Will the cruel Tory welfare reforms save any money?

First topic message reminder :

My personal opinion is that the current spate of tory reforms to the benefit system are cruel, regressive, and worst of all won't save money (the alleged intention).



In a supposedly modern civilised country one would think housing would be considered a human right.......rather than simply an investment / a chance to make a fast buck.

I note there is talk of a yacht for the biggest benefit claimee of them all. I note over £10billion has been spent on the olympics. I note £32billion is being spent on a high speed rail link (london-birmingham) - this will shave, a no doubt absolutely vita,l 32mins off the journey (essential??!!!) and be used by a miniscule % of the UK population.

How about investing this money in affordable social housing instead? Or do government no longer care to invest in those they view as peasants and serfs?

The tories efforts to turn the nation against those unfortunate enough to find themselves unemployed via vile smears, and an insidious propaganda campaign, are reminiscent of Nazi germany's propaganda campaign against the jews.

Iain Duncan Smith is a disgusting human being and has blood on his hands.

Instead of kicking the weakest targets that can't defend themselves....maybe the Bullingdon bullies should try picking on somebody their own size.....like the bankers, or benefit leeching corporations like Tescos.

They currently resemble a 20st thug stamping on a little girls head.

Welfare is essential and if we are to remain a civilised country we owe it to ourselves to provide for those less fortunate; unless we want to see people starving and homeless turning into savages.

The biggest burden on the UK in recent times has not been the unemployed.....welfare is not a burden - it is an essential expense in a civilised nation.

The biggest burden, and the cause of much unemployment, has been the rich greedy bankers who have cost this country, and us taxpayers, untold £billions in order to benefit a few. They have placed the real burden on the UK.

oftenwrong wrote:Does anyone feel strong enough to forecast the likely result of this change?

Massive arrears. I hate that it sounds so paternalistic, but the fact is that there are a lot of people who are used to working hand-to-mouth with money, and whose impulse-control and forward thinking isn't good - finding themselves with a lump sum that covers a whole month is likely to be a temptation many will find hard to resist.

Ironic that at the same time as the government is planning to hand a relatively large sum of money to people, its Tory component is also calling for money to be withheld and cards to be issued instead which can only be used for 'responsible' purposes.

I remember when I was working in Mental Health, there was a spate of what was called 'section 117 money' - briefly, if you were provided with services by the Local Authority as part of your Section 117 care plan (discharge plan after detention as a Section 3 psychiatric patient) such services were supposed to be free to the patient. This included quite expensive residential care services. Patients were in fact charged a contribution for such services (from their benefits on the whole) but, following a test case, it was found as it often is, that the Law, being a bit of an ass, dictated that those patients ought to have the whole of this contribution returned to them. Many cases dating back to the 1980's, some of the payouts were impressive.

Many a recovery plan was scuppered by this provision - giving thousands of pounds to people in a fragile mental health condition is not always conducive to continued good health.

This has always remained in my mind as an example of the perils of sloppy legislation (the 1983 Mental Health Act being a good example of such) and makes me really worried about this government's insistence on going hell-for-leather for legislative change, without at all thinking through the consequences, never mind drafting the provisions in any sensible form that makes sense.

sickchip wrote:boatlady,

We stopped the poll tax - we can stop this. Have a little faith, please.

After the judges ruling on the tory 'back to work' programme, I think they can also be challenged, and defeated, on this issue. Their policies and credibility will soon be in tatters.

I think a legal challenge is, in the short term, probably the best chance of getting this overturned. If not that, then a comprehensive GE victory in 2015 (or preferably sooner).

It seems we may have misunderstood. That nice Mr. Osborne has been very kind to us in clearing lots of space on the High Street for entrepreneurs to provide us with better shopping opportunities. Today's MSN headline is ""If the recession did anything it was to sort the high street wheat from the chaff."

http://style.uk.msn.com/socialvoices/theres-no-use-crying-over-the-demise-of-the-high-street-if-you-dont-vote-with-your-feet

So if you happen to be one of the FORMER employees of Woolworths, Comet, Blockbuster, HMV, Republic et al, every member of the Tory-led Coalition is grateful for your sacrifice.

