Department for Work and Pensions investigates 60 claimant suicides, with sanctioning connected to crime and depression
Less than two years ago, 50-year-old David tried to take his own life in a council house in Salford. You can still see the scars when he stretches out his arm to light a roll-up cigarette.
“Everything just builds up after a while. I was walking around thinking where I was going to get money from, what [was] I going to do about the kids, how was I going to survive?” says David, as his two daughters sit quietly next to him on the sofa. “I’ve been through the bins and all sorts, trying to make ends meet. I’m not proud of it, but needs must at times.”
For four months – including Christmas 2012 – David was sanctioned by Jobcentre staff for failing to turn up for an appointment. His jobseeker’s allowance payments were immediately suspended and with it his housing and council tax benefits. His pre-existing rent arrears rocketed. “Christmas was bad,” says David. “It felt like I’d failed the kids. There was nothing I could do.” He says that being sanctioned, and the hardships that followed, led to him trying to take his own life at his dining-room table.
[source : Suicides highlight the grim toll of benefits sanctions in austerity Britain, The Observer, http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jan/03/benefits-sanctions-leading-suicides-dwp-depression, 3rd January 2015]
It's all about 'quality of life'. But our quality of life has been reduced by banks not ourselves. But never mind that. The banks come first, always and forever. Don't they. And if that means making life such a misery for the rest of us that we demand the right to kill ourselves rather than replace their rotten self-serving system with one that serves us then they literally are laughing all the way to the bank.
No matter where you are, from Land's End to John O' Groats, if you listen carefully you can hear them laughing in their strip clubs in London.
Shush for a moment.
Listen.
Can you hear them?
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