Disabling People
The UK Labour Government is doing to disabled people what the Conservatives before them didn’t think they could get away with.
Image Source: Unsplash
About four years ago, I fell through a loft hatch. Had I gone all the way to the ground, I could have easily broken one or both of my legs, or hit my head and returned myself to sender. As it was, quick reflexes meant that I grabbed both sides of the hatch and arrested the fall. Of course, as I lowered myself down, I also slashed my hand open and now have a stigmata-like scar on the palm from where it had to be glued back together but I counted myself lucky at that.
Till a couple of weeks later when I collapsed while getting out of bed. It turned out that when I caught myself, I very nearly gave my lower spine the equivalent of a hangman’s drop but had avoided it by a margin of basically nothing, instead coming away with bruising and muscle strain. Several months of pain and physio later, I made a full recovery but I was little more than a quirk of physics away from a life-changing and permanently disabling injury.
I know people who have been on the other side of that quirk. Who HAVE had life-changing injuries or illnesses or who have disabilities either mental, physical or both for any number of other reasons. To say that all of us are worried about the incoming cuts and changes that Labour (of all parties) are making to the welfare system is an understatement. My friends down south are particularly worried but it’s clear that Scotland won’t be entirely insulated from this.
Perhaps one of the more positive policies that has come out of the SNP government has been its approach to the humane side of welfare. It’s never easy to ask for help but the way that so many people are shamed, victim-blamed or outright castigated for asking for that help is appalling. By contrast, someone I know who recently applied for the Scottish Adult Disability Payment reported that while it was a bit of a faff to go through the paperwork, they never felt like they weren’t being treated with dignity. I sincerely hope that the cuts in England don’t end up impacting the Block Grant to the point of compromising those devolved programmes though I fear that the remaining reserved programmes in Scotland almost certainly will be.
The message from UK Labour is quite the opposite. The party that used to pride itself on the principle “to each according to their need; from each according to their ability” has instead adopted the worst aspects of transactionalism introduced by the Conservatives. The new motto may as well be “To each, according to what they put in so long as we think they’re worthy of it”. “Worthy” now seems to no longer includes disabled young people who will face even tighter restrictions to disability payments if they’re under 22. As if illness, injury or genetics check the calendar before striking.
Even for people without disabilities face the prospect of vital lifeline payments being cut off if they happen to be unable to take a job within a certain (and as of the time of writing, unknown) period of time. “Work or starve” is back as Government policy but this time without the guarantee of the first part.
This isn’t all about money though. Yes, those welfare payments ARE a vital lifeline for many and the folk I know who receive them tell me how much of a relief they are in practice not just for addressing the additional needs of their disability (not that the relatively meagre payments often cover all of those costs) but in reducing the anxiety of living under a “work or starve” environment in general.
This is why I support a Universal Basic Income. None of us, disabled or otherwise, should live under the cloud of that anxiety. We should all be able to live without worrying about those basic needs not being met. And, as I’ve laid out in detail in previous articles such as this one, a UBI has been proven to be the best and most efficient means of delivering that future. All other mechanisms such as means-tested benefits, job guarantees without UBI, universal basic service schemes or non-cash transfers like food stamps are less efficient, less effective and less humane.
However this absolutely doesn’t mean that disability payments should be folded into such a UBI. Disability welfare schemes are and must always be additional to a UBI because the needs imposed by a disability is and always will be additional to those experienced by someone without.
Common Weal’s proposal for how we should go about disability social security is laid out in our National Care Service blueprint Caring for All and our local care delivery scheme Care in Your Community. Essentially, we need local Care Hubs that act as the care equivalent for your GP, which can assess your individual situation and build a properly resourced care package around you. Some of this might indeed involve an additional cash payment on top of a UBI, but it should also mean giving sufficient practical and professional support of whatever nature is required by the person to enable them to live as full and as dignified a life as we all expect for ourselves.
Many people with disabilities do work or want to work but can’t for reasons that won’t be solved by starving them into submission. Many of the barriers to work are not the fault of the individual but faults in housing, workplaces, employer discrimination, societal stigma or even in the nature of work itself. Labour’s view – shared with the Conservatives before them, except now doing the things that even they thought they couldn’t get away with – that the only worthy person is someone who sells as much of their time and skill as possible to someone else for that employer’s profit – is no longer a view that is fit for purpose in the 21st century.
Starving disabled people into submission won’t help them. It won’t create armies of more and better workers. It won’t even save any money because treating a condition made worse by poverty and lack of early stage support WILL be more expensive than the alterative. All it will do is disable people further and make our society poorer, meaner and grimmer for all us us in the process.
