Who actually approves of this grotesque Tory barbarism?

Steven Smith spent the last months of his life fighting an utterly perverse decision to declare him 'fit for work' and strip him of his disability benefits despite evidence from his doctors that he could barely walk 20 metres without collapsing.

In February 2019 he was hospitalised weighing just 6 stone, but he had to get a pass out of hospital to attend an appeal against the perverse DWP decision to deny his disability benefits, despite the mountains of medical evidence that he was severely ill like his diagnoses of incurable Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, and osteoarthritis.

Thankfully the judge saw what should have been glaringly obvious to the Tory-administered DWP and the corporate outsourcing minions who operate their disability denial programmes, that 64 year old Steven could barely walk down the street, let alone hold down a full-time job.

Just a couple of months after winning his appeal against this utterly barbaric Tory system Steven died.

This is a shocking individual tragedy that should make even the most hard-hearted of Tories question what their beloved party did to this poor man, but this isn't just an example of an unfortunate individual falling through the cracks, it's an example of the Tory disability denial system working exactly as designed.

Literally thousands of sick and disabled people have died within weeks of having been declared fit-for-work in the Tory disability denial system.

Just imagine the suffering of being so ill you're on death's door, and being told by the Tory DWP that you're not really ill, but actually an idle scrounger who needs to go and get a job. Imagine how you would feel seeing a member of your family being psychologically tortured like this in the final weeks of their lives.

Then there's all the money the Tory government have spent fighting against appeals from people like Steven Smith. In 2017-18 they blasted an extraordinary £120 million opposing appeals against their barbaric disability denial system, with over 40,000 people proving that they were entitled to the benefits they'd been denied.

That's £120 million in public funds that could have been spent on all manner of useful things, like rehiring some of the 20,000+ police jobs the Tories have scrapped since 2010, more nurses, more firefighters, Sure Start centres, or affordable housing.

And then there's the fact that these Tory disability denial programmes actually cost far more to administer than they will ever save in reduced benefits payments.

The Tories have known for years that it actually costs more to treat disabled people in this horrific manner than it will ever save, but when it comes to systematically abusing sick and disabled people, suddenly the Tories' absurd "there isn't enough money" austerity narrative goes in the bin, and there's plenty of public cash to subsidise their malicious abuse of sick and disabled people.

This despicable Tory mistreatment of sick and disabled people at the public expense is so barbaric that it's been repeatedly condemned by the United Nations as a "grave and systematic violation of the rights of persons with disabilities".

Labour have pledged to put a stop to this absolute barbarism, and several of the other opposition parties (Greens, Plaid Cymru, and the SNP) have been absolutely vehement in their opposition to this systematic Tory abuse of disabled people too.

However the big problem is that there are literally millions of selfish "I'm alright Jack" wankers out there who consider the plight of Steven Smith (and tens of thousands more like him) to be "a price worth paying" in return for whatever (probably imaginary) benefit they think they're getting from voting to keep the Tory party in power.

If you're one of the 13.6 million people to have voted Tory in 2017 then you should have a long hard think about the appalling suffering that you've helped to inflict on literally thousands of people like Steven Smith.

And if you're still planning on voting Tory, even after reading this, and even after learning that a Labour government would put a stop to it, I honestly don't think I'm being too harsh to point out that you're an absolute fucking monster of a person.

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