by Frances Ryan
Louis’s generation of disabled children are in many ways experiencing the sharpest end of what I would call the equality myth. In some ways, they are at a significant advantage compared with previous generations: where it was once culturally expected – and entirely legal – to segregate or exclude disabled people from education, jobs or transport, a disabled child growing up today does so in a Britain that largely tells them they will be treated equally. But this increasingly feels like a cruel false promise, one that on paper dangles unprecedented opportunity and independence for the next generation of disabled people, but in reality oversees polices that are regressively pulling back their rights and life chances. Unflinching, Joanna sums it up: ‘They’re forgotten children. That’s what they are.’
Conclusion
British compassion for those who are suffering has been replaced by a punitive, mean-spirited, and often callous approach.
United Nations rapporteur Philip Alston,
November 2018
The active, deliberate and persistent maltreatment of Britain’s disabled people has gone beyond critical levels. Over the course of a decade, people with disabilities, chronic illness and mental health problems have been routinely driven into destitution, pushed from the workplace and stripped of the right to live in their own homes. The gains that generations of disabled campaigners fought for have been rapidly rolled back, and the promise that the Great British welfare state would always protect disabled people shown to be little more than a fantasy.
Societies generally accept that we have a collective duty to provide a safety net for citizens in times of ill health or disability – that’s why we have the NHS, disability benefits and equality laws. As this book has shown, it is not simply that Britain is now shirking those responsibilities. It is that we have reached a point where we are practically relishing it, in which a cocktail of austerity and long-standing prejudice towards disabled people is leading to the sort of large-scale negligence that at its extremes is tantamount to abuse. The British state has to all intents and purposes turned on the very people who are most in need of its help.
The increase in disability hate crime in recent years – from which even disabled children have not been exempt – shows, at its most extreme, the toxic attitudes bolstering such unprecedented cuts. The people on the very bottom rung of society have been shrewdly dehumanized by those at the top. Smearing disabled people as idle, fakers and abnormal makes it more and more difficult to empathize with them. The stories of the disabled people this book has told show at first hand the consequences: how the rationale that people affected by disability and poverty are ‘not quite like other human beings’ has come to excuse and normalize any number of nightmarish results that, even a few years ago, would likely have been unthinkable.
As ministers prepare to further demolish the safety net relied on by millions of disabled and working-class families, all at a time of the colossal change of Brexit, the time has rarely been more ripe for a new kind of solidarity politics – one that recognizes the humanity and contribution of disabled people, and rebuilds the public’s trust in a flourishing welfare state.
After all, some of the biggest issues facing domestic politics in the upcoming years will uniquely impact disabled people, while reverberating across society as a whole. Near-bankrupt local councils are ceasing to meet even their legal duties, with the social care system for disabled and older people on its knees. Affordable-housing shortages, mixed with haemorrhaging living standards, have created a modern epidemic of homelessness and insecurity, in which disabled renters are at the sharpest end. The multi-billion-pound mass roll-out of Universal Credit is set to bring with it widespread destitution and even added risk of suicide,1 as continual cuts to social security and an increasingly hostile climate abandon the sick and disabled.
What is both bleak and a source of hope is that it is entirely within Britain’s power to fix this. Far from being inevitable, inequality for disabled people is avoidable. The transformation in disability rights over the latter half of the twentieth century came about as a result of concerted efforts to improve the lives of disabled citizens. On the other side of the coin, the increase in hardship for disabled people over the past decade is a direct result of political choices. Britain can stop disabled people going hungry, if we have the will.
This will is building. While immediately after the global crash the narrative that austerity in Britain is both necessary and – even – morally right was widely accepted (a narrative the Labour Party crucially failed to challenge), recent years have seen this dogma start to lose its clout. Theresa May’s declaration at the 2018 Conservative Party conference that ‘austerity is over’ was widely meaningless – as this book has shown, more deep cuts are due in the coming years – but the fact that she felt the need to say it was not. Opinion polls consistently show the public to be weary of austerity. The British social attitudes survey in 2017, for example, showed that public tolerance of government cuts is collapsing, with 48 per cent of people surveyed supporting higher tax and more spending, up from 32 per cent at the start of austerity in 2010.2 Notably, there was a surge in support for spending on disabled people, with 67 per cent supporting funding for disability benefits, compared with 53 per cent in 2010. There was also a significant softening in attitudes to benefit recipients, with the proportion of people believing that claimants were ‘fiddling’ the system dropping between 2015 and 2017 from 35 per cent to 22 per cent – its lowest level in thirty years.
