Grandmother Stephanie Bottrill was forced by this Government to find £20 a week that she didn’t have for the bedroom tax. She had lived in her terrace house for 18 years. Last Saturday she left her home for the last time to walk to Junction 4 of the M6 where she walked out in front of lorry- she was killed instantly. She is the first known suicide to result from the heinous bedroom tax imposed by the Tories. She left notes for her family in which she said: don’t blame yourselves, blame this government. Days before her death she told neighbours ‘I can’t afford to live anymore’. Read more of this harrowing story at https://www.cantpaywontpay.org/publish/?p=2655
A deputy head of a London school wrote to the DWP asking if they knew about the effects that sanctions were having. She described children who hadn’t eaten, children fainting from hunger, children unable to attend school because they did not have shoes.
https://dpac.uk.net/2013/05/dear-department-for-work-and-pensions/
This is 21st century Britain; a place where the suicides and premature deaths from the DWP and Governments regimes are increasing with alarming speed; a place where people are unable to feed their children or their selves.
On the day Stephanie’s tragic story was exposed by the Mirror, the Benefits Justice Summit2 was happening in London. The second of two successful summits and a model that has been replicated in local areas for a ‘fight back’ to this attack on disabled people and people on low incomes by the multi-millionaires and corporate companies running this country. A country that is the sixth richest in the world, but one which sees no end to the demonization and increasing desperation and destitution of ordinary people like Stephanie and many others. We cannot allow this any longer, we must all join together to fight these horrendous attacks on ordinary people!