Benefits Follow

More than 12,000 people across more than 50 towns and cities protested against the Tories' vicious bedroom tax yesterday, Saturday.

MPs voted last week for a real term cut to most working age benefits by scrapping the link with inflation. It could leave some people as much as £215 a year worse off.

The Tories are at war with millions of benefits claimants.

Parliament was about to vote on deep cuts to benefits that millions rely on as Socialist Worker went to press.

Tory minister Iain Duncan Smith says that only the poorest should get state funding for care in their old age. The idea is linked to government reforms to introducing means testing for certain benefits, which means people have to prove their poverty before they can claim them.

Basildon Council used fake evidence to accuse a single mother Mandy Barratt for benefit fraud. It claimed it received a phone call reporting her, but it has emerged that this never happened. The investigation was really triggered by a news article.

The Tories announced plans to give parents of children with special educational needs more "choice" in support. This is part of the cuts agenda. It will snatch support from hundreds of thousands of children who need it.

The Tories’ welfare reforms will kick half a million disabled people off benefits—according to the government’s own figures.

The Tories will force nearly a million people off incapacity benefits and leave 600,000 with no benefits at all, according to new research. Nearly 2.6 million claimants currently receive the benefit.

An unemployed man has committed suicide in Wandsworth, south London, after his housing benefit was cut. This would have forced Richard Sanderson and his wife Petra to move.

The Tories blame ordinary people for their own poverty to justify benefit cuts. They paint a picture of parents as feckless scroungers who can’t be bothered to find a job and help their children.

The government and the right wing media are stepping up their war on people who claim benefits, claiming that there are millions of "workshy scroungers" living off the hard work of the rest of the population.