True tribute to past is reflection

Ill advised 'welfare reforms' led to 'human catastrophe' yet UK Government hires top barristers to help cover up its past and present sins 

Mandy Lawrence wrote (Hereford Times letters, September 24), “Slavery is not just a horror of the past, it is all around us now” and “a true tribute to the past is reflection, and action to make our present kinder.”(1)

In my personal experience, a lack of reflection, truly informed decision making and accountability on the part of elected politicians and their appointed ‘problem solvers’ in identifying the true nature of the problems is a taproot of slavery being “all around us.”

In March 2007 a Labour Government signed Britain up to the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (UNCRPD), yet in February 2008 the UK Government’s appointed ‘welfare reform guru’ investment banker David Freud was foisted upon us, boasting that his lack of prior knowledge about the state benefit system could be an advantage to “sorting out the mess that is welfare.”

In short, he declared without noting his sources, that 2/3 of Incapacity Benefit claims were fraudulent, and the eligibility test was conducted by the claimant’s own GP, who would have a vested interest in proclaiming the claimant unfit for work.

“He told the paper it would be ‘economically rational’ to pay as much as £62,000 to a company which managed to place an incapacity benefit claimant in a job which lasted three years or more.

“Incapacity benefit costs the Treasury about £12bn a year.“(2)

The CEO of Child Poverty Action Group told the BBC that official figures suggested the true fraud level was below 0.5% and:

"Ministers will surely be alarmed that the man charged with major reform of the welfare system and family security rights gets basic facts wrong about benefits that he could find out in a second with a Google.His suitability must be under question for the task Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell has set him." (3)

Later that month community social worker Bob Holman noted: "The affluent elite tell the government about poverty. Those who endure it are shoved aside."(4)

A decade later, the UK Government faced UN investigation as “cuts caused human catastrophe.”(5). Persisting in its denial, UK Government now sends top barristers to disability benefit test-related inquests to argue against public inquiry into the thousands of related deaths,(6) and David Freud is a Life Peer sitting on the Tory benches and President of the charity ‘Volunteering Matters’(7) nee ‘Community Service Volunteers’.(8)

Alan Wheatley

Notes

(1) https://newsforwardsfromalanwheatley.blogspot.com/2020/09/mandy-lawrence-reflects-upon-last-night-of-the-proms.html is an edit by Mandy of her original submission to Hereford Times
(2) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7223687.stm Title: Two million wrongly get benefits
(3) ibid
(4) https://newsforwardsfromalanwheatley.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-apartheid-of-wealth-state-we-are-in.html
(5) https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/uk-faces-un-examination-government-cuts-caused-human-catastrophe/
(6) Search Results for “barrister inquest” – Disability News Service
(7) https://members.parliament.uk/member/3893/registeredinterests
(8) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteering_Matters