THE shameful treatment of an RAF veteran stripped of incapacity benefits illustrates the hypocrisy at the heart of Britain’s warmongering government.

Just this week Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson made a pitch for more military adventurism abroad. This might seem unnecessary — after all, British governments have hardly refrained from starting or escalating foreign conflicts in recent years. We helped bomb Yugoslavia “into the stone age” in 1999, helped the United States attack Afghanistan in 2001, invade Iraq in 2003, reduced Libya to a war-torn slave market in 2011 and have been far more deeply entangled in the Syrian war than Downing Street likes to admit — with the number of British air strikes on the country hitting a record high in the last month of 2018.

But this is not enough for Williamson, who wants British ships to patrol the coasts of China and police the Caribbean as well. As former soldier Gus Hales, whose fight for veterans to receive better treatment has been detailed in this paper, told the Morning Star then: “The money is there for the weapons but not for the aftercare. The generals want more tanks, the admirals want more ships and the air marshals want more planes. Veterans are left as a charity basket case.”

The way Jonathan Williams has been treated by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is tragically not unusual. Being assessed as fit to work by an agency worker who showed “no interest at all” in the actual condition that had led multiple doctors to assess him as unfit — in his case, post-traumatic stress disorder — is an experience grimly familiar to tens of thousands whose lives have been ruined by the Conservatives’ “welfare reforms.”

The Disability Benefits Consortium’s Supporting Those Who Need It Most report of 2017 found 62 per cent of people surveyed “disagreed or strongly disagreed that assessors ‘took into account how my symptoms/aspects of my disability or health condition change/fluctuate’.” The same proportion did not believe their assessor understood their condition.

Such widespread mistrust of the validity of the DWP’s assessment process seems justified given that two years earlier the department was forced to admit — after then chief Iain Duncan Smith had exhausted a string of attempts to hide the evidence, including by claiming it had never been collected — that 2,380 people had died after being declared fit for work between December 2011 and February 2014. Disability Rights UK has declared that the work capability assessment must be “scrapped in its present form,” but the government continues to use it.

Aside from the thousands of direct victims of government policy — including those who took their own lives or even starved to death after their benefits were cut — are the victims of the “hostile environment” the government has whipped up, a brutish Britain in which hate crimes against disabled children rose 150 per cent in the two years to 2017 and are still rising; figures that are certainly an underestimate because “people with learning disabilities, Down’s syndrome or autism may not recognise the abuse they have experienced as a hate crime or may lack the confidence to report these crimes,” in the words of charity United Response.

That Williams worked in the armed forces does not make his treatment more or less outrageous than that meted out to the disabled and unwell the length and breadth of Britain by a government whose war on the vulnerable was savaged as “cruel and inhuman” by a United Nations rapporteur.

It does show up the mendacity of an Establishment that sneers the left is unpatriotic for refusing to cheer on politicians who send our troops to kill and die abroad, but has absolutely no interest in those soldiers’ welfare thereafter.