Here we go again....

Tory junior finance minister Laura Trott has been out today chumming the water for her boss (Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt) in advance of his Autumn Statement and telling anyone who'll listen that disabled people who are unable to work in the workplace and therefore are in receipt of disability benefits have "a duty" to work from home.

The cohort of disabled people she's talking about here are those judged to have 'limited capability to work'. Which basically means "In an ideal world we might be able to find them jobs, but in practise we can't get employers to even look at them" and for a good chunk of them "Working would actually probably be damaging to their health". And in many cases they should actually be in the next cohort up from Limited Capability, with no capability for work related activity, but the assessments have been fixed by the Tories since forever.

Of course the idea of DWP providing useful support for disabled people to work from home is risible, DWP doesn't see us as capable of anything beyond shelf-stacking, so the likely assumption driving this is everyone can get a zero hours contract doing remote call centre work. It's actually going to move disability employment backwards, because why should the government invest in schemes like Access to Work to make workplaces accessible, when they can just throw us all at remote minimum wage call centre jobs? And the employers will know it, and that there's no political will to drive Equality Act enforcement.

I think the language Trott was using is revealing. By talking about us having 'a duty', rather than the normal Tory waffle about 'work being good for you' - based on some extremely dubious 'science' that looked at abled workers, not disabled, Trott is tacitly acknowledging that they can't make the 'work is good for you' argument for the people affected, and if that's the case, then she's really acknowledging that work will be bad for them.

Over and above the direct damage that's likely to accrue from forcing disabled people to work when they're medically unfit, we know from every other time DWP have been let loose to sanction disabled people on a whim that it will lead to despair, destitution, and all too likely cases of suicide. The Tories know this as well as anyone else, they fought long and hard to stop the DWP's internal inquiries into the deaths being released, but they clearly think they can get a few positive headlines in the Tory rags and/or find a few extra pounds for Hunt to give away to party donors in tax cuts. The Nasty Party is back.

In more positive news, the Court of Appeal has ruled that people are perfectly entitled to call Iain Duncan Smith "Tory Scum".