Wednesday 27 August 2014

Is this life in the present?

I haven't written a blog for some time and have stayed away from the subject of social security for my own sanity recently. 
However saying that I have still been reading/listening to what's happening and found its impossible not to know what's going on around me and to this once great countries people.
More and more I am reading of people going hungry due to failures in the social security system ( I refuse to call them benefits as they are clearly not of benefit to anyone) 
Vulnerable people are not receiving sufficient and in some cases any money to enable them to feed themselves or their family.
I read this morning of a woman who was made to feel so ashamed when she asked a council worker for a food bank referral that she never approached them again and now eats so infrequently she has already lost a stone and a half!
This isnt new news to me anymore, it's becoming more and more common- children happy to go back to school as they will get 'fed' there, mothers going without sustenance themselves so their children can eat, people dying through lack of nutrition and on it goes.
Want proof that this is the case?
Think I am scaremongering as we are so often accused of doing by this government?
Read any of the social network sites that have come about these last few years to get the true picture- ATOS miracles is a good place to start. It's not 'telling stories to shock' or seeking to be 'in your face' it relates accounts of real people suffering real hardship and deals in facts not fiction.
Why is this happening?
Why are people going hungry in this day and age?
It seems to me it's a result of and progression of this governments need to deny that sickness and disability exist.
You can't be disabled, you can't possibly be sick, you're malingering, you're not trying hard enough, you're scrounging and so on with all the rhetoric that has been thrown at this group of people for the last few years.
They have tried making the system for support so difficult, damn nigh impossible to get financial assistance but still some of us managed to get 'some help' 
They have tried to turn others against this group of people, headlining in most papers the damage and cost of us and waiting for the hatred to drive us out of the system or even out of existence. But still the good people in society fought on, food banks sprung up and even though they were smeared and discredited they continued helping where they could.
So now it's starvation? Now it's being unable to get to hospitals etc for medical help? Now it's shaming the very people who need help into not going to ask for that help and if they are daring/desperate enough to ask then shaming them some more so they go away, maybe this time for good as death is becoming a real possibility through lack of medical help and starvation. 
Can I be talking about this country? Surely not!
Yes I am and I am disgusted, angry and immeasurably sad at what we have become.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Great post as ever Penny. Although I agree that we (Britain) should help others in need around the world - another £10m has been donated to Iraq today I believe - it is hard to stomach that our own Government is so blinkered in its belief that we don't have people living in poverty here in Britain.