Don't let IDS cut sickness benefits

People's need before the wealthy's greed

Swheatie notes that there was a time when disability campaigners realised that 'the Atos test' or 'Work Capability Assessment' by which Employment & Support Allowance was administered was really a targeted benefit cut. (Sort of like sanctions are now to JSA claimants, while an estimated average of 356 Londoners are sanctioned daily.) And the 38 Degrees campaigning website did not recognise that campaigning against the testing regime should be a voting option for its campaigners to vote upon prioritising.

And serial retesting for ESA has been a form of 'Russian Roulette'.

The petition authors say that they have worked all their lives. Too many disabled jobseekers, meanwhile, have been punished for 'not fitting in', however hard they have tried, until they/we have claimed disability benefits and won them after tribunal. I am a very slow learner but now apply my understanding to campaigning with Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group. By what fruits do the purveyors of callous indifference toward disadvantaged minorities measure their lives? Each attack on the life prospects of disabled people is another notch on the record of how successive UK Governments have defaulted on the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities.

Now 38 Degrees seems to have grown up and woken up. So let us support this petition and encourage 38 Degrees to go further.


Proceed to Don't cut sickness benefit petition to Secretary of State for Work & Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith