DWP

The Tories Are Fighting A War Against State Dependency, Not The Disabled

Samuel Hooper42 Comments

ATOS Kills - Birmingham Against The Cuts - DWP - Welfare Reform

–

Opposition to the Conservative government’s welfare reforms are high on hyperbole and outrage, but tellingly low on alternative proposals

To listen to many voices on the Left is to be told that we live in a uniquely heartless and uncaring age, where living standards are being deliberately driven to unprecedented lows by the deliberate actions of a government which is not just wrong, but actually evil.

Here’s Laurie Penny in the New Statesman, pouring scorn on the very thought of verifying that claims for sickness and disability benefit are genuine:

I should say “fitness tests”, because nobody gets to be sick any longer under Iain Duncan Smith (so good at rebranding ideological cuts that they named him twice, once for each face). Navigating this system is humiliating enough for disabled people without them being lied to every step of the way. If the DWP would just come out and say that it doesn’t believe the state should help people who are ill, disabled or injured, it would somehow be more bearable. At least people would know where it stood. But the stated aim of the welfare changes is to “get people working”, because: “Work is the best route out of poverty.”

And here’s the Green Party’s Jonathan Bartley, churning out the latest conventional left-wing thinking over at Left Foot Forward:

For IDS it is now clear that disability is not something to be embraced, let alone celebrated as part of the diversity which makes us all stronger. Disability is an aberration. It is a problem which needs to be fixed.

And if those who are different get the right therapy, or where necessary they are sanctioned, they can be pushed into the workplace to become like ‘normal’ people.

Left-wing opposition to Tory welfare reforms has now become so reflexive and so unthinking that encouraging people to work and be economically self sufficient – with all the freedom that it brings – is now actively seen as a bad thing.

Britain is now such a “diverse” country that it apparently contains a large bloc of people for whom any kind of work is permanently impossible to contemplate, and for whom any attempt to help or encourage them away from dependence on benefits (thus protecting them from vulnerability to future policy and benefit changes) is seen as an unconscionable assault on their “human rights”.

This is dangerous, hyperbolic nonsense.

Continue reading →

The Left Are Weaponising Human Rights In Their Hatred Of The Tories

Samuel Hooper10 Comments

UN Declaration of Human Rights - United Nations

–

The United Nations – that bright and unstained beacon of morality in our dark world – is to investigate claims that Britain’s welfare reforms are an infringement on the ‘human rights’ of benefit claimants

By now, we are used to the continual cheapening and debasement of the term ‘human rights’, transformed from the noble assertion that every individual is entitled to live in freedom and security to its new meaning as code word for the petulant, open-ended demand for benefits and services funded by other people.

This much is not new – almost every swivel-eyed anti-austerity protester seems to have a tale about how the Evil Tories are callously and deliberately violating their ‘human right’ to something or other. And as small government conservatives or libertarians we must continue to contest these fatuous claims as best we can. But now, those people who believe that their life circumstances endow them with a government-enforced claim on the wallets of their neighbours without so much as a thank-you have won themselves a new ally: the United Nations.

From the Herald Scotland:

United Nations officials will visit the UK in the next few months to investigate whether Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms have led to “grave or systematic violations” of disabled people’s human rights, the Sunday Herald can reveal.

A formal investigation has already been launched by the UN’s Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. UN investigations are conducted confidentially, but a leading Scottish disability charity has told the Sunday Herald it has been advised a visit by the Special Rapporteur and members of the committee on the rights of persons with disabilities is expected in the “near future”.

The only surprise is that this has not happened sooner, some time in the last parliament. After all, when your existence in a left-wing echo chamber destroys your ability to construct an intellectual argument or engage with those who think differently, the only remaining option is to appeal to outside bodies to bully, shame and intimidate your opponents into reversing course.

Continue reading →