Toxic BBC leads the charge in tearing down a disabled woman
The mainstream media – led by the ever-toxic BBC – are frothing at the mouth over a disabled woman who ‘stole’ £23,000 in benefits, then was ‘caught’ zip-lining on holiday.
You can barely move for news stories about benefits. And no, I’m not talking about the news that Motability plan to restrict how far disabled people travel. Or that the DWP will be using AI to read responses to the PIP review. Or even that MPs are calling for another carers allowance inquiry
No, the story taking up so many column inches is that of a ‘benefit cheat’. or more accurately, a disabled woman who dared to live her life and go on holiday.
BBC rabid for ‘benefit cheat’
The BBC ‘reported’:
A woman who claimed more than £23,000 in benefits, saying she was too ill to go outside, was caught surfing and ziplining in Mexico.
Catherine Wieland, 33, claimed she suffered anxiety so crippling she was housebound but the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) found evidence of her surfing in Cancun and visiting Thorpe Park three times.
Wieland, from Goring-by-Sea, West Sussex, claimed tens of thousands of pounds in Personal Independence Payments (Pip) over more than two years, spending the money on manicures, tanning sessions and trips to a private Harley Street dentist.
Obviously, the BBC is a bin fire, but fuck me, they could at least pretend to be unbiased. This reads as if it came straight from The Sun, not the BBC.
And while the BBC article was disgusting, it set the tone for the rest of the media to be just as disgusting. There are so many stories spewing the same hatred that when you Google DWP and click the news tab, there’s a whole section dedicated to just this story.
At one point the BBC ‘news’ article even details exactly how many times Wieland treated herself:
While claiming her health was so poor she could not cook or wash herself, Wieland made 76 beauty appointments, visited 60 pubs, clubs and restaurants and spent money in foreign currencies.
Media turning public against benefit claimants
Unfortunately, this all makes sense when you consider that a YouGov survey found that just 11% of people think those on benefits should be able to afford beauty treatments. 27% said you should be able to afford to go out if you’re on benefits. In the same survey, 26% said people on benefits shouldn’t be able to afford to eat a balanced diet.
Most people on benefits have experienced being asked, ‘how can you afford that?’ when they buy themselves a treat. The implication is always ‘you shouldn’t be able to afford that’. And that’s a direct effect of stories like this, where the media are screaming about how benefit cheats are ‘stealing’ taxpayers hard earned cash.
It’s also not just the media finding these stories coincidentally. As the Canary’s Hannah Sharland reported, the DWP plants benefit fraud propaganda when they need to turn the public against disabled people
It’s absolutely no coincidence that this is happening whilst the government is trying their hardest to cut disability benefits. The fact that Wieland’s anxiety was highlighted plays nicely into the DWP trying to tighten the criteria for PIP and exclude mental health conditions.
It’s also coincidentally at the same time that they’re still trying to find a way to cut the LCWRA element of Universal Credit and move it to PIP. Meaning many will be forced to work despite being too unwell to.
Disabled people should be allowed to live
This absolutely rabid coverage from the media shows just how willingly our papers are prepared to throw disabled people under the bus if it means they’ll make more money. But more than anything, it shows that society has been so turned against disabled people that it’ll only be happy if we’re all miserable and destitute.
Disabled people deserve to live full lives, without fear that our benefits will be cut for daring to enjoy ourselves. But until the media stops working for the DWP and turning the public against us, they’ll keep us afraid. And that’s exactly where the DWP wants us so we don’t attempt to fight their cruel cuts.
Featured image via the Canary
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It’s funny that it’s always others who are the undeserving poor, or who has fallen on hard times because they’re feckless or lazy and other such bullshit. Poverty is structural – we’re born into a society in which every step of our lives has been pre-organised, bureaucratised, legislated for, and over which we have no say, and cannot opt out. Participation is compulsory. The cost of that compulsory participation should be that no one does without or is compelled to work for those things that they cannot survive without. That is the basis of a compulsory social contract. Anything else is illegitimate. It shows the extent of what might be understood as a kind of social Stockholm Syndrome, whereby those subject to the whims of the wealthy also side with the wealthy, rather than seeing them as their natural enemy, which they are. Until the structure of society is decided inclusively by everyone, what will exist is oppression and subjugation. The sad thing is that many millions seem happy that that is the case.