Surely what one wishes to see is the emergence on Pease Pottage High Street (and in similar retail environments of England ) of Fortnum & Mason outlets. After all, it becomes ever-more difficult to obtain decent lobster for lunch in these shocking days of Labour-inflicted austerity...

It's not all gloom on the High Street. You might find a fizzy drink and a Mars Bar at the Pound Shop, Phil.

skwalker,

sickchip wrote:boatlady,

We stopped the poll tax - we can stop this. Have a little faith, please.

After the judges ruling on the tory 'back to work' programme, I think they can also be challenged, and defeated, on this issue. Their policies and credibility will soon be in tatters.


I think a legal challenge is, in the short term, probably the best chance of getting this overturned. If not that, then a comprehensive GE victory in 2015 (or preferably sooner).

I think you're being more than a little naïve if you think a labour government will overturn, or rid us of, any of these tory reforms. Labour may act as though it opposes the tory party, but they are simply part of the same 'tag team' waiting to take their turn in the ring.

I can't imagine Labour not repealing the bedroom tax. A manifesto commitment to do so will guarantee them many votes, especially after two years of its insanity.

The remaining Blairite/Progress faction within Labour is undoubtedly a problem, but one that needs defeating rather than throwing out the baby with the proverbial bathwater.

" You might find a fizzy drink and a Mars Bar at the Pound Shop, Phil. "

Indeed so. Mrs Hornby is a staunch advocate of said Pound Shop in town and arrives home with all sorts of purchases therefrom.

Some people just have no class....

How to turn a housing crisis into a homeless catastrophe

Extracts from an article by Polly Toynbee:-

"Westminster expects 5,000 families to be evicted by housing benefit cuts – and it's happening almost everywhere. Councils have no choice as they frantically search for cheap housing, often hundreds of miles away. In Hull the bedroom tax hits 4,700 families with a spare room, and only 73 small properties free.

Puny savings from housing benefit bulge into huge local council bills. Never mind the injustice of evicting 660,000 households, wrenching children from schools, parents from jobs and families from relatives who provide childcare – if you tried to turn a housing crisis into a catastrophe, you couldn't do better.

Capping housing benefit equally everywhere, regardless of widely differing rents, means driving the poor and the unlucky into no-hope ghettos without jobs or school places. A third of those hit by the ‘spare room’ tax are disabled, with no exemption for divorced parents or foster parents with visiting children. Families in Hartlepool and Liverpool who have suffered the death of a child now face cuts for their empty bedrooms.

Nothing about housing policy makes sense. The government is right that spending £23bn a year on housing benefit is grossly wasteful, but why punish tenants when most of it goes straight to landlords? They claimed these cuts would make rents fall, but instead they rise. At the same time, housing associations must charge an unaffordable 80% of market rent, which makes them ‘social’ only for higher earners."

For the full article:-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/18/housing-crisis-bedroom-tax-failure-to-build

An essential part of that package is that housing benefit is to be paid direct to the Claimant in future, no longer to the Landlord.

That should result in a lot more Possession Orders coming out of the Courts.

No wonder this government wants us out of the Human Rights Act. I think we are going to need to use it to take the government to Court on a lot of matters. Unfortunately they have all but abolished legal aid, so you will have to represent yourself. The Health Service is failing people because it is being run by callous mega-rich individuals who have been brought in to cut services wherever they can get away with it. Those on the front lines are taking all the flack for being overstretched and short-staffed while the fat cats take a bonus for every saving they make for the government, and every bit more suffering they inflict on those least able to defend themselves.
Do we not have an Opposition Part worth the name of Opposition?
Slippery Dave is becoming every bit the persuasive operator, eloquent and seemingly sincere - the man who would lay down his country for his friends - and who has grown into the statesman-like chimaera that Milliband seeks to emulate.
A decent Human Rights Lawyer could do a better job of it.

