Disabled art activist Dolly Sen is sending the Labour Party government a clear, and harrowing message. That is, the callous plans of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) will lead to countless more deaths of disabled benefit claimants.
An act of art activist resistance against the DWP’s cuts
Sen will send A5 postcards to all 404 Labour MPs to highlight the DWP’s brutal policies that have led to the deaths of disabled claimants.
As the Canary’s Steve Topple has reported previously, between 2011 and 2018 alone, the DWP was responsible for over 35,000 (recorded) deaths. Of course, many more people have died since due to the DWP.
So crucially, Sen’s postcards will spell out that it will happen on Labour’s watch if they act on Starmer’s dangerous and false rhetoric on disability benefits. Sen’s action is a plea to MPs to do the moral thing and oppose the plans.
The postcard displays the photographs of “just a handful” of disabled people the DWP’s brutal policies have killed:
On the other side, the postcard lists a haunting block wall of names under the caption: “Some DWP deaths” and “there are thousands more”:
The postage for this intervention was crowd funded.
‘Wouldn’t it be a government to be proud of’ if no disabled claimants died from DWP policies?
Dolly Sen has previously made a documentary on DWP deaths and has undertaken two art interventions at the DWP head office in London.
She has also made an accompanying video about why she is doing this action, which you can view here:
Disabled people have been seen by successive governments as easy targets and very little actual truth about the situation is publicly known. For example, even the DWP’s own figures on fraud shown it is less than 0.2% and is going down.
Sen hopes her postcard will nudge the humanity of MPs and compel them to do the right thing. Ultimately, she’s challenging the Labour government to be better than the Tories with the DWP, poignantly asking:
Wouldn’t it be a government to be proud of if no disabled claimant starved to death, took their own life, or die from their condition after being deemed ‘fit to work’?
If they don’t do the decent and moral thing, Sen has put boxes on the postcard to fill in the details of those who will die in future – on Labour’s watch.
Featured image supplied