Demolish the BBC/JBC. Rid the country of the fascist state mouthpiece!
I am not on benefits, I survive comfortably, but I cannot afford the life style described here.
As a tax payer should I be paying towards this lady’s lifestyle or should I be claiming benefit myself?
PIP is a non legacy benefit. She could be a millionaire, or independantly wealthy. David Cameron claimed the child version DLA for his son, Katie Price claims it for her son. Ed Davey will be claiming it for his son. PIP is not a benefit in the same sense Universal Credit is. PIP is designed to give you options to help keep up with able bodied people. I am disgusted at what she did, but you can’t afford to do what the BBC claimed she did on PIP and UC alone. I sure as hell can’t. We hear the same over people on PIP gwtting a free top of the range car, do we buggery, they cost nearly £80 a week for a basic car, if you want top of the range, tou put up to £10,000 up front, people who get those cars are wealthy enough to do so
I do find it hard to justify this case when the whole point is that her anxiety prevented her from even leaving the house. I would be terrified to zip line and I have no disability. That said too many disabled people are demonised for asking for help but the media loves a witchhunt and the DWP are only too happy to supply the information.
You need to find a more deserving cause than this fraudster.
She has no defence other than total greed and pleaded guilty
I am confused…
Is this woman actually disabled? Or not? “Fraud” implies not. So why is a rightly vllified non-disabled PIP fraudster being characterised as an example of a disabled person being victimised?
And if she IS disabled as she claimed (anxiety being a fluctuating condition, that’s entirely feasible), why is her (unlawful) deprivation of PIP (that, yes, she is entitled to irregardless of her other wealth/income or what she chooses to spend it on), and what seems to be a MASSIVE breach of her right to privacy, not a major focus of this story?
If this woman was not suffering from the things she claimed in order to get PIP, all this article is doing is muddying the waters further by claiming her as one of us and then expecting people to be outraged by her treatment despite the fraud…? We should be condemning, unequivocably, actual benefit fraudsters – and anyone who gives the bastards any more sticks to beat us with than they already have – surely? Because that is precisely the brush we are all tarred with?
I’m sorry…it really doesn’t make clear whether she was actually committing fraud, or whether she’s just another disabled person being stiched up by the DWP and, in this case, also opportunistically trashed to manufacture consent for the “government’s” next go at ramping-up the Social Murder of disabled people.
I don’t mean to sling rocks here…I love and admire your work and thank you for keeping on fighting; but, as another disabled person, it matters that this is not clear.
It seems to me you are really missing the mark here – this woman is a criminal fraudster so what is wrong with publicising her crime? You can be opposed to generalised attacks on, and misrepresentations of, people who claim (mostly measly levels of) benefits in the UK without feeling it necessary to criticise reporting of actual fraudsters and leaving the impression that you support their criminality. Now, we all know that the exchequer loses much more money through tax evasion and that City & Corporate fraud costs us many, many times more than individuals like this, but that’s not the point; she’s a convicted criminal and you’re putting the word ‘stole’ in quote marks is quite silly.
Surely part of the argument here should be – is the DWP doing its job in carrying out the checks and balances regarding the evidence supplied to back up her disability claim, or, since the change to include”non physical” disabilities which are harder to prove are they just waving through such claims to prevent claims of discrimination?.
The DWP are very quick to stop payments for other benefits where any doubt is suspected, but ifnthe system for any benefit is open to abuse, then the system is to blame, not the individual. Many criminals have defrauded Government systems (NHS, SUPPLY CHAINS etc) as well as DWP. I know my wife receives PIP, for which the hoops she had to go through and the assessments carried out as she has a physical disability were quite intensive, but how do you “prove” depression or anxiety?. Hard choice, but the responsibility of the department to decide. If it sets a standard of proof, it cannot then cry that people are defrauding it where that proof mhas been met, it needs to review the levels constantly.