This 15 May 2017 video, from before the general election in Britain, is called Theresa May confronted by woman with learning disability.
By Steve Sweeney in Britain:
Tory MPs Lash out at May’s Disability Rights Cuts Crisis
Friday 25th August 2017
Switch from DLA to PIP so disastrous that even PM’s own team is troubled
THERESA MAY was facing a back-bench rebellion over disability benefit cuts yesterday as charities warned that thousands of people are being wrongly assessed.
Tory MP Heidi Allen led the charge after Labour demanded an urgent review of the assessment process.
The MP for South Cambridgeshire, who famously used her maiden Commons speech to launch a searing attack on George Osborne’s benefits cuts, said: “People with disabilities and health conditions already face challenges in life, so we must not add to them.”
She called for a review of the way personal independence payments (PIP), which replace disability living allowances (DLA), are assessed.
Labour had warned that disabled people are being forced to use foodbanks as benefit payments are being stopped incorrectly.
Work and pensions select committee chairman Frank Field has written to ministers demanding an overhaul of the current system, which he says fails to consider the impact of people’s disabilities and health conditions.
And Labour MP Neil Coyle has demanded answers, saying the assessment process for PIP has “failed on every measure.”
The calls come as the government moves people over from DLA to PIP with thousands of people having their claims rejected only to have the decision reversed on appeal.
Disabled People Against Cuts’s Linda Burnip told the Morning Star that assessors working for private-sector firms Atos and Capita appeared to be “totally ignoring medical evidence.”
She accused the Department for Work and Pensions of simply rubber-stamping flawed rulings which were then overturned on appeal.
“It’s past time something was done about it,” she said, calling for the government to “get rid of the companies, hold them to account, fine them for their negligence.”
An Oxford University study earlier this year revealed that more than 50 per cent of households which use foodbanks include a disabled person.
In the letter to Pensions Secretary David Gauke, Mr Field said that the PIP process used a “rigid” set of questions which saw may people having benefits wrongly withdrawn or drastically reduced.
Mr Field said: “Might you therefore review as a matter of urgency please the quality, accuracy and reliability of the assessment process, and report back on the steps that are being taken to ensure it more accurately reflects applicants’ health conditions?”
The assessments are carried out by privateers Atos and Capita, which are being paid an astonishing £600 million for their PIP contracts — the original contract was for £512m.
Mr Coyle said: “Millions of pounds of public money was being poured down the drain” with DWP officials reviewing many of their decisions and backdating benefits to those who have their PIP reinstated.
To qualify for PIP, claimants must be awarded eight points for the standard rate, or at least 12 for the higher rate.
But 13,130 people who were initially awarded no points at all after being assessed went on to receive PIP after an appeal.
The work and pensions select committee will decide whether to continue with its PIP inquiry when Parliament’s summer recess ends on September 5.
Government spending on private firms carrying out ‘brutal’ disability benefit assessments soared by £40m in a year. Exclusive: Campaigners say amount paid to Independent Assessment Services and Capita for ‘fear-provoking and destabilising’ assessments is ‘damning’: here.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
Saturday, 2 September 2017
TUC must stand up for the disabled against the Tory government!
THE UN has slammed the UK, which it says has violated the Convention on Disabled People’s Rights.
A damning UN report released yesterday states that the Tories have created a ‘human catastrophe’ for disabled people. Theresia Degener, the UN committee chair told the UK government: ‘Social cut policies have led to a human catastrophe in your country, totally neglecting the vulnerable situation people with disabilities find themselves in.’
The UN report also criticised the closure of the Independent Living Fund which disabled people absolutely relied on. The introduction of Universal Credit and the change from Disability Living Allowance to Personal Independence Payments, the UN said, threw disabled people into even deeper poverty.
However, it is not the case that the Tories have failed a ‘moral test’ – this government has declared war against disabled people, a war which it is prosecuting with great vigour and enthusiasm.
Firstly, they cut disabled people’s money by £29 a week; secondly they have seized their mobility cars, leaving them isolated in their homes; and thirdly they are demanding all disabled people attend ‘fit-for-work’ tests. Private companies Atos and Capita were being paid hundreds of millions of pounds by the government to force disabled people to attend assessment interviews.
There were allegations that they had a quota to drive disabled people off benefits and got paid accordingly. Thousands of disabled people who were obviously incapable of working were kicked off benefits and left to starve.
Atos was stripped of the government contract in 2014 after a litany of scandals. The ‘fit-to-work’ assessments were then taken over by the American health firm Maximus, who continued along the same lines.
The government actually admitted that as many as 158,300 of the assessments wrongly branded people ‘fit for work’. This was proved by the fact that 42 per cent of disabled people who appealed the decision to strip them of benefits WON and got their money re-instated.
However, this meant that for the entire period that the lengthy appeals process was proceeding, they were absolutely penniless. It emerged last month that the government’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has spent £39m in 2017 so far fighting disabled people’s appeals.
So it is crystal clear, they will happily spend hundreds of millions of pounds on private companies and on fighting appeals, so determined are they to strip disabled people of benefits, rather than just give those hundreds of millions of pounds to disabled people so that they have the money they desperately require to live on a day-to-day basis.
The situation has got so bad that thousands of disabled people have been driven to suicide after being stripped of their benefits and ‘thrown to the wolves’. However, the Tories have once again underestimated the determination and strength of the working class. There are constant demonstrations and protests outside the ‘fit-for-work’ centres.
Disabled people have teamed up with the striking railway guards to demand that every train has a guard, and there have been successful occupations by disabled people of both the lobby of parliament and the road outside Whitehall, where disabled people chained their wheelchairs together, bringing central London to a grinding halt.
