Britain’s most obnoxious politician, Iain Duncan Smith, has come up with an ingenious way of helping sick and disabled people: he is going to cut their benefits by £30 a week. If you suffer from a trivial medical condition – say, like cancer – Duncan Smith wants to make you poorer. This, you see, will encourage you to get back to work, with the additional assistance of his various schemes which have failed to put hardly anyone back into work. Yes, cutting benefits is an incentive, especially if you are going to die. I’m glad that’s all clear, then.
£102 a week is far too generous in Duncan Smith land. After all, someone who is sick and disabled doesn’t really need to eat properly or keep warm. If you want to keep warm, there are countless minimum wage jobs out there. Perhaps they can take one of them, assuming the prospective employer allows time off for the worker to attend chemotherapy treatment. (This may need to be unpaid time off.)
I know this scenario is a bit over the top but I made it so in order to illustrate the contempt these politicians have for those who are sick and disabled. If you are suffering from a serious condition, it is not necessarily a good idea to sit in a freezing cold house because you can’t afford to keep the heating (or hot water) on. I am not a doctor, but it is probably not a good idea to go without food, either.
The big Duncan Smith lie is that he is trying to help people back to work, that somehow this privileged senior Tory who married into money spends every waking hour fretting about those of us who can’t buy our underwear on expenses, like he as an MP has done. That the first thing he thinks about every morning is getting the sick and disabled to stand on their two feet, even if they haven’t actually got two feet. No. This is about one thing and one thing only: cutting benefits.
The Work and Pensions secretary really does believe, it seems, that there is an army of scroungers, idly sleeping through the day, only to wake to watch their 50 inch plasma TVs and live their lives in luxury. I wonder if he has ever seen a sick and disabled person who can’t pay the bills, who queues to use the food bank, who is undertaking medical treatment that will decide whether they will live or die? He may well have, but he doesn’t care. He is Iain Duncan Smith.
I am not exaggerating about the huge underclass that this government is creating. It is real and it is growing. The media reports on the skivers and scroungers, of whom admittedly there are a good few, but it never seems to seek out the silent and overwhelming majority whose lives hang in the balance, abandoned by them and the government they support.
Duncan Smith is a deeply devout Roman Catholic which either tells you a lot about him and the God he believes is on his side. In the unlikely event that his God really does exist, this evil man may well be on the highway to hell and maybe even that’s too good for someone utterly heartless like him.
