The Week in Ableist Bullsh*t: another fantastic seven days for the human wet wipe Mel Stride

As expected after an embarrassing time at the polls, the Tories were back to take it out on disabled people this week. The human wet wipe, the DWP’s Mel Stride, has been gurning in the press again about how his “plan is working”. This time, he was launching the WorkWell programme.

The human wet wipe: dealing in miracles

The initiative apparently aims to help people recover from long-term sickness, cos ole Stridey Boy deals in miracles now as well as bullshit. 

He told Sky News:

“what I want to do is get in there early and bring together both healthcare support and critically also work coach support so that we can keep people in work rather than out of work… as part of their recovery” 

He once again cited mental health, because long-term depression is something that can definitely be cured by forcing someone into work. He also weirdly said GPs can refer people to the service, which is funny because last week he didn’t trust them to determine whether someone was sick enough to get a fit note.

But as is often the case, the blustering on TV didn’t even tell us half the story, and was nowhere near as funny as when Wet Wipe (WW) launched it on Twitter.

The DWP stealing my jokes. Whatever next?

In cringe the likes we haven’t seen since Pursglove donned his stabvest, we saw WW practising for his new role of Uber driver.

“Join me on the road for the next generation of welfare reforms” he shouted.

Hang on – this sounds familiar… “we’ll be making a few stops along the way” No surely not?

The DWP are stealing my jokes???

The reason it sounded so familiar was that last week I started my column with “all aboard the hating disabled people bus” – little did I know that the DWP were going to take inspiration from it. 

The thing is though, Stride has clearly never taken a bus in his life, so instead it becomes a zippy little black car, but the message is the same. 

In my piece, I said we’d already had stops along the way such as “Doctor’s can’t be trusted to write sicknotes” lane and sure enough WW is going “full throttle” towards what appears to be a fitnotes layby.

WorkWell. A contradiction in terms if ever there was one.

So what is WorkWell? Basically as far as I can tell it’s a scheme ran by the DWP where instead of supporting disabled people who can’t work they’ll pass you around to other services.

Instead of giving people the Universal Credit they need to survive and allowing them to focus on their health, the DWP is going to cure their chronic conditions – with a life-changing four whole physio sessions and a meeting with a counsellor.

But that’s not all! You’ll also get referred to Citizens Advice for financial advice where you can ask questions as ‘how do I pay my bills when the government aren’t supporting me to look after my health or helping me get back into work’. 

But wait! There’s more!

You’ll also be socially prescribed a support group for loneliness where you can all discuss how you have no money to feed yourself and the government wants you dead.

Of course, this is once again just another example of how out of touch the government are. They’re investing £64m into WorkWell but there’s no mention of extra funding for the NHS or local services to support them with the influx of disabled people accessing their services.

Mel Stride: the cruellest of them all

The announcement was so popular that despite being viewed over 225 THOUSAND times, the tweet has just 69 likes. Surely they can’t still think the public supports them?

The government wants us to believe they don’t know that people don’t recover from disabilities and chronic conditions with four sessions of therapy. In reality, it’s much more sinister than that.

The DWP know how much damage they are doing to disabled people and the community, DDPOs and even the bloody UN have been telling them for long enough. 

But we don’t matter to them. Disabled people are subhuman to Tories and they would prefer we were all dead. And old wet wipe Mel Stride, well he’s the cruellest of them all. 

The man deserves a life as miserable as what he’s reducing disabled people to, but I’ll settle for him crying in a sports hall when he loses his parliamentary seat.

Featured image via the Canary