Regarding the 'bedroom tax': Anybody who thinks this, or any other tory welfare reform, is fair has to be a sadist.

There appears to be a lot of sadistic folk at large in the UK at present. Where has this streak of cruelty and inhumanity came from? Is it because people believe tory propaganda? Is it a mutation of personal greed and inflated self-worth? Is it simply a lust to inflict blame and pain upon defenceless targets?

Whatever! There are a lot of sick, deluded, sadistic bastards out there.

I suspect the poor will eventually turn violently and unrelentingly on the middle classes - their homes, villages, towns, and cosy sheltered existences might well be destroyed in time.

The moneyed, sometimes described as "The Establishment" have held British governance firmly in their grasp since they were little more than local bandits who got lucky.

In the modern world they have appointed the Tory Party as their Aunt Sally public face. To take the blame, to absorb the opprobrium, to divert some criticism towards the upstart "middle classes", but above all to keep our real leaders anonymous and faceless. For which The Establishment is prepared to pay well, and to generously reward loyalty.

sickchip wrote:Regarding the 'bedroom tax': Anybody who thinks this, or any other tory welfare reform, is fair has to be a sadist.

There appears to be a lot of sadistic folk at large in the UK at present. Where has this streak of cruelty and inhumanity came from? Is it because people believe tory propaganda? Is it a mutation of personal greed and inflated self-worth? Is it simply a lust to inflict blame and pain upon defenceless targets?

Whatever! There are a lot of sick, deluded, sadistic bastards out there.

I suspect the poor will eventually turn violently and unrelentingly on the middle classes - their homes, villages, towns, and cosy sheltered existences might well be destroyed in time.

I've had a number of conversations with well-meaning people who thought it was fair to the extent of 'well, you've got to do something, what with all those old people blocking 3-bedroom homes that younger people need'.

That lasted right up until I explained to them who is really affected by the 'tax' - and the fact that pensioners are, at least in the first phase, protected from it.

Education is the key - then people get mad. It happened to me a year or so ago - it can happen to others.

I suspect the poor will eventually turn violently and unrelentingly on the middle classes - their homes, villages, towns, and cosy sheltered existences might well be destroyed in time.

I think that plot-line is in a book by John Pilger?

Or was that another book that identified who had that agenda?

Democracy has deep roots in the UK and organising an effective opposition will need the kind of coherent planning that this current government had put years into. I was amazed how quickly they dropped fully formed policies into place, removing political pluralism and replacing it with targeted media manipulation.

I can criticise this bunch of daylight robbers the same as anyone, but what I want to see is a believable opposition with sound-bites that will make people sit up and say 'yes - this would work much better'. There is international monetarism and the debt economy is the only show in town. It needs openly addressing and fair play - this lot of rich kids knows how to move money from one place to another and make a profit.

What's the alternative?
How will it work on the international merry-go-round of stock exchange trading?

methought wrote:What's the alternative?
How will it work on the international merry-go-round of stock exchange trading?

There will be a battle, without question:

From http://skwalker1964.wordpress.com/2012/07/27/the-radical-imperative-who-dares-wins/

There’s some necessary scene-setting in this post – context that has to be grasped for the main point to make sense. I don’t think this is going to be my most entertaining post, but I believe it’s an important one, so please bear with it if you can.

I’ve just flown back overnight from Africa. I don’t generally sleep fantastically well on planes, especially when I’m in the middle seat and sandwiched between two people as ill-suited to narrow economy-class seats as I am. So I spent most of the night re-reading parts of Naomi Klein’s excellent, eye-opening work ‘The Shock Doctrine’. If you haven’t read it, then please put it at the top of your reading list – it’s one of those books that causes a true paradigm-shift: you come out of reading it different than you went in, and a lot of governmental, quasi-governmental and corporate behaviour makes a lot more sense once you’ve seen it in its broader context.

