Over the last year or so, George Osborne (the UK's Chancellor of the Exchequer, or for those who don't know what that is "the dude what handles all the money") has been "re-assessing" PIP - Personal Independence Payment. This is a benefit for those with disabilities, physical or mental, to help them, ranging from a little "extra help" for those who are merely inconvenienced by their disabilities to a borderline living allowance for those who cannot work due to their disabilities. This "re-assessment", supposedly, aimed to see how eligible people were for their PIP, to change those that didn't need it as much, to promote independence.
Naturally, this is a load of utter bollocks.
This "re-assessment" is a thinly-veiled attempt to reduce the number of disability benefits. Simply as that. The people assessing have apparently quite literally being given a daily amount of people to cut disability payments for. The questions are awful - generally encouraging those who don't know how they are supposed to answer the questions to answering in a fashion that makes them seem more able than they are. The assessment is done by a completely different person that the one that actually interviews, presumably to make it easier for them to literally turn off a flow of money which is helping a less able person because it's "less personal", but also makes it a lot less accurate for them to decide exactly how eligible they are because they weren't there. Not to mention the eligibility is literally measured by numbers. No joke. They assign you an arbitrary number for various areas based on your answer, then add it all up and decide if the number is high enough. Not to mention the numbers they give you are barely accurate - I, personally, explained how I would struggle with cooking because I wouldn't know what to do if something went wrong during the process and would panic, and I got a 0 which means "perfectly able". It's the most impersonal, cold thing I've ever seen.
And I'm one of the luckier ones. Sure, this little extra payment (which I was deemed ineligible for) which helped my family with little things was something that did help, but nothing more. But there are some people - many people - who have had this payment cut who
relied
on it. Literally cannot live without it. I mean, there have been nearly 50 suicides over this already. And this fuck in the government, completely detached from any direct repercussions, is perfectly happy to just go "hey, you know what, let's reduce benefits for the disabled!"The final straw? This extra money the government are getting from cutting these benefits, which some vulnerable people literally rely on, you know what it's basically being used for? You know what George Osborne, that earlier mentioned person who organised this whole thing, in his new budget yesterday, has managed to find the money for?
Cutting income tax for people earning over £43,000.
What a cunt.
