Disability Rights Groups Call for New Government Website to be Shut Down Immediately

By John McArdle

Monday 12th July 2010

Disability Rights groups have called for a government website to be shut down with immediate effect.

The website, which was set up by Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne's Department, The Treasury, was set up to allow people to suggest ways to cut government spending.

The campaigners say the site, called “The Spending Challenge,” is full of neo-nazi, racist and supremacist ideas, including the forced sterilisation of benefits claimants, the return of the Victorian 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.

A video on the homepage shows Osborne telling 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.”

Steve Donnison of Benefits and Work, an online welfare rights organisation said “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. Another poster to the site entitled “Discouraging those who do not work from starting a family” which recommends 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 the pregnancy (if early on), or be recommended to give the child up for adoption.”

Another idea submitted to the coalitions Government's site entitled “Benefits claimants to work in sweatshops” urges the government to send the unemployed to Afghanistan as cannon fodder.

Other ideas submitted were “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 claimants; 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 toe-rag who’s never worked a day in his life gets it courtesy of the State.”

“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” he said.

He says “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.”

In a subsequent comment, another poster responds by stating “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. The site is littered with the most ugly and extreme examples of ignorance and prejudice. The comments are so extreme that we are not prepared to reproduce them” said Steve.

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.

They assert that the content may also be in breach of discrimination and harassment legislation.

Steve says “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 members of the professions and the public who will have both the knowledge, and the sense of outrage, to do so and that they will involve the police in the investigation of this site.”

“The site does have a ‘Report to the moderator’ feature, but appears to be otherwise unmoderated” he said.

Steve said that “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.”

A spokesman for the Edinburgh-based “Black Triangle Anti-Defamation Campaign” which

campaigns to defend the rights and reputation of disabled benefit claimants said “This kind of pathological hatred towards the unemployed, the sick, the disabled and other vulnerable minorities in our society is spreading like wildfire through our society and the incidence of serious assaults are increasing by the day.”

“The latest report from the Crown Prosecution Service for England and Wales shows that there is the equivalent of one case of disability hate crime tried per day in the courts of England and Wales. And this shows that that is only the very tip of the iceberg as the vast majority of crimes remain unreported.”

The Black Triangle Campaign is dedicated to the memory of the life of Edinburgh Leith-based poet and author, Paul Reekie, who, after being notified by the Department for Work and Pensions that his Incapacity and Housing Benefits had been cancelled as the result of a new Government “Work Capability Assessment”, tragically took his own life last month.

The medical assessment was administered by ATOS Origin Healthcare Ltd for the DWP.

“At first sight you would think that Paul's tragedy and the comments posted on the Treasury's website were unrelated and separate issues, but that is simply not the case” he said.

He continued “The government, and to a very large extent the mass media too, are irresponsibly whipping up public opinion against benefit claimants and the disabled by continuing to make public statements that portray them as feckless, parasitic scroungers who are nothing but a burden to society, and as people without whom the world would be better off.”

“The Chancellor's emergency budget announcing changes to the benefits regime, allegedly to get millions of sick and disabled people off benefits “and into work” implicitly suggests that a great many of them are malingers, and that their doctors and consultants are either “too soft” on them or are somehow acting as co-conspirators in the execution of alleged benefit fraud”

There is now undeniable evidence that tens of thousands of disabled and/or gravely ill people, some suffering from terminal cancer, are being declared “fit for work” by ATOS. Unfortunately Paul was one such victim of this evil policy and he found he simply couldn't take it any more.

It is in this context that we at the Black Triangle Campaign view the outrageous and evil suggestions now being posted on the Government's “Spending Challenge” website.

“We see it as nothing less than a cynical attempt to garner the support of the general public and lend legitimacy to welfare policies which we hold to be a grave violation of the human rights of the sick and disabled under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities Article 28. and under almost every other code of decency that we can think of”

Article 28 of the Convention provides for an adequate standard of living and social protection for sick and disabled people.

“We do not only condemn the wicked comments posted on the website, we condemn the very existence of the website as a cynical and shabby attempt to justify the unjustifiable. This Government must be forced to rethink its current welfare policies and something must be done to stop the epidemic of abuse and violence levelled at disabled people” he said.

“We are urging people to contact their MP to tell the Chancellor to close down this vile site, and not to open it again until it has been properly cleaned up and until it is properly policed.”

Editors:

Please contact the author John McArdle by email if you have any questions:

jonjamesmcardle@hotmail.com

The Black Triangle Campaign link:

http://www.facebook.com/posted.php?id=117145668332176#!/pages/Black-Triangle-Anti-Defamation-Campaign-In-Defence-of-Disabled-Claimants/117145668332176

HMG “The Spending Challenge” Website:

http://spendingchallenge.hm-treasury.gov.uk/@@search?Subject=state%20benefits

CPS Hate-Crime Report

http://www.cps.gov.uk/publications/equality/

Thank you, your Crime Report has been submitted.

Your online report reference number is CR02-00071198 (Please note this is not a Crime Reference number)

Your report will be forwarded to the police station covering the location of the crime and a crime reference number will be issued to you in due course. You will be contacted by an investigator in the next 72 hours.

http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B-spAvZZrSMeYjk1ZjExNTItMmY4Zi00MWJlLTk4MDctMjk1M2I3MWQ4ZTJh&hl=en_GB&authkey=CM3UnfsP

Regards,

John McArdle