You’ll know the observation attributed to Gandhi that “the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members” – or, if not, you will recall a similar sentiment expressed by someone else. Samuel Johnson, Dietrich Bonhoeffer … just about anybody who’s ever appeared in a GCSE textbook has come up with such a line.
For most of my life the truism has seemed precisely that: so uncontroversial as to be a cliche. Sure, you could argue the toss over what good treatment means, or who should be included among the vulnerable. But no matter how moth-eaten and means-tested their welfare state, how dilute their social democracy, the first world, G7-club British would never publicly repudiate their commitments to the sick, the elderly, the poor. Until the past four years, and the election of a government that treats disabled people with a scarcely believable callousness.
The prompt for this piece is of course Lord Freud’s musings on whether people with disabilities should work for £2 an hour. Or, rather, it’s the debate that has dutifully followed in parliament and the press over what the welfare minister meant and whether in private he’s a sensitive flower. Because such semantics are entirely to miss the point. The comments are just the smallest injury Freud has dealt disabled people. Under the benefit reforms and spending cuts brought in by Freud and his colleagues Iain Duncan Smith, George Osborne and David Cameron, people with disabilities have been hit harder by austerity than any other group you might think of.
To be disabled in post-2010 Britain is to be unsure when and whether your benefits will be paid because the new system keeps chopping and changing and growing historic backlogs – so that even a parliamentary select committee describes the switch-over as a “fiasco”. It’s to be constantly monitored on whether you really are disabled, because the Department for Work and Pensions is animated by only one idea: that someone, somewhere, is claiming something to which they’re not entitled.
It’s also to hear that the private firm doing the assessments declares as fit for work people on the verge of death, such as Linda Wootton, whose employment and support allowance (ESA) was cut off while she lay in a hospital bed, drowning in her own body fluids. It’s to rely on social care, which is now just someone popping by on a flying visit, forever on their way to the next “client”. It’s to see your benefits slashed and to hear of more cuts to come. And it’s to be classified as a scrounger – for the cardinal sin of not being as well as other people.
Anyone who relies on public services and welfare – the unemployed, the young and very elderly and the low-paid – will recognise some of the above. But the point about people with disabilities is that they often rely on a range of services from the welfare state. The worse your impairments, the more you’ll need public support – not just specific disability benefits such as ESA, but housing benefit and social care too.
The bedroom tax might as well have been explicitly designed to wreak havoc for any disabled people who need an extra room for equipment or a carer. And historic cuts to local government budgets mean that care is being slashed.
A relatively small group is being whacked again and again by Cameron and co. Researchers at the thinktank Demos last year observed that 120,000 faced a “triple whammy” of losing a number of core disability benefits all at once; 99,000 would see cuts to four benefits at once. At the same time, the Centre for Welfare Reform estimated that, compared with the average, people with disabilities would be hit nine times harder by austerity; the total hit for those with severe disabilities would be 19 times greater.
Going by GDP data, this country has never been so wealthy. It certainly has the money to look after a group that Gandhi and you and I would recognise as being among our most vulnerable. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, the PM announced that, if re-elected, he would find the cash to cut tax bills for high earners.
Which leads me to the conclusion that the reason coalition ministers don’t mind slashing entitlements for disabled people, are quite happy to use them as guinea pigs for new benefits that don’t work, and to chuck them at incompetents such as Atos, is because they couldn’t care less. That’s also the most generous interpretation one can put on the comments made by Freud. A man who’s been working at the heart of government for six years and who was once a journalist for the FT can’t be described as inarticulate. If his words, or those similar comments made by senior Tories Philip Davies or Andrew Selous, were carelessly chosen it is because the speakers don’t care about the people they’re airily discussing.
Contempt for disabled people runs right through coalition policy. Just look at how the government is scrapping the Independent Living Fund (ILF) – a small cash pot that ensures about 19,000 severely disabled people get the support they need to live in their communities. The court of appeal last year declared the fund’s closure illegal; but armed with some extra paperwork Duncan Smith and his ministers reannounced its abolition by next March.
Ever since, as the tireless blogger Kate Belgrave has documented, the Disabled People against Cuts and other campaigners have mounted increasingly dramatic protests – and this week they go to the Royal Courts of Justice. We should all hope they win. If they lose, thousands of severely disabled people will either be prisoners in their own home or shut up in a far more expensive residential care facility.
This isn’t a partisan issue. Freud got his first job from Gordon Brown, and Ed Miliband has no plans to save the ILF or to significantly deviate from the coalition’s cuts. In our name the political classes are destroying the lives of disabled people: through cuts, through anxiety and through vilification.
The coalition has so thoroughly vilified “scroungers” that hate crimes against people with disabilities are rising year on year: up 13% since 2011. Forty per cent of incidents are violent. Take the visually impaired man walking in Brighton last year, who was asked by a stranger what it was like to be blind – before being set on fire. Campaigner Paula Peters tells me she’s been spat at in the street, while friends in wheelchairs have been shoved into oncoming traffic.
Austerity is the incompetent treatment of the symptoms of a dysfunctional economy rather than its cause. Housing benefit bill too high? Don’t build more council houses, cut welfare! Paying too much in tax credits? Don’t get employers to pay more, cut benefits! Rather than help create decent jobs, Cameron and Freud prefer to drive Britons off welfare into cut-price employment. That logic is at its most naked and futile in the treatment of disabled people. They are being beaten harder than anyone else; yet no amount of guff about shirking will suddenly make them less disabled.
The day before writing this I spoke to Angela Smith. A master’s graduate from Warwick, she has cerebral palsy. After being made redundant in 2011, she has just landed herself a new job. But she did it despite the government, not because of it. The jobcentre was no use and neither was her employment agency. Now she’s back in an office, the state’s Access to Work scheme is taking ages to provide the necessary help. That’s something Freud might care to help with. As Smith points out, support would have been much more use to her than the threat of sanctions and cuts. “David Cameron’s son had a very similar condition to me,” she told me. “I don’t understand why he can’t use his personal experience in making better policies.”
