The day before yesterday, I received a threatening letter from the DWP.
I was in the WRAG (Work Related Activity Group) group, and it informed me of the financial sanctions that I would face if I did not comply with whatever the Jobcentre told me to do – including working for £1.63 an hour on Workfare.
Yesterday I received another brown envelope from the DWP.
It told me, in an oblique way, that I had been placed in the Support Group! Success, my challenge to the original ATOS and DWP assessment had been successful! I would no longer have to go to the Jobcentre, or be faced with workfare! I could plan to recover, go forward.
Today – ONE DAY after being told I was too ill to work! – I got a white envelope.
It was from ATOS Healthcare.
It was notice of a new assessment of my ‘abilities’ to work. The whole process was to start again from scratch. The whole process, which destroys, kills, disables, was to be enacted upon me again.
If you ever believed that the ‘fitness to work’ assessments were about simply removing fraud from the system, you can now think again – and above is the proof.
ATOS assessments have nothing to do with fraud, nothing to do with enabling disabled people to find employment – and everyone to do with torturing the disabled until they either give up claiming their rightful benefits, have a worsening of their illness leading to death, or kill themselves.
The process – started by Labour but rolled out much more comprehensively by the Tories aided by their LibDem quislings – is about stopping the welfare state, removing benefits from those who have insured themselves to receive them if unwell.
They will stop at nothing. They will harass, demonise, and, eventually, obliterate the disabled.
I am beyond consolation – I am in shock. I do not know how to bear this, I do not know how to survive it; it is difficult enough keeping safe with a mental illness, without this constant stream of vitriolic political harassment thrown at you.
Staying alive is difficult.
Despair sets in.
Despair and a tiredness that seeps like rot into the muscles, into the fibre of your being; a weariness that does not allow for recovery from one of the most painful illnesses that can be imagined. Or not imagined, in fact.
I have so much frustration and pressure within me, I want to puke it out, violently assault that which threatens me, commit myself to their physical destruction. Yet, through love of my family, I cannot, for it would hurt them beyond hurt, remove me from them, and the victor would only be the Tories and their ATOS torturers. They would remain, and I would not.
Where is the justice? Where is the justice?
Our country has been taken over by barbarism; a friend remarked that the veneer of civilisation has been rubbed through, and the awful spectre of what this country has become has been made plain for all to see.
Black crows with torturers as evil-minded as Those who took over Germany with twisted swastikas have invaded our land.
And I am left, bereft.
Trapped between the rock of the calumny of disability, like so many of my disabled friends, and the hard place of ATOS and their weapons; weapons paid for by you and me, millions and millions of pounds’ worth of weapons at their legal disposal.
I am helpless. Lost in a sea, lost and rudderless, pushed hither and thither by strong forces, whose aim is not betterment, but annihilation.
Help me.
Please, help me.
Carnage In Fairyland 