Disability minister faces resignation calls after posting ‘dangerous’ and hostile video

The minister for disabled people is facing calls to resign after posting a hostile and “dangerous” post on social media that warned benefit claimants his department would “track you down” and “bring you to justice”.
Tom Pursglove and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) have been warned that a video accompanying the post “must be withdrawn immediately” because of the harm it will cause to claimants’ mental health.
The video – posted by DWP on Twitter and by Pursglove on his Facebook page – is a clumsy parody of a speech in the violent Liam Neeson thriller Taken, in which Neeson’s character promises: “I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.”
In the DWP video, Pursglove says to camera: “We will track you down. We will find you. And we will bring you to justice.”
There was a furious response to the post from disabled people, and within 72 hours it had been deleted from the DWP Twitter account.
Dr Jay Watts a disabled activist and consultant clinical psychologist, said she could not “emphasize enough how dangerous this messaging is, nor how damaging it can be to claimants’ mental health”.
She said: “The DWP video not only plays on fears of persecution and being accused of wrongdoing, which claimants tell us in clinic provokes terror, despair, and anxiety – quite understandably, unfortunately, given the cruelty of our current welfare system – but also ramps up the messaging with highly evocative and persecutory language almost perfectly designed to trigger fear responses in the body.
“For any member of the public deluded enough to believe the DWP’s likely response that the messaging will only affect people considering fraud, let me tell you this: mental health clinicians such as myself spend a considerable amount of time convincing people in desperate need that they deserve benefits because the pervasive fear we nearly all hold is that we’ve done something wrong.
“When I say that this policy will get inside people’s heads in terms of intrusive thoughts and persecutory auditory hallucinations, I mean it quite literally.
“This video is unacceptable, and it must be withdrawn immediately.”