The debate follows the introduction of the Work Capability Assessment, a simplistic model of ensuring many disabled people are deemed by DWP to be seeking benefits when they should be doing the nine to five slog.
Darren Gilligan (pictured) is one example. Despite losing a leg in an industrial accident and injuring the other as well as his back, the DWP's crude point system has assessed him as "fit". He captured the essence of the attitude to the mentally sick and disabled perfectly when he told the Mail, "If you can breathe and blink they want you back to work." The Department wishes to cut payments from 500,000 of the poorest to save, £2.25Bn.
Mr Duncan Smith said: ‘It’s not like incapacity benefit, it’s not a statement of sickness. It is a gauge of your capability. In other words, do you need care? Do you need support to get around? Those are the two things that are measured. Not “You have lost a limb”. Well, now we know.
If such heartlessness, roundly condemned by Mail readers does not leave you slack-jawed, then the Express's campaign supporting the disabled workers at Re-employ just might. "Asked why the disabled were being robbed of a choice between a segregated or mainstream workplace, Mr Duncan Smith snapped: “How far do you want to go with the idea that you can choose to do exactly what you want?" Adding to one of the soon to be sacked workers, "You don't make much."
IDS clearly lives in a world of theories and charts chewed over with officials and advisers divorced from the extremes of life. He never seems to recognise the harshness of his measures nor does he accept the disabled are being told to find jobs which in most areas don't exist. After tax cuts for the top rate tax earners this Victorian punishment is pretty obscene politics.
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