How Disabled People Were Singled Out as part of the Austerity Offensive
SOCIALIST DISABILITY GROUP MEETING
Register here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYpdemgqD0qHtC2Q-lBqGAVoJCAAKZMLXf3
The Socialist Disability Group
(SDG) is holding an online meeting on Friday 25 March called “SHAFTED — how disabled people found
themselves on the front line.”
Disabled people have been the main
sufferers of the pandemic, of the austerity that came before it and generally
of government policies. Now, new legislation will cut benefits, make it more
difficult to apply for help and cut many off from vital NHS services through
privatisation and enormous waiting lists. This can not go on. As Christine
Tongue of the SDG and the meeting’s organiser said:
We have to take action. We need a bold, grassroots fightback which will make our presence visible. It’s too easy for the world — especially politicians — to ignore people with disabilities. We’re not going to let that happen.
The main speaker at the meeting will be Paula Peters of
Disabled People Against the Cuts, a group known for taking direct action and
mounting imaginative protests.
But a special feature of the event will be contributions from
the floor. Christine said:
We will have members of our network telling their
own stories and saying what they would like politicians to do about their
problems. But able or disabled, we welcome all to this meeting.
Disability and illness is a lottery. Anyone can get it. The point about a
civilised society is that we recognise that we have a duty of care to those who
fall victim to disability.
My first experience of disability was when I was told I had
Hepatitis C in 2012. I went on to experience chronic liver disease and cirrhosis
of the liver. I had had hepatitis for 20+ years. I was however lucky in the
sense that new non-interferon treatments were coming on stream.
Interferon, which was the only method of treating Hep C previously
is an extremely toxic drug. I was first
treated with it in 2013, along with 2 other drugs, and after a couple of months
I discovered that although it was killing the virus it was also killing
me. I spent 18 days in intensive care as
a result.
In the summer of 2014 I was one of an initial 500 people nationally, part of a special government programme, who were judged to be the most sick, who were put on the new Harvoni treatment. You had to take 1 tablet a day for 3 month. Each tablet cost $1000 dollars even though it cost $1 to make. As Gilead Sciences, the company which made the drug freely admitted, they were charging what the market would bear, even though their pricing policy meant that thousands of people died as a result. What was worse was that most of the research for the drug had been carried out at Cardiff University. This is capitalism at its rawest. See Big Pharma Prepares to Profit From the Coronavirus
From 2013 to 2015 when I had a liver transplant I experienced
what it was like to be old and frail. Taking more than a few steps was an
effort. Walking to the shops was an ordeal. Taking part in political protests
was simply impossible and I had to withdraw from the Sodastream protests that
Brighton PSC were engaged in.
My first consciousness of what it was like to be disabled though
was when I was Vice-President Welfare of Brighton Polytechnic Student Union,
some 45 years ago! Disabled students who felt left out by the union suggested
that the best way of understanding what they experienced was for me, as the responsible
official, to navigate a campus in a wheelchair. Falmer was chosen as it was the
most hilly.
It was an eye opening experience to realise the difficulties
in reaching for handles that were too high or doors that were too heavy to open
or steps that made even getting into a building difficult. Toilets were even
more of an obstacle.
Things have improved since that time. Then disability toilets
were the exception. Automatic doors had
not yet made an appearance. Ramps instead of or in addition to stairs were very
much the exception. But if some of the
worst obstacles have been eliminated (& see Christine Tongue’s article for
the Isle of Thanet News below) then the attacks on disabled people’s right to a
decent living have not abated.
People won’t remember that in the 1970s there was no
disability discrimination legislation. That was only introduced under John
Major’s government as a result of our membership of the European Union. And the
first Act was made as weak as possible. It was, for example, possible to
justify both direct and indirect discrimination on grounds of cost whereas
today direct discrimination can never be justified. The same was true when age
discrimination laws were introduced.
Disability benefits have been under attack ever since the
introduction of Disability Living Allowance in 1992, which unified all previous
disability benefits and extended them to those with mental health difficulties.
