Regain our trust.
Times have changed over the decades since Thatcher and successive governments starting shifting away from Beveridgism.
Labour lost the trust of disabled people when they brought about welfare reforms in 2008 under Tony Blair’s regime.
Yes, I will unashamedly point out that it was indeed those reforms, initially intended for new claims, which turned social security into the negative state it is now in. It was intended to be new claims only, however the likes of Begg, Gilmore, McGuire and Abrahams soon realized all was not well.
I recall in 2013 myself and other campaigners met with McGuire at her office in Stirling and again later at Newcastle Football Stadium where it was pointed out that a few people had died after incorrect assessments carried out by Atos who were the outsourced providers at that time.
It was then that Labour recognised the assessment system was not working in the way they had intended it to when they were last in office.
Labour lost he General Election in 2010 when Gordon Brown was left in charge after Blair quit his post. In marched Iain Duncan Smith under David Cameron’s mandate along with Lord David Freud, a former policymaker for the Labour Party, and they carried on with the assessments, bastardising them into the monster it is today.
They claimed baselessly that Labour were too soft on those needing state support.
George Osborne persuaded the public that those needing social security were feckless, lazy and in need through their individual for their poverty, rather than considering the endemic, structural and systematic causes of poverty. The social security system had already been rebranded as welfare benefits, handouts and benefits by New Labour.
No serious or substantial attempt was made by Governments since the 1980s to explain why poverty occurs in Britain, and across the country. No attempt was made to secure well-paid employment in sectors which build supply chains and jobs. Across the industrial Midlands, Pennines and North, Scotland, Wales and Cornwall lost manufacturing jobs were not replaced with quality work.
By 2010 it was easy for Osborne to fuel that attitude with his strivers and skivers rhetoric than to offer real opportunities to those who were disabled, low paid or experiencing unemployment and job precarity.
Pushing the rhetoric of neighbours with curtains drawn while other residents went to work and paid their taxes to keep them lying idly in bed, Osborne pushed the misinformation that people in need of social security were taking advantage of the taxpayer. Which of course was largely untrue, fraud is low and most of the social security budget is taken up by the state retirement pension.
Thatcher massaged figures
Back in the 1980s Thatcher had parked many of the middle aged and older working age men and women who were victims of her recessions mass redundancies on Incapacity Benefit. Ageism in the workplace and lack of transferable skills made it impossible for these people to find work, and they were parked in the embarrassingly high unemployment figures. Moving these unemployment benefit claimants onto Incapacity Benefits helped Thatcher and Major massage the unemployed statistics.
In part, New Labour recognised the unfairness of consigning people to the scrap heap, but they focused on using benefits as a springboard to work. The unemployed became job seekers and the beginnings of theories that sickness might be helped by work were creeping through the policy makers and lobbyists policy papers.
By 2010, Iain Duncan Smith had formulated his view that everyone should work, and that unemployed, disabled and even sick people might work. Given the right support everyone could work and the Universal Credit (UC) system which has been under consideration from the mid-1990s was being transformed into policy by 2012.
However, Universal Credit has been badly planned, with poor software support, operated through Job Centres and call centres which have had staffing levels cut, that no longer provide real job search support. As with legacy benefits and disability benefits, UC claimants are forced to jump through hoops, but for lower amounts of money.
The system of social security in Britain has effectively ceased to exist. What we have now is cruel process calculated to delay, deny and deter people claiming any form of state assistance and with the much vaunted insistence that the economy has large numbers of job vacancies.
The fact that many jobs are low paid, part-time and precarious has constantly been glossed over.
Fast forward a decade and still the current Tory Government blames everyone else for the state of this country including the Labour Party, which has not been in power for ten years, while absolving themselves of any responsibility for their mistakes. They have brainwashed the public thus far to go along with everything they say including those most in need. Sadly over 13 million people fell for the Conservatives’ lies at the last General Election.
Even in a pandemic that the Johnson regime was mismanaging from the outset, the Tories clapped and praised the NHS and its workers who they have systematically abused for a decade through low pay and poor working conditions. They saved Boris Johnson’s life while slapping them in the face by voting down a pay rise for them. While business and people tried to adapt to COVID regulations, members of the Government, their special advisors and relatives were found to have flouted the rules when they put themselves in harm’s way. No thought given to all those front line workers who have kept the country going.
Recently the Labour Party’s DWP Shadow Minster for Secretary of the State Jonathan Reynolds claimed in an article published on ‘Labour List’ there would be no returning to George Osborne’s demonising rhetoric used against disabled, sick and unemployed people under his watch.
Having spoken to him previously regarding his disastrous first article published in Politics Home, he shows promise. I can see he is making steps in the right direction especially against the hated Universal Credit which is an utter failure. has further shown it to be such a mess to people who before the pandemic had never had any contact with the system.
Many of those who were furloughed, or lost their jobs at the outset of lockdown are sadly among those who will encountered the social security system for the first time as all of our business sectors shed jobs.
The British people face unprecedented levels of unemployment which experts expect will return to levels not seen since Thatcher of between five to nine million people.
