Starting as He Means to Continue?

Imagine the uproar if a new (male) Minister for Women's first press article said 'well, we all know that they are all sluts', or if a new (white) Minister for Racial Equality's first article said 'well, we all know that they're all terrorists', but the (non-disabled) Minister for Disabled People fronts an article saying 'well, we all know that disabled people are all frauds and scroungers' and no one bats an eye. 

Yes, with DLA fraud at 0.3% the lowest of any benefit, new DWP Minister of State for Disabled People Mike Penning's first public act was to star in the latest* in the Hate Mail's ongoing demonisation of all disabled people as frauds and scroungers by claiming that DLA is riddled with people put there by Labour in an attempt to defraud the unemployment figures (apparently he's a bit hazy on the fact DLA is an In Work benefit) and that 94% have never had a medical assessment. As Sue Marsh eloquently points out, that might just be because in 94% of cases a DWP decision maker has decided there's really not much point in checking that an amputated limb has grown back, cerebral palsy has vanished overnight, or whatever.

Unfortunately as disabled people we're growing used to this. You wait years for justice and then along come three Ministers Against Disabled People in a row. First we had Miller, Miller the Cripple Killer, then the odious 'they get better' McVey, and now Penning, whose only prior contact with disability from a quick scout of Hansard appears to have been questions about disabled shipping while Undersecretary of State for Transport. If you look at his c.v. in more detail it doesn't get any more promising - squaddie in the Grenadier Guards (and IDS is an ex-Guards officer), fireman, junior minister at Transport, junior minister at Northern Ireland, and now us. We can be charitable and assume that he didn't come by his disablist views independently, but nothing in his background suggests anything likely to have generated an informed or remotely empowering attitude to disability. He was Shadow Minister for Health, but that's more likely to have driven him into the 'they're broken' Medical Model camp, amply reinforced by his coming of age in the relentlessly physical Army and Fire Service. Whatever his own views, it's clear that the institutional disablism of the Department of Work and Pensions (or maybe just IDS's SpAd), have thoroughly nobbled him in his first week in the job.

So once again disability advocates and activists are faced with dragging another Minister kicking and screaming into the 20th Century, and god forbid we manage to get one to understand the Social Model before they are moved on. It is clear the DWP's Unum-trained advocates of the perverted Bio-Psycho-Social-Model (aka 'the scroungers have only got themselves blame if they're too lazy to recover from a spinal cord injury') have already gotten their claws into Penning, but note that both Miller and McVey were promoted for what they did as Minister Against Disabled People, so clearly vilifying us in the media equals a job well done in Cameron's eyes. I'm not sure that even Miller or McVey started their ministerial stint with such an open attack on disabled people as frauds and scroungers, and neither were exactly slouches at that, so keep your eye on Penning, he may be the coming man.

Disablism, the one form of hate that's growing ever more popular, now with extra Ministerial approval....

*I'm not going to link to it, that just drives up their advertising revenue and convinces them that attacking disabled people gets plenty of page hits.

Edited to add: I may have been unreasonably positive about Penning, I've just seen his interview with Disability News Service: Spending on DLA and PIP will be cut next year, says new disability minister and apparently he knows all about disability because he's friends with Simon Weston and knows some disabled ex-rugby players *headdesk*  *headdesk*  *headdesk*

Guest post: Disability benefits and the self-made mouth #badd2012

This is a guest post from @indigojo_uk that originally appeared here. It is reproduced here as part of Blogging Against Disablism Day 2012 as it's a write up about a disablist appearing on the radio decrying benefit claimants.

Last Saturday night, there was a debate on the Stephen Nolan show, a late-night phone-in on the BBC station Radio 5 Live, in which the former Apprentice contestant Katie Hopkins, who styles herself “the only candidate to say ‘no’ to Sir Alan” [Alan Sugar of Amstrad, who runs the TV series, The Apprentice], defended the government’s cuts to disability and housing benefits and Lisa “Lisybabe” Egan and one of the other callers tried to oppose her. Hopkins is clearly of the opinion that disability benefits are given out to an awful lot of people who aren’t really disabled or don’t deserve them, as shown by this tweet:

If people's disability benefit was handed out from the top rung of a ladder I reckon most would climb the ladder to get it.