DLA was a good benefit because it was not means tested and because other
earnings were disregarded. That was why it soon came under attack from New
Labour. A campaign by the Daily Mail and the tabloids was launched against
‘bogus’ disability claimants who we were told were bankrupting the country.
All Work Tests were introduced run by companies such as ATOS
with the clear purpose of getting as many people as possible off benefits.
Incapacity Benefit was abolished by New Labour and towards the end of the
Labour Government a Green Paper was issued by the Health Secretary Andy Burnham
which floated the option of abolition of DLA for the over 60s (after all
getting old means getting infirm!) or at the least abolishing Attendance
Allowance. Burnham himself refused
to deny that these options were on the table.
It was New Labour that set the scene for the Cameron
Government and Ian Duncan Smith’s attack on the living standards of claimants
generally and disabled claimants in particular. Introduced by the 2012 Welfare
Reform Act it was a replacement for DLA for all those above the age of 16. It
was meant to cut the cost of DLA by 20% whereas in fact it has risen.
Now that the COVID pandemic is considered by the government
to have gone away (which it hasn’t) we can expect further government attempts
to cut and restrict disability benefits as they embark on a new period of
austerity.
Below is a lightly edited article by Ellen Clifford in
Tribune in November 2020 and an article by Christine Tongue, of the Socialist Disability
Group and a Steering Committee member of the Socialist Labour Network.
Tony Greenstein
Britain’s
War on Disabled People
In 2016, the
UN said austerity had created a ‘human catastrophe’ for Britain’s disabled —
but the last decade has also seen unprecedented organising to fight back.
Prior to
2010, the UK government was known as a world leader on disability. A decision
was made under the Coalition government and carried forward by successive
Conservative administrations that this progress had gone too far. This marked
the first time in the history of modern social policy that things went
backwards for disabled people. This was done in order to make disabled people
pay for a financial crisis that they did not cause. It needed to be concealed
from the public. The way in which right-wing politicians and the media achieved
this was by creating a narrative that blamed disabled people themselves,
purposefully stoking fires of division and hatred.
What the
government did is one half of the story. The other half is the resistance
mounted by disabled people themselves. If the Tories imagined that disabled
people would be easy targets for their brutal cuts, they were wrong. Again and
again, the government was forced into U-turns and concessions. These discrete
wins along the way have not been able to halt the overall regression in
material conditions for disabled people, wiping away the hard-won gains of
generations of disabled campaigners before us. After more than a decade of
tireless resistance against austerity and welfare reform, the odds against us
have grown even greater.
Targeting Disabled People
In 2016, the
UK became the first country in the world to be found guilty of grave and
systematic violations of disabled people’s rights. This was the finding of an
unprecedented investigation by the UN Disability Committee into the impacts of
welfare reform and austerity measures. What was of concern was the rolling back
of the rights of disabled people, driven forward, the inquiry revealed, by
deliberate legislative and policy choices.
Regressive
measures, badged as government ‘reforms’, were pushed through by the Coalition
government in the face of sustained opposition. As a consequence, disabled
people experienced negative changes within all areas of our lives. In 2018, the
Equality and Human Rights Commission warned that
‘[d]isabled people are falling further behind in many areas, with many
disparities with non-disabled people increasing rather than reducing’, and they
called on the government to urgently adopt an ‘acute focus on improving life in
Britain for disabled people’.
Measures
implemented in the name of austerity and welfare reform have had a
disproportionate impact on disabled people. This was the truth behind David
Cameron’s lie that ‘we are all in it together’. Cuts to benefits (excluding
pensions) and local government made up 50 per cent of the 2010 austerity plan.
Disability and carers benefits make up about 40 per cent of non-pension
benefits and social care makes up 60 per cent of local government expenditure.
Thus, the decision to target spending reductions in these two areas
automatically led to extensive cuts to income and services for disabled people.
The
combination of cuts in benefits and services was found to hit disabled people
on average nine times harder than most other citizens in research carried out by
the Centre for Welfare Reform. For disabled people with the highest support
needs, the burden of cuts was found to be nineteen times that placed on most
other citizens. Contrary to the government’s repeated claim to be ‘protecting’
and ‘targeting resources’ on ‘the most vulnerable in society’, the cuts were
effectively aimed at disabled people.
