many recipients are fraudulent. There is no evidence to support this, other than a few, extreme anecdotal cases.

Maybe. But what is your account of your own disabilities - for which you deserve, of course, great sympathy - but another anecdotal case?

You can't argue that cases which support your point of view should be published in the Guardian, but cases which support points of view you dislike should be ignored.

@ thfc 123,
The people living in cloud cuckoo land are those who are happy to peddle the nasty party line that immigrants, dole-scroungers and benefit cheats are the cause of all our economic problems.
These are the traditional targets of the tories NO MATTER WHAT THE STATE OF THE ECONOMY! You need to get that clear

Inherently, the tories believe that people with money should not be forced via taxes into supporting the less fortunate - charities exist for those who wish to help, but compulsion is wrong. Knowing as they do thatt his would be electorally unacceptable as a manifesto pledge, we get the same misrepresentations (incentives to work, empowering the disabled, invigorating retirement) used to describe the politics of selfishness every time.

What is different this time is only the hiding place. The image of Cameron regretting the pain he has no wish to impose, only the economy is forcing his hand, is one which should have us crying for his removal, not posting spiteful little comments

@thfc123

Have you actually read the article? There is little evidence to suggest that the majority of disabled people are claiming benefits fraudulently.

A society should judge itself on it's ability to help those most in need.

George Osborne in 'Crap On The Vulnerable' SHOCK.

Incapacity benefit is the most depressing area of our welfare system with many of the 2.5 million claimants left there to rot in a vain effort to improve unemployment figures. Any attempt to rationalize this travesty will be drenched with piteous shrieks of horror from the Labour Party even though Peter Hain tried and failed to do the same. The Coalition proposes radical reforms whereby existing claimants who genuinely cannot work are protected but those who can work are 'encouraged' so to do. George Osborne might as well start with this most sensitive issue because bellows of synthetic outrage from the usual suspects will always be forthcoming. Of course, had Gordon Brown tackled this issue during the boom years, jobs would have been available whereas a shake-out in the current climate will be painful.

...you might be mistaken for thinking that it was we disabled people and the long-term sick who caused the recession and created the enormous budget deficit.

Classic Tory ploy - go after the weakest in society, those they expect can't or won't fight back, & make them pay for the mistakes of the rich & powerful.

thfc123

The very small number of people who pretend to be disabled are cheats & fraudsters, just like those who avoid/evade paying their taxes. Guess which group of people costs the country more every year...

No genuinely incapacitated (not disabled as not all incapacity is due to being disabled) person is claiming fraudulently. But those who are not genuine - the malingerers and hypochondriacs are claiming on a possibly fraudulent basis. That is why fitness certificates have been introduced.

liamsharrrat

There is little evidence to suggest that the majority of disabled people are claiming benefits fraudulently.

But who has said they are? Straw man, surely

And what would you accept as evidence that some are?

liamsharratt

Do you actually believe there are 2.5million people in the UK so ill,so disabled, so afflicted that they cannot do any work? Really If you do then I have a nice bridge that I'd like to sell you.

justabloke

I cannot be bothered to respond to your juvenile tribalistic partisan rubbish.

xenium

Whataboutery and therefore irrelevant.

Good article, Emmanuel and I totally agree, but fear you'll get some sniping down here.

George Osborne is talking tough on incapacity benefits and suggesting that many recipients are fraudulent. There is no evidence to support this, other than a few, extreme anecdotal cases.

But it plays well to the Daily Wail crew - if they're a few hundred quid worse off a year, then the 'scroungers' will have to be a few hundred quid worse off as well.

I fear for the weak and vulnerable in our society if this coalition survives.

thfc123 -

"You must live in cloud cuckoo land if you believe every single claimant is genuine"

There are bound to be a few who are scamming the system, but remember that every claimant had to submit to medical examination before they receive a penny in benefits so I should imagine the numbers getting benefits they are not entitled too are small. It's difficult to know because the government doesn't give any figures.

This attack on some of the weakest and most vulnerable people in our society is typical Tory. It is a product of the Tory doctrine of survival of the fittest.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are about to get a kicking.

Just watch.

Have you actually read the article? There is little evidence to suggest that the majority of disabled people are claiming benefits fraudulently.

With the numbers of people claiming disability benefits, we've either got a large number of fraudelent claimants, or a public health crisis on a massive scale.

EvaWilt

Typical emotional rubbish.

Do you know what will happen to the GENUINE weak and vulnerable in our society if the nation has to default? Or has a period of mass inflation to get rid of the debt?