— Katie Hopkins (@KTHopkins) April 25, 2012

Her stance was that people need to rely on their own resources rather than the state as we live in “austere” times, a line that she trotted out again when Lisa reminded her that people had paid National Insurance and that the whole idea of an insurance scheme is that it pays out when things go wrong. As for housing benefit, she said she did not see why the state should pay for people to live in the south-east, without apparently realising that the majority of housing benefit recipients are actually in work. She also posted this rant about child benefits on her blog, claiming (without the slightest evidence, of course) that “for so many of our poorer families in this country the child does not benefit at all – but rather the overweight mother guzzling McDonalds with her large brown Primark bag bulging at her feet”. You can listen to the show here for the next week. (For non-British readers: a Primark bag does not signify affluence.)

The issue of housing benefit is not the main concern here, except to state that the majority of recipients are in fact in work, and much of it pays for the shortage of affordable housing stock, the political decision to sell off council houses, and the runaway house price inflation caused by the credit boom which ended in 2008. Disability benefits are a burden society has always had in one form or another, because there have always been people whose physical or mental condition, whether temporary or permanent, either does not allow them to work, or makes them a less attractive proposition to employers for one reason or another. There are two separate categories of disability benefit: the Disability Living Allowance, which covers the cost of being disabled (such as for care and mobility aids) and is paid regardless of whether the recipient is working — indeed, it may help them remain in work — and the former Incapacity Benefit, which supported people who were unable to work, whether due to illness or a complication of their disability. Many of those who currently receive DLA would previously have been institutionalised, a practice which ended because the public realised that there were rampant abuses, the care was often impersonal, taking no account of people’s needs and abilities, and there was little dignity or privacy in many of them, besides the fact that the vast majority of people do not need to be housed apart from their families and the community. They were paid for out of state expense as well, and the land they stood on is now in many cases prime real estate and the grand buildings have been demolished or converted into luxury flats, so a return to that is going to be extremely expensive as well as unsatisfactory for all concerned.

Hopkins introduced herself by saying that “as a taxpayer” it had become obvious to her that people could live where they choose, have as many children as they choose, and smoke if they choose and have the state pay for the consequences of that, and that benefits should be a privilege and that people should “look to themselves” rather than the state to provide for them. She also invited the others to come with her on “claimants’ day” to the benefit office to see people collecting their benefits in their pyjamas. (I was on Job Seekers’ Allowance for two years and I almost never saw people in the Job Centre in their pyjamas.) Lisa asked her if, in the event of her getting cancer or having an accident, she would try to use the national insurance contributions she had paid, and Hopkins replied no, that she had savings that would provide for her family in such circumstances, money she had made by “grafting” and getting up at 5:30am every morning to provide for her family. Further enquiries reveal that Hopkins has epilepsy, and if she expects everyone to rely on themselves rather than the state, she should explain whether she has used the NHS to provide either the medication or the care she needs such as consultations to decide which medications to take and so on, and hospitalisation in the event of a severe seizure. In any case, she is not the only one who gets up at that time or earlier, and the majority of us do not make a lot of money because our jobs do not pay us that much. Hopkins got lucky; she does not mention on her website that she invented anything or has actually run a business doing anything other than selling advice to other businesspeople and public speaking. She is, in other words, a professional mouth, someone with opinions who gets paid for them.

When Egan asked her if she really was so cruel as to insist that people with cancer not receive help from the state, she fell back on her claim that the benefit system was too generous. She claimed that the people she “accosts” in their pyjamas get “home allowance” of up to £400, job seekers’ allowance, disability allowance “although they’ve managed to walk very well to the job centre”, and that it makes it not worth your while to work part-time. In fact, having been on JSA, the last time I received it, it was about £65 per week, which is about a day and a half’s average pay and just enough to buy the bare essentials for a week with. The reason it is “not worth your while to work” is because the money is deducted from your allowance and the allowance is stopped if you have two days’ work that week, even if it is a one-off booking through an agency during a slump, so unless you get a permanent job or a prospect of a lot of casual work, accepting a work booking could well leave you worse off. This is simply a consequence of the version of means testing that is used for JSA, and it is one of a number of circumstances in which means testing is a proven disincentive to work.

Nobody really confronted Hopkins with why some benefits need to be paid, and disability benefits in particular. We either pay for people with disabilities to live at home, and for the necessary adaptations and home care arrangements, or we pay for them to live in a care facility, when the land is bought, and they’re built, and all the cooks, cleaners, nurses, managers and others are hired, at huge expense — there is no third option, unless you count leaving them to die or leaving them to beg on the streets. Some people with disabilities can work, and others can if they are provided with some assistance, or if people help them to find a niche they can cope with working in, or helps them through (or past) the interview process, and the benefits made to these people may be more than recouped in the taxes they pay because they are then able to work. Others cannot, either because they do not have the intellectual capacity, or because their physical limitations make it impractical, or because their health complications or mental health problems mean they will not be able to work reliably, or because prejudice or inconvenience means people will not hire them. Of course, some people with disabilities are very wealthy and can afford to pay for care themselves, and some can run their own business, but this is not the majority and the costs of being disabled or of having a long-term medical condition add considerably to the cost of living, which is why we have a health service and a welfare system.