The section I was reading last covers the 1980s, from the accession of Thatcher & Reagan onwards. It’s heart-breaking to remember how close we came to getting rid of Thatcher after a single term (possibly less) and before she was able to do the damage that she did to the fabric of our society. Had she not been politically rescued by the ‘opportunity’ of the Falklands conflict, she would have been just a footnote in Britain’s political history, rather than the primary cancer that metastasised into the deeply-embedded, systemic sickness of greed and inequality that still blights our social fabric today.

But the thing that struck me most, as usual, was pattern. The early examples of neoliberal, free-market worship being imposed on societies that were previously trying to treat all their people well rather than just a so-called elite were all achieved by violence and repression, but from the 80s another model started to become commonplace. Thatcher was the first to be able to shock a democratic society into the Friedmanite ‘greed and inequality’, small-state model without a violent coup and the torture and oppression of its people.

While Thatcher failed to impose the ideology to its ultimate degree, she ‘succeeded’ to a very substantial degree, and established a reference-point that allowed right-wing economists to sell the falsehood that democratic ‘freedom’ and free-market economics were two inseparable sides of the same coin – and that formed a die that has been cynically stamped ever since on any country that ‘threatens’ to go down a different path.

From Bolivia under Paz and Argentina under Alfonsìn, through Poland under Solidarity even to South Africa under Mandela, capitalist governments and institutions (primarily the IMF and World Bank, aided and abetted by ‘the markets’) have ganged up on various emerging nations to make sure that the initial intentions of their democratically-elected governments were rapidly killed.

Instead of establishing alternative, co-operative, fair economies based on justice and the redistribution of wealth from the hands of those who gained it by ill means into the common good, those new governments were forced into a helpless acceptance of the ideological construct that says ‘strong’, sustainable economies can only be built on the back of slashed spending, privatisation and deliberate erosion of protections for ordinary people.

These surrenders were forced by a combination of measures. Creditor nations insisted that emerging countries must repay the crippling debts generated by those who had oppressed and impoverished them – equivalent to telling a mugging victim that he or she is liable for the debts of the mugger; IMF and World Bank loans were withheld until new governments agreed to slash state spending, give away public property and services to private interests; stock markets dived and companies threatened to remove operations and investments every time any kind of radical fairness measure was even hinted at; speculators (something I’d happily make an imprisonable offence) exploited weakness to drive down the value of currencies to make sure that countries had no choice but to bend the knee.

The result has always been that the good intentions of incoming leftist governments have been killed at birth and replaced with the insane free market model that has allowed a tiny minority to enrich itself while the vast majority experiences poverty, insecurity and fear.

It’s been a tragedy of lost opportunities, and seeing them encapsulated in a few chapters of text was a heart-rending experience for someone who believes there are genuine alternatives, different ways of being and doing that build people up instead of grinding them underfoot.

Which leads me onto my real point for this post. I don’t think any clear-thinking, well-intentioned person can plausibly deny that we’re witnessing in this country the sequel to Thatcher’s move to create inequality and allow the powerful few to become rich at the expense of the many. And, as I’ve written recently, I believe it’s being done in a deliberate and ideologically-driven way, orchestrated by politicians, corporate interests and media to keep most British people ignorant of the scale of the coup until it’s too late.

But I don’t think the situation is without hope. Fuelled by the freedom of communication possible via social media, and by a new willingness in the Labour Party to claim the left ground and own the fairness proposition, I believe word is starting to get out. People are beginning – not as fast as I’d like, of course – to see Cameron and co for the callous, greedy, corrupt elitists they are. They just need a clear and genuine alternative to believe in.

There’s a long way to go and we can’t afford to relax for a minute until it’s done and dusted, but for the sake of imagination for the moment, let’s assume that the Tories continue to be as disastrous and as evidently arrogant as they currently are, and that they lose the next election (please God, catastrophically and much sooner than 2015!), so that we have a strong Labour government coming to power against a European backdrop of resurgent socialism in France and other places.

