Crowdfunder success means every MP will receive copy of book that lays bare decades of DWP violence

Thanks to the success of a crowdfunding initiative, every MP is to receive a copy of a book that investigates how the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) caused countless deaths of disabled benefit claimants over the last 14 years.

Organisers of the crowdfunder had hoped to raise enough money to send a copy of The Department to every Labour MP on their return from their summer break, but it has been so successful that they can now afford to send a copy to all MPs.

If the crowdfunder reaches the final “stretch” target of £7,000, they will also be able to send copies to other influential figures, educating them on “the human cost of benefit cuts”.

And they plan to use some of the funds to organise an event in parliament that will discuss the implications of the book for future social security policy and will focus on fighting the implementation of social security cuts announced by the last Conservative government.

The idea for the crowdfunder came from John McArdle, co-founder of the disabled people’s grassroots group Black Triangle, who is leading the project with fellow disabled activist and author Ellen Clifford.

They are being supported by other members of the delegation of activists from disabled people’s organisations and unions, and allies, who visited Geneva in March to hold the government to account over repeated breaches of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Among those from the Geneva delegation who have been supporting the crowdfunding campaign is Anne-Marie O’Sullivan, who has fought for justice for more than a decade for her father Michael, who took his own life in 2013 after being wrongly found fit for work.

The campaigners have warned that the new Labour government is now planning its own social security reforms, after years of harm caused by successive Conservative-led governments.

They want to educate MPs about DWP’s history ahead of those reforms.

They particularly want to ensure there is parliamentary pressure on the government to design a social security system that respects the lives of disabled people and other benefit claimants and “does not treat us with contempt and hostility and does not kill us and then hide the evidence”.

Among the comments from those who contributed to the crowdfunder, Christopher Shaw said: “Being disabled myself, I totally get what you’re trying to do, and I really hope it will be successful.

“The DWP has virtually terrorised the disabled community for years with threats and scaremongering, and it has to stop!”

Elijah-Aaron Rowan said: “MPs are often ignorant of many disabled people’s issues within the welfare system. It is often cruel and dehumanising.

“I think demanding they read what’s happening is a fantastic idea.”

And Kerensa Gaunt wrote: “This book should be required reading for Labour MPs. If we don’t remember our history, we will repeat it.”

Only this week, Disability News Service (DNS) reports how flaws within the universal credit system were linked to three deaths of disabled people who took their own lives, despite DWP previously telling civil servants that fears about the safety of “vulnerable” claimants were “misplaced” (see separate story).

The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence, by DNS editor John Pring, will be published by Pluto Press on 20 August.

It describes Pring’s 10-year investigations into how the actions of DWP, spurred on by politicians and the outsourcing industry, led to the deaths of hundreds, and probably thousands, of disabled people, and how they covered up their role in those deaths.

It includes new documents obtained from the National Archives that show how the violence inflicted on benefit claimants built slowly from the late 1980s until it exploded in the post-2010 austerity years.

It also tells the stories of some of those who lost their lives because of that bureaucratic violence, following years of dehumanisation and destitution, and the impact on their families and friends.

Dr China Mills, lead on disability justice for Healing Justice Ldn (HJL), and on HJL’s Deaths by Welfare project, has described the book as “a dark whodunnit, where a government department is the killer”.

She says it shows “how policy signed off in Whitehall can end someone’s life miles away in distance and time” and is “an essential history and a call for action and solidarity right now”.

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