A WHIRLWIND is about to strike more than 80,000 vulnerable people across the region – one that will blow away £25 of their weekly income.

That is the number who receive incapacity benefit but who are likely to fail a much tougher “work capability test” being introduced gradually across the country.

For these 80,000, the days of receiving a typical £89.90 a week will be over. The new regime will be £64.30 - and a strict requirement to actively look for work.

Already, right-wing newspapers are drooling over this “proof” that the sick and disabled have been shirking all these years – and, no doubt, a few of them have.

However, some inner-city family doctors are horrified that the new test is failing people with serious mental illnesses, in particular.

These GPs are no longer asked for their opinion.

Instead, boxes are ticked by panels lacking, allegedly, specialist training in the fluctuating nature of mental health.

Concern appears to centre on the 300,000 adults with autism.

Most are failing in their claims – leaving them without vital benefits when they then fail to find work.

When ministers first vowed to replace incapacity benefit with an employment and support allowance based on the harsher test, they promised that no one would receive less benefit as a result of the switch.

But that was quickly forgotten, as the test – focusing on the work claimants can do, rather than that which they cannot – was extended to existing claimants as well.

It means all 2.6 million incapacity claimants will be tested over three years, including the 125,000 across the North-East and North Yorkshire – a legacy of the industrial meltdown of the Eighties.

With the first results in, one-third were assessed as fit for work, while another third dropped out before completing their claim.

Hence my calculation that, in our region, about 80,000 – two-thirds – will be told to look for work.

Now, few doubt that work is good for most people, or that a full-blooded attempt to tackle this pointless waste of human potential is long overdue.

However, when the Government claimed expert backing for an end to the “something-for- nothing” culture – from an economist called Paul Gregg – it came with a quid pro quo.

In return for the threat of benefit cuts claimants were to receive personalised help, with increases to the miserable income on which jobseekers are forced to live.

The alarmed reports of GPs and charities suggest the former is not happening – while £64.30-a-week means the latter is but a distant dream.

Meanwhile, our 80,000 people will hit the dole queues when jobs are scarce and getting scarcer, with an inevitable cost to their health and families.

She did not quite say that her motto was ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out’ – but the spirit of the counterculture lives on in Dari Taylor, it seems.

During a debate on higher education, the Stockton South MP said: “In my day, with the universities of the Sixties and Seventies – yes, I am afraid that it was those decades – I am proud to say that I was one of the flower power people.

“I may be an ancient flower power person now – but it is still there with me!”