Our country’s welfare system is just one example of how brilliantly our Government has administered private companies into separating the neediest in society from their hoards of cash. The needy have everything! It’s about time we have a government effectively end those scroungers’ reliance on the nanny state. Their method for the improvements is so flawlessly simple, too, it’s quite brilliant in its simplicity. Even the idiots in Liebour could have thought of it if they’d bothered!

Firstly, they spend years just barely increasing health, and social care budgets, effectively ensuring cuts over time but without those dastardly employees being able to complain overmuch. Those scroungers who are in the queue for the social care system get pushed back and pushed back, until their issues get worse and force them into the healthcare system. The healthcare services become oversubscribed to the extent they begin to grind to a halt, and waiting lists steadily increase. This helps fuel demand for treatment in the private sector - ensuring the good old boys are able to make a bob from their private companies that, until now, the NHS had been stealing the customers from. More like National Half-inching Scum!

Meanwhile, the media is encouraged in the creation of poverty porn, and embolded to prioritise stories about the plebs in the working class stealing from the poor taxpayers. The smallest instance of one of those benefit-claiming scumbags even so much as daring to do something resembling fun, such as owning a TV or going outdoors, will be blown out of proportion beyond all possible means. The repetition of this kind of story in the media inspires ill-will towards those bottom-rung habiting members of society, and bad feeling towards them festers into resentment and hatred. Ensuring every news cycle contains this reiteration of the lives of lazy bottom feeders will help establish a feeling of negativity by the public towards the overall benefits budget. This outrage is enhanced to an all time high and the fact that the total cost of the benefits budget is dwarfed by the cost of governmental maladministration will never even factor into the thoughts of the general populace, so focused is their hatred of the scroungers. The creation of a common enemy redirects the focus of the masses away from any potential thought that our glorious leaders could do wrong, which is a core part of our government’s genius ethos to ensure ongoing support for the system.

Next, the funding issues affecting the health and social care sectors begin to impact the construction or implementation of new healthcare services, meaning the existing services are forced to meet ever-increasing patient numbers. Nurses are rushed and pushed beyond their limits, with pay equalling teenagers working fast food; doctors, dentists, and therapists barely have time to see each of their thousands of patients, never mind fully and correctly document their issues. Patients who are lucky enough to see a healthcare professional in person are few and far between, lauded for their luck. Each appointment time is reduced ostensibly so as to ensure all patients are seen, but in reality means issues cannot be fully investigated or documented in medical records. Referrals to specialist services grind to a halt, waiting lists go from weeks before being seen, to months, to years.

While this is ongoing, the years of lack of funding and investment into IT services means medical records are locked within obscure layers of disparate databases run by different software sets, the use of which vary depending on a myriad of factors as designated by the management consultant who implemented it. These records are Definitely Going To Be Unified In Just One System Some Day, once the government decide which of the Peers to award the contract to. Until then, full records are difficult to access since no one truly knows which of the systems some of them are in, so any errors are difficult to find. Summary records aren’t affected though, and so most patients won’t appreciate the difference, and never notice. Thus, the idea of a patient accessing and correcting medical records in their entirety is essentially an administrative impossibility. And here begins the final, most effective aspect of this brilliant government’s even more brilliant policy: stonewall bureaucracy.

The application process for financial support for those who are disabled is made to be dehumanising, demoralising, and destructive to those who apply, discouraging applications. Those who work in the system and actually care about the applicants quickly become overwhelmed, ensuring staff attrition. Cheaper replacements are brought on and trained quickly, often being regaled with stories of “gotcha” moments about denying claims, which fosters an attitude of “us Vs them” to maintain hostility towards the applicants and beget a culture of refusal.

The paperwork the applicants must fill out is dozens of pages long, takes weeks to arrive, and will only be provided on paper (it is paperwork after all!) to ensure long administrative processing. Those with reduced ability can’t use the electronic methods they depend upon to assist them in reading and filling out this paperwork, so either have to rely on the presence and ability of others in their household to make sense of, and complete, the paperwork for them. This helps to mute the voice of those useless people, since they can’t speak for themselves. Those who live alone are doomed to rely on the help of the overworked and oversubscribed charities - and only those charities with free phone numbers of course, since by this stage the applicants have no income with which to pay their phone bill.

Once this paperwork has been received, further requests will be made for the completion of even more paperwork (on paper, of course). All of the new requests are for identical information to the original paperwork, but asked for in different words and presented in different ways. This helps to most effectively catch out any cheating scroungers who may be in a different level of ability that day, ergo proving their fitness to work. It also helps to catch out any who are unable to complete and return the paperwork in the seven day (postage time inclusive, of course) period required, the laziness!

For those few applicants who have made it to this stage, now comes another absolutely brilliant part: having their disability assessed “in person” so they can be branded forever more as fit to work by an unqualified member of the company which directly profits from refusing them. The unqualified nature of the staff is the most important aspect, as it ensures the report (which will refuse them financial support) is written by someone who has no knowledge of, and thus no empathy towards, the issues the applicant faces.

During the assessment, the word of the assessor is law. Any statements made by this during the interview will be treated as unarguable fact, regardless of reality or evidence presented. Any statements made on behalf of the applicant do not need to have actually been said by the applicant, and recording the assessment to disprove any inaccuracies is treated as a hostile act worthy of terminating the application. The truth isn’t what’s important here - only ensuring these chancers are caught out and refused the money they haven’t earned that could make their pathetic lives more interesting. Scrounging scum!

After weeks of back and forth, ideally having lost some correspondence in transit so the claim can be refused, the cherry on top of the cake of requests will be made: even more medical evidence. The applicant will request their records from their GP, if they can, or resort to a DSAR if they can’t. Once received, hopefully outside the timeframe for responding to the benefits claim, the applicant will pay an exorbitant fee to post the reams of paper (allowing them to be emailed would be too convenient), which rules out some more of the undesirables who wish to apply but can’t pay the fee. More fool them!

This is where the brilliance of the system comes to its shining climax. The records, once received, are perused by more unqualified staff members, all to be combined with the story created by the assessor during the interview and used as damning evidence against the applicants, regardless of pesky “facts” or “reality”. The records have been filled out so quickly and briefly by overwhelmed medical staff that not all of the thousands of words required to prove a claim are there. Thus, those tasked to review the records to disprove the applicants disability will latch on to any of the barest hint of “fitness to work” and declare the claim denied, based on a single utterance of ability, disregarding the preponderance of other, less convenient evidence to the contrary. Letters stating facts from doctors are disregarded in favour of a statement from the initial, unqualified assessor saying the opposite, without evidence or merit. This cannot be questioned or denied, as there is no one to whom it can be questioned, or denied.

The building of the bureaucratic stone wall is complete, the problem of the infirm resolves itself by attrition, and the money goes to where it should: the personal pockets of our government. Truly, they’ve earned it.