This Is What Fascism Looks Like

Our government is demonstrating the early/mid stages of a totalitarian government.

That disability benefit which took me years to get, alongside failing those dehumanising Personal Independent Payment assessments, keeping me in poverty and helpless (and most importantly hopeless) but for the financial help of family members? Well, with the government’s budget announcement today that benefit is being taken away. It is being replaced with a re-labeled one which importantly will now be dependent on getting PIP to begin with. So many aspects of our welfare system are bottlenecked through a need to have PIP in order to be eligible for other stuff.

And this is the tactic they’ve been using for every one of the last 13 years they’ve been in government. Call it ‘reform’, give an existing thing a new name whilst degrading it, and apply some manipulative language to give the impression that they are somehow increasing support. They’re not.

The PIP assessment was so much more cruel, difficult and degrading than the Work Capability Assessment (as bad as that in itself was). The PIP assessment criteria are so much more stringent, whilst the WCA assessment currently has less stringent criteria. Yet now any new claimants will need to go through the PIP ordeal first. The PIP assessment is simply a set of questions which are relevant to only a very small subset of people. It makes no sense at all except to the authoritarian Conservative government we have.

Ultimately the benefit I currently have is only for people deemed to have ‘Limited Capability For Work and Work-related Activity), and is valid for 2 years before re-assessment or until my circumstances change. Therefore I need to get PIP if I want to continue to receive financial help with my health issues whilst eventually looking for work. I can’t afford not to be of ‘Limited Capability For Work and Work-related Activity’.

Of course, the goal of this system is to eventually get people to commit suicide, which it is pretty effective at doing. It has been condemned by the UN multiple times since 2010.

And you’re not alone if you find this whole system so confusing— so many different names and acronyms, it’s impossible for other people to keep track no matter how I try to describe it. The obfuscation serves a purpose.

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