Sterilise claimants urges racist treasury website

Sterilise claimants urges racist treasury website
12 July 2010

This is a single issue newsletter asking for your urgent help in getting a government website closed down. The site, set up by the treasury to allow people to suggest ways to cut government spending, is full of hate-filled racist and disablist suggestions, including the sterilisation of benefits claimants, the return of the workhouse and the forced repatriation of asylum seekers and migrants. Some of the site’s content is so extreme it may even constitute a criminal offence.

The Spending Challenge website at

http://spendingchallenge.hm-treasury.gov.uk/

was set up on Friday by the coalition government and features an introduction and video on its home page by chancellor George Osborne.

In his video Osborne tells visitors that “Your government needs you, please get in touch” and the introduction assures visitors that:

“A team has been put together right at the heart of government and their job is to make sure that your ideas and comments are taken seriously - and that the best ideas are taken forward as part of the Spending Review.”

Yet these ideas and comments clearly demonstrate how the demonisation of claimants by successive governments has succeeded in promoting open and widespread hatred. One suggestion is to “Re-open the workhouses” for the unemployed, the elderly and asylum seekers. The poster goes on to suggest that:

“To prevent the problem of generations of poor people, release could be conditional on getting sterilised.”

Another idea entitled “Discouraging those who do not work from starting a family” goes on to say that:

“Where NHS staff have identified that a couple or single mother isn't in a position to support themselves and a child financially, they should be advised to terminate the pregnancy (if very early on), or be recommended to give the child up for adoption.”

Other ideas include:

“Benefits claimants to work in sweatshops” which urges the government to also send the unemployed to Afghanistan as cannon fodder;

“Let The Disabled Community Forge A New Industry” which suggests that disabled claimants should grow and sell cannabis for a living;

“Employ Crocodiles in Benefits Offices” to discourage claims;

the self-explanatory “Stop paying JSA etc to drunks, druggies & wastrels”; and

“Stop handing out free laptops and internet connections to the unemployed” in which the poster goes on to say that “I worked fifteen years before I could afford to buy myself a laptop, some toerag who's never worked a day in his life gets it courtesy of the State.”

Even where the initial post appears to be an attempt at humour or irony, the baying mob of supportive posters demonstrates that many others take the ideas seriously.

Equally disturbing and possibly criminal are the huge number of racist rants being published by the treasury.

In one suggestion “Move immigrants in council houses out of cities”, the original poster wants the coalition government to “Tell immigrants that they are being moved to less expensive areas. If they don't want to, they can leave the country.”

However, in a subsequent comment, another poster responds with “I'm not sure that I want to see immigrants living in our villages - keep them in the ghetto's until such time as they can all be deported.”

Many of the suggestions target specific groups such as Somalis and the site is littered with the most ugly and examples of ignorance and prejudice, many so extreme that we are not prepared to reproduce them,

The Public Order Act 1986 makes it an offence to publish material which is likely to stir up racial hatred. Benefits and Work believes that this is exactly the effect that the treasury website will have. The content may also be in breach of discrimination and harassment legislation. Whilst we do not have the legal knowledge to pursue this matter further, and don’t want to be accused of a publicity stunt, we hope that there are readers of this newsletter who will have both the knowledge and the sense of outrage to do so and that they will involve the police in investigating this site.

The site has a ‘Report to the moderator’ feature, but appears to be otherwise unmoderated. To leave the responsibility for policing a government website to members of the public instead of checking each submission before publishing it is, at best, inexcusably negligent and, at worst, criminally irresponsible. There are, in any case, so many vile sentiments being posted there, that it would be a full-time job to keep reporting them all.

If you are as revolted as we are by the use of taxpayers money to encourage racism and hatred of claimants, please consider doing the following:

Contact your MP today and ask them to tell the chancellor to close down this vile site, clean it up and don’t reopen it until it is properly policed;

Make a complaint to the Equalities and human Rights Commission at

http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/our-job/contact-us/

Good luck,

Steve Donnison

This article can be viewed online at

http://www.benefitsandwork.co.uk/news/latest-news/1233-sterilise-claimants-urges-racist-treasury-website


(c) 2010 Steve Donnison. Benefits and Work Publishing Ltd. Company registration No. 5962666
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America Here We Come!

I read this on the Ipswich Unemployed action this morning about how the government is considering plans to distribute food vouchers to people on the dole. I find this shocking in this day and age. Is this not what they do in America?.

DLA/Brown Envelopes/3 Months On

How do?

Just when I had thought I had escaped from Incapacity Benefit and the medicals I now face a new horror. I receive lower rate care DLA so that means at some point I will have a DLA medical. Can they not just f*****g leave me alone and let me try to get on as best I can?. I did what they wanted and did the right thing and panicked jumped ship from IB and got a job which was a miracle in itself.

I mean its just another way to add more anxiety to the problems people already have. I have been getting low rate DLA for care because of things related to my head injury and also because I am epileptic, it really helps just being reminded to have tablets because I often forget or for someone to be aware that I having a bath and just to check on me.

I would have thought it would cost a small fortune to have everyone on DLA to go through a medical test and no doubt some private healthcare companies the usual suspects are going to make a packet on the way. It looks like it will cost more just to save a measly £75 a month. Judging by what happened with ESA I would imagine there would be a lot of appeals as well so that is going to cost time and money.

I feel like it's not disabled & sick peoples fault that they have to go through these medicals. We are all paying in this thinly disguised attack on DLA in the emergency budget. The government have wanted to cut DLA and here an opportunity has presented itself on a silver platter. It was just convenient about the economy and the bankers came along so the Government could use it as an excuse to add medical tests for DLA claimants in the emergency budget.

Here's my really simple way for DWP to save some money is by not sending me a remittance advice every bloody week telling me I am getting £40 a week Return to Work Credit. How much does that cost every week sending them out to all the people on RTWC?. Why not just send me a letter once a quarter showing all the transactions?. I know I am getting RTWC for a year but I don't need a stupid brown letter every single week reminding me of the fact. I thought I had escaped the brown letters from hell but I get one every week.

I have been working now for the agency for about 3 months and I think the honeymoon period is over and I am facing the reality of being in work. I do like my work but physically I get exhausted and I know its catching up a bit as I have had a couple of 3-4 hour sleeps this week when I have got back from work. The reality of the situation is if I did less work then I don't get paid for it.

I am no longer getting Incapacity benefit, so there's some nice savings there for the DWP and I also pay Tax and NI so I am also contributing. I don't want to sound melodramatic but in my case this is the price of having a disability and going to work but what price am I paying with my health. I think its a case of trying to manage both and manage my spoons

ta ta for now.