You are likely to have seen many benefit fraud stories. It features everywhere you look in the media, from the BBC’s programme Saints and Scroungers to the “shameless” and “swindling”families often plastered across the Daily Mail, the Sun and the Daily Express. For decades, the benefit fraudster has been the villain of choice for certain sections of the press and the political class. the right has carefully positioned the benefit fraudster as a natural bedfellow of austerity, the scapegoat to justify the obliteration of social security in the last eight years. Conservatives have created a witch-hunt against people on benefits. As the first cuts to disability benefits were introduced amid talk of the bloated welfare bill, the DWP ran advertising campaigns telling us that we, the public, had an important role to play in identifying benefit cheats. National newspapers ran campaigns calling on “all Brits to be patriotic and report any cheats you know”.
Government ministers have also adopted rhetoric suggesting disabled people are faking in order to get social security, and the majority of new claimants of sickness benefits are actually well enough to do some work. Theresa May’s former policy chief, George Freeman, said welfare should go to the“really disabled”. Esther McVey, the newly appointed work and pensions secretary, once bragged that she’d go after the “bogus disabled” while abolishing the lifeline of disability living allowance in her former role as minister for disabled people.
Private companies are hired to push the sick through assessments so inaccurate that this week it emerged the government will have to review the benefits of 1.6 million disabled people that they may have wrongly removed, while claimants are sanctioned, often for reasons outside of their control, to the extent that people are left without food.
In this anti-welfare climate, it doesn’t actually matter if someone is lying to claim benefits or not. By dint of receiving “taxpayers’” money, they are still said to be cheating “hardworking families”. At a time when low pay is leading to a state of chronic insecurity, this sort of divide and rule tactic is particularly dangerous, as workers are sold the lie that the reason their wages can’t pay the rent is because the paraplegic person across the street is living the life of Riley. In reality, they’re struggling to afford to eat. Just this month, research found the majority of disability benefit claimants are being left without enough to live on. We are witnessing a scale of dehumanisation that has reached such heights that even a wheelchair user can be judged as “undeserving” and a a culture in which those who are unable to pay the rent or afford food for their children are increasingly seen as being there because of their own failings.
In 2016 the Observer revealed through freedom of information requests that out of a million alleged cases of benefit fraud put forward by the public between 2010 and 2015, a staggering 85% were completely unsubstantiated. Last month the Independent reported there had been almost 300,000 public tip-offs on benefit fraud in the past two years that had resulted in no action due to a lack of evidence.
Benefit fraud accounts for just 1.1% of the total benefits bill.
Taken from Here
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/01/spy-on-your-neighbour-britain-demonisation-benefit-claimants-disabled-people
Government ministers have also adopted rhetoric suggesting disabled people are faking in order to get social security, and the majority of new claimants of sickness benefits are actually well enough to do some work. Theresa May’s former policy chief, George Freeman, said welfare should go to the“really disabled”. Esther McVey, the newly appointed work and pensions secretary, once bragged that she’d go after the “bogus disabled” while abolishing the lifeline of disability living allowance in her former role as minister for disabled people.
Private companies are hired to push the sick through assessments so inaccurate that this week it emerged the government will have to review the benefits of 1.6 million disabled people that they may have wrongly removed, while claimants are sanctioned, often for reasons outside of their control, to the extent that people are left without food.
In this anti-welfare climate, it doesn’t actually matter if someone is lying to claim benefits or not. By dint of receiving “taxpayers’” money, they are still said to be cheating “hardworking families”. At a time when low pay is leading to a state of chronic insecurity, this sort of divide and rule tactic is particularly dangerous, as workers are sold the lie that the reason their wages can’t pay the rent is because the paraplegic person across the street is living the life of Riley. In reality, they’re struggling to afford to eat. Just this month, research found the majority of disability benefit claimants are being left without enough to live on. We are witnessing a scale of dehumanisation that has reached such heights that even a wheelchair user can be judged as “undeserving” and a a culture in which those who are unable to pay the rent or afford food for their children are increasingly seen as being there because of their own failings.
In 2016 the Observer revealed through freedom of information requests that out of a million alleged cases of benefit fraud put forward by the public between 2010 and 2015, a staggering 85% were completely unsubstantiated. Last month the Independent reported there had been almost 300,000 public tip-offs on benefit fraud in the past two years that had resulted in no action due to a lack of evidence.
Benefit fraud accounts for just 1.1% of the total benefits bill.
Taken from Here
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/01/spy-on-your-neighbour-britain-demonisation-benefit-claimants-disabled-people
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