IDS - Ratbag!

Iain Drunken-Smith can use as much spin as he wants on 'managing and slowing down welfare'. It comes down to one stark truth for our class. Cuts!

His leader can grow red in the face spluttering mealy-mouthed as he tries to explain away the bedroom tax as a benefit. However, we, the 99%, know that DLA to PIP, the bedroom tax, universal credits are ideologically driven policies that will go a long way to hastening the demise of the Welfare State - an ideal that has always been anathema to the Tories; and one that complicates and creates barriers to today's vampire capitalism, namely neo-liberalism.

If we look at just one of the benefits that IDS isn't cutting, no merely 'managing and slowing down', DLA/PIP. DLA currently stands at around £12 billion per annum. In reforming DLA the government boasts it will make 20% reductions; thus a saving of £2.4 billion.

What about fraud? Doesn't it run rife in this benefit. Well, if you go by the reporting from the scum press, all DLA claimants are at it. We're either refereeing football matches at weekends or conducting tango dance classes. Some of the more heinous of us are reported for going swimming - god forbid we try to get some sort of exercise or respite in a swimming pool.

Oddly fraud runs at about 0.5%, according to the DWPs own figures. Half-a-per-cent barely registers on the fraud radar. Yet this isn't the full story. Of that 0.5% 'fraud' a proportion will be claimant error and a proportion official error! So in fact the all the horror stories we hear about disabled people running rings around doctors; faking their conditions; and generally living a life of luxury at the tax payers' expense are good old fashioned propaganda.