The Green Party’s leader Natalie Bennett has dismissed the notion that Iain Duncan Smith has become a “champion of the disabled” after the former Tory leader resigned from the government over an apparent disagreement on spending cuts.
Green Party leader, Natalie Bennett, said:
“Iain Duncan Smith correctly observed in his resignation letter that the government’s fiscal approach is increasingly regarded as an ideological-driven dead end even in the Tory Party, but it is far too late for this former Tory leader to paint himself as a champion of the disabled when he has presided for so long over a welfare regime that has left disabled and ill people in dire poverty and desperate fear.
"Iain Duncan Smith is right to identify the way in which young people have been made to pay for the greed and fraud of the bankers, but he is wrong to blame a whole generation of their elders.
"Britain's state pension is among the lowest in Western Europe, 16% of pensioners live in poverty. The problem lies with the decisions of successive governments to allow rich individuals to accumulate a larger share of the nation's wealth, while multinational companies have become parasites failing to pay their way with taxes or decent wages and benefitting from wholesale privatisation of public assets."
Mags Lewis, the party’s disability spokesperson, said:
"As someone with MS, I know only too well how vindictive these cuts are and continue to be. Having just gone through the stressful, bureaucratic, and cumbersome PIP application process myself, I find it astonishing that the government - having found that changing DLA to PIP did not save the billions they'd assumed - arrogantly plans to change the goal posts and change their own application process.
“Disabled people face the perfect storm of uncertainty, cuts from all directions and government indifference. Many of us are drowning in a sea of fear for the future."
ENDS