is all about profit and not about the patient's actual needs.
This is what David Cameron has planned for Great Britain, and he's starting with the disabled because disability makes most people uncomfortable because they're so self-obsessed and shallow that human empathy is too rich an emotion for them to grasp. Instead they are turning against the disabled, and talking to many disabled people it is very clear that a lot of them are now living in a climate of fear, hounded by bullies in their local communities, taunted in the streets, often physically abused or spat at, their homes broken into, their meagre possessions stolen.
And all this human misery because David Cameron's Conservatives will not punish the banks and hedge funds which caused the recession which has wrecked our economy, and he will not close down the corporate tax loopholes, shut down the tax havens and start throwing corrupt, greedy financiers in prison where they belong. All this human pain because Conservatives think that the State should stop providing services cheaply and reasonably efficiently, and instead services should be run by completely unaccountable private comanies whose only masters are the shareholders. This is all about profit, nothing else. profit at the expense of human pain and fear.
On appeal following an ATOS assessment around 70% of people win their cases, proving how incompetent ATOS' system is, but the cruellest part is that an appeal can take a year, during which that disabled person's mental and physical health has deteriorated. Many are driven to desperation and suicidal thinking. The government is just about to make it much, much harder to appeal against an ATOS decision by making it impossible to get any form of Legal Aid which would pay for a solicitor armed with the Law to represent you. It seems unbelievably wicked and cruel to me.
All photos © 2011 Pete Riches
Do not reproduce or reblog my images without my permission.