05.02.1998

Miserly payouts for miners

The recent High Court victory trumpeted in the press as a record breaking settlement of damages, although running into billions overall, is actually worth no more than £10,000 per miner. £10,000 for a crippling, terminal illness, which slowly and ever more painfully kills you, is hardly justice by anyone’s measure.

What is clear is that the Blair government’s hand is working strings in the background of all these mass industrial disease cases. Take ‘vibration white finger’, a crippling disease which kills the grip and robs the fingers of power and dexterity. Caused by prolonged use of pneumatic picks and burrowing machines, it affects possibly 25% of all former and current mine workers.

Prior to the last election, British Coal were on the ropes. In High Court cases they mostly had to concede to us. The initial figures for compensation ranged from £3,000 to £40,000. Conscious that such payouts could be multiplied by tens of thousands of mining victims nationwide, and that the government would have to pick up the tab in the absence of a British Coal which was now formally wound up, their lawyers were given time to appeal against the size of the sum.

With the new Blair government in office, cutting and stealing back benefits, their lawyers came back and appealed the whole case - they have not been given a blank cheque to say that the government was totally innocent of blame. Blair’s mob know that every £10 they can nick back off the compensation adds up to tens of thousands saved overall from the crippled miners.

Mind, they have already stolen £40 per week from every miner with pneumoconiosis, broken backs and other disabling injuries. This they took off everybody with industrial injuries benefits in the country who had reached 65. Despite the award notices, which stated “for life”, they did the same thing with hardship/reduced earnings allowance, withholding £40 from workers impoverished by industrial injury and disease.

Of course, it was the outgoing Tory government that did this - but did the incoming Tory (New Labour) government give it back? No, of course not. So if they have kept stolen goods, and they know who those goods belong to, they are thieves too.

Then we have had the alteration of back payments for injuries and disease. We used to be able to claim back to the date of the accident or the onset of the disease - which is logical, isn’t it? But this of course cost the state millions. So the outgoing Tories reduced it to a maximum of three months’ money, no matter how long the disease had been active and crippling the person. Take a miner with chronic bronchitis. He tries in 1993 to claim the benefit and is turned down as having no dust in his lungs. He tries every year until he dies and is told that he does not have the disease. After the autopsy we discover large amounts of coal dust and evidence he had had the complaint back to 1993, as he thought. The DSS doctors now record the date of onset of his disease as 1993. Previously his widower family would have been paid disablement benefit to which he has always been entitled back to the date of onset. Now, after the outgoing Tories and despite the incoming New Labour ones, you can only claim money for three months.

The whole picture cries out injustice - and it is injustice against those crippled, diseased and killed by the greed of big business. Of course, Blair has taken up where they left off: attacks on single parents benefit, not “unmarried mothers benefits”, as Labour spin doctors have circulated. That benefit was paid to either parent, left to bring up the kids alone for any number of reasons. “Single parents want work, not benefit,” they tell us in a shower of misinformation, failing to mention that you get that benefit when you are in work.

I got it as a single parent working in the mines, and it was a godsend in offsetting the demands of a young teenager in terms of clothes and school stuff. Likewise, disability living allowance - “Disabled want work, not benefits”. More misinformation. That benefit is paid to disabled people who are working, as a recognition that their disabilities are more of a financial burden than other able-bodied people face.

The numbers of people - hard working ordinary people of every description - being robbed blind by this and the former government runs into millions. Most families are entitled to one benefit or another. That is why we paid our national insurance contributions. That is the deal we signed up to with the state when we worked our bollocks off and paid the money every week.

We must not allow them to spread the lie that somehow we are scrounging something off them. As we have seen, we have caught them with their fingers in our till, robbing our contributions and leaving us peanuts. This is the real benefit fraud. Working people, disabled and abled alike, must react with fury and determination to stop and reverse the robbery.

Tough on state theft, tough on the causes of state theft.

Dave Douglass