And I have questioned that in response to the way our country - and our elected and unelected leaders - have approached and dealt with the issue of welfare reform and, more pertinently, the budget for our sick and disabled.
Personally, I have loathed David Cameron’s Welfare Reform Bill from the beginning.
Not just because I view him as a hopelessly out-of-depth and and incapable Prime Minister, which I do, but because it is the singularly most reprehensible attack on our vulnerable - our disabled - that this country has witnessed in many years.
And while I appreciate that it was Tony Blair’s government who created the original blueprint for this welfare reform, it has been David Cameron‘s Coalition who have fought, without mercy, to bring this particular kind of national masochism into being.
So, those moments of despair when I have wondered how much further we could possibly sink in terms of inhumanity have occurred in a series of bile-tinged snapshots as the reforms debates have progressed.
Take, for example, part one of the welfare reform voting that took place in the Lords’ last week and the unedifying spectacle of Lord Freud, leading the Government's charge. Someone once claimed that he had a conscience, but I presume that was just a rumour for I have yet to witness it.
This is a man so determined to carry out Cameron's wishes that he attempted to overturn the voting later on that night with the aid of a few key Peer friends.
However, by far and away his 'can he get any lower?' moment was when he attempted to argue about ’how ill is really ill’ and how much care and support we should give such unfortunates.
What Lord Freud lacked in compassion he more than made up for in a type of passive vitriol so determined was he to be the Head Boy to Cameron's proposals.
'How much further can we possibly sink in terms of inhumanity?'
Personally, having enjoyed the overwhelming benefits of good health and an able body, I can’t quite fathom how low a person you would need to be to even conceive such a thought process: a scale of despair if ever there was one.
They might as well dispense with the social niceties and just start branding people ‘not long to go’ and ‘got a bit longer, worthy of assistance’ so graphically deplorable was the tone and content of his argument.
He better hope that such a life or death decision doesn’t fall to someone else on his behalf one day.
Someone, perhaps, like me who may decide he is not worth saving as their hand hovers over the life-support switch and the decision is taken whether to keep him in the fight or let him ebb slowly away.
The thing is much to the Government’s consternation, disability campaigners - led by the formidable Spartacus team who prepared the impressive counter-argument ‘Responsible Reforms ‘The Spartacus Report‘ - are not prepared to go away quietly.
Oh, no, siree. Despite their collective illnesses and disabilities - and even hospitalisation as a result of the stresses and strains of compiling the report - they are jumping up and down and banging the table and saying ‘No, we will not take this lying down’.
Heartless: They might as well dispense with the social niceties and just start branding people 'not long to go'
But then, it has to be noted, these people do not have a choice. It is their lives that Cameron and his apparatchiks are playing with in such a cavalier manner.
Thankfully, the Lords’ threw out the first three disability proposals which DWP honcho, Iain Duncan Smith, then proclaimed that they would evoke old laws to push the reforms through, anyway.
Dear Lord - do these people have no shame? So determined are they to get their way that they will attempt any tactic, underhand or otherwise, to see their ghastly measures come to life.
To re-cap, in their morbid determination to see the Welfare Reform Bill come to pass they have barely left one immoral stone untouched. And at great personal (to the disabled) and public (taxpayers) expense.
Thus far there have been costly public consultations (where the results were thrown out by David Cameron when they were found to be almost 100 per cent in opposition to the reforms) and levels of spin that even original spinmeister, Alisdair Campbell, may baulk at.
Today will see the second part of the highly dubious and controversial welfare reforms to reach the Lords. This time the emphasis is on scrapping Disability Living Allowance and replacing it with the deeply-flawed Personal Independence Payment. (PIP).
PIP is riddled with problems which, if David Cameron had chosen to listen to the people who know about these things - the disabled - he would already have known about.
DLA, for example, is a working benefit. It enables the sick and disabled to continue in gainful employment while supporting them in that endeavour. PIP, on the other hand, will offer no care to a person even if they are unable to shower, wash their own hair and get dressed.
Oh right. So we want to make people intentionally unemployed then, do we? Presumably so.
The Government need to engage in some joined-up thinking. According to their own figures we are heading towards an all-time high of three million unemployed in this country, helped along, no doubt, by major chains Peacocks and Past Times going into administration and leaving tens of thousands unemployed.
So why then do they want to remove DLA from people who are already working and make them unemployable? Can someone take this back to the drawing board please?
The problem about the Government’s proposals about DLA, in general, and disability benefit, in particular, is they are not merely cruel but short-sighted, too.
