All aboard the hating disabled people bus for our next batshit destination! Having just left ‘doctors can’t be trusted to write sicknotes’ lane and careening past the UN report at breakneck speed so as not to allow us time to digest it, we arrive at our next stop – that’s right, it’s ‘give people on PIP vouchers‘!
Yep, the latest in the Tory’s horrific announcements about disability benefits is that they plan to scrap PIP payments and replace them with a system which will involve answering a wizard’s riddle to get any money.
Okay, that’s not strictly true, but the actual plan isn’t any more serious. What Rishi actually wants to do is replace Personal Independence Payment with vouchers. I did warn you.
Vouchers for disabled people?! Come off it!
This is such a horrible idea I can’t even fully articulate how cruel it would be. For starters, it strips away the ‘independence’ part of PIP as it takes away our financial autonomy.
Vouchers would limit where we spend our cash. Would they be accepted in all shops? How much would the vouchers be for? Will they just be things to help support us – like care and mobility aides – or will they also be for food and bills?
Will taxis accept them? What about carers and people we hire to help us like cleaners? Can I pay my prescription charges exemption certificate in vouchers?
Okay now you’re taking the piss
The other option the government is ‘exploring’ is submitting receipts to claim money back.
This is even more absurd because it almost insinuates that the DWP runs effectively enough as it is, never mind when swamped with millions of expenses requests a month.
There’s also one very obvious fact, though apparently its not obvious to the Tories. So I’ll spell it out here.
You can’t buy things to claim the money back if you don’t have any money in the first place
What this plan will do is make disabled people take out loans and enter into buy now, pay later schemes. It’ll push us further into debt – and you can guarantee you won’t get reimbursed plus the interest.
By proposing we send the government receipts to claim money back, they’re treating our everyday essentials and commodities as expenses.
Though I guess to a man who’s worth £700 million they are.
Not the millionaire PMs problem
Sunak never has to worry about whether he can afford to turn the heating on or where his next meal is coming from.
The man will never be in debt in his life. He will never know the humiliation of having to use vouchers and coupons for food and electricity.
Oh, the inaccuracy
So of course the media has been full of regurgitated and unchallenged inaccurate rubbish, mainly that PIP is an out of work benefit. This is not true. Many on PIP work and as a result are the taxpayers you claim we’re stealing from.
Human wet wipe and DWP minister Mel Stride was on BBC Breakfast this morning once again demonising us. During this, he said PIP was a ‘very blunt’ benefit. This is only correct if he’s talking about the rigid assessment criteria and traumatising assessments.
The best part of what the human equivalent to farting and blaming it on the dog said though was this:
You get a fixed amount every month, irrespective in many ways of your condition. In some cases that may be a condition that needs something like a grab rail to get into the bath and various other appliances of that kind.
Which are relatively inexpensive, you might even be able to get them from your local authority or local NHS and yet the PIP thousands of pounds a month.
So lets break this snippet of bullshit down
- PIP is only ‘irrespective of conditions’ in the sense that it doesn’t take into account the nature of many conditions and the assessments focus on if you can feed and dress yourself.
- Grab rails don’t mean anything when we can’t afford specialist food or to have the heating on more.
- Local authorities and the NHS are already stretched, they don’t have the funding.
- PIP is a maximum of £798.63 a month, but many get much less.
As I said in my column previously it’s a huge problem that these lies are being allowed to be continuously spread – and worse regurgitated by the media.
The government and the corporate media have spent months demonising conditions like autism, ADHD, and anxiety and it was all building up to this. Because you can’t just straight out announce you’re cutting disabled people’s support. But you can spend months making them out to be liars and a drain on society so that the public will think they don’t deserve the support.
The thing is I don’t think the aim is to cut PIP, because those fuckers know they’ve got to win an election first.
What vouchers for disabled people is actually about
We don’t know what you will be able to claim vouchers for or expenses on, but I can tell you what you absolutely won’t be able to claim for: anything nice. The little things we treat ourselves to get through this awful reality the government has forced us into.
This “plan” is an attempt to appease the sad little losers who clog up my mentions telling me to get a job and stop ripping off taxpayers anytime I get my nails done. It’s the 72% who think people on benefits shouldn’t be able to have a takeaway once a week.
The people who are constantly wanging on about how we’ll only spend it on booze and iPhones and helicopters (but not helicopters) anyway – whilst MPs piss away thousands of taxpayers money on just that (and nearly helicopters) – with the almost side-by-side announcement that Lord Hamface Cameron has just bagged himself a £42m private jet).
Why don’t we make MPs and former PMs live on vouchers instead?
So what can we do about it?
Well first off, if you can, take part in the consultation on all this bullshit. It’s open til the 22nd July
Then obviously if you’re in England we have local elections on Thursday, this is our chance to send a clear message that we want them to fuck off.
Other than that, keep fighting back, check in on your friends and treat yourself to something you know will piss off the DWP.
Featured image via the Canary