What Labour have never done since 2010 is acknowledge and apologise for the part its reforms to social security played in giving the Tories the tools they have gone on to use with such viciousness against disabled people.
With the exception of a few individual MPs, the Labour Party over the last decade has not visibly fought hard enough to protect disabled people. This lack of fight seems to have come about because of fears of talking publicly about social security in a society that demonises anyone who must claim any form of support from the state.
When you ask awkward questions they want to engage, while squidgy bums squirm on seats, many campaigners have put in enormous numbers of hours of work without payment into researching the ways the benefit system is failing disabled, impoverishment pensioners, low paid, sick, unemployed people and WASPI women.
Many are working often from their sick beds, including myself, to engage in policy decisions, many of our findings were ignored, or cherry picked without even as much as a reference or a thank you for the most part.
So you see to gain disabled people’s ‘trust’ again, let alone encourage the general public to vote for Labour in any local or general election, it is time to come clean and admit your mistakes in a number of areas of policy and tell them what you plan to do to put things right should they gain power.
In 2020 I can still hear all those disabled Labour voters shouting ‘I do not believe you’! Frankly, I do not blame them when 184 Labour MP’s voted with the current reforms.
Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see the Tories ousted from office and a Labour Government returned to power and that’s why I am standing for the NEC seat of Disability Representative.
I recognise that the Labour Party has to radically change the way it designs policy and the way it engages with disabled people, other marginalised groups and the wider public. Failure to do so means we will remain in opposition for a very long time to come and in the meantime many who need social security support will continue to suffer and die.
Gail Ward, Hexham CLP
Gail will be appearing in a discussion on Labour Grassroots on Wednesday at 7:30pm. Register to watch on Zoom here.
People are now frightened to make a claim for disability and the ones with benefits are frightened to inform DWP of change of circumstances and then be reassessed and lose their benefit.
The Tory government has the disabled scared of being in receipt of disability benefit by continuously assessing their benefits over a short time. DWP / HCP assessments are affecting people’s mental health – noting the level of incorrect statements made by HCP, the outright lying by HCP and no quick method of correcting these blatantly errors – going to stop now and let my BP get back to normal
Eleven years of Tories taking the pee and paying a bonus to kick people off of the sick. That was May. Even her own MPs said labour should apologize for this not realising that she also voted for it. F the Tories
Dear Gail Ward
thank you so much for your Article “Labour Party must play it part in the ATOS Testing”
I wish our constituency was meeting so that I could read it out to the Members!
yes politician s and writers shouldapologise fortheir mistakes like no indicating what ATOS stands for.
Whilst I agree that some people in the 1980s were working the system because they didn’t want to work, I am utterly shocked by the dismantling of the safety net which was there when I was young and that really sick people are being found fit for work and all means of living taken from them, so they are likely to die and many have done. This happened to my son in 2011, just after he had graduated and offered his first job but became seriously ill and couldn’t take it up, so I was well aware that the Labour Government brought in the Work Capability Assessment and whilst I tried to flag up what was going on from that time, Jeremy Corbyn was the only MP to really listen. Still most Labour members are unaware of what the Work Capability Assessment is and why very sick people are being made to look for work and like my son are getting 0 points in the assessment. Whilst all the blame was being put on ATOS, it was the test itself that is flawed. It seems that whoever designed it was thinking of ‘static’ disabilities like blindness, deafness, paraplegia and had forgotten those with chronic, progressive or terminal illnesses. My son was suffering from Ulcerative Colitis, which led to wasting away, weakness, internal bleeding and in the end after many blood transfusions, steroids and immunosuppressants he had to have his colon removed and a stoma in order to save his life but he got 0 points in the test. For the sake of understanding, please imagine you are sick with flu and are not up to working. The ‘test’ asks you if you can lift a carton of juice, take a phone message, put on your jacket or take it off, walk 50 metres with or without aid. You would probably answer yes to these questions and would get 0 points in the test. 0 points because the test does not cover whether you have a fever, whether you are bleeding internally as my son was, whether you are weak or faint, whether like my son all your energy was going in trying to stay alive. These type of things are not covered in the questionnaire. I think a lot of time and energy was directed against ATOS whereas it was the government and the test itself that should be blamed. We need to go back to GPs and hospital consultants deciding whether someone is fit to work. With the release of ‘I Daniel Blake’ more people know about this situation but I don’t think enough Labour members have a real understanding of what is going on and how thousands have needlessly died because of something our party started. I keep saying that when you are arrested for a serious crime such as murder the State does not take away your food and shelter and let you starve, yet it does this to sick and vulnerable people via the WCA and sanctions. What is their crime to be treated like this. It is a scandal and should be treated as such.
Totally agree with you the WCA was designed to fail disabled people and that’s why I wrote this piece and why I’m standing for NEC Disabled Seat. Labour Members are largely unaware unless you are disabled and subjected to such barbarity. There is a total difference between being disabled and chronically sick.
They are a government outsourced company Arnold which do disability assessments for disabled people and they have been splashed across the press, so I cannot understand how you would not have known that they had their contract taken off them .