andrewducker

So your definition of *work* is a bill that will result in disabled people like myself losing a third of our income? I've been through the bill and the new PIP descriptors and discovered that I'm going to lose the mobility component and a premium. Please forgive me for being so horrified at people who make statements like your last sentence. In my current state of mind I have you pegged as someone who buys into the Government's rhetoric and the Daily Mail's hate-mongering and just wants all poor and disabled people to fuck off and die. I could be wrong, I frequently am, but that's how I see you and anyone else who thinks people like me should lose 33% of our income at the moment.

Please read the actual words I wrote before making up shit about my beliefs. I've had enough of that today already from idiots on Twitter.

I said "the Universal Credit provisions may be the start of a system that will actually *work*". I said *nothing* about the changes which will (if not modified -- the bill is still being debated) see people lose contributions-based ESA and so on. I have been, and continue to be, an active campaigner against those clauses. If nothing else, my disabled wife is one of those who will lose out.

I was talking, very specifically, about the Universal Credit - the replacement of a complex system with a simpler one, and in particular the idea of it being tapered away rather than removed altogether as one enters work.

I didn't say I agreed with the rest of the bill - in fact, rather the opposite. I said I was 'less angry' - that implies that I am still angry *to some degree*. Which I am. I just don't see the bill as an unalloyed disaster, since having seen the benefits system from all sides (I spent most of my early 20s unemployed, I've worked for the JobCentre, and my wife's attempts to jump through the bureaucratic nightmare that is claiming ESA are the kind of thing I could write a book about) I can see just how broken it is. What I want is for the bill to be amended so the bad parts of the bill can be removed while the good parts - the parts that will actually help fix a broken system - will remain.

Quite how you get from that to me wanting poor and disabled people to fuck off and die, I have less than no idea.

(And no, it hasn't escaped me that this is *precisely* the conversation I said I was trying not to have in the post that Andrew linked above.)

It's really easy actually. Just combine self-loathing with mental illness and several years worth of people telling me I'm worthless and a burden to society and it would be better if I were dead, add in some suicidal ideation and running out of medication and I can believe just about anything bad especially if it's going to impact negatively on me. Piece of cake really.