What’s going to happen then? The markets, the IMF, World Bank, the powerful corporate interests who stand to lose profit and power if a genuine alternative gets a chance to succeed, are not just going to sit back and let it happen. They’re going to push back – hard, fast and in as many ways as possible. They’ll use every conceivable tactic to force the UK (presumably Miliband) government not to disturb the status quo – to continue to accept their treasured austerity-narrative, to continue to cut spending (perhaps in a fractionally more measured way), to lower taxes (and certainly not to raise them!) and to acquiesce to the fallacy that no other path exists than the neo-liberal, ultra-capitalist model that has made those vested interests unimaginably rich over the past few decades.

It’s already started, of course. Threats are muttered that investment would disappear if fair taxes (though they don’t call them that, of course) were imposed, that the rich would flee (if they’re not paying proper taxes, we wouldn’t miss them), that the markets will panic, interest rates rise, inflation grow out of control. And so on. A litany of fear and threat.

It’s inevitable that powerful interests will try to kill any alternative way or view at birth. So what do we do? Well, just as the right is already promoting its twisted narrative with every ounce of its energy, I believe we need to start constructing and communicating an alternative that is coherent, clear and radical. It’s not enough to offer a slightly redder, kinder austerity-narrative that effectively does nothing but continue the pain but at a slightly lower level while leaving the underlying structures undisturbed, in the hope of claiming the ‘competence’ proposition.

That’s like offering an aspirin to a cancer-ridden patient. People are tired of the ‘same old same old’ and can see what we have now isn’t working – but they need to hear intelligent, clearly-articulated and radically different ideas. Ideas that start to paint a completely different world-view, one in which we’re not condemned to the despair of believing what the Friedmanites would love us to believe (remember Fukuyama’s staggeringly arrogant ‘The End of History’?) that all we can ever hope for is a slightly different veneer on the way of being and doing that has brought us disaster after disaster.

And I believe it has to start with us – from the bottom up. There has to be leadership, vision and inspiration from the leaders of the opposition, of course, but the reality of Parliamentary politics in the context of suborned or biased media means that it’s going to be hard for Ed Miliband and others to be the ones to discuss these radical ideas to begin with.

It’s not enough to be outraged – though that’s important, and I’m full of outrage. It’s not enough to snipe and point out the idiocy and falsehoods of Tory claims and thinking – though that’s important too, and heaven knows they’re clear enough! There has to be a groundswell of positive, bold, alternative ideas - a subversive, even semi-subterranean momentum that spreads via word of mouth and social media, via the meeting of minds between the already-engaged and the not-yet aware, until it’s strong enough that the media can’t so easily ignore or misrepresent it to destroy the political capital of those we need to replace our corrupt and venal ‘leaders’.

Ideas. Ideas that embed themselves in the mind, thoughts that can’t be unthought and that shift paradigms and world-views – and the guerilla-boldness to advocate them in spite of media bias and the scorn of ‘commentators’ who want to perpetuate and strengthen the hopelessness-mindset. Ideas that ‘go viral’, spreading far beyond the committed radicals who conceive them and into the thinking of everyone – even ‘white van man’.

If we can create that momentum, that groundswell, then the next Labour government will be seen to have a massive, solid mandate from an aware and informed people – and will be much more able to resist the corporatist push-back that will inevitably come.

The centre-ground has started to move left, and we need to proclaim radical ideas to push it further, so that the bankrupt Tory ideology is simply ridiculous to the majority of people.

I have some (you’ll find them in this blog, in existing and future posts), and I’m sure you do too. Let’s not be shy about sharing them with like-minded people – and with those who aren’t like-minded yet. And think big!

Now’s not the time for timidity or excessive caution. Conviction carries weight, and who dares, wins.

