THE present Labour government is planning to make massive cuts to several welfare benefits. Current estimates suggest these cuts range from £3 billion to £10bn.

This government, which claims that all of its actions are guided by improving life for “working people,” wants to get rid of PIP which is a benefit that helps many disabled workers. It is not clear if Labour wants to bring back the barbaric Tory idea of replacing cash payments with vouchers. We should not forget that PIP is a non-means-tested benefit to help disabled people with the extra costs of being disabled.

John Pring, editor of the Disability News Service using a freedom of information request has obtained a copy of a three-year-old Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) report, Triggers to Claiming Personal Independence Payment (PIP). This totally undermines the arguments in favour of making cuts to PIP. Hence why both Tory and now Labour ministers are refusing to let this report be made available to the public.

The report, based on internal DWP research, said: “Most individuals cited financial support as the driving purpose of PIP, with bills and basic survival mentioned prominently.”

People interviewed for the report said how they viewed the extra money provided by PIP as essential to buying aids, and adaptions and paying for treatment or therapy.

Paula Peters of Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) has lambasted Labour for its plans to cut PIP, saying: “The Labour government will harm disabled people with its ideological austerity agenda. Cutting financial support will lead to more poverty and marginalisation of disabled people. How many disabled people will we lose before the end of this Parliament as a result of these cuts?”

The disabled journalist Frances Ryan, who has a regular column in the Guardian, has recently observed that Labour’s plans seek to maintain the massive social and economic inequalities in our society:

“It is about the systems that normalise impoverishing and isolating disabled people while protecting the assets and power of the privileged. It is about the attitudes towards disability and poverty that make those with the least seem the right group to lose the most, and the dehumanisation that says their suffering doesn’t really matter.”

Labour politicians like Stephen Timms and Liz Kendall talk in the abstract about how their plans to “reform” benefits i.e. make huge cuts to them, are all designed to help disabled and sick people while reducing the “burden” on the public purse.

Of course, these affluent politicians, who have never suffered the poverty and indignities involved in living on benefits, have no idea that their cuts will force people in poverty to make decisions about putting the heating on or eating regular meals.

These politicians, who would never dream of making the super-rich pay a penny more towards public services, are completely indifferent to the massive suffering and potential deaths that will be a consequence of their “reforms” to benefits such as PIP.