An interesting section of the latest Ispos/Mori asks people if they agree with cutting disability benefits for those who need help with daily living. A resounding 84% disagrees, but far more worrying 13% think it’s a good idea. Who are these 13% and what were they thinking about?
Lifted from the DWP this is what aid or appliance means for disabled people:
(a) it means a device to improve, provide or replace a physical or mental function;
(b) includes a prosthesis; and
(c) does not include an aid or appliance ordinarily used by a person without a physical or mental condition which limits that person’s ability to carry out daily living or mobility activities.
Aid or appliance is relevant to a number of personal independence payment activities, including:
Taking nutrition.
Managing therapy or monitoring a health condition.
Washing and bathing.
Managing toilet needs or incontinence.
Dressing and undressing.
Communicating verbally.
Reading and understanding signs, symbols and words.
Moving around.
You can see from this list that people on Personal Independent Payments (PIP) would not necessarily come into the category of ‘shirker’, as defined by George Osborne. We are not talking about financial assistance for someone with ‘a bad back’, for example. We mean someone who needs help going to the toilet, getting dressed and washing. And get this: at last week’s budget, Osborne announced plans (though oddly not in his actual speech in the House of Commons) to cut PIP payments to these people. For all his subsequent bluster and U turning, he thought he could get away with cutting money to a person who can’t use the loo on his or her own. Some shirker.
To be honest, I am surprised that the figure given for those who agree with attacking the most disabled people in the land is as low as 13%. Before Iain Duncan Smith resigned as DWP secretary, it seemed that the cuts would sail through with barely an objection. After all, the government had already cut £30 a week from Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) and there wasn’t a murmur on the Tory back benches. Osborne had clearly judged that if he could cut money from one group of sick or disabled people, he could extract an even bigger wedge from a much larger group.
The 13% who think it’s a good idea to allow the disabled to go hang either don’t understand the arguments or they simply don’t care. Or perhaps it’s a combination of both?
I just think that Osborne overplayed his hand. Duncan Smith has been a willing accomplice for billions of pounds of benefit cuts since 2010 and it’s only reasonable to assume that the chancellor would have expected him to go along with anything else, as long as it made the poor poorer. What a shock it must have been when ‘the quiet man’ either finally grew a pair or made a cynical move to resign in order to campaign on what he really cares about: turning Great Britain into Little Britain (or rather Little England) by leaving Europe. Duncan Smith is not known for his great political courage, so we must assume his calculation was more to do with the latter.
The 13% will be pleased, though, because the government has merely said it has “no plans” to make further cuts to benefits. New DWP secretary and religious fanatic Stephen Crabb was as slippery as an eel when refusing to go further than say there were “no plans” because he knows as well as everyone else that “no plans” could easily turn into “plans” in the same way that cuts to disability payments are described by the current government as increases. This is politics and it’s why so many people hate politicians. There’s 13% of the general population I probably won’t like too much, as well.
