Dying On Our Doorstep – How Britain Is Failing The Disabled

Dying On Our Doorstep – How Britain Is Failing The Disabled

A Freelance article from Gemma Hurst

In an ideal world, everyone in Britain would experience life from a level playing field, all having the same opportunities, and able to proceed through life according to their skills, abilities, and wherewithal rather than according to the circumstance of their birth or physicality. Unfortunately, this is not the case. We all experience different levels of opportunity. Furthermore, we all have different limitations, and even different upbringings and cultural outlooks which affect the opportunities we are offered. Much of this differentiation is what makes British society the vibrant, interesting mix that it is – life would, after all, be very boring if we were all exactly the same. However, some certainly have a lot more opportunity than others – and the Coalition’s policies appear designed to improve opportunity for the haves and to seriously reduce it for the have-nots. One of the groups being seriously affected by such policies are the disabled.

UK Uncut and Disabled People Against The Cuts. Photo: Jamie Kelsey Fry.
UK Uncut and Disabled People Against The Cuts. Photo: Jamie Kelsey Fry.

Taking From The Disabled To Give To The Rich

Those with a disability may have an awful lot to offer society. Most disabled people are capable of giving a lot, and certainly deserve the chance to live a normal, human lifestyle like everyone else.  However, they may also need a degree of help to achieve this. Usually through no fault of their own, they may require a certain amount of support, perhaps in the form of care, perhaps in the form of specialist equipment. They may also be unable to work in the same manner as more conventionally able individuals. Thus their opportunities are already limited. Rather than consigning such individuals to the scrapheap, a just and moral society would seek to level the playing field by providing a degree of financial assistance to such people through benefits, thus allowing them the opportunity to achieve their full potential – or at least to live as full a life as they can. The Coalition appears to disagree.  The less able seem, to them, nothing more than an inconvenience to whom as little aid as possible should be afforded. Consequently they have spent their tenure slashing benefits to the disabled and making it harder to claim disability benefit – all while affording various financial sops and tax breaks to the super-rich who have never wanted for anything. The money to cover these latter, incidentally, comes from slashed welfare and spending on public amenities like town halls, policing, and healthcare – all of which the disabled rely upon. Indeed, a Tory minister was overheard earlier this year mulling over the question of whether big business could save money by paying disabled employees less – earning a measly £2 an hour – as they are “not worth” [1] any more.

Disabled People Starving To Death

Disability Cuts poster
Disability Cuts poster

All of this is having a knock-on effect. Driven to the margins of society, the disabled are suffering even more than usual. In February of this year, a disabled man starved to death in Oxfordshire after benefit cuts left him with on £40 a week. He had been assessed by Atos Healthcare (under pressure from the government to cut disability benefits) as ‘fit for work’, yet, as the Oxford Mailreports, the inquest into his death found that he was “far from fit to hold down a job” [2]. Nor is this an isolated case. The Department for Work and Pensions has carried out sixtinvestigations into deaths as a direct result of disability benefit cuts since 2012 – and these are only the ones that have reached the attention of the government. Many more people are struggling, suffering, and dying quietly, without anybody taking any notice.  It gets worse, though. According to the Guardian, hate crimes against the disabled are at the “highest level since records began” [3]. Most commentators are in little to no doubt [4] that the cause of this is the ‘anti- scrounger’ rhetoric and propaganda both spouted and encouraged by the Coalition.

Exclusion From Opportunity

Disabled people are being excluded from opportunity due to cuts.
Disabled people are being excluded from opportunity due to cuts.

Many with disabilities are increasingly being excluded from many areas of our society by the removal of basic opportunities. For example, funding for disabled students has been cut for many universities, hitting their ability to cater to the needs of disabled students hard. Furthermore, many grants and allowances for disabled students are steadily being withdrawn. Disabled students may be unable to undertake the kind of jobs that more conventional students would do in order to earn money, and may also require specialist equipment in order to complete their studies – thus putting their expenses up while simultaneously eliminating their ability to earn those expenses.

While certain grants and funds are available for those who need them, they’re becoming fewer, and those which remain are getting harder and harder to access. Indeed, Disabled Students Allowances – the biggest and most reliable (which isn’t saying much) – source of disabled student funding is to be cut from 2015. The knock-on effect of all this will naturally be that bright, intellectual, but disabled students will struggle to fund their studies in the same way that their classmates can, and all but those disabled young people with super-rich parents will therefore be excluded from the opportunities offered by higher education.

A Morally Bankrupt Society

Disabled people do not choose their disability. It comes upon them as an accident of birth, of genetics and fate. It is no fault of their own, and punishing them for such an accident is heinous and wrong. While there will always be unscrupulous people who try to exploit the system, the number of taxpayers’ money lost through benefit fraud absolutely pales into insignificance when compared to the amount of money lost through tax evasion by corporations and the ultra-rich (whom the Coalition, incidentally, appear to have no intention whatsoever of ‘cracking down’ upon). It is certainly not worth cutting everyone’s benefits in order to winkle out the very few who are abusing the system. At the moment, this benefit-slashing and ‘scrounger’ rhetoric is hurting the most vulnerable people in our society – and, as Ghandi said, a society is measured by how it treats its weakest members. British society under the Coalition is scoring very low indeed on the Ghandi scale.

[1] Adam Withnall, “Lord Freud disabled wage comments: ‘Those words will haunt him’, says Tory

MPs as peer faces calls to resign”, The Independent, October 2014

[2] Katriona Ormiston, “Man starved after benefits were cut”, Oxford Mail, February 2014

[3] The Guardian, “Disability hate crime is at its highest level since records began

[4] Ben Riley-Smith, “Hate crimes against disabled people soar to record level”, The Independent,

June 2012

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