While ministers vilify people on benefits (Freud sorry for comment about disabled people, 15 October), we urge everyone who thinks this is wrong to stand up for benefit justice. Attacks on benefits threaten everyone who is low-paid, not working, sick, has disabilities or plain unlucky. Freezing housing and other benefits would cut the income of 50% of households – those with least money, without work or on low pay, zero hours and high rent. The threat to remove all benefit from people under 21 – many in full-time work, with children, and without rich families to support them – shows ministers’ contempt for our young people and how tough life is for them.
The least well-off, in work or not, did not cause the deficit, triggered by trillions in bank bailouts and subsidies. Why should they be penalised, while the richest benefit from more tax cuts? We should not stigmatise or blame each other, but defy and beat these attacks on Britain’s welfare safety net. We can force ministers to retreat, as we have in the fight against Atos, workfare and the bedroom tax. Now is the time to stand up and be counted. We will be supporting the TUC’s Britain Needs a Pay Rise demonstration on Saturday 18 October.
Ellen Clifford Disabled People Against Cuts
Eileen Short Anti Bedroom Tax and Benefit Justice Federation
John McDonnell MP Lab, Hayes and Harlington
Mark Serwotka PCS union general secretary
Len McCluskey Unite union general secretary
Austin Mitchell MP Lab, Great Grimsby, chair council housing group of MPs
Ian Lavery MP Lab, Wansbeck
Natalie Bennett Leader, Green party
Dot Gibson General secretary, National Pensioners Convention
Paul Kenny GMB union general secretary
Billy Hayes CWU union general secretary
• What Jeremy Hunt is actually saying (Pay rises would mean loss of 15,000 nurses says Hunt, 13 October) is that thousands of health workers need to take a pay cut in order to fund the NHS properly. Why is this fairer than everyone paying a small tax increase? Isn’t that how the collective model of health funding is supposed to work?
Ian Reissmann
Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire
