ATOS Medical Services - A Dickensian Tale

The news that ATOS Medical Services doctors are threatened with being struck off by the General Medical Council should surprise nobody. Disabled people and disability organisations have for some time being warning about this organisation and the draconian powers, not to mention the vast amounts of money, which  it has been handed by this government over the lives of disabled people. It would be interesting to find out if it is a donor to the Conservative party.

It is already carrying out appalling tests on all those people living on Incapacity Benefit and there have been lurid headlines in the tabloids trumpeting the fact that their tests have found a large percentage of those being put throught the process ineligible. Terms such as "workshy" and "scroungers" have been bandied about with callous and wanton abandon. The next group of people to be handed over to the tender mercies of this piratical outfit are those on Disability Living Allowance - they will be handed over to ATOS in 2013, after which we can expect thousands more disabled people to be thrown into penury and more headlines screaming about "benefit cheats" etc.

Truly it is worth reflecting in this the year of the bicentenary of the birth of that great writer and humanist, Charles Dickens, that the same turgid and loathsome views which he used his pen and all his wit to protest against, are still abroad and nowhere more than in the minds of members of the current government such as Ian Duncan Smith. What would the great scribe have thought of those intellectual descendants of Mr Bumble and Uriah Heep? The poor must be made to suffer and the indigent and disabled should go to their beds at night feeling crushed and in a constant state of fear and hysteria about their future. Such is the world being planned for us by these sanctimonious politicians and their Blue Labour counterparts. Was there ever a more obnoxious and festering hypocrite as James Purnell the architect of the Welfare Reform Bill who now masquerades as a social reformer. Many of these characters have truly Victorian attributes and Dickens would have seen through them in a flash.

As Mr Bumble, the Parish Beadle says in Oliver Twist:

""Out-of-door relief, properly managed,-- properly managed, ma’am,-- is the porochial safe-guard. The great principle of out-of-door relief is to give the paupers exactly what they don’t want, and then they get tired of coming."

A quote which would fit snugly with the attitudes of Messrs Duncan Smith and Osborne regarding the poor and disabled in this country.