It is time to seize on this shift to make the case for a rejuvenated twenty-first-century social safety net, and, with it, strengthened disability rights. The most effective way to tackle inequality of disabled people is to think about it in the round, looking at issues of housing, employment, social security and social care, and offering a coordinated strategy that not only is right morally but also speaks to everyday common sense. The left is often criticized for supposedly outlandish spending pledges, while conservatives position themselves as arbiters of prudent economics. This myth has rarely been peddled more effectively than through the austerity era, when the vast removal of state support was sold to the public as some sort of shrewd financial management. In fact, while arguing there was ‘no money’ to meet disabled people’s needs, successive Conservative chancellors found cash for tax cuts for corporations and the rich: while austerity policies since 2010 will have cut social security benefits by £35 billion a year by the early 2020s, tax cuts will cost the Treasury £47 billion per year by 2021–2.3
What’s more, policies which pull support from disabled people have both a terrible human and literal cost. Take away the social care assistant who helps a wheelchair user get dressed, and that person can no longer work and pay tax. Cut the housing benefit that helps a mum with MS and her kids stay in their accessible home, and the council has to pick up the temporary-accommodation bill. The left should never sideline the human consequences of austerity – indeed, creating a compassionate climate where such suffering matters is crucial – but our argument can only be strengthened by beating Conservatives on their own terms. Far from deep cuts to disabled people’s support being economically prudent, it is actually costing us more to plaster over errors than to invest in long-term solutions.
To that end, we need to tackle how the social safety net is seen. Austerity has demolished not only funding for the welfare state but also the principles behind it. Too often, it is now viewed as a draining cost to keep down rather than a world-class strategy to provide security in our times of need. Across the board, the benefit system is in chaos, with disabled people forced through a system defined by hostility and humiliation. The ‘tick-box’ testing by multi-billion-pound private companies rolled out by the coalition government has been uniformly proven to be grossly negligent (as of 2018, as many as 70 per cent of appealed benefit rejections were overturned), while causing widespread poverty and mental health crisis. Social security assessments for disabled people must be taken out of profit-driven hands
and brought back ‘in-house’, with decisions based on evidence provided by the disabled person’s own doctors. It gives an insight into how hysterical the mistrust of ‘faking’ disabled people has become that the state trusting their medical notes could be seen as radical.
Next, we must get to grips with disability and work. Attempts to reduce the disability employment gap have made snail’s-pace progress in decades, with recent ministers using the zealous rhetoric of getting people ‘off the sick’ while doing little to address the actual barriers that keep disabled people out of work and cut off from the security of a regular wage. Indeed, through cuts to schemes like Access to Work, they have made it actually harder. The arguments used by right-wing politicians to push people off benefits are in some ways correct: people are (largely) financially better off in work, while there can be considerable psychological benefits to a fulfilling job. But they completely neglect the relevant questions. Where are all these jobs that are suitable for disabled or chronically ill people? Who are the bosses willing to hire a worker whose heavy fatigue, say, means they can only work half-days or who needs to repeatedly take time off for medical appointments? Similarly, such critics often ignore the fact that, for disabled workers, taking an unsuitable job can be considerably worse for their health than no job at all. This is even more the case in a labour market that is increasingly characterized by insecure, low-paid and unrelenting casualized work. The push for a four-day week by some unions and campaigners in recent years gives hope that narratives around working conditions are becoming more mainstream – a shift that would benefit non-disabled and disabled colleagues alike. In the meantime, normalizing flexitime, job sharing and remote working would be a positive step. Overall, governments need a strategy that understands how to assist disabled people who can take a job with the right support, while accepting – and providing a dignified safety net for – disabled people whose health means they will never be able to do paid work.
This sort of nuance is more often than not missing from the conversations around disability. The easiest thing in the world for those in power is to simply blame the individual – for their poverty, their unemployment, even their own illness. The left has not done a good enough job in recent years of communicating the structural causes behind disabled people’s struggles. Moreover, no one has done a good enough job of addressing the structural causes behind non-disabled people’s struggles. To put it another way: it is no real surprise at a time of squeezed wages, unaffordable homes, diminishing life chances and growing uncertainty that the average voter has had little desire to think of their disabled neighbour. Or, worse, that they are ripe for duplicitous voices to tell them that the cause of their woes is not, say, insecure jobs or a lack of social housing but the costly ‘welfare’ bill. It is difficult to focus your energy on what is happening in a care home to a disabled stranger when you’re struggling to pay the bills, or your children can’t find affordable housing. The challenge in the coming years is to bridge this gap, to show not only that disabled people are not an economic threat, but also that the struggles facing each of us are not so different after all.
A favoured idiom of some disability campaigners is describing non-disabled people as ‘the not yet disabled’ – essentially skewering the very human but false belief that ill health will only ever hit other people, and instead establishing that it could befall any of us at any time. The rationale is logical: if the public understood that, for example, bad luck means that they too could become too disabled to work, they may be more likely to care when out-of-work sickness benefits are cut. But in some ways, this argument surely gives up the ground we’re trying to win. Public backing for a well-funded safety net won’t be secured when non-disabled people care about disability benefits because they may one day need it themselves, but when they care because someone else needs it now. Besides, the cuts that early on were pitched as solely a concern for disabled people have in time come to the doors of the rest of the public. From unprecedented local council cuts, to Universal Credit’s mass roll-out, to the effects of Brexit, in the coming years austerity’s reach is only going to spread. To turn George Osborne’s infamous phrase around: increasingly, we really are all in this together.
