Establishment : And How They Get Away With It (9781612194882) by Jones Owen

Author:Jones, Owen [Jones, Owen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61219-488-2
Publisher: Random House Digital Dist
Published: 2015-04-21T04:00:00+00:00

Brian McArdle was a fifty-seven-year-old former security guard in Lanarkshire, left half blind and paralysed down one side by a stroke. He struggled to speak, let alone feed or dress himself – a tragic, classic example of why the existence of Britain’s welfare state is so important, you might think. But Mr McArdle found himself instructed to attend a ‘work capability assessment’ by Atos, a French corporation that was hired to drive down welfare spending by reducing the number of people claiming disability benefits. Days before his appointment, McArdle suffered another stroke, but he still turned up. He was found fit for work and, on 26 September 2012, he was informed that his benefits were to be stopped. The next day, he suffered a heart attack, collapsed in the street, and died.

His thirteen-year-old son, Kieran, claimed that ‘Atos caused my dad stress and unnecessary suffering which brought all this on and didn’t help.’ When the Daily Record newspaper handed a letter on his behalf to Iain Duncan Smith, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the response revealed little empathy. ‘I know nothing I can say will do anything to ease the pain of losing your father, but I’d like to explain why the Government’s reforms to the sickness benefits system are so important and how much work we’re doing to make the process as fair as possible,’ wrote Duncan Smith (or, more likely, one of his advisors), before suggesting that, if the family ‘wish to discuss the outcome of your father’s claim’, they could arrange a meeting at the local Jobcentre Plus. ‘I want an apology for the way my dad was treated and for the thousands of other disabled people being targeted in this disgusting way,’ his grieving son said.20 In November 2012, I appeared on BBC 1’s Question Time with Duncan Smith and raised the failures of Atos, asking him to remember Brian McArdle’s name if nothing else. The Secretary of State exploded in a fit of rage, wagging his finger in my direction as he snarled: ‘We’ve heard a lot from you.’

The Atos system is the inevitable consequence of Establishment dogma. With the state increasingly privatized, it is becoming a mere funding stream for private companies. Serving the needs of human beings is not the core purpose of such companies: instead, it is about making money. Atos was first hired in 2005 by the then Labour government to carry out work-capability assessments. Its contract was renewed by the coalition in November 2010, now with far greater responsibilities as the government launched a sweeping programme of so-called ‘welfare reform’. This five-year contract was worth £500 million, or £100 million of public money every year. In 2012 the National Audit Office condemned the government contract with Atos for failing to offer value for money. Atos had not ‘routinely met all the service standards specified in the contract’, the report declared; its record on meeting targets was ‘poor’; the government had failed to seek ‘adequate financial redress for underperformance’; and the ‘management of the contract lacked sufficient rigour’.

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