To abolish Disability Living Allowance is absurd and will cost more in the long run. It will certainly create more problems than it can possibly resolve.
Contentious: Today will see the second part of the controversial welfare reforms reach the Lords
It is a proven fact that it costs more to live a disabled life rather than an able-bodied one. Expenses that the majority of us do not even have to consider such as having a carer, appropriately adapted transportation, hoist and even medication (I met one woman who uses her DLA for liquid Paracetamol as she cannot take regular tablets).
However, there has today been a small glimmer of hope as an amendment to PIP - calling for a pause - has been tabled for the Lords. A concession, presumably, because the overwhelming opposition - including 16 charities and even London Mayor, and Cameron friend, Boris Johnson - have finally started to get through to the hard and arrogant head on the PM's shoulders.
I look forward to the moment in all these proceedings when David Cameron and his team who are pushing for these draconian measures - Chris Grayling, Iain Duncan Smith and Lord Freud - are held to account for their acts against the disabled.
I, personally, believe that what they are doing is tantamount to hate crime.
They routinely issue misleading and questionable statistics and further perpetuate the idea of ‘scroungers’. They should be aware that each time they do this it has a serious and detrimental impact on disabled people who are frequently bullied and beaten by people calling them all manner of heinous names including 'retards' (just as Hull Conservative MP, John Fareham did on Twitter last week).
I can’t bear all the scheming and spin that the Government have indulged in for welfare reforms.
I look forward to when those supporting these draconian measures, such as Iain Duncan Smith (above) are held to account
Where the Department for Work and Pensions issue selective and ill-informed data, designed to whip us up and make us believe that every person claiming some form of disability is undeserving.
Their myths include statements like 'it takes little more than a form to get disability benefit' like it's as easy as sticking on a kettle or running a bath. Of course, they fail to tell us that these forms are lengthy - 50 pages - and are extremely complex and require medical information and details that are far from straightforward.
I detest that old crock that this is all about tackling fraud in the system and rooting out those miscreants who abuse it. For those of us who have looked closer, rather than just take our information from a DWP press release, we know it is nothing of the sort.
That is merely a smokescreen to obfuscate the shady dealings that are taking place.
According to the Government’s own figures, there is less than 0.5 per cent fraud in disability benefits and a phenomenal 16 billion remains unclaimed in benefit entitlements. And yet they still want to shave 20 per cent off the budget.
Is it, as disability campaigner Lord Patel suggested in The Lords last week, that we have "entered a different type of morality" when we "rob the poor to pay the rich."
I believe so. Many thousands of us are still waiting to hear why the Government regularly cuts 'sweetheart deals' for the likes of Vodafone and Goldman Sachs thus allowing them very favourable tax exemptions to the tune of billions.
The way the DWP go on anyone would think that the disabled and sick had enjoyed a free walk in the park. I encountered one woman with progressive Multiple Sclerosis who was called a ‘liar’ to her face during assessment - and she was confined to a wheelchair at the time. Truth is, that many disabled and sick people have multiple conditions and these do not fit in to a tick box assessment.
As David Cameron, the father of a disabled young boy who sadly passed away, should know only too well. How appalling that he appears not to.
It gives me heart to see what the group behind the Spartacus Report have done by bringing together other frightened and threatened sick and disabled people and mobilising them into one incredibly, impassioned and articulate voice.
These campaigners have worked tirelessly to have the truth heard and they still fight on. Many of them from their sickbeds, quite literally.
Disappointment: Lord Freud has shown a substantial lack of compassion
They have become increasingly empowered as their findings have served to, rightfully, knock the Dark Lord Freud off his preposterous perch.
Yesterday he issued a letter to the Lords rubbishing the Spartacus Report but failing, miserably, to adequately address the many and numerous claims that the report contained.
Sue Marsh, one of the powerhouses behind the report and movement - and herself suffering with a rare form of Crohn's Disease - says it was telling that Freud did not address any of the substantive criticisms about the government's misleading use of statistics. Telling, indeed.
No one, not even the campaigners, is asking for Welfare to remain the way it is. We are all aware of the need for reform, but it is deplorable that the Government have used slurs and smears to achieve an end that will lead many to contemplate, and carry out, suicide. That is an absolute certainty judging by the level of desperation that has been whipped up for our disabled and sick.
I am now going to ask something completely irregular for a journalist. And it is this: can we please search our collective conscience and let our local MP’s know, in no uncertain terms, that we do not support this act of treacherous brutality against some of our most vulnerable citizens and that we demand, once and for all, that the ‘well’ be put back into welfare. For all our sakes.
Sonia Poulton
