Give Over, Matthew Parris. We Know It’s the DWP Screwing Over Disabled People: the Backdating Trick

August 5, 2023 Eleanor Scott

***‘And then the DWP said there was nothing wrong with me, and had I thought about a job with Deliveroo?’*** (Painting: *Les Mendiants* Pieter Brueghel the Elder. See also Disability Arts Online.)

Matthew Parris, one of many MPs who have failed to survive on benefits for even a week, has headlined in The Times today under the banner, ‘We must ask whether generous benefits for conditions such as stress have made opting out of work too attractive’. Oh give over, Matthew. The Department for Work & Pensions’s own figures show they are the ones diddling disabled people of out money allocated to them. What you trivialise as ‘stress’ includes conditions such as brain damage, profound developmental delay, and post-combat complex PTSD.

No, Andrew Neil, the UK doesn't have a 'sickie culture' problem - it has an NHS lack of treatment problem

July 16, 2023 Eleanor Scott

Skeleton mosaic from house floor, Pompeii (Source: Ashmolean Museum Oxford). Trust me, Andrew, I’m trying to *carpe diem* but it’s hard when you’re being stuffed full of an iatrogenic chemical soup

Andrew Neil, writing in the Daily Mail, bemoans the ‘sickie culture’ of this country.

Welcome to Sick Note Britain, a country whose people are succumbing to all manner of medical ailments almost as quickly as they are losing the will to work.

Oh Andrew, you so very nearly ‘get it’ when you mention the NHS waiting lists, before segueing into all the immigration stuff. But you know it’s not that simple. Have you got any idea how fucked up the NHS is for people genuinely seeking treatment for the most common medical problems that keep them off work, even when they do get an appointment?

How about we look at back pain and arthritis? Are you aware that most of the patients developed these problems at work in the first place?

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