The Labour Party’s cuts to DWP Personal Independence Payment (PIP) and health-related benefits will lead to a rise in hate crimes – and Jason Alcock’s story proves this.
When Jason Alcock shared his story of grief, living as a disabled person with several complex conditions, and the tragic loss of his beloved wife, he never imagined it would make him a target for online hate and abuse.
But after his story was published in major newspapers, cruel and abusive trolls from the dark corners of the internet sent him vile messages, which then turned into a serious case of harassment on his front doorstep.
This led to him fearing for his safety, and even his life.
Jason Alcock: bereavement and health battles all at once
In 2018 Jason’s beloved wife Paola sadly passed away from a lengthy ordeal with cancer. This turned Jason’s life upside down overnight, as he lost the love of his life, who he described as his “anchor”.
Together for 20 years, Paola’s traumatic death left Jason heartbroken, he had lost his soul mate, and his “world”. Then just seven days after her passing, Jason was diagnosed with bowel cancer and had to have:
40% of my upper intestines removed, and the medication they gave me after the surgery caused me to start hallucinating and seeing myself as my wife and going through her death.
At this point, Jason was suffering from severe PTSD, associated with his wife’s death, and felt like giving up:
I wanted to end it all, I had a plan, I was going to end it all because there was nothing to keep me in the world.
Family and friends encouraged Jason to go out the house, to help him with his severe bereavement. But every time he tried to step out of the house, his hands would:
just go to the place where I pushed the powerless wheelchair around for almost 20 years, and everything triggered me.
The coping strategies that Jason had developed over the years as an Autistic person to:
cope with everything from masking to other strategies was completely torn away from me when she passed away.
Doctors were therefore lost on how best to support Jason during this truly challenging period in his life.
DWP PIP benefit cuts: threatening financial support vital to Jason’s independence
However, a mental health specialist who was treating Jason at the time, discovered that technology could help and support Jason:
they started using technology, using virtual reality, using computer games and connecting to my special interest.
From this moment, Jason finally started to feel like his life had begun to “turn around”, despite the fact that he was and still is reeling from the loss of his beloved Paola.
Due to the fact that Jason has several complex conditions, including Autism, ADHD and bipolar type two, he receives several benefits to provide him with financial assistance including Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) and PIP.
These benefits enable Jason to have a level of independence and help him to be able to pay his bills.
His mobility scooter, which Jason relies upon due to his sensory and physical needs, gives him a:
safe space, where I can go to the local Tesco, or I can go to the local park.
However, Jason worries about what the recent cuts to disability benefits may mean for him and believes that he will have to “cut back on things”.
A wave of vile abuse after sharing his story
During the cost of living crisis, Jason was hit hard and was forced to wash himself with a “wet cloth” and had to sell some of his possessions, with some of them being treasured items that had belonged to Paola.
Therefore, Jason felt inclined to tell his story to the press, including PA media, which was then syndicated to the BBC and other publications.
But he could never have anticipated what came next, including the vile comments from trolls.
Discussing the media attention and the hatred that came after it, Jason told the Canary that at the time he was:
naïve, and as an Autistic person I don’t understand the concept of deception.
Within the articles he chose to use a picture of himself with his “computer and VR headset” to display his special interests and coping strategies as a disabled person. The articles discussed his struggles during the cost of living crisis.
After being in the public eye and receiving thousands of comments which dubbed him as “lazy” and a “scrounger”, he said that “some of the trolls started to come onto my stream”, which took place on Twitch and YouTube.
From there, Jason’s once therapeutic environment became a living hell, as he was consistently berated and bombarded with atrocious abuse.
From online threats to real-world hate crimes
At one moment, when he was streaming and playing a videogame, Jason froze. A troll had told him that they knew “where I lived”. He told the Canary how:
At this point, I froze, I couldn’t run away.
The troll followed this by saying that they would:
break the solar panel in the backyard, and climb in my back window, they even said things like, we’re gonna take your wife’s ashes and put them in a pot noodle and make you eat them.
They even cruelly alleged that Jason had “killed” his wife.
He then contacted the police, as he was severely worried about his personal safety, but the police were unable to help as the trolls had used “VPNS”. Jason explained that:
If you ban someone on Twitch or you ban someone on YouTube, they can get a new name in seconds and be back in and it’s all anonymous.
From here, things only began to get much worse for Jason, as a troll emerged from the dark corners of the internet in February 2024 and turned up at “my front door”.
Jason said the troll had:
pushed a pack of skittles through my letter box.
But as he was wearing a face mask, and he was not able to be identified by the police:
The troll also mentioned Paola, Jason’s late wife, and said that Paola “would have loved them”, (meaning the skittles).
Taunted and abused, Jason also received a fraudulent and false letter from “the council” that the trolls were responsible for making. They then posted it through his door, and claimed that he shouldn’t be on benefits, and said:
we’re going to investigate you, your benefits will be frozen.
The abuse didn’t stop there however, as the thuggish criminals said that they would:
report me to child safety, saying that I was a paedophile and all these things.
Fearing for his safety thanks to negative media narratives
After each instance of receiving this vile abuse, Jason reported them to the police and the ongoing cybercrimes investigation.
Jason explained that unfortunately:
they found that these people had completely anonymised their data and everything so they couldn’t find them.
To this day, Jason doesn’t know how they:
got my address because we looked, and we couldn’t find my address anywhere.
For a while after the hate crimes committed against him, Jason feared for his safety and life so much that he began to put a heatproof mat under his letter box in case the trolls tried to do something much worse to him.
Asked about whether he believes hate crimes against disabled people will rise after Rachel Reeve’s cuts to benefits like DWP PIP, he said he worries that other disabled and Autistic people will be attacked and abused because of the media’s attention on PIP claimants.
The media often portrays disabled people in a particularly negative light. Jason feels that this then leads people who are also struggling with the cost of living problem to:
latch onto an ‘enemy’, to latch onto someone to attack.
Speaking on behalf of the disabled community he believes that they have been “scapegoated for everything” by the government and certain media networks which fuel an ableist hatred of disabled individuals.
He also believes that instead of targeting “the most vulnerable people in society” we should be:
taxing the rich and stopping all the tax loopholes.
The Labour Party: an ‘evil mastermind’ punching down on disabled people via DWP PIP cuts
In the 2024 election, Jason had voted for the Labour Party on the premise that:
there would be a change.
But instead, he believes that:
we got an evil mastermind, the way they want to bring in an assisted dying bill, and cutting benefits, it’s like where are you going with this? Yeah, it just feels a bit weird.
At the current moment, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimates that a whopping 70,000 disability hate crimes occur every year, with the work concluding that:
people with learning disabilities and/or autism are four times more likely to be a victim.
The abuse of disabled individuals, both online and offline, must be stopped to prevent more victims like Jason from enduring such horrific acts.
Moreover, the government must take a firmer stance to ensure trolls are not given free rein to target vulnerable people and continuously get away with it.
The government itself should also be wary that its particularly negative attitude towards DWP PIP claimants at the current moment could lead to a rise in cybercrimes and the harassment of vulnerable disabled people.
Featured image and additional images supplied
