Ok, I wrote this a couple of weeks ago while thinking about the roundtable meeting with John McDonnell and saved it away, I think it needs putting out there now, because clearly even people supposedly aware of what is going on seem to not understand what it is like to be a target of government hostility. This is what a future new government needs to do to make things right and respect disabled people’s rights and lives and to move forward.
1. People have a form of trauma from their dealing with the DWP and contractors over the last decade, we are survivors of state sponsored abuse, that needs recognising and help given.
2. To that end there needs to be a formal state led process of truth and reconciliation and part of that will entail key senior command people face trial, thousands of lives have been taken here and that trauma cannot be dealt with without redress, forgiveness can only happen after an oppressor accepts what they have done and that it was wrong. There is no place for sanctions in a social security safety net. It should also be noted that professional bodies (General Medical Council, Nursing & Midwifery Council & Health and Care Professions Council) have sought to protect their members from complaints and remedying their institutional bias needs to be part of this process. The Coroner System also needs to be changed so the threshold of determining suicide and causes is no longer to a criminal standard and that coroners warnings to government about lethal effects of policy have statutory force and cannot be hidden or dismissed. As for Corporate Charities or Disability Rights UK, when push came to shove, they mostly failed us. If they want to share in this way forward they have to re-orient how they represent the people they supposedly are constituted to help.
3. Long term the DWP is so institutionally dysfunctional it has no future in a civilised society, we need a new Ministry combining Social Security and Social Care closely allied to Health (if not also Health) DHSS, imagine such a thing! And firmly rooted in human rights and the social model. So not Universal Credit.
4. More directly about the future, there needs to be a transition plan so that the Friday morning when Labour walk into Downing Street, civil servants and government lawyers are tasked with ending the contracts with Atos, Capita & Maximus. On this we are happy to provide testimony to show all three are catastrophically in breach of their contacts and deserve no exit clause payments, in fact they deserve prosecutions. The assessments need to be paused, interim payments continued and an emergency process in place to deal with ongoing claims and new claims while new legislation is debated and passed, ideally seeing NHS professionals and the claimants own support network co-produce an assessed support plan that is the gateway to benefits. The era of the fear of the brown envelope must end immediately.
Recovery in the Bin 