Windrush Brits are far from the only people to have suffered callous Tory abuse

The treatment of Windrush Brits by this horror show of a Tory government is an absolute outrage, but it's vital to remember that this dreadful scandal is just one example amongst many in a pattern of callous Tory abuse against pretty much anyone who is not a member of the wealthy establishment class that the Tory party exists to serve.

Windrush Brits

The Windrush scandal has come about because Theresa May introduced some vile UKIP-pandering anti-immigrant legislation in 2014. Nobody in parliament could have been under the impression that this was anything but an extreme-right attack on British values given that May openly bragged that the legislation could be used to create a guilty until proven innocent "deport now and hear appeals later" environment.

Since 2014 the Tories have been using this legislation to dehumanise and discriminate against Windrush Brits without the paperwork to prove their nationality. 

This systematic Tory discrimination has resulted in people being denied employment, denied accommodation, denied social security, denied pensions, denied NHS treatment, denied their freedom in immigration detention centres, and denied the right to return to Britain.

Other commonwealth Brits

Windrush Brits are far from the only Commonwealth British citizens to have been dehumanised and discriminated against in Theresa May's vile UKIP-pandering legislation. People from all manner of Commonwealth countries who arrived in Britain before 1973 have been denied their citizen's rights under Theresa May and Amber Rudd's "Hostile Environment". Examples already include arrivals from Kenya, Uganda, Cyprus, New Zealand, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and Canada.

The EU 3 million

Theresa May has been absolutely insistent that the lives of the three million EU citizens living in the UK should be used as disposable bargaining chips in the Brexit negotiations. 

In the weeks after the Brexit vote David Cameron wanted to make a unilateral offer to secure these people's rights, but Theresa May vetoed it.

Labour, the Lib-Dems, the SNP, Plaid Cymru, and the Green Party all agree that providing peace of mind to the EU 3 million should be an absolute priority, but Theresa May still insists on forcing them to live under the shadow of uncertainty, despite having had almost two years since the Brexit votes to give them a cast iron guarantee that they won't be deported or denied their rights. 

Sick and disabled people

One of the most shocking things about the Tories is their relentless systematic abuse of sick and disabled people.

One of the worst aspects of this systematic abuse are the dehumanising and discriminatory assessment regimes that are carried out by profiteering corporations like Atos, Capita and Maximus. Not only do these assessment procedures have spectacularly unreliable outcomes (almost three fifths of WCA cases that go to appeal are overturned), they also cost far more in corporate administration fees than they will ever save in reduced disability benefits payments.

The fact that the hated disability assessment regime costs far more to run than it will ever be able to save is conclusive proof that the Tories aren't even treating people maliciously for financial reasons, they're doing it because they enjoy it, and believe the taxpayer should subsidise their malicious treatment of some of the most vulnerable people in society.

The jobless

Another one of the malicious Tory policies that costs way more to administer than it will ever save in reduced benefits payments is their draconian sanctions regime against the unemployed.

Not only does the sanctions regime cost far more to run than it saves in reduced benefits payments, the evidence is absolutely clear that condemning people to absolute destitution (often for utterly trivial offences) actually reduces their ability to find work.

People with mental health problems

In 2014 the Court of Appeal ruled that the Tory Work Capacity Assessment regime is unlawful because of the way it discriminates against people with mental health conditions. The Tories just carried on regardless.

In 2017 the Tories were caught telling their army of corporate disability assessors to actively discriminate against people with mental health conditions.

And despite continually banging on about the importance of helping people with mental health conditions, the Tories are still ruthlessly cutting away at NHS mental health budgets.

Children

Over 400,000 more children are growing up in poverty than when the Tories came to power in 2010. The Tory government have also introduced the most extreme school spending cuts in decades.

Any country in which rates of child poverty are rising, and education budgets are being slashed is a country that has given up on its own future.

Workers

Despite all of their shtick about "making work pay" and "work is the best route out of poverty" the Tories have overseen the longest sustained collapse in workers' wages since records began, and they've also continually slashed in-work benefits for the working poor.

The Tories have also overseen an explosion in exploitative low-pay, low-security work like Zero Hours contracts and the fake self-employment gig economy.

Then there's the fact that in 2013 they introduced unlawful legislation to price low-income workers out of employment tribunals so that bad bosses could get away with treating their workers like dirt.

With an appalling track record like this anyone who works for a living and votes Tory is undeniably voting against their own economic best interests.

