Some numbers. Very sad numbers. You can check all of these using search engines, and have multiple corroborating sources. [Edited from a post by S. K. Walker.]
27 – People shot dead in the Connecticut school shooting.
24,000 – number of people who died in the UK last winter because of ‘fuel poverty’.
But that appears over-cautious. Yesterday, the Tory Minister for Disabled People, Esther McVey, told the House of Commons that, of the 560,000 people who will be assessed for the new benefit by 2015, 330,000 are expected to be excluded from the benefit. That’s an exclusion rate of 59%. 3.2 million people receive DLA, so if the same failure rate applies as they become due for reassessment, that means around 1.9 million disabled people who will lose crucial support. Using the same calculations as I applied to the 500,000 initially flagged to be excluded, it means almost a million people pushed below the poverty line.
(There is also another issue: how do the Government know the numbers before reassessment has even taken place? This sounds like another ‘forecasted mean’ that looks like a target, but “isn’t a target – OK?”…)
Factor that into the death rate from energy and food poverty, and you’re looking at a situation where the 24,000 deaths last winter will look like nothing compared to what we’re going to see, let alone the 30 innocent deaths in Connecticut.