Hopkins clearly does not know much about what she is talking about here, only that she doesn’t want to pay to finance anyone else’s lifestyle. She promotes herself as some sort of “self-made”, self-employed person who “tells it like it is” as a social commentator and public speaker (reinforcing her “tough” image by boasting that she went to the Sandhurst military officers’ academy), but on this evidence that seems to consist of making bigoted and ill-informed comments that might go down well with all the well-paid drunks at a corporate party but do not add much to this discussion. There is a lot of talk about scroungers in pyjamas claiming benefits that were enough to live on comfortably without working, yet no solution has been given as to how to get the idlers off benefits without impoverishing people who are in real need and are unable to work; the government did not come up with one and neither has she. Yet again, British talk radio allows a serious and important debate to descend into a slanging match by giving undue prominence to an opinionated but uninformed guest — at the expense of the licence fee payer!

Image source: The Sun.

Two Legs Better

Orwell's Animal Farm is an allegory about the corruptive influences of power under Stalinism, but sitting here tonight I find myself applying that same allegory to Labour.

Yesterday, at the Labour Party Conference, Ed Miliband held a Q&A session and was challenged by disability activist Kaliya Franklin (aka @BendyGirl, author of Benefit Scrounging Scum ) over his attitudes to disability. Charged by Kaliya that he was "reinforcing the destructive rhetoric" of the ConDems towards disabled benefit recipients, particularly through the disabled man he lambasted earlier this year as just as irresponsible as any banker because he hadn't been able to find work, attitudes repeated in his keynote speech on Tuesday, Miliband responded: "The problem is I met his next-door neighbours … and they didn't actually refer to him, but they said: 'Our problem is we are working incredibly hard and we are worried we are paying for people who can't work.'" And as far as Ed is concerned, that justifies condemning that man, and all disabled benefit recipients by extension. No thought that much of the impact of disability is invisible, no thought that the neighbours might just possibly be disablist, just he's disabled, they're angry, and they have more votes.

As Orwell had it as things went wrong for the lesser animals, 'Four Legs Good, But Two Legs Better'.
 
Now the interesting part of this from my personal perspective is that earlier this year I was interviewed by BBC South East about my experience of disability hate crime. One of the points that I made, and one that was backed on air by the disability charity Scope and other experts, was that the rise in hate crime results at least in part from government propaganda intended to confirm non-disabled people in their impression that disabled benefit recipients are all frauds and slackers. The Conservatives trotted out Mark Reckless, MP for Rochester and Chatham, to defend themselves. How did he do that? By saying that if people thought those around them were receiving disability benefits without deserving them, then they were fully entitled to be angry. No thought that much disability is invisible, no thought that the neighbours might just possibly be disablist, just he's disabled, they're angry, and they have more votes.

Two politicians, one a hardline Conservative, one the leader of the Labour Party, both making exactly the same argument to justify their attitude that criticism of disabled benefit recipients by those who know nothing about them is perfectly justified.

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Tories Compete to Plumb the Lowest Depths

A few weeks ago I commented on Facebook that the Tories seemed to have discovered a cache of 'The New Statesman' episodes that were rejected for being too outrageous even for Alan B'Stard at the heyday of Thatcherism and were having a competition amongst themselves to see who could propose the most outrageous idea of all.

Today Philip Davies MP (Conservative, Shipley), seized the prize. Christopher Chope MP (Conservative, Christchurch) was front-runner with his private member's Employment Opportunities Bill, aiming to undermine the minimum wage by creating a situation in which it would be legal for individual workers to be bullied into opting out of the Minimum Wage, but Davies leapt into the lead by using the debate on that bill to propose that disabled people should offer to work for less as they "cannot be as productive in their work".

Davies openly acknowledged the disablism that denies disabled people the opportunity to enter the workplace, no matter what the Equality Act might say, but, rather than challenging his Tory-voting chums over their open contempt for the law, proposes that the law should be changed to allow disabled workers to be treated as an underclass of workers, who can expect to see demands that we work for less than the minimum wage if we want a job.