The TUC must take action. It cannot be seen to be doing less for the disabled than even the UN!
The time has come for the TUC to lead the struggle against the Tories on behalf of all the oppressed. At its September Congress, it must call a general strike to bring this government down and bring in a workers government and socialism!
On Monday September 11th, the Young Socialists will be lobbying the TUC Congress from 8am. Make sure that you are there to give the TUC no alternative but to call a general strike to remove the Tories and go forward to socialism.
This is the only way forward for the entire working class, the youth, the elderly and the majority of the middle class. Capitalism is disintegrating. It must be put out of its misery before it manages to drag humanity down with it. Forward to Socialism!
https://wrp.org.uk/news/13604
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Thursday 21st
posted by Morning Star in Features
The government’s ‘tough love’ approach to forcing disabled people back into work is causing anxiety, mental ill health and enforced isolation, writes RUTH HUNT
AS REPORTED in the Morning Star earlier this month, more than 80 disability organisations have found that the changeover from disability living allowance (DLA) to personal independence payments (PIP) has worsened the mental health of claimants, leaving them isolated and struggling to pay for food and bills.
This intervention provides an opportunity to ask what has been the psychosocial impact of the last seven years for claimants?
How are people who have a serious illness and/or disability coping when they are living in fear of the department for Work and Pensions (DWP) processes, which have the power to cause long-term harm to physical and mental health? What is the impact of knowing you are constantly under scrutiny?
The activists from pressure group Recovery in the Bin (RITB) said: “Just saying that the DWP is causing us ‘stress’ doesn’t even begin to cover it.
“People can’t understand why people are killing themselves over the ‘DWP experience.’ That’s why if we don’t talk about it, people don’t realise how the DWP is wrecking our chances of good physical and mental health.
“The government stresses how the welfare reforms are ‘helping’ people back to work, but everything about the benefit system is so counterproductive to being as well as you can be, as and when you can, because it feels like punishment, which is reinforced until it grinds you down and down and down.”
We all know “the DWP experience” involves the demonisation of the ill and disabled, with covert surveillance of claimants and attempts to trip them up.
We know how sections of the media and social media have an obsession with what they call “scroungers.”
We know armed with this misinformation, the general public can “shop” neighbours and colleagues who they might think are abusing the system.
What we might not realise is how all of that, combined with a punishing benefits system, made up of continual assessment and reassessments, is having the opposite effect of what the government claims.
Far from this “tough love” encouraging the disabled into work, the constant stomach-churning anxiety, plus finger-wagging, suspicion and spying is forcing many indoors, out of sight, with all the risks enforced isolation can have on physical and mental health. What should be a straightforward procedure — the claiming of benefits — has become a living nightmare.
This “experience” is something this activist knows all too well: “Since 2010 I have become much more nervous going out. I feel paranoid about any strange cars or vans. I get scared to leave the house with just my stick — even if I’m going to a car parked directly outside and using a wheelchair the other end.
“I get nervous about walking the distances I can manage for fear of being accused of being able to do more. I feel that everyone, including some peers, now judge me on the basis of whether I am employed or not, that no amount of voluntary work could ever match up to the gold standard of being employed. It makes me feel like I no longer qualify as human in their eyes.”
RITB pointed out that those who have a mental illness, and are already prone to paranoia and/or hear voices, can have their symptoms exacerbated by the covert nature of the surveillance by the DWP.
One of the activists felt they were being scrutinised and constantly filmed: “I thought anyone asking me for directions or for change in the car park was a set-up. It made me so much more paranoid and more unwell and restricted me from doing anything remotely beneficial.
“It got to the stage where I thought any car driving past; any plane flying over my house was filming me. I thought the TV and my computer were filming me at home. I didn’t want neighbours to ever see me in case they were keeping notes on me. I have always been prone to paranoia but it got completely out of control when I was being reassessed.”
With the reach of the DWP now extending online, another activist became paranoid about having “happy” photos on social media, stating: “I remember Fightback [www.fightback4justice.co.uk] advising people to only post information on social media which reflected exactly what they said on their forms, and I see their point entirely.
“It increases isolation because, on the one hand, to help maintain friendships people want to see positive things, on the other, I’m afraid to focus on the positive in case the DWP looks at my Facebook page and assumes it is a true reflection of my life and circumstances.”
The impact isn’t simply psychological. RITB said many of them felt unable to contribute to charities in a voluntary capacity for fear of the DWP using this against them, or assuming they are fit for a nine-to-five job.
This means valuable service-user contributions are being lost. A dammed if you do, dammed if you don’t conundrum.
However, what they stressed was the most worrying impact was what this environment had on the overall mental health of claimants.
Suicides are becoming common, along with the rise in use of antidepressants and hospital admissions.
They felt lives that with the right amount of help and support could be valuable to society as a whole are being denied the chance to flourish: “Living like this is the complete antithesis to being supported in being able to make the best of what you can and of contributing what you can.
“I am trying to challenge it personally at this current time but one push from the DWP and I know I’ll be back right over the edge. Every contact from them makes life more precarious. They have taken my hope, my potential and my future. I used to have security; the system was so much fairer and easier to negotiate, with support, not like it is now.”
Ruth F Hunt is the author of The Single Feather (Pilrig Press).
Whatever you are going through you can call The Samaritans free on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org. There is also help for people on benefits at: http://www.fightback4justice.co.uk, http://www.benefitsandwork.co.uk and http://www.citizensadvice.org.uk.
http://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-f4f1-The-hellish-ordeal-of-the-DWP-experience#.WcQYLsZpEdU
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