At the same
time, decisions were made to benefit the rich and help households with the
highest incomes. A 2019 report from the Fabian Society identified how changes
to tax and benefit policies since 2010 have contributed to Britain’s crisis of
inequality, revealing that the government is providing more financial support
for the richest 20 per cent of households than the poorest 20 per cent.
Human Catastrophe
Evidence before us now and in our
inquiry procedure as published in our 2016 report reveals that social cut
policies have led to a human catastrophe in your country, totally neglecting
the vulnerable situation people with disabilities find themselves in.
– Theresia Degener, chair of the United Nations Committee on the Rights
of Persons with Disabilities
These words
were addressed to representatives of the UK government during the concluding
session of a routine public examination of the UK under the United Nations
Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It took place less than
a year after the government dismissed the findings of the committee’s special
investigation.
Death and
suicides linked to cuts and benefit changes are the most extreme example of the
human cost of austerity and welfare reform, but there have been many other
terrible impacts, including rising poverty, food-bank use, debt, survival
crime, and homelessness, in addition to dramatically escalating levels of
mental distress. A study by academics from Liverpool and Oxford Universities
published in 2015 found that reassessments for Incapacity Benefit from 2010 to
2013 were associated with an extra 590 suicides, 279,000 additional cases of
self-reported mental health problems and the prescribing of a further 752,000
anti-depressants. Victims of welfare reform who have died or taken their lives
as a direct consequence of benefit cuts are now a common item on daily media
coverage.
Legislation
and policies that have inflicted such suffering have also largely failed to
deliver their stated aims. The transition from Disability Living Allowance
(DLA) to Personal Independence Payment (PIP) was intended to save 20 per cent
compared with DLA remaining in place, but it appears to have cost around 15 to
20 per cent more. A report from the Office for Budget Responsibility
published in January 2019 estimated an overspend on the DLA/PIP budget of £2
billion, leaving an estimated £4.2 billion shortfall when compared to the
original savings target.
On a societal
level, cuts to local authority budgets threaten disabled people’s continued
existence in the community alongside non-disabled people. Funding cuts to
education and social care and a failure to invest in accessible social housing
are leading us towards physical re-segregation and institutionalisation.
Alongside this, there has been a fuelling of attitudes that ‘other’ and thereby
marginalise disabled people: on the one hand, growing disadvantage, resulting
from cuts to state-funded support and leading to greater reliance on charity,
has encouraged a pitying view of disability; on the other, hatred and hostility
towards disabled people have been enflamed by anti-benefit-claimant rhetoric
used by the government to justify welfare reform.
Political
Fallout
A government
does not attack its own citizens en masse without consequence. The
impacts of austerity and welfare reform on disabled people have played a
significant but overlooked role in the political upheaval of the last ten
years. In terms of retaining control of Westminster, the Tories were largely
correct in their assumption that — as Iain Duncan Smith observed — ‘[disabled people] don’t vote for us’,
and thus that their attacks on disabled people would not affect their chances
of re-election. Nevertheless, Cameron’s miscalculation on the EU referendum can
be attributed to his failure to adequately understand the impacts of his
policies and the bitter anger towards anything regarded as ‘establishment’.
Welfare
reform has politicised large swathes of people. Experiences where individuals
have their benefits stopped are obviously traumatic for those affected, but all
benefit claimants are now subject to a benefit assessment approach which is
personally humiliating. Trauma, confusion, and anger can turn to demoralisation
and distress, but they can also lead to politicisation and activism. Research
by the University of Essex and Inclusion London found that, in order to make
sense of their situation, claimants came to think about their difficulties
within the context of politics and Tory attacks on disabled people. Those who
adopted an attitude of resistance towards the system and/or became politically
engaged were better able to restore a sense of self-esteem that had been taken
from them by their interactions with the Department for Work and Pensions
(DWP).
Issues
affecting disabled people have the potential to cause far greater social
upheaval than the public and political profile of disability suggests. Disabled
people make up 22 per cent of the population, a figure that is often
underestimated. We are geographically and generationally dispersed across the
population. Issues relevant to us also affect our friends, family, neighbours,
and the range of workers whose jobs are linked to disability. Lack of recognition
for the social significance of disability issues within politics and the media
reinforces in those experiencing them the idea that their lives are not valued
by those in power, making them hungry for a change from the status quo.
