WHEN you have a dog that attacks people for no reason other than it’s an evil beast, you put it down. When you have a politician that attacks disabled people and the poor for no reason, you make them Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.

Iain Duncan Smith (IDS) decides to close the Independent Living Fund (ILF). This fund helped disabled people pay for visits from professionals to carry out some of the more personal elements of their care. It also gave them the ability to employ staff who lived with them to support them. It helps disabled people to stay out of institutions and live relatively independent lives.

In its final weeks the £320 million ILF paid out an average of £300 a week to approximately 18,000 disabled people, but that’s too much to pay out. Much better to waste billions on some vanity project like a train line or new runway in London.

Arranging for councils to take over the payments without ringfencing it? Well, carers have seen similar things done with the “breaks for carers” scheme. That wasn’t ringfenced and there was a huge underspend which mysteriously vanished into someone’s pockets. As a carer I know that getting any assistance from councils can be a long process. Accessing one particular resource took me almost four years of constant fighting!

Then we get IDS deciding to scrap the Child Poverty Act, the mentality behind this being that the numbers of children that are in poverty make the Conservatives look bad and there’s no chance of getting rid of child poverty so the best solution is to hide it.

Stephen Timms summed it up: “David Cameron’s government is trying to make child poverty go away by pretending that if you don’t measure it, it doesn’t exist.” IDS’s reply was … well who cares what IDS’s reply was because it will have been lies and smears and misinformation.

Still, he can’t cause more misery can he? Yup, he sure can! It seems the BBC Today programme has a scoop that ministers are reviving a secret coalition plan to cut sickness benefits. It has a leaked Whitehall paper describing the Employment and Support Allowance as a “passive” benefit which does not “incentivise” people to find a job, and proposes abolishing the work-related activity group (WRAG) category. If scrapped, weekly payments would drop nearly £30, bringing it in line with Jobseeker’s Allowance.

Yet again the Tories have managed to cure people with disabilities by cutting vital financial help. What a fantastic political party they are.

So the Conservative Party have got rid of child poverty and cured disabled people by cutting two vital benefits, round of applause for such splendid work. Now all we need is the report on how many people have died after being classed as fit for work, and we all know it will be a truthful piece of fiction, I mean accuracy that hides nothing, honest.

At least we have an effective opposition, don’t we? When you need an opposing party speaking out against the cuts disabled people and less well-off people are being hit by constantly, where is Labour? We have Liz Kendall trying her hardest to be accepted by the Sun and Cameron, Rachel Reeves wanting to be harder on benefits than the Tories and the Blairites pulling strings wherever they can.

When is Labour going to expose the actions of the Tory government? They can easily counter the Tories’ “Labour are the party of benefits” if they want to or have the inclination. It’s just that Labour seems content to sit on its hands and watch us suffer.

The film Brassed Off tried to show how the last Tory majority government treated our miners. The Mr Chuckles rant seems as relevant now as it was then: “So God was creating man. And his little assistant came up to him and he said: ‘Hey, we’ve got all these bodies left, but we’re right out of brains, we’re right out of hearts and we’re right out of vocal chords.’ And God said: ‘Fuck it! Sew ’em up anyway. Smack smiles on the faces and make them talk out of their backsides.’ And lo, God created the Tory Party.”