Other Tories were quick enough to condemn him, but words are easy. Davies admitted the awkward truth, that disabled people face near ubiquitous discrimination in finding work. Abusing us off ESA and IB won't fix that, condemning us as scroungers won't fix that, the only solution is to take the fight into the HR departments and the Directors' offices and force them to live up to the promises of the Equality Act (an act Davies voted against).

Are the Tories willing to put their actions where their mouths are? Or did Davies simply say what they really think?

Miliband: The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

‎"We should not demonise people anywhere in society."

So says Ed Miliband, while busy demonising a disabled benefit claimant he claims he met on the campaign trail.

So what exactly did Ed think he was doing with his example of the man on Incapacity Benefit? Since when has labelling an individual person as 'irresponsible' in a speech as head of the Labour Party, and through him disabled benefit claimants en masse, if not disabled people as a whole, not counted as demonising them?

I am currently in the ESA Work Related Activities Group, presumably where Ed thinks that man should be. I had 22 years in a good job as a software engineer, I've been unemployed since the end of 2008, but for me to get a job now I first need an improvement in my medical situation, which has worsened since my redundancy: can't sit, can't stand, can't reliably use my left arm is a bad combination for just about any job you can think of. I have been chasing that medical improvement for the past 2 years, but progress is slow, we are barely holding things back from getting worse, never mind making them better. Yet even if I can get an improvement in my situation to about where I was when I was made redundant (i.e. to merely can't sit, can't stand), I face a situation where multiple employment consultants have told me I have no hope of a job in the private sector and not much more hope of a job in the public sector.

The problem isn't my willingness to work, been there, done that. The problem isn't my willingness to try and find jobs in a different sector, been there and done that too. My problem is finding an employer who is within my very limited commute radius of about 10-15 minutes driving (all my back will stand), and, biggest ask of all, who is willing to offer me a job no matter my disability and who has the flexibility to accomodate someone who will probably need considerable reasonable adjustments (such as needing to work in a prone position). And what goes for me also goes for the disabled person using a wheelchair, a guide-dog, personal assistants or whatever. The only irresponsible thing about our employment situation is not acknowledging the difficulties we face, both practical in terms of accomodations to disability, and discriminatory in the attitudes of recruiters and employers towards potential employees with disabilities.

Demonising us won't help, nor will driving disabled benefit claimants through harsher and harsher assessment regimes and 'Work Programmes'. 'The floggings will continue until morale improves' has never been the most productive of management techniques. We need someone to shine the harsh light of public opinion on the willingness of British employers to employ disabled people. They even collected the figures for us, trying to proclaim that less than 30% of them being willing to consider employing a disabled person was some kind of triumph of equality. Where is the political party willing to take up this opportunity, challenge the disablist attitudes and bring about a real change in the attitudes of employers, creating the opportunity for disabled people to take part in the labour market as equals? It certainly seems the contemporary Labour Party isn't up to the job.

I will be generous and assume Ed is completely clueless about the kind of day to day discrimination disabled people are facing as a result of being branded workshy by the DWP's continuing campaign of demonisation (a campaign that sadly began under Labour), but today the leader of the Labour Party deliberately used a disabled man as a negative example and by doing that he has worsened the acceptance of every disabled person in the country. And isn't that a shameful thing.

Pontius Grayling has Spoken

So the Work and Pensions Committee had Chris Grayling over for a little chat, and the members chose to take him to task over the hatred of disabled people the DWP press releases on disability benefits are whipping up in the tabloid press, spilling out from there into the general population.

Mr Grayling promptly claimed himself "bemused" (not 'horrified'?) at how the tabloids chose to portray the DWP press releases, claiming he had been criticised for saying benefit claimants shouldn't be called 'scroungers' -- criticised by whom, Mr Grayling? Saying it when?

If DWP is so lily-white and innocent of all wrong, why exactly did it release press releases proclaiming 70% of people on IB were fit to work, when that 70% consisted of 40% in the Work Related Activity Group who by definition are not currently fit to work, and 30% placed on JSA, but still very much disabled. Why has DWP been trawling through the IB stats, looking for the most seemingly outrageous claims it can find? Why did the Prime Minister feel it necessary to proclaim on national news that disabled people whose disability causes addiction or obesity were not fit to receive benefits -- ever heard of Praeder-Willi Syndrome, Mr Grayling?