I cannot understand how you cannot see that there are hundreds of thousands of people who could and should work sitting on benefits taking money from hard pressed taxpayers as well as those in genuine need.

Politicians and Lords are also scroungers and thieves as are bankers, big businessmen who put their money in offshore accounts where they do not have to pay BRITISH TAX! I do not see anyone putting their neck on the block or saying they are scroungers or using other contemptuous words for these odious people.

A couple of years ago they totted up just how much money is lost to the economy by the very rich evading tax payments against the money retrieved from those who were claiming sickness benefits et al. Sickness benefit was a mere percentage of the amount from that of tax evaders. Was anything done? No! Is anything being done now? No.

It might be educational for some to note that many of the so-called "scroungers" were not the very poor and very needy but people working in very good jobs. One was a Mayoress! Not exactly the type of person the Tories would have us believe.

Going for those who are very sick and poor just shows how low this government will go to make those who the most vulnerable scape goats. So simple and people fall for it every time.

Get after the Politicians, Lords, businessmen and the very rich who think they are fireproof. Get rid of quangos which cost this country in excess of £100 billion every year - unelected and unaccountable entities that control your life!!!!

Some disabled people are scroungers. As are some able bodied people.

I cannot understand how you cannot see that there are hundreds of thousands of people who could and should work sitting on benefits taking money from hard pressed taxpayers as well as those in genuine need

Any proof, or is this just Littlejohnese?

Last year the DWP caught 56,493 benefit thieves. These are not extreme anecdotal cases.

Unfortunately that means genuine cases are going to be subject to more stringent checks.

With the greatest respect, this feels like the upteenth version of the same article, namely 'X is being cut, I get X, I'm not happy'. As pointed out by @pietroilpittore these are as anecdotal as the stories of 'Bob down the road he gets £1000 a week for his bad back and still plays footie on a Sunday.'

What interests me is the increase in people receiving these benefits - I am completely open-minded on this, and would genuinely like to know whether the increases are due to an increase in health problems, a desire to move people off the unemployment figures, changes to the assessment rules etc.

Surely if we do have a lot more people classed as disabled, it's a health issue and one that needs to be explored in some detail.

Sorry for stating the bleeding obvious, but it was the last government that started this attack - the new lot are just continuing the kicking.

EvaWilt

I fear for the weak and vulnerable in our society if this coalition survives.

And I fear the the whole of our society if it doesn't.

@thfc 123

justabloke

I cannot be bothered to respond to your juvenile tribalistic partisan rubbish

Nice chap for a troll, our thfc

Justabloke

Thank you for so quickly providing a justification for not bothering to enter debate with you.

The weak and powerless are easy targets for Cameron and his LibDem patsies.

"You see what power is: holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them." Amy Tan.

Much easier for them to hurt the disabled.

God forbid we should close tax loopholes. Conservative party funding would disappear overnight.

Bevan once described the tory party as 'lower than vermin'. Sadly this is still the case

As a disabled person I would love to work. I don't want to live my life on benefits. However if anyone can find me an employer who is willing to take on someone who has needed an average of 5 months off sick every year then I would love to hear about it.

Many people who rely on disability benefits probably are able to do some form of work, however due ti discrimination and prejudice many employers are unwilling to take them on.

There are many extra costs to being disabled and as such subsisting on JSA without any top-up would be just about impossible for many people and this is why things such as DLA are a great help.

If this government wants to reduce the number of disabled people out of work then they need to try and ensure that employers discriminate less and that there are schemes in place to allow flexible work for those of us who have fluctuating conditions.

thfc123 -

Just one bank took more money from the 'hard pressed tax payers' than all of the 'scroungers' put together.

And they are still taking it.

you might be mistaken for thinking that it was we disabled people and the long-term sick who caused the recession and created the enormous budget deficit

No-one thinks this and you know it. Like nearly all issues of chronic mismanagement, the people who cause the mess and the people who suffer its consequences are not the same.

This coalition government wants to ..... move me from incapacity benefit to employment support allowance, with no transitional relief.

No they don't. They want to give you a medical test to see if you a really incapable of work. If it's done fairly - and that's where the focus should be - what's wrong with that? You are receiving taxpayers' money on the basis of incapacity to work, why should that issue not be checked periodically?

You don't say exactly what caused the civil service to retire you but the fact that you are unable to work as a civil servant does not mean that you are unable to work at all.

I think we need a shake-up on not just incapacity benefits/DLA as well as education.