One of the greatest challenges in any of this is how disabled people are perceived. Long-standing cultural prejudice around disability, teamed with the demonizing rhetoric of austerity, has exacerbated a sense of difference in British society: an othering that suggests that disabled people aren’t quite normal, or want a life – family, home or education – like everyone else. These attitudes do not exist harmlessly in a vacuum but are directly related to how willing non-disabled people are to see state programmes for disabled people destroyed. Why improve the lives of people who don’t want a family or home like anyone else? What’s the point in funding social care if disabled people don’t go to the pub with friends or need to get to the office like ‘normal’ people?
Part of this surely comes down to representation, in culture as well as politics. Put it this way: a non-disabled person is much more likely to empathize with a disabled person who’s had their social security cut if they’ve grown up surrounded by positive, everyday versions of disability – be it on-screen, in the media or at school or the office. Similarly, disabled people’s needs are significantly more likely to be addressed if we are in positions of power ourselves, from more disabled MPs in the House of Commons to disabled people being at the forefront of disability charities and think tanks. As it stands, only a handful of MPs are disabled, for example – meaning disabled people are effectively excluded from the decision-making bodies that so often determine our fates.
The kind of history that seems to dominate our culture is too often centred on the concept of a benevolent ruling class bestowing rights upon marginalized groups. This has been particularly prevalent when it comes to disabled people – a group who have long been viewed as passive, weak, as infants in need of ‘looking after’. But as this book has shown, disabled people are the ones who know their own lives, and it is their voices that should be amplified in a society that so often tries to speak for us. Disabled people, like the working class, have organised throughout the decades to gain our rights and – as these rights are threatened afresh – it is disabled people who are front and centre of the fight back.
Progress is not a straight line. It ebbs and flows; it flourishes and strains. Despite decades of progress, the intricate threads that make up disabled people’s safety net are always vulnerable to those in power who wish to cut them away. As successive generations, it is up to each of us to remake the case for state support for disabled people as a fundamental right. It is not hyperbole to say that the stakes have rarely been higher than now.
Britain feels increasingly like it is at a tipping point, a precipice of national character in which we decide what sort of society we want to be. Brexit, for its part, threatens to push us not only from precious resources but also from the energy and focus to address the pressing issues of the day. The risk of carrying on as we are is clear – creeping poverty, the hollowing out of public services, and a growing gulf between the ultra-rich and the disabled and poor. This book has disability at its heart, but it has always been about something more. After all, a society that is content to see wheelchair users queuing at food banks has not only lost its way in how it treats disabled people, but also abandoned its basic humanity. As the welfare state teeters on the edge of collapse, there has never been a more crucial moment to find our compassion and social solidarity – to strengthen the social safety net, demand more from our leaders than austerity, and reject policies led by callousness and fear. The rallying cry for our times is clear: how things are is not how they need to be. Disabled people’s lives depend on it.
Notes
Introduction
1 Patrick Butler, ‘UN inquiry considers alleged UK disability rights violations’, Guardian, theguardian.com, 20 October 2015.
2 Jason Beattie, ‘United Nations says t
reatment of disabled people in the UK is a “human catastrophe” ’, Daily Mirror, mirror.co.uk, 31 August 2017.
3 Patrick Butler, ‘UN panel criticises UK failure to uphold disabled people’s rights’, Guardian, theguardian.com, 31 August 2017.
4 BBC News, ‘PM David Cameron: London Paralympics will inspire’, bbc. com, 29 August 2012.
5 George Osborne, ‘George Osborne’s speech to the Conservative conference: Full text’, New Statesman, newstatesman.com, 8 October 2012.
6 Simon Duffy, ‘A fair society? How the cuts target disabled people’, the Centre for Welfare Reform, centreforwelfarereform.org, January 2013.
7 Full Fact, ‘The Sun’s benefit fraud figures need context and clarification’, fullfact.org, 1 March 2012.
8 Martyn Brown, ‘Iain Duncan Smith: “We’ll root out the benefits cheats who pretend to be ill for money” ’, Daily Express, express.co.uk, 30 December 2014.
9 Robert Booth, ‘One in five Britons with disabilities have their rights violated, UN told’ Guardian, theguardian.com, 7 October 2018.
10 Dan Bloom ‘Tory welfare cuts have hammered the disabled declares Britain’s human rights watchdog’, Daily Mirror, mirror.co.uk, 25 October 2018.
11 BBC News, ‘Theresa May: People need to know austerity is over’, bbc.co.uk, 3 October 2018.
1 Poverty
1 Joseph Rowntree Foundation, JRF analysis for Frances Ryan, 2018.
2 Ibid.
3 The Social Metrics Commission, ‘A new measure of poverty’, lif.blob.core.windows.net, September 2018.
4 Helen Barnard et al., ‘UK Poverty 2017’, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, jrf.org.uk, 4 December 2017.
5 Ibid.
6 The Living Wage Foundation, ‘The calculation’, livingwage.org.uk, 2018.