Honours system branded a farce as DWP employees get rewarded

DWP New Year Honours
Listen to This Article
Voiced by Amazon Polly

The New Year’s Honours list was announced this week and as usual there are some questionable recipients. In what can only be seen as a slap in the face to the victims of austerity, 15 Members of the Department for Work and Pensions will receive a gong from the Queen.

The DWP has been under intense pressure in 2018 over its handling of the Tories welfare reforms.

They’ve lost several high profile court cases which have shown they are discriminating against disabled people.

The previous Work and Pensions Secretary, Esther McVey reached levels of hate that Iain Duncan Smith enjoys.

The United Nations gave a scathing report on the state of poverty in the UK and to top it off, Amber Rudd was appointed the new Work and Pensions Secretary. This despite her having had to resign over the Windrush scandal.

Honours for Suffering

When the news of the honours broke, Amber Rudd was quick to tweet showing her pleasure at the awards for her staff.

However, the responses to her tweet were not positive.

Many people were keen to remind her that a prominent study had shown 120,000 people have died due to austerity since 2010. Or that just days before, Lancaster University had released a report which branded Tory austerity measures on Welfare as “social murder.”

120,000 since 2010 equates to roughly 48 people needlessly dying everyday.

The honours system in the UK used to be something people could be proud of. There are by the way, many deserving recipients who have done work in their communities. In my opinion if there is to be an honours system at all, it should be for people without a public profile only.

More and more people are becoming disillusioned with the current system as it’s increasing being used as a political pay off.

2018 Political Pantomime

After the year the DWP have had,the last thing any reasoned person would expect is for them to be bragging about this.

But, this is Britain 2018.

The year where MPs accused of sexual assault got away without a proper investigation as long as they voted for Theresa May.

The media machine became so biased they stopped pretending anymore.

The Prime Minister was proud to be seen as xenophobic and, having pensioners deported got you a job in Cabinet after a couple of months off.

Unless there’s a change of government in 2019, I can see no sign that anything will improve.

I’d love to be wrong but the current state of affairs leads me to doubt it very much.

7 comments