Some are physically incapacitated - which a medical test can sort out whether they are claiming fraudulently but then again nearly everyone who is incapacitated in one way can find work that suits their work.
Roger Federer - World Number 1 in tennis was not allowed to do his National Service in Switzerland due to a bad back - yet he is doing a very physical game and his back hasn't been a disadvantage.

Then there are those that are mentally not capable to do a lot of work. There are people with autism who cannot speak - most jobs would be difficult for them. People with autism/aspergers tend to find it more difficult to learn to read and if they aren't diagnosed or can pass for normal then in the education system can be left behind. So we need better understanding, better education. Yet people with aspergers/autism usually think in a completely different way so they can work - it just has to be different kind of work than "normal people" do!

CharliesGhost

The shares that the government owns in banks will be sold at a profit.

So what exactly was your point.

Here we have people more able to extract money than the general population getting away with it because of their special needs, while the rest of us see them not doing a stroke of work at anything for the greater good for a living, and it costs society billions more than all the other groups of people put together. These people are called bankers.

Perhaps the banking industry directors should give their bonuses directly into the disabled living allowance, which has cost the country a lot less.

It was cowardly the way the last government was held to ransom by big business and had its arse kicked. It's downright vile people that vent their frustrations picking on the disabled as a scapegoat. Cowards and scumbags, how do you even sleep?

It is only in very difficult economic times that the search for scapegoats for all social ills is anything other than a very extreme and marginal ideological position. However, when the economic system is in crisis, the rhetoric of blame and censure reaches a crescendo, and the easiest targets are always the ones below you in the pecking order, hence the attacks on the poor, the unemployed the young, the disabled, immigrants, the ill etc which we are witnessing now.

It is quite easy for politicians to manipulate this mass insecurity and anxiety. It is starting to feel as if anyone standing on the other side of a dividing line between us and them is fair game for abuse and criticism - and that this message is coming from the very top. The scramble by otherwise quite decent people to join the "desirables" by ghettoising and demonising the "undesirables" is the start of a process that leads to very nasty outcomes.

Emmanuel, yours is a clear case of someone with disabilities who should be supported. The problem is that governments - starting with Thatcher's government - have used disability benefit as a convenient dump to massage unemployment figures, such that many thousands of people capable of working were written out of the figures and remain on benefit. These are not just tabloid inventions. I have met such people. One of them told me she had "worked all her life", so didn't feel guilty for living on the state now. "All her life" in this case meant she had worked to the age of 41 and was now in her late 50s approaching the end of a second fit and active decade on IB. These are the cases that surely can and should be looked at again.

@thfc123

That's nice for the government and the banks, not so nice for the people you lost their jobs and homes. They're still all a load of low-lifes.

Forget Tory propaganda about bankruptcy and benefit scroungers. We all know who the real scroungers and, just in case you needed reminding, the UK is still one of the wealthiest nations on earth.

What we are about to experience is a continuation of Lady Thatcher's economic Pinochetism. While a small elite of British society will grow ever wealthier, the rest of us are about to be discarded and turned into surplus people as has happened in the 'developing' world. That's right, 3rd world immiseration awaits under the guise of good house keeping!

But it doesn't have to be like that.
'Tough but fair' deficit reduction could be achieved by tackling the more than £100 billion of taxes lost each year because of abuse of loopholes in the tax system, tax bills remaining unpaid and from illegal non-payment of tax. Tough on the rich and fair for the rest of us.

It wasn’t government spending that caused this crisis: it was finance that caused this crisis. And there is no electoral mandate for any party to impose cuts of the scale and type now proposed.

Make those that caused the deficit pay for it. As the Financial Times’ Martin Wolf has pointed out, cuts ‘will be viewed as punishment of the innocent for the sins not just of the guilty, but of the rescued and now bonus receiving guilty’. Tax can do the exact opposite: those who created the crisis can and undoubtedly should be made to pay for it. That is of-course unless you want to live in a society modeled on the 3rd world.

God forbid we should close tax loopholes. Conservative party funding would disappear overnight.

bobbyb71

So would be billions of pounds of tax revenue. Since Labours tax rises, many companies have already moved their tax affairs abroad costing the UK Treasury serious revenues.

Closing loopholes and raising taxes does not always equal increased goverment revenues. Why are the left so ideologically blinkered no to recognise this FACT.

vraak

That's nice for the government and the banks, not so nice for the people you lost their jobs and homes. They're still all a load of low-lifes.