Brits with non-EU spouses

One of the most sickening things Theresa May did at the Home Office was to introduce a highly discriminatory arbitrary minimum income threshold for British citizens to bring non-EU spouses into the country.

These rules strongly discriminate against the low-paid, because women are far less likely to earn the arbitrary minimum income threshold than men, and people in poorer regions of the UK (north east, Northern Ireland, Cornwall) are much less likely to earn enough to meet the threshold than people in wealthy areas like London and the Home Counties.

At the exact same time as she was introducing these rules to split up relationships, or force British people to live in exile, she was also handing out British residency and British passports to super rich Russian oligarchs, corrupt Chinese officials, the families of African dictators, and Middle East oil barons who wanted to buy their way in.

Women

86% of the economic burden of toxic hard-right Tory austerity dogma has been loaded onto the shoulders of women.

That Theresa May persists with this brazenly sexist economic dogma is a clear demonstration that you don't have to be a man to be a misogynist.

The elderly

Given that the elderly are far more likely to vote Tory than working age people, you might have thought that they'd be somewhat protected from the worst Tory malice, but you'd be wrong.

The victims of the Tories' £4.6 billion cuts to the social care budget are predominantly elderly people. The victims of the Tory devastation of the NHS service are predominantly elderly people. And if that wasn't enough, in 2017 they decided to announce a policy of taxing people with dementia (and other serious debilitating diseases) so that they lose their houses, and lose their ability to leave even modest inheritances to their children and grandchildren.

Conclusion

It turns out that it's not just Windrush Brits who have suffered under this vile Tory government, it's almost all of us.

Pretty much the only people who are immune from this Tory malice is the mega-rich. Not only have they been spared the malicious treatment borne by the rest of us, they've also been showered in handouts, tax cuts, tax breaks, and quantitative easing cash to help them literally double their wealth since the global financial sector insolvency crisis hit in 2007-08!

If you're not one of the mega-rich elitists the Tory party exists to serve, yet you still vote for them, you're not just voting against the interests of the majority of British people, you're also voting against your own interests too (unless of course you imagine that you'll never be poor, never be sick or disabled, never be elderly, never have children, never be female, and never actually have to actually work for a living).

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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The depraved coalition deals the Lib-Dems cooked up with the Tories behind closed doors

Polly Mackenzie was never a Lib-Dem MP, but as one of Nick Clegg's core advisers she played a crucial role during the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition period. She's just admitted the kinds of depraved horse trading that went on between the Lib-Dems and the Tories at the time in a Twitter mini-thread.
 

She starts off with an unobjectionable and actually rather astute observation about how the Tories seem to announce a new green measure or plastics ban every time they want to move the news away from their latest scandal, but she followed the Tweet up with some more observations that shine a light on the grotesque horse trading the Lib-Dems did with the Tories.

She claims that the clampdown on plastics was actually a Lib-Dem idea, and that they finally secured the limited introduction of 5p charges on plastic bags in return for their support for a toughening of the draconian Tory benefit sanctions regime.

Here are a few facts about the benefits sanctions regime:

• Benefits sanctions condemn individuals and their families to periods of absolute destitution for up to two years by stopping their social security payments.

• Benefits sanctions have been applied for the most grotesquely inappropriate of "offences" such as having a heart attack during a work capacity assessment, a veteran selling poppies a few hours a week, being five minutes late to an interview, missing an appointment because their child was stillborn, missing an appointment because they had a stroke (see a list of grotesque examples with sources in this article)...

• Benefits sanctions have been shown not to work. It's obvious that removing a person's ability to eat properly, clean their clothes, print documents, travel to interviews reduces rather than increases their ability to find work, but the Tories insisted the opposite. That condemning people to absolute destitution is a way of helping people.

• The Tories repeatedly and vehemently denied that there were benefits sanctions targets and league tables, and that they had created a culture of sanctioning as many people as possible. In 2013 the sanctions targets and league tables were leaked to the press.

• A huge proportion of people caught up in sanctions destitution have been those with mental illnesses and learning disabilities. It's obvious why. If Jobcentre staff were under pressure to sanction a set number of people per week, it's much easier to trick a few mentally ill people into committing sanctionable offences than it is to spend huge amounts of time and effort catching out the tiny minority of hardened benefits scroungers who probably know the rules of the system better than the Jobcentre staff themselves.

• Doctors from Britain's leading mental health organisations have demanded that the government stop their sanctions regime because "it fails to get people back into work and damages their mental health".

