The barbaric Tory sanctions regime is still going on

The draconian Tory sanctions regime is callous, shockingly ineffective, economically unjustifiable, and deadly.

The stated purpose of the DWP Sanctions regime is to shock benefits claimants into putting more effort into looking for work by consigning them to periods of absolute destitution.

The Sanctions regime hit its peak between 2012 and 2015 during the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition, with up to 90,000 people per month hurled into absolute poverty, and never fewer than 30,000 people per month subjected to either Jobseekers or Universal Credit sanctions in the austerity coalition era.

The sanctioning rate has dropped off since the Lib-Dems left government, but there are still thousands of people per month receiving letters like the one above, and being forced to go through lengthy (and expensive to the taxpayer) appeals processes, or just give up fighting against a system that's designed to abuse them and live in extreme poverty for as long as it takes.

Callous

Excerpt from a 2014 Johnny Void article
about Jobcentres rewarding staff for 
high sanctions rates.

We know that during the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition Jobcentre staff were given mandatory targets to sanction a set percentage of claimants per week, in order to get the unemployment figures down (people subjected to sanctions aren't counted as officially unemployed).

It's beyond obvious that Jobcentre staff ended up targeting the mentally ill and severely uneducated by sanctioning every minor error, or deliberately giving them impossible tasks to comply with (like two appointments at the same time so they miss one and get sanctioned).

It's just so much easier to target the vulnerable than it is to expend significant amounts of time and energy on catching the tiny minority of die-hard benefits scroungers who know exactly which hoops to jump through to avoid losing their payments.

Perhaps most shockingly of all, the Liberal Democrats have openly bragged about how they helped the Tories make this sanctions regime even more draconian, in return for 5p charges on plastic bags.

Ineffective

We know from extensive research that sanctions are a massively counter-productive method of encouraging people into work.

Just think about it for yourself. If you had your income reduced to just £5.82 to last an entire month, how would you afford to print CVs, travel to job interviews, clean your clothes, eat properly so you can concentrate on making a good impression?

Multiple research papers have found that the victims of DWP sanctions ended up suffering extreme poverty, ill-health, mental distress, and resorting to survival crime like shoplifting.

Yet the Tories persist in using these sanctions (which disproportionately hit disabled people) under their warped belief that you motivate the poor to work harder by making them poorer, while you motivate the rich to work harder by giving them ever more lavish handouts and tax breaks!

Deadly

It's no exaggeration to say that sanctions are deadly. The most notorious example was the death of the ex-serviceman David Clapson who died of diabetic ketoacidosis in 2016 after being left penniless by sanctions and having his insulin supply spoiled because his electricity supply was cut off.

Although the most high-profile case because of the campaigning of his family members, David Clapson is far from the only example, with dozens of people having been driven to suicide after suffering sanctions.

Economically unjustifiable

Three years ago the National Audit Office found that the benefits sanctions regime costs more to administer than it will ever save in reduced benefits payments.

This means that the Tories have actually been using public funds to treat people in this despicable manner, and they've continued doing so despite knowing that it's a total waste of public money.

These Tory devils know perfectly well that sanctions don't work, yet expect the rest of us to actually subsidise their barbaric treatment of vulnerable and disabled people through our taxes because they apparently get some kind of kick out of it.

It would be bad enough if they were behaving like this in order to save a few million quid, but they're not saving anything, it's actually costing us fortunes to subsidise their system for treating vulnerable people in this disgusting way!

Conclusion

Even if you're the kind of person who doesn't care about all of the evidence that sanctions are unspeakably cruel and demonstrably ineffective, or that they're disproportionately used against vulnerable and disabled people, or even if you're completely indifferent about all of the suffering, misery, and death this barbaric regime has caused, surely you can't believe that it's a good or sensible use of public funds?

Surely you can't approve of the money you pay in taxes being used to subsidise a system designed to make vulnerable and disabled people suffer absolute destitution?

Surely you can think of better uses of your money than that, even if it's just being allowed to keep a bit more of it in your own pocket?

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