[Kizzy]

lly shouldn’t be writing a column this week. I’ve come down with a one-two punch of stomach flu and food poisoning and have spent the past 48 hours trying to keep my insides on the inside while the room spins suspiciously around me.

I’m obviously in no state to work. But the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) would disagree. Between December 2011 and February 2014, 2,380 people died of a chronic or terminal illness shortly after being found “fit for work”. I doubt that it would make an exception for me and my norovirus. This is Tory Britain. You work until you collapse and then you work some more and you’d better be grateful. I’m just trying to move with the times.

The Conservatives speak of delivering a smaller state but they are more than happy to use the mechanisms of state to grind all the fight out of the poor. This is the state weaponised against the vulnerable, to make them believe that they are less than human. This is the welfare state twisted into a tool to separate human beings from their social conscience. Simply getting rid of the welfare state would have been easier and cheaper, but this way the Tories can persuade the most vulnerable in society to accept their fate and the rest of us to believe that they deserve it. That is why the benefits system is a moral hazard to us all, whether or not we are sick. The UN is right to investigate and the government and the public should listen before it’s too late.

Fantastic article
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics...e-harms-us-all