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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
National
Ros Wynne Jones

Mum's fight in memory of disabled daughter who killed herself after DWP fit-for-work ruling

Jodey Whiting took her own life after being found fit for work.

Just one of tens of thousands of people crushed by Tory austerity ­measures since 2010.

On Sunday in Brighton, her mother Joy Dove will address the Labour conference fringe in memory of Jodey, who died two years ago.

This week David Cameron has been given the chance to reflect on these lives lost in interviews on television and in print.

A father who also lost a son. What he said was extraordinary.

That he wished he had started those vicious cuts earlier and cut deeper to balance the books faster.

'Jodey would still be here if it wasn't for them'
Devastated mum Joy Dove is seeking Justice for Jodey (Teesside Live)

“We might as well have ripped the plaster off,” he said.

He said criticism of cuts to public spending were “hysterical”.

“You’d think we had reinstated the workhouse,” he said.

Joy listened in horror to those words. “I don’t know how he dare,” she says.

“People’s lives don’t matter to them, do they? They have no morals.

“They don’t even think of the people who suffered and died. He did reinstate the workhouse, that’s what I thought when I heard him say that.

"He put the country back to Victorian times when it came to welfare.”

Joy’s beloved Jodey, who had multiple physical and mental health issues, including ­curvature of the spine, a brain cyst and bipolar disorder, took her own life after seeing her disability benefits stopped.

The former shop assistant had failed to attend a DWP appointment she never knew about.

“‘How can I work?’ Jodey said to me,” Joy remembers. “She said: ‘I can’t even walk out the door’.”

The night Jodey died she left a note for Joy that said: “I love you. I’m going to go to sleep, mam.”

Joy with Jodey's daughter Emma Bell with a letter of apology from the DWP (Evening Gazette)

The DWP have since apologised for the “multiple failings” found by an independent inquiry.

The Independent Case Examiner ruled the department had failed five times to follow its own safeguarding rules.

A DWP spokesman said: “We apologise to Ms Whiting’s family for the failings in how we handled her case and the distress this caused them.

"Our thoughts are with them at this difficult time and we are providing compensation.

“We fully accept the Independent Case Examiner’s findings and are reviewing our procedures to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”

Grandmother Joy, from Norton in Teesside, plans to take the DWP to court, and believes Jodey’s death was manslaughter.

“They are all the same,” Joy says. “They have blood on their hands.

“I wrote to Theresa May three times when she was prime minister.

"She never replied. In the end I got a letter from Penny Mordaunt, who was Minister for Disabled People at the time.”

Joy is full of praise for the dad who confronted Boris Johnson at Whipps Cross Hospital this week while his baby waited for help.

“We have just all had enough,” she says. “It’s still going on. Day after day.”

Film director Ken Loach made a supportive phone call (Getty)

She recently received a phone call from Ken Loach, the filmmaker behind the movie I, Daniel Blake.

“He is supporting my Justice for Jodey campaign,” she says. “He said it’s worse now than when he made the film.”

Joy has received many messages from other families suffering under welfare cuts and austerity measures.

“I spoke to a mother who broke her heart to me,” she says.

“She said she was screaming inside because her 21-year-old son had died like Jodey. It’s the powerlessness.

"I told her that Jodey’s death feels like yesterday to me. It changes your life and you will never be the same but we have to keep fighting.”

Joy’s voice is breaking. “How many more mothers will have to go through this?”

On Sunday, Joy will speak at the Daily Mirror-Unite Real Britain fringe, which will hold the Government to account once more for austerity deaths caused when the welfare safety net began failing amid David Cameron and George Osborne’s savage cuts.

Cameron’s cuts have been attacked by the United Nations, whose poverty envoy said they had caused “great misery”.

They have led to a million more children with working parents living in poverty than in 2010, over a million more food parcels, and a 169% increase in homelessness.

To hear hungry children, destitute parents and bereaved families dismissed this week by former prime minister David Cameron is shocking in two ways.

It shows that during his gilded life among the chocolate box villages around Chipping Norton and the streets of wealthy West London, he never saw the people like Jodey, who were just clinging to life by the fingernails.

The family of Jodey Whiting have made an official complaint to the DWP (Evening Gazette)

But it is also shocking that – with all the half-hearted mea culpa he gave us last week about Brexit – he is still missing the link.

He still doesn’t see that the ravages of austerity, which he and George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith let loose like a virus through our high streets, social safety net and our NHS, led to a level of anger and ­disaffection that the country he says he loves is still reaping now.

That’s why next week in Brighton, however much Brexit dominates, we must keep talking about austerity and a different future vision for the country.

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