Excellent post - well spoken - and of course it is difficult to organise an alternative perspective because of the 'you're either with us or you're against us', 'reds under the beds' mentality of the previous American administration which locked wealth and power into the hands of corporate leaders who have more power than national leaders.
Other books by Brian Griffiths - Thatcher's head of the Bank of England - showed where the seeds of the debt economy were sown - and Dark Victory is another book which clearly exposes how the planned crisis in world banking will leave all the monopoly money in the hands of the shylocks of the banking overlord system, with nothing in the hands of the people who produce the goods, distribute them, or purchase them. Everything we own is in effect owned by bankers, since we have mortgages and credit cards and loans. It is, at this point, more about where your perspective lies and whether you can play the game well or not at all, and comes back to a very basic question - if the current global monetarism has bankrupted us all, surely 'us all' can come up with a better system??
Gordon Brown faced that momentous turning point when the banks collapsed and either the country let them fall and started all over again with nationalised banks, protectionism, and even possibly rationing of essentials to protect those who lost everything, or putting the whole country into debt to keep the machine working as a negative equity debt generating machine.
Part of me would like to see the establishment of an alternative currency start from scratch and just write off the wealth in off-shore holdings as incompatible with a fairer system. It ain't gonna happen though, and powerless little nobodies are expendable, especially if they have oil.

We have gained from the effective organisation provided by banking, that underpins the circulation of money. Perhaps just putting in more money is the best solution - give each individual a float of £1000 and boost the economy that way.

Excellent posts both Steve and methought. As it stands though I don't believe any of the existing political parties have an inclination to change a system that benefits themselves and would involve re-thinking policies and politics that have been around for centuries.

Thatcher was widely described as a Radical.

Maybe it's a good time for the Labour Party to produce a Radical reformer.

Best of luck there OW.

Does anybody know why I have to sign in to view the posts or have the rules been changed?

Hi tlttf - these policies haven't been around that long. Reagan invented them (or one of his lot did) with the aim of creating third world debt with loans that couldn't be paid back, to, allegedly, a world bank which created the money in the first place and received real money in payments back.

Sir Brian Griffiths was deeply concerned about the absence of morality in monetarism and felt that Britain should not be party to profiteering in this way. Thatcher on the other hand believed that giving shares to the workers would allow them to feel committed to how well their company was doing, and therefore work harder to benefit all the workers.

It didn't work out that way though, and now we are in the same sh*t that the third world countries are mired in, and why didn't we see it coming?

Thatcher moved the goal posts and the 'old order' of workers and bosses was gone, along with the big unions, in favour of an emphasis on individualism and maximising profit for a smaller group of people.

For the world bank - IMF stuff you would need to sift through the zeitgeist videos on youtube and work out what is honest revelation of real goings on and what is conspiracy theory, super-sized. The easier version is the Dark Victory book which is very readable. And I'm not referring to the Batman book....

Does anybody know why I have to sign in to view the posts or have the rules been changed?

tlttf. Everyone has to sign in for the moment. The forum has been threatened by one of the headcases who hacked into and deleted the old ProBoards forum twice. Sadly he is being allowed to do and say what he likes by the irresponsible administrator of another forum.

tlttf wrote:Best of luck there OW.

Does anybody know why I have to sign in to view the posts or have the rules been changed?

The rules have been changed temporarily because of a couple of security/ToS issues, mate.

methought wrote:For the world bank - IMF stuff you would need to sift through the zeitgeist videos on youtube and work out what is honest revelation of real goings on and what is conspiracy theory, super-sized. The easier version is the Dark Victory book which is very readable. And I'm not referring to the Batman book....

There is stuff against the IMF which is reliably documented and very damning. One example can be read about here:

http://skwalker1964.wordpress.com/2012/08/27/proven-imf-brings-down-economies-intentionally/

Thanks Ivan.

The country is in a worse state than when this government took office.

We can now probably answer the question this thread asks.

The tory welfare reforms are simply cruel acts of class war, and don't really save any money. If they do save a miniscule amount it is at the expense of fellow citizens health, welfare, and indeed homes. Does a fellow citizens suffering make the tory cuts/reforms worth it?