You have said much the same thing about being 'bemused' by the results before, Mr Grayling, and since then Scope has found it necessary to warn the government of the rise in disability hate crimes as a result of these press releases, so you can't claim to be surprised by the hatemongering headlines, and yet still your press releases go out. And each one seems to come with its anonymous quotes from 'a source close to the reforms', snidely wondering things like why someone with a mere bad back might need to claim benefit.

And then there is Polly Toynbee, on the list to receive all DWP press releases, yet strangely not receiving this latest one. And when she enquires about it, what is she told? That it was sent only to a small number of “key contacts”. That would be the Tory rags you can rely on for the 'bemusing' headlines, then Mr. Grayling?

So the DWP dug up the most extreme examples it could find, sent them only to the "key contacts" known to take the most outrageous stance possible, briefed them to take an extremely negative attitude towards people with long term spinal conditions, and yet Mr Grayling proclaims himself to be 'bemused'. Do you also proclaim yourself to be clueless, Mr Grayling? Or might your 'bemusement' relate to people actually having the audacity to try and hold you responsible for the hatred you are sowing?

Pilate, it seems, has washed his hands of responsibility for whatever the mob may do.

Another Poison-Pen Letter from IDS

So on Saturday IDS escalated the hate. His boss, David Cameron, crossed the line into direct attacks on disabled people last month with his open attempt to demonise those whose disabilities lead to addiction or obesity, attacks which led Scope and the Guardian to point out that government attacks were leading to increasing rates of Disability Hate Crime, but on Saturday his pet attack-dog ramped up the attack with more hate-filled articles from the sockpuppets at the Tory Rags. This time it isn’t just disabled people with addictions or obesity who are being openly derided as frauds and not worthy of benefits, the new target is DLA recipients, and particularly disabled people whose disability manifests through long-term spinal conditions, or as IDS’s anonymous source would have us believe, a mere ‘bad back’.

I talked about the myth of the ‘bad back’ a few weeks ago in That Proverbial ‘Bad Back’ , the myth that ‘bad-backs’ are some kind of scrounger’s charter or somehow less than other disabilities that is. My ‘bad back’ has destroyed my career and seriously limited the life I can live, even as I lie here to write this (sitting would be unbearable) it is causing me a noticeable amount of pain. No amount of money could compensate me for the pain I experience, and ESA, DLA HRM and DLA HRC combined wouldn’t come close to replacing the salary I have lost because of my ‘bad back’, even if I actually received them all – of those three benefits I only actually get ESA, the thought of putting myself through the ATOS ordeal again for DLA HRM is simply too much to face right now (DLA HRC, even LRC, I clearly have no hope of claiming). I did apply for DLA several years ago, but not knowing how to navigate the labyrinth didn’t get past the first hurdle of using the appropriate terms on the form rather than simply naively explaining how disabled I am (yes, there are hurdles, no matter what the Tories, the DWP and the attack-hacks in the tabloids would have us believe). I have been trying to gather the evidence to support another claim for several years now, side-by-side with trying to get myself the treatment to get back into the workforce, but the cuts to the NHS are making that a dreadfully slow process (so slow I’m actually going backwards), not helped when my local rheumatology department tell me that my ‘bad back’ is so complex that they don’t actually have anyone qualified to look at it in its entirety…

Yes, you didn’t read that wrong, even after having gone through the horror of the WCA test, and passing, even with my local rheumatology department struggling to cope, my disability is not clearly severe enough to entitle me to the benefit the Tories are trying to convince people is handed out like Smarties at a kid’s party.

But let’s get back to the tabloids, IDS, and their ‘anonymous source’. It’s amazing the courage that comes from having a tame journalist willing to quote you anonymously as ‘a source close to the reforms’, no need to hold back on the vitriol you can turn on disabled people. What we see here is demonization by insinuation. No direct statements, just the nudge-nudge, wink-wink, they’re all at it you know of your friendly neighbourhood poison-pen letter. Phrases like ‘a huge increase’ and ‘cash payments’ are clearly designed to imply that the sums involved are significant and somehow akin to backhanders, not the less than £20 a week that DLA is for many people, not the £51.40 per week that HRM claimants are expected to sacrifice for those ‘free’ Motability cars that provoke so much bitter jealousy against us (nope, I don’t get one of those either).