Forefront of the Fightback
With the
Disabled People’s Movement (DPM) in decline from the mid-1990s, resistance from
2010 onwards can be characterised as a return to grassroots activism. In a
conscious departure from the identity politics era of disability campaigning,
new groups such as Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) were set up with the
explicit aim of building alliances and joining the wider anti-capitalist
movement.
One of the
ways in which the British government was able to get away with making war on
disabled people was by the sheer volume and complexity of the measures they
unleashed. Where disabled people and their allies succeeded in holding them
back was through intense and varied activity operating on many fronts and
involving many people, each making an invaluable contribution in their own way.
Resistance has used every tool at its disposal — from research, lobbying,
protests, endless legal challenges, awareness-raising, and direct action.
Collectively, the stakes are too high to give up and give in.
Since 2010,
campaigners have won significant victories such as forcing Atos, a global
corporation with a revenue measured in billions, out of its contract to deliver
the Work Capability Assessment. The government has been free to ignore
the UN disability committee findings but it was a considerable achievement for
grassroots disabled activists to secure the unprecedented special investigation
that took place from 2015–16. The findings served to validate the experiences
of millions of disabled people under attack from their own government. The
government’s failure to slash the DLA/PIP budget can be attributed to the hard
work of campaigners, claimants, advisers, and public lawyers who have
consistently resisted attempts by the DWP to introduce measures limiting eligibility
for the benefit.
Disabled
activists have been at the forefront of the anti-austerity movement. Despite
our efforts, the direction of government policy is further regression of
disabled people’s living standards. One of the impacts of this is that it is
becoming harder for disabled people to mobilise resistance.
The War Goes On
In December
2019, the most right-wing government in modern British history was re-elected
with a significantly increased majority.
This was
disastrous news for disabled people. Under Boris Johnson, the Conservatives now
had the parliamentary power not simply to carry on in the same direction with
the continuation of policies that have spread inequality, poverty, and
immiseration, but to ramp up their attacks and implement welfare reform
measures that they were previously beaten back from achieving.
An early
indication of what the election result meant for disabled people was the
decision announced in the New Year’s honours list to award Iain Duncan Smith a
knighthood. Duncan Smith had not held a ministerial appointment since his
period as secretary of state for work and pensions from 2010 to 2016. The
honour effectively endorsed the dismantling of the social security safety net
over which he presided. It also suggested full government commitment to rolling
out Duncan Smith’s big idea, Universal Credit, in spite of the well-evidenced
harms it has caused.
Into this
picture, we then had the Covid-19 outbreak. The pandemic exposed existing
inequalities within society even more starkly than a decade of austerity and
welfare reform had. Disabled people were at the same time most at risk from
coronavirus and also largely ignored in official responses to the pandemic. At
a time of great uncertainty and anxiety, disabled activists and health workers
had to challenge NHS guidelines that stated that disabled people were not a
priority for life-saving treatment. Two thirds of deaths from coronavirus in
the UK are disabled people. Between 15 March and 2 May, 22,500 disabled people
died from Covid-19 compared to 15,500 non-disabled people.
Campaigners
suspect that Boris Johnson’s original strategy of seeking to create ‘herd
immunity’ and the government’s failure to do more to protect disabled people
was part of a deliberate plan to remove from society those whose lives are
deemed to represent a cost burden on the state. This is not inconceivable. Both
Johnson and his close adviser Dominic Cummings have expressed views described
by researcher-activist Roddy Slorach as ‘textbook
examples of eugenic opinion’.
Speaking to
city bankers during his time as mayor of London, Johnson said:
Whatever you
think of the value of IQ tests it is surely relevant to a conversation about
equality that as many as 16 per cent of our species have an IQ below 85 while
about 2 per cent have an IQ above 130 … the harder you shake the pack the
easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top. And for one reason or
another — boardroom greed or, as I am assured, the natural and God-given talent
of boardroom inhabitants — the income gap between the top cornflakes and the
bottom cornflakes is getting wider than ever.