So people are to absolved of all responsibilities for their lives? Perhaps if people could not afford a mortgage they should not have taken one out? Owning anything is not an automatic right.

tfhc123

recent figures for all benefit fraudTax evasion costs Treasury 15 times more than benefit fraud - again, all benefit fraud

So, what about it? Irrelevant?

Utterly true, and of most of those on the benefit. Also of the *ankers, who laugh as they draw their bonuses whilst hanging onto the govt loans - then threaten to 'lend less' if made to toe the line. Grrr!!! [The real word would be unprintable!]

tfhc123

recent figures for all benefit fraud

Tax evasion costs Treasury 15 times more than benefit fraud - again, all benefit fraud

Try again...;-)

mediocrity511 - i agree, we need to have flexible hours and a better society of not just employers but in general. i'm guessing in the next 10-15years - half the population will be able to claim DLA because medically they will have some sort of mental disorder on some scale and therefore will need support in some way or another. if we build that support into society from education upwards and we have the general public learning about the differences then we'll probably not need DLA as much.
Growing up i met people with dyslexia and dyspraxia, yes its right they should have support in the ways they need but i'm pretty sure we can set up society and education so they don't need paying by the state.

Hurrah! Take heart, amidst the change, turmoil and chaos of contemporary society there remains one unshakeable, shinging rock of stability - theTory Party remains, indubitably, the :Nasty Party" .

Seen it all before. What's news in the UK today, was news in Australia 4 years ago.

Many policy ideas used by one govt have a second life in the other country.

We used to think, it was politicians adopting international best practise . But actually, I think the governments franchise their policies out, . Like TV companies franchise their shows. The countries where they are new, think they're wonderful .... and the originators, get rich.

The last Australian government too, saw no need to pay a disability benefit. It understood physical disability, as a somatic manifestation, of work-shyness.

Its motives - the same as your government's motives. It needed to save cash, to fund the war effort in Iraq. It wanted to falsify official unemployment statistics. And it couldnt resist fingering another Enemy of the People. for us to hate.... ..

All that, offended me, here, then. I hope you feel offended at your government, there, now.

Sinisterfootwear is completely right.

Anyone living in cloud ostrich land thinking that the nastiness that is going on is in any way productive (or necessary, since apparently the nice banks will hand all of the money back sometime anyway) , what a load of cods.

This very well found quote bears repetition and deserves to be in bold.

" the Financial Times’ Martin Wolf has pointed out, cuts ‘will be viewed as punishment of the innocent for the sins not just of the guilty, but of the rescued and now bonus receiving guilty’."

For me the jury is out on the true figure for disabled scroungers.

One thing that is not in much doubt is with the onset of obesity across the nation being fat and its associated conditions is a disablement that you would have barely heard of 30 years ago.

Emmanuel - as per usual the right wing trolls get a sniff of the benefit scrounger issue and are all over an article like flies on kak trumpeting away their predictable loathesome garbage.
You are right mate. Sane people everywhere know you are right.

This motley crew in Westminster at the moment are pandering to every tabloid squeal with completley impractical, repugnant policies.
This coalition isn't going to last FFS. It is a bloody joke. LibDem MPs are already planning to rebel - as are some Tories.
Where are the jobs that are going to be filled by all these "shirkers"?
Stop kicking down the poorest in society - focus on the scumbag bankers and tax dodgers and start creating some bloody jobs.

Disabled people are not scroungers but some scroungers are claiming disability benefits.

It was commonly believed (I don't know if it was true) that Labour was encouraging able-bodied, long-term unemployed people to be shifted onto disability benefits to make their employment figures look more flattering. This is the trend that the present government must try to reverse, surely.

xenium

Closing all loopholes and enforcing all tax law would cost a lot of money in order to recover an unknown sum. Already since Labour rose taxes a few years ago a number of multinationals moved their tax affairs abroad, to Ireland, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, etc etc. This has cost the UK Treasury a great deal of money. Putting up taxes does not always mean higher government revenues, if it did every singe government would just raise taxes. Do you actually think governments don't like to have the most amount of money possbile to spend?

Why would any multinational want to come to the UK, invest billions, create jobs and prosperity when they can do the exact same thing in any number of other nations and keep more of their own money?

Justabloke

Thank you for so quickly providing a justification for not bothering to enter debate with you.

Denied the opportunity to debate with thfc - I'll not get over it.

stfcbob - true, we also need to tackle that and that i think can be done due to education, sport(and not let people wangle out of it)