By: A.C.
Mo Stewart is a former healthcare professional, a disabled female veteran and, for the last 6 years, has researched the links between the DWP, Atos Healthcare & Unum Insurance.
To date, the research evidence has been quoted during welfare debates in the House of Lords, the House of Commons and in Westminster Hall.
Mo routinely shares all research evidence with academics, medical and healthcare professionals, front-line national charities, selected politicians and service users.
Recently a large size collation of edited articles and evidential URL link were published in a book titled Cash not Care: The Planned Demolition of the Welfare State. This book is not like a mystery thriller. It brings together years of research into a readable narrative suitable for the layperson, aided and assisted by eminent professors, GPs, graduates of Disability Research at universities and many other contributors who have allowed Mo Stewart access to previously difficult to access academic papers.
Mo has patiently & effectively shown in detailed, researched documentary evidence in her work, to link “Thatchers Legacy”, the right wing media, Peter Lilley, IDS, right wing politics, Labour & Liberal Politicians, and the American insurance & healthcare giant Unum Provident who were official government advisers. At the centre of all of this is one Sir Mansell Aylward, who’s Biopsychosocial Centre at Cardiff University which was funded by the insurance giant Unum for five years, and whose doctrine formed the basis for the WCA.
Aylward was at one time the government’s Chief Medical Officer.
The author has shown that the influence of Unum, Atos and Biopsychosocial model for the WCA has led to the precipitous state of dismantling the welfare state and moving it to a model like the USA’s which seems to be borne out in this research. The absolute intransigence of IDS/DWP in the face of evidence that thousands of people were dying as a result of the WCA and ESA is evidenced in the research.
The discredited WCA (Work Capability Assessment) is actually based on Unum’s disability denial model, which in a very sly way they used to promote so–called ‘functional assessment’, thus avoiding medical professionals, GP’s etc. This meant by introducing the tick box culture of “assessors” , the rubber stampers or decision makers at the Jobcentre were unwilling to overrule or go against the ATOS model. By taking doctors out of the whole equation, ATOS basically ensured that unqualified assessors with only six weeks training, were allowed to have an opinion, which the Jobcentre were unwilling or incapable of overturning. Unum Provident are a discredited health insurance company, who denied disability payments in America and were ordered to repay $640 Million and ordered to reinstate over 40% of the claims they refused by the courts. Yet the Governments of both Labour and the Tories were happy to do business with them. Why? Well, you’ll need to read the book to find out.
Mo Stewart has done a great job, linking “Thatcher’s Legacy” through various Governments from Cabinet papers in 1982, and how her adoring acolytes, Osborne, Cameron, IDS and Lilley, in complicity with Clegg used the liberated markets and the crash of 2008 as an excuse to hammer the disabled and chronically sick. The compliant media were fed propaganda – as we well know, but equally the only media source to sound warnings about Unum and its fraudulent past in America, were the BBC. These were ignored by the Government and the compliant media who were more focused on demonising the disabled.
Many of the articles and documents used in this book are freely available online, at The Disability Research Centre Archive at Leeds University, Research Gate and Why Wait Forever.
Cash Not Care: The Planned Demolition of the Welfare State. Mo Stewart paperback £ 15.99 Kindle £6.99