Cash Not Care

Margaret Thatcher was the first elected neoliberal politician in Britain and, since then, toxic neoliberal poison has swept the world.

Neoliberal politics has successfully replaced need with greed and, in Britain, has gradually eroded almost all evidence of any moral or ethical responsibility by government to the chronically sick and disabled public, who are financially dependent upon welfare funding.

Known as the Iron Lady, it was Thatcher who declared in a magazine interview that “there is no such thing as society” and she demonstrated this belief using a dominant leadership style, which saw her forge a deep bond with Ronald Reagan in the US, and eventually obliged her to resign from office in 1990 following a battle within the Conservative Party. But Thatcher has since been immortalised and her dark legacy continues.

The long-planned demolition of the welfare state couldn’t happen overnight and began quietly. In November 2001, a conference was assembled at Woodstock, near Oxford, with the subject malingering and illness deception.

The 39 participants were all linked to UnumProvident Insurance, the US corporate giant acting as advisers to the British government on welfare claims management, represented at the conference by John LoCascio and supported by Mansel Aylward, the chief medical officer for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

Image: Unum Group NYSE: UNM is a Chattanooga, Tennessee-based Fortune 500 insurance company formerly known as UnumProvident. Unum Group was created by the 1999 merger of Unum Corporation and The Provident Companies and comprises three distinct businesses – Unum US, Unum UK, and Colonial Life.

The US corporate influence would be ever-present within the DWP, as Aylward worked to undermine welfare funding for chronically sick and disabled people by suggesting that chronically sick and disabled welfare claimants were “malingering,” not least because he disregarded diagnosis and all medical opinion. Aylward’s biased opinion, influenced by US-corporations, was welcomed by politicians on both sides of the House of Commons because it would eventually reduce the welfare budget.

In 1995, 21 per cent of incapacity benefit claimants had a mental health problem and by 2005 the proportion had risen to 39 per cent, or just under one million people.

This is why future DWP-commissioned welfare reports claimed that one million people should be removed from long-term out-of-work disability benefits and returned to work, suggesting that mental health problems are not considered to be serious enough to warrant welfare support.

To reduce the numbers, eventually a new benefit and a new benefit assessment model would be introduced to limit access to welfare funding, to coerce as many chronically ill and disabled people as possible to find work, to manipulate the British public with propaganda and to spend a great deal of DWP time and energy demonising sick and disabled people when guaranteed to be reported by the Tory national press.

Former City banker David Freud first gained attention in early 2007 with the publication of the report Reducing Dependency, Increasing Opportunity: Options for the Future of Welfare to Work.

Commissioned by John Hutton in December 2006 when he was the work and pensions secretary in the New Labour government, the first draft was produced in only three weeks when limited to using evidence from DWP-published data, which has since been exposed as being unsound.

Fifteen years ago Unum (Provident) Insurance was exposed in Parliament in the 1999 Permanent Health Insurance debate,38where MPs identified the suffering of constituents as Unum (Provident) Insurance refused to pay out on income protection insurance policies. Given this company’s proven record of sustained misconduct and recorded malpractice over many years, one must surely enquire as to why this company were invited to be advisers to the UK government on welfare funding?

Freud’s report claimed that it was possible to reduce the 2.68 million out-of-work disability benefit claimants of incapacity benefit (IB) by one million, who should be returned to work, and also recommended that the private sector should undertake all reassessments of IB claimants.

ABC Additional Comments: This became a reality in October 2008 with the introduction of the work capability assessment (WCA), conducted by an unaccountable corporate giant known as Atos Healthcare, which reassessed IB claimants being migrated to the replacement employment and support allowance (ESA) benefit, and assessed all new ESA claimants. This new assessment system, when using the private sector, permitted state crime by proxy. An appointed unaccountable corporate giant was expected to tolerate any public protest against the fatally flawed WCA, while the DWP could hide behind the corporate screen at a cost to the taxpayer of £500m per annum

Constant toxic rhetoric by the Secretary of State and various DWP Ministers from the Coalition government, supported by the national press quoting their often extreme comments, have successfully convinced the British public that vast numbers of chronically sick and disabled people are ‘shirkers and scroungers’ and disability hate crimes are the highest ever recorded, as identified in a 2014 bulletin by the Home Office team: ‘Hate Crimes, England and Wales, 2013/14’

The constant reference to ‘disabled people’ by DWP Ministers, whilst disregarding those with catastrophic illnesses, adds to the ongoing human suffering of the most vulnerable people in the UK. They are far too ill to consider working but they now live in fear of claiming the income related benefit needed for their very survival, as the Coalition government consider all ESA applicants as potential malingerers, regardless of what can be a devastating diagnosis.