Inequality
is a state that Johnson and Cummings both regard as natural and even desirable
for the functioning of society. It is nevertheless important to remember that
the war against disabled people cannot just be attributed to individual
ministers or Tory governments. Its existence is bound up with the intrinsic
relationship between disability and capitalism.
What has
happened since 2010 is a sharp reflection of the fundamentally important role
that the category of disability plays within capitalist political economy,
where it serves to identify the less productive members of society and enables
a ‘weeding out’ from the rest of the population. Interrogating the relationship
between disability and capitalism is a powerful way to expose the inequalities
and cruelty of the system of exploitation under which we live. It is no wonder
then that disability issues are so hidden and misunderstood within mainstream
society: they need to be shrouded in myths and misconceptions in order to
obscure the true nature of capitalism.
Those of us
who want a fairer world must fight for improvements in the living conditions of
disabled people as part of — not in isolation from — the rest of the working
class. But our resistance must also be consciously situated within the struggle
to transcend capitalism itself. Only then can we guarantee freedom from
oppression and a society where diversity is truly valued.
Opinion
with Christine Tongue: Mentioning the unmentionables
Look away now if you feel squeamish about talk of lavs, pants
and pads and toilet issues in general.
My friend Mandy who has an undiagnosed neurological
problem, said to me “I sometimes can’t do two things at the same
time. Standing up from the loo and pulling up my pants was just too much today.
I fell flat on my face — hence the new bruises!”
My friend Sue, wheelchair user, has to use incontinence pads
at night when getting to the loo involves hoists and transfers to a special
bathroom wheel chair. But the pads she could get free from NHS supplies are not
comfortable or adequate. She has to buy her own. A large weekly expense.
Some disabled people have catheters into their bladder —you
pee into a bag beside your bed. It’s convenient but leaves you prone to
infection.
I’m not at that stage yet, but with my failing legs and
painful back, going to the loo is now a much more difficult process. Social
services have provided metal surrounds and raised toilet seats for my home. But
going outside your house is a minefield.
I’ve just had to get my long suffering partner to carry one
of my toilet frames to a friends house. Last time I used his loo I nearly fell
over trying to hold onto his bath and a door handle —the door opened, I lurched
into the cupboard etc etc. You get the picture….
Why aren’t all houses designed with potential disability in
mind. Whose mad idea was it to put in low toilets in modern bathrooms with no
grab rails around them? Most people are taller than me so have a long way to
haul themselves up from a low seat.
But public loos are not ideal. They may have wheelchair on
the door but it doesn’t mean all disabled people can use the space.
The disabled loo in Broadstairs harbour needs a “radar” key
to get in —just in case you able hooligans go in and use it for antisocial
behaviour I guess. It’s a kind of master key for most disabled public loos. Nothing
electronic about it and anyone can buy one. But for me, even though I now have
a radar key I bought on the internet, I would have to stand outside, reach for
my key, put my sticks in one hand, or prop them up on the wall in order to use
the key. Mandy might have fallen over by now.
You get inside and need to lock the door. Another balancing
act. But oh joy, two bars on each side of the loo to grab and lift yourself up
with. I wonder how others get on with washing their hands. For me it’s another
balance problem with no stick to lean on and sometimes a distance to the hand
dryer.
The other disabled loo at Broadstairs bandstand doesn’t need
a key and is easy to get into on my scooter — which gives you a safe stable
object to hang onto. Which you need because there’s a lack of grab rails and
the hand dryer is the other side of the room from the sink. Take a clean hanky
and give it a miss is my advice.
People using the dryer will inevitably drop water
on the floor. A wet floor and sticks is not good! Which is why I like to take
the scooter in with me. I can’t risk slipping. My bones are rebellious enough
without shaking them up sliding on a wet floor.
What I’m talking about is often down to basic design. You
won’t fall over if you have a grab rail in the right place. If you need pads
and special pants let’s make sure the people who need them get the best
available. As for public lavs, let’s make them accessible, clean, safe. Not
locked! Why not?
