Corporate media outlets are no strangers to spinning bile on DWP benefit fraud, but one site has recently ramped this up to disgusting new heights over PIP. In a vitriolic assault on disabled people, BirminghamLive has penned a piece outing a sweep of benefit fraudsters.
Specifically, it centres round people that have purportedly claimed the disability benefit Personal Independence Payment (PIP) on false pretences.
However, the article is both massively misleading, and packed full of ableist dog-whistles masquerading as facts.
DWP benefit fraud bluster from the gutter press
On 17 June, BirminghamLive published an article sensationally titled:
The shameless DWP benefit cheats whose PIP application lies were busted on camera
In it, the news site detailed how a handful of supposed fraudsters:
managed to swindle thousands of pounds from the system with their lies. Some used the money to fund a life of luxury and pay for expensive holidays, while others took it upon themselves to pocket the cash.
But each and everyone was caught out, whether they were captured on CCTV stealing from supermarket giant Asda or seen in holiday snaps.
Presumably, its aim was to illustrate the scale of PIP benefit fraud. Only, it doesn’t really do this. It gives over the rest of the article to describing snapshots of just five separate cases of this fraudulent activity.
Given the scathing tone of the article, you might assume assume PIP benefit fraud is rife. There’s just one problem: it’s precisely the opposite. For the financial year ending 2024, the DWP considered PIP benefit fraud so negligible, it classified it at 0%.
So where exactly has the outlet dredged up these examples from? Funnily enough, just two of these cases of purported PIP benefit fraud were from the last financial year. On top of that, the majority of these aren’t even recent cases at all.
BirminghamLive’s examples came from 2022, 2020, 2018, and one far back as over a decade ago.
The obvious implication is that disabled people can’t or shouldn’t participate in society the way non-disabled people do. According to Birminghamlive, disabled folks shouldn’t lift boxes, shop, exercise, work, or go on holiday.
News flash: disabled people have fulfilling lives of their own, and damn well live them. Naturally, that doesn’t matter to the corporate media hell-bent on punching down on marginalised communities. In a double whammy of this, the BirminghamLive piece managed to be both factually misleading, and full of ableist rhetoric.
It’s not an out of work DWP benefit
Predictably then, the BirminghamLive article forgot to mention that, on PIP, people CAN both work and go on holiday the same as everyone else.
Firstly, though DWP ministers and corporate media cronies like to ignore this fact on the regular, PIP is NOT an out of work benefit. PIP is a disability benefit, ergo, many claiming it actually do work.
It’s simply that Tory policymakers want most people to forget that fact, because it doesn’t fit into their demonising narrative. Specifically, if PIP claimants are in fact, taxpayers themselves, then they’re not exactly stealing from the taxpayer, as the Tories like to cast it.
But in a galling example of how disabled people just can’t win, BirminghamLive laid into PIP claimants for doing precisely that. Because according to the shitrag, disabled people are STILL penny-pinching from the public purse. This time, it’s because they work and get benefits. Nevermind that PIP is there to make life a bit more equitable for disabled folks in a society set up for non-disabled people.
Of course, in theory, the amount of PIP a claimant gets does indeed depend on a person’s level of disability. Although, there are numerous problems with this in reality. For instance, the shoddy assessment itself for one, as well as subjective, unqualified, and sometimes downright cruel assessors who invariably don’t always get this right. In fact, by and large, they don’t, as the huge number of PIP claimants receiving benefits and uprating at appeal, or tribunal consistently demonstrates.
MS: a case in point
However, that aside, the fact also remains that disabled people’s health can and does change over time. These are known as ‘fluctuating’ conditions where a person’s disabling illness can vary in intensity and frequency.
Take Annette Bond, the lady who claimed PIP for multiple sclerosis that the outlet shamed for “going for 5km runs in her neighbourhood”. Now, it might well be the case that she lied about her condition entirely. However, MS is also one such fluctuating condition. The National Multiple Sclerosis Society states that:
The symptoms of multiple sclerosis are variable and unpredictable. No two people have exactly the same symptoms, and symptoms can change or fluctuate over time.
Moreover, there are treatments like disease modifying therapy (DMT) that can reduce the number of relapses a person with MS experiences. In other words, like with other fluctuating conditions, it’s possible to have better days and bad days, and treatments exist to improve this.
Not disabled enough
What the article also fails to acknowledge is that in some conditions too, a person can engage in physical activity, but:
- Be in pain while doing so – in other words, pushing themselves.
- Have a relapse after doing so. For example, this is the case for people living with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), with its hallmark feature – post-exertional malaise (PEM). This entails a disproportionate flare in multiple symptoms involving dysfunctions across many of the body systems.
With the first point, it’s also salient to note that many disabled people don’t have full-time carers, or support. For one, PIP certainly isn’t enough to cover it. But crucially, this means that yes, disabled people with reduced mobility sometimes have to do essential tasks, despite the toll it can take on their condition in the short and long-term. Of course, not everyone disabled can ‘push’. The DWP has designed PIP typically to this narrow experience.