What is not well known is that the evidence in the Freud report, as it came to be known, was exposed in an academic paper by Professor Danny Dorling in 2007 within weeks of the DWP-commissioned report being published.

Image: Professor Danny Dorling

Dorling identified Freud’s incompetence and demonstrated that “he got his numbers wrong” as Freud had misinterpreted his own references, but successive governments disregarded the identified flaws and adopted Freud’s recommendations.

For his report, Freud used information from various DWP-commissioned reports. The 2005 Waddell and Aylward report The Scientific and Conceptual Basis of Incapacity Benefit had also advised that one million people could be removed from long-term sickness benefit, without providing any supportive evidence for such a claim.

The Waddell and Aylward report opened the door to future preventable harm by disregarding the medical opinion of claimants’ GPs and consultants and recommending a “functional assessment,” using the bio-psychosocial model, for the reassessment of all 2.68 million IB claimants and for all new claimants of the replacement ESA benefit.

Despite having no political experience and admitting in a press interview that he knew “nothing about welfare,” Freud was ennobled by David Cameron, which meant that as a member of the House of Lords he could be invited to work on behalf of the Conservative Party.

Never elected, Freud was first appointed as the DWP shadow minister for welfare reform for the Conservative Party in 2009. In 2010 he was appointed as the DWP parliamentary under secretary of state for the coalition government and was reappointed in May 2015 as the DWP minister of state for welfare reeform in the new Conservative government.

During his time in office, Freud recommended many changes to welfare funding with the priority of reducing welfare costs. With one notable exception, when Freud recommended that disabled people should work for (a mere) £2 per hour, the coalition and Conservative governments accepted Freud’s recommendations verbatim.

Chronically sick and disabled people very quickly learned to live in fear, with the constant psychological tyranny of relentless DWP reassessments which could remove essential funding without warning.

DWP coercion and brutality became the norm. The regular use of sanctions, with the claimant’s only income stopped for several weeks, meant that chronically ill people would starve to death in 21st century Britain as a penalty for being five minutes late for a jobcentre appointment.

The budget is the only political priority, not the people in need of access to welfare funding.

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“Cash Not Care will make you feel angry, sad and inspired in equal measures. This is a book that needs to be widely read and talked about.”

Dr Kayleigh Garthwaite ~ Postdoctoral Research Associate

Centre for Health and Inequalities Research, the University of Durham

“Government is entitled to ensure that benefits are given to those with a genuine entitlement and to assess people. But the process must be professional and honest. In this book Mo Stewart peels back the layers of deception, and the confused thinking that underpins the destruction of social support for disabled people… Some of those assessed as fit for work died just afterwards. Others died later and some committed suicide. Stewart names names. She shows where and how the policies originated. She destroys all claims that they were based on solid research. To understand what is happening and why, this is the book to read and I thank Mo Stewart for writing it.”

Sir Bert Massie CBE, DL ~ Chair, Disability Rights Commission 2000 – 2007

“When the history of the persecution of disabled people in the name of welfare reform in Britain finally gets written for mainstream audiences, Mo Stewart’s evidence will form the starting point. Read it here first.”

Catherine Hale ~ Independent Researcher

Author of: ‘Fulfilling Potential? ESA and the Fate of the Work-Related Activity Group’

“Mo Stewart’s ground-breaking and tenacious research has led the way in exposing the destructive force of the corporate state on the concept of welfare. It has exposed the duplicity, harm and abuse these actions have caused to disabled people with the courage of truth. Its value cannot be overestimated and its worth must not be ignored.”

Debbie Jolly ~ Co-founder, Disabled People Against Cuts

The Author

Mo Stewart is a former healthcare professional, a disabled female veteran and an independent researcher. This book is the culmination of six years of self-funded research and the evidence exposes the influence of corporate America, since 1992, with the future welfare reforms of the UK. The impact of the enforced austerity measures of the UK government is identified, as they negatively affect the welfare and the survival of the chronically sick and disabled population in receipt of welfare benefits when unfit to work. The research has informed welfare reform debates in the House of Lords and the House of Commons since 2011 and contributed to the evidence used by the United Nations to investigate the UK government for breaches of the Human Rights of sick and disabled people. Endorsed by the disabled community and by academics, the research has identified the adoption of lethal social policies, copied from American social security policies, and linked to the death of thousands of the most vulnerable of all, as the UK welfare state is systematically demolished as all planned over thirty years ago by a previous Conservative government.