LETTER: Warning over Reform UK’s disability benefit plans

Another day, another round of benefits bashing from the British Right as Reform UK announces plans to make already difficult-to-claim sickness and disability benefits available only to “severe cases”.

It’s hard to say which is more perverse: their desire to divide the working from the non-working – when of course any working person can lose their job, get sick or become disabled – or the fact that Reform and their friends in the Tory party persist with the idea that there are enough jobs out there for people to do even if they were well enough to do them.

The latest data shows there are 1.77 million healthy, able-bodied unemployed people competing for just 705,000 job vacancies.

They claim the lowest unemployment benefit in Europe and can be subject to benefits sanctions, which have killed scores of people already, including people starving to death.

What does Robert Jenrick expect all the sick and disabled people they plan to “get back to work” to do?

That they think they can get away with this is due to a campaign of relentless lying and demonisation by the Right-wing media over many decades; the failure of the supposedly impartial TV media to present the facts; and the sad reality that many British people lap up all the misinformation and don’t think these policies will ever affect them or their family and friends as evidenced by Michael Albin’s letter about food banks.

With ever-rising food price inflation and threats to the food supply itself, the grave consequences of this nasty politics will be on all those who supported it.

Henry Gordon