As that nice Mr. Osborne said in Parliament just today, "My reforms are essential to deal with the situation we inherited from the previous Labour Government."

I knew what the situation was in 2010. The Tories were so anxious for Office that they cobbled together a Coalition with a Quisling Lib-Dem rump in a professed intention of solving all the problems.

What hubris possessed them to think that they might be capable of doing so?

The pressure group ‘Compass’ has produced a briefing document entitled ’Social Security for All’. Here are some extracts from it:-

“We should be clear about what we are facing; nothing less than the systematic attempt at dismantling our nation’s welfare state.”

Despite the crash we are still a very rich nation with GDP almost 70 times greater than in 1955. It is a political decision what we do with that wealth.

The value of the basic safety net benefit received by a single person is now very low in absolute terms and relative to other developed countries. It is currently only 11% of average earnings compared to 18% in 1948 and 20% in the late 1960s.

60% of the £3.7 billion cut as a result of the Welfare Benefit Uprating Bill will fall on in-work households.

The government has admitted that the cuts to benefits and child tax credits will push 200,000 more children into poverty.

Department for Work and Pensions figures for 2011/2012 confirm that benefit fraud (and error) is a miniscule 0.7% of the entire social security budget.

Intergenerational worklessness and a ‘dependency culture’ are virtually non-existent. Intensive research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation could find no such families in the UK.

The full briefing can be read here:-
http://clients.squareeye.net/uploads/compass/documents/C4_Compass_Document.pdf

'This government is not cutting welfare it is managing growth at a lower level......'

IDS's new twist on cuts to welfare

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mCA2q7vvbw&NR=1&feature=endscreen

If this is true something is changing for the better?

900,000 choose to come off sickness benefit ahead of tests
Nearly 900,000 people who were on incapacity benefit dropped their claim to the payments rather than undergo a tough medical test, latest government figures show.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9963012/900000-choose-to-come-off-sickness-benefit-ahead-of-tests.html

From the same article:

Mr Shapps said: “One of the cruelest things about this welfare system, which had developed over decades...is that it traps people who want to work hard and get on in life with no other option but to be trapped into a life on welfare.

It’s cruel, I think the system had actually become literally cruel, even evil to people. People suspected for a long time that incapacity benefit had been used by the previous government to hide the unemployed.

This is a new figure, nearly a million people have come off incapacity benefit...before going for the test. They’ve taken themselves off. My big argument here is this is not these people were trying to play the system, as much as these people were forced into a system that played them.

So even Shapps doesn't think people were playing the system - they all wanted to 'work hard and get on'. They were 'trapped' in a system that gave them a half-decent amount of money to live on, while the Tories are 'liberating' them onto 'the less generous Jobseekers Allowance'.

Poverty shall set you free, it seems.

The Tories don't half talk some shameless s**t. They've set up a system that so terrifies a lot of disability claimants that some have even committed suicide, and which wrongly disqualifies at least 40%, with pre-determined targets of how many are to be barred, and which pays a company for disqualifying them even when they get it wrong and their decisions are overturned on appeal.

I don't have enough information yet to say more in detail, but this 878k figure will be as distorted as all the other stats the Tories crow over.

You only have to look at who's figures they are:
"Nearly 900,000 people who were on incapacity benefit dropped their claim to the payments rather than undergo a tough medical test, latest government figures show"

Bobby, are those the figures revealed in a 2008 survey? That is to say during the previous administration.

http://news.uk.msn.com/nearly-900000-drop-benefit-claims-1

Great point, OW - was just writing an article about it, but you beat me to it!

Govt & Torygraph distorting again - this time disability claims
http://wp.me/p2sftc-6IK

This proves to my satisfaction that the Tories will not hesitate to steal the Labour Party's trousers whenever they feel it may help their cause. It's exactly what they tried to do in 2005, having no policies of their own.

Miliband will simply have to keep his cards close to the chest, despite calls for a Battle Plan to be revealed by supporters naturally anxious to begin the Election Campaign. Nobody said it would be easy.