• Benefits sanctions have killed. The ex-serviceman David Clapson died after suffering benefits sanctions. He was left with no money to buy food, and no money to pay for electricity. He was found dead from diabetic ketoacidosis with no food in his stomach, a supply of ruined insulin in his powerless fridge, and a pile of CVs by his dead body.

• Probably the most shocking thing of all is that the draconian sanctions system costs more to administer than it ever saves in reduced benefits payments, meaning that the Tories (and Lib-Dems) actually used taxpayers' cash to subsidise their malicious treatment of some of the most vulnerable people in society.

So in return for the limited introduction of 5p plastic bag charges the Lib-Dems green lighted even more savage Tory abuse of some of the most vulnerable people in society.

There's nothing wrong with caring about the environment, in fact it's highly commendable, but if you're willing to kick thousands of extremely vulnerable people under a bus in order to make a minor step forward in combating excess plastic waste, then you've got your priorities disgustingly wrong.

So the next time you hear someone trotting out the tired old Lib-Dem platitude about how they were a "moderating influence" on the Tories, remind them of the way they decided to give Iain Duncan Smith even more power to brutalise the most vulnerable people in society in return for nothing more than 5p plastic bag charges (that would have eventually been introduced anyway due to EU legislation).

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Why do the mainstream press let the Tories get away with systematically abusing disabled people?

Do you remember when the mainstream media whipped up a storm of condemnation of Theresa May and the Tories after a study at Herriot Watt university found that the Tory Work Capacity Assessment regime is "fundamentally discriminatory to people with mental health conditions", that staff carrying out the assessments were unqualified to make mental health judgements, and that the discriminatory WCA process actually intensified the mental health conditions of many of the people who were forced to go through it?

No. Because it didn't happen.

Just like the UK press failed to whip up a storm of condemnation of the Tory government when the courts ruled that their Work Capacity Assessment was discriminatory towards people with mental health conditions in 2013, yet they carried on regardless.

Just like the UK press failed to whip up a storm of condemnation of the Tory government when it was revealed in January 2016 that this discriminatory Tory Work Capacity Assessment regime actually costs far more in corporate outsourcing fees than it will ever save in reduced benefits payments, meaning the whole traumatic farce actually relies of taxpayer subsidies to keep going.

Just like the UK press failed to whip up a storm of condemnation of the Tory government when the United Nations produced a scathing report into the way disabled people's rights are being systematically violated by the Tory government.

Just like UK press failed to whip up a storm of condemnation of the Tory government when they were caught specifically instructing the corporations who administer the Work Capacity Assessment regime to actively discriminate against people with mental health conditions (whilst simultaneously dressing themselves up as champions of mental health!).

Why the media blackout?

The suffering of people with mental health conditions under this discriminatory Tory assessment regime just isn't considered newsworthy by the majority of the mainstream press.

It's not newsworthy for two main reasons.

The first is that, even though there are millions of disabled people in the UK, the suffering of disabled people just doesn't sell enough newspapers or generate enough website clicks. A significant swathe of the mainstream media won't touch stories like the ongoing systematic abuse of disabled people, because they'd make more money by churnalising sensationalist guff.

The other main reason the systematic Tory abuse of disabled people given so little prominence is that it runs counter to the pro-Tory bias of the mainstream press. They're not going to expend time on holding the Tory government to account for their callous mistreatment of disabled people when their billionaire bosses are fanatically pro-Tory. It's a matter of self-interest for most mainstream media hacks. Push the agenda that their sociopathic right-wing billionaire bosses demand, or get pushed out of the door at the next round of redundancies. Stay on message or face the chop.

What we can do

• Spread awareness that the Tory government has been systematically abusing disabled people, and that the Labour Manifesto pledges to put a stop to it.

• Support independent media because independent journalists have the freedom to write what they want to write about, and don't have to worry about getting sacked if they stray from the propaganda lines imposed by the fanatically right-wing billionaires who own the publications they work for.

• Share this article to let more people know about the way the mainstream media consistently under-reports the savage Tory mistreatment of disabled people.

• Speak to disabled people because although articles like this are useful in providing evidence, they're no substitute for hearing a first hand personal account of how devastating Tory policies like the WCA assessment regime, the ESA cuts, the confiscated motability vehicles, the under-funding of social care, the still ongoing mental health budget cuts, and the scrapped Remploy centres have been.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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