In the past couple of weeks, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) boss Mel Stride has lied not once, but twice about disabled people’s benefits – specifically, PIP. Naturally, the DWP boss that the Canary’s Rachel Charlton-Dailey has aptly branded a “human wet wipe” now refuses to apologise. Of course, it’s just another day in the life of ableist Tory scapegoat politics.
DWP boss lying through his teeth
First, in an interview with the BBC on 29 April, Stride claimed that those accessing the disability benefit Personal Independence Payment (PIP) get “thousands of pounds a month”.
However, people were quick to point out across X that the claim was verifiably bullshit. In fact, the highest amount people can actually receive on PIP is a measly £798.63 a month.
On top of this, the DWP gives many claimants much less than this, as a poster on X highlighted:
Apparently Tory MP Mel Stride is on TV conning the public telling them that people with anxiety & depression get “thousands of pounds per month PIP” They dont. The vast majority get just £28.70p per week. He’s saying they get thousands so you go along with the Tories cruel cuts. pic.twitter.com/Ikd0E4pvwB
— Becky (@Becky_Padovani) April 29, 2024
Yet, why would a Tory hell-bent on demonising disabled people concern himself over a small thing like the facts?
What’s more, people on X slammed his hypocrisy when the duplicitous secretary himself claims thousands on MP expenses:
Conservative MP Mel Stride claims PIP benefit is thousands of pounds per month.
No it is an absolute maximum of £720 a month, and most people only get about £250.
Meanwhile he claims £1,250 a WEEK in rent on his expenses
Lying, thieving b****** pic.twitter.com/ksJe7a4X4x
— BladeoftheSun (@BladeoftheS) April 29, 2024
PIP IN WORK or out of work monthly allowance- £314.82
Amount Mel Stride claims each month in rent & ENERGY BILLS-
£1,800Amount Mel Stride even claimed for a new Macbook for f#cksake- £1,657
Care to comment on who the real scroungers are eh Mr Stride? pic.twitter.com/ChLjOCrb8H
— Fletch (@Paul_Kearns01) May 7, 2024
More to the point, PIP is about making the cost of living equitable – or in other words, attempting to somewhat level the playing field for disabled people financially. Disability activist Paula Peters underscored this:
#PIP
Mel stride says pip is thousands of pounds a month in tv interviews today. High rate care & high rate mobility totals £737.20p a month. Disabled people have additional costs due to their disability.— paula peters (@paulapeters2) April 29, 2024
Ultimately, Stride wasn’t worried about the truth. Benefits costing the taxpayer “thousands a month”? His goal is visibly to whip up hatred towards disabled people.
So why stop there?
Well naturally, he didn’t.
Spinning a web of untruths
Stride followed up this bare-faced lie with another. Disability News Service (DNS) picked up that during the same interview, he:
also told the BBC on Tuesday that PIP was “a benefit that has not been reviewed for over a decade”.
This was also untrue. There were two high-profile independent reviews of PIP, with the first published in 2014 and the second reporting in 2017, just seven years ago.
So once again, Stride was caught out spinning his web of untruths. Ostensibly, the only thing with more holes than his BBC interview was the social security safety net he’s been carping on about.
His fallacious comments to the BBC come amid the DWP’s rancid plans to scrap PIP for a voucher scheme.
For more on why that’s an astoundingly terrible and vile idea, you can read the Charlton-Dailey’s scathing take-down here. But in short, it’s the Tory’s latest diabolical proposal to punch down on disabled people.
Pitching to his ableist voter base
Predictably, Stride has made no apologies for his falsehoods. As DNS reported:
When approached about the two comments, DWP only responded to the first one, claiming that Stride “misspoke” and had meant to say “thousands of pounds a year”, which he said during other interviews that morning.
The department refused to explain why he had wrongly claimed there had been no review of PIP for over a decade, and refused to say if Stride would apologise for either statement.
Naturally, these weren’t his first offences. DNS also pointed out that:
It took him just six days after he was appointed in 2022 to claim wrongly that there were 2.5 million people who were “long term sick” and “economically inactive” and who wanted to work.
In fact, the Office for National Statistics figures he was quoting did say there were 2.49 million working-age people who were economically inactive and described themselves as “long term sick” in the latest quarter of that year (June to August 2022), but those figures also showed that only 581,000 (23 per cent) of this group wanted a job.
So essentially, Stride has been a serial liar on television interviews since he took up the role. He could walk back these missteps, but ultimately of course, the damage is done.
At the end of the day, his lies and glaring lack of apology either suggests the latest DWP incarnation of evil shitfuckery doesn’t know his brief.
Or, more likely, he’s deliberately dishing out deceit to drum up support from the Tories’ racist, ableist, classist gammon voter base.
My money – including every paltry penny of my PIP – is on the latter.
Featured image via Sky News – YouTube