Moreover, PIP is not enough to get by, particularly with the spiralling cost-of-living. And that’s even taking into account out of work/ low-income benefits like Universal Credit as accompanying support. That is, if you can get it, which many can’t owing to their partner’s income and work status.
The government hasn’t increased any of these in line with inflation either. As a result, claimants are actually largely worse off in real-terms than before the pandemic. In short, everyday essentials have gone up in price, but benefits have not kept pace to match.
In other words then, the outlet is playing into the ableist trope on not being “disabled enough” to deserve disability welfare.
Disabled and poor people can’t have nice things
In its vitriolic tirade, the gutter outlet also couldn’t possibly entertain that disabled folks might get to do nice things. It spouted that:
A benefit fraudster who said he was too sick to work was seen riding an elephant in India. Lying Stephen Worton, 55, was caught out by his holiday albums which showed him in Amsterdam, Turkey and riding a camel and an off-road buggy in Egypt while claiming £85,000 of public cash.
So, in ten years of claiming benefits, Worton went on a handful of holidays with his family. However, under government rules on disability benefits, there’s nothing wrong with this. With PIP for instance, claimants can go on holidays, and need only inform the DWP if they plan to go abroad for more than four weeks.
The article noted that Worton was also claiming income support, housing benefit, and council tax help. However, again, why should this preclude someone from getting to participate in some of life’s joys?
Poor people can’t have nice things either, like holidays, apparently. Of course, those benefits exist to subsidise employers paying poverty wages and landlords charging extortionate rents.
Fluctuating conditions
Worton was prosecuted, but not specifically for a little jet-setting. Instead, the DWP found him guilty largely owing to his two businesses and savings, which made him ineligible for out of work benefits. Partly, it was also due to the fact he hadn’t notified the DWP of a change to his health. In other words, it wasn’t necessarily the case he’d lied about his disability, just that he’d failed to update the DWP that it had improved.
Far from exposing systemic abuse of the benefits system then, the BirminghamLive article actually tapped into the glaring issues with PIP itself. Because there again, the piece inadvertently highlighted another shortcoming.
The problem with this is that fluctuating conditions are unpredictable. Specifically, they can literally change from day to day, hour to hour. Setting aside the incredible impracticalities of constantly updating the DWP on these changes, there’s also a risk in doing so. A person’s condition could improve temporarily, but can just as quickly worsen. In these circumstances, the DWP could put claimants through another gruelling reassessment, where they could risk losing their benefits altogether.
Blue or red ties, it’s all the same
The timing of the article is likely no accident either. Sunak and his ministers have been out on the campaign trail dusting off the disabled benefit scrounger rhetoric. As the Canary’s Rachel Charlton-Dailey reported on 10 June, Sunak unveiled his plans to:
slash welfare by £12bn a year and get Brits back to work
Then, on 16 June, the Tories’ Welsh secretary David TC Davies built on this back to work bluster. In a TV debate, he said that the majority of people on sickness benefits were capable of work. Of course, as Charlton-Dailey also pointed out, it’s the government who decides who can and cannot work. And given the DWP’s record on killing claimants it has deemed well enough to do so, they aren’t exactly compassionate or reliable arbitrators on this.
What’s more, it follows a series of recent articles on the DWP uncovering the Bulgarian benefit fraudster ring.
Given all this, a well-timed press release from the DWP could bolster the party’s message in the heat of the election campaign. Of course, there’s no way to be sure, but it wouldn’t be implausible that one from the DWP instigated the BirminghamLive article.
The DWP categorised PIP benefit fraud as essentially a non-issue, yet the corporate media still spews out these vile attacks on disabled people anyway. Scraping together a handful of examples from as long as a decade ago doesn’t prove a systemic problem. Far from it. However, that isn’t the point of these hit pieces.
General election: no safe hands for disabled people
The Tory-led (for now) DWP, with the aid of its dutiful lapdogs in the corporate media, is trying to dupe people into thinking that it is regardless. Or more to the point, pitch disabled people as the enemy of the hard-working taxpayer. This is even despite the fact that disabled claimants actually often work themselves. And it’s doing all this to manufacture consent for stripping back the welfare state.
Maybe the DWP did find the minuscule minority abusing the benefit system. However, this should not justify the mass surveillance and control of disabled people’s lives that the Tories seek to implement. Unfortunately, error-riddled as the article is, it’s just the sort of discourse that sets up for this.
While it’s likely the final desperate gasps of a government on its way out, as the Canary has been reporting, disabled people won’t likely find a safe pair of hands in Labour either. Ultimately, articles like this feed into the blue-Tory, red-Tory campaign to force sick and disabled people into work, no matter the cost to their health.
Feature image via the Canary