The ‘anonymous source’ then goes on to say “We are going to bring in a new assessment and regular checks to make sure support is getting to those who need it.” There’s a term to describe this, lying. DLA already has an assessment and regular checks, with stressful three-yearly renewals regularly terrorising disabled people, but the Tories and their tame attack dogs are trying, successfully, to mislead the tabloids’ core readership into believing that disability benefits are handed out just for the asking to people who fake their disabilities in order to scrounge from the State. The fact that seriously disabled people live in terror of losing their DLA in the Kafka-esque lottery of renewal, the intrusive medical checking, the thuggery of ATOS, these are inconvenient truths that they work to hide from their readership, treating them with precisely the same contempt they display towards us.

The Tories aren’t interested in seeing that support is getting to those who need it, if they were then they would never have closed the Independent Living Fund that provides for people with the most profound disabilities of all, it is just one more big lie to hide the truth from people by claiming the absolute opposite. The replacement for DLA, PIP, is simply an excuse to harden the rules and exclude 25% of the people currently in receipt of DLA, no matter their level of disability. Claims that it is meant to replace a broken system are simply more lies, DLA works, the aim is not to fix it, but to cut the numbers able to claim it, the predetermined percentage betrays that for all to see, yet the Tories lack the guts to admit it. Easier by far to demonise disabled people and convince the country that we deserve the cuts, after all, we’re only disabled, we probably vote Labour, what does it matter to the Tories if we’re attacked in the street as a result.

The only thing that surprises me about this is that I had thought that depression would be the next disability to be attacked, piggybacking on society’s poorly hidden fear of mental illness, with spinal conditions following afterwards. There is a clear strategy behind the attacks on us since the turn of the year. Before that the focus was simply on demonising us all as scroungers, but then opposition started to cohere and find a voice, whether from disabled people themselves, as seen in WTB, DPAC and the Broken of Britain, or from charities, campaigning groups, the Guardian alone amongst the national dailies, and even from members of the general public who had realised what the propaganda campaign really amounted to. Faced with a potential backlash, the Tory campaign has taken a new tack, seeking not just to undermine us en masse, but to divide and rule by targeting and demonising individual sectors of the disability community, implying that the people who fall within those sectors aren’t really disabled, and actively deserve everything that happens to them. Obesity and addiction have already had their turn in the stocks, on Saturday it was the turn of spinal conditions, I suspect depression and mental health will see their turn soon enough. We actually have a term for this in the disability community, we call it the Hierarchy of Disability and I have written before on why it is such a divisive, dangerous idea even in normal disabled life, but now we see someone actively seeking to use it against us for political ends and I am unavoidably reminded of the (sadly forgotten) earliest form of Pastor Martin Neimoller’s poem:

First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the sick, the so-called incurables, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't mentally ill.

Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me

Together we stand, divided we fall.

Rounding out Saturday’s diatribe of hate is the contemptible disdain of Martin Sinclair, the mouthpiece of the ‘Tax Payer’s Alliance’ who states DLA claimants are “a particularly unwelcome burden” on taxpayers, failing to acknowledge that a great many DLA recipients are taxpayers. Apparently Mr Sinclair doesn’t agree that part of the role of the state, the very reason we pay it tax, is to support those of us who, through disability, face extra financial burdens. I was a taxpayer for twenty-three years, Mr Sinclair, given my choices I still would be, and there are several million more disabled people like me who either pay taxes, have paid taxes, or would love to have the opportunity to pay taxes. Doesn’t your organisation feel an obligation to represent us too, or does the fact that we are who we are make us beneath your notice, too likely to vote for the wrong party, ultimately just unspeakably disabled?

There is one final name I haven’t talked about in this catalogue of shame, the Liberal-Democrats. This is the party that, even more than Labour, has traditionally portrayed itself as the party that puts Social Justice first, ahead even of political power, the party that currently shares in the government of the country alongside the Tories. So where exactly does your party stand on this, Mr Clegg? People like Danny Alexander were vocal enough about the problems arising from ATOS assessments in Opposition, but as soon as a ministerial position was wafted under their noses they became strangely silent. Less than three months ago your party’s Spring Conference, specifically addressing DLA Mobility Component, made it clear to the parliamentary party that attacks on disabled people had gone too far, finding it necessary to remind you of your obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Your party has spoken, Mr Clegg, but they, and we, are still waiting for your reply….

Disabled People, Still Labour's Whipping Boy....

I've just read the text of Ed Miliband's latest speech, and it's full of carefully turned phrases on how Labour can be a real prospect at the next election, of how it will make Britain a land fit for those who work hard and deserve the rewards of that labour, and that's all to the good.

But then you come to this statement:

"People felt particularly angry about those they felt could work, but didn't, as making ends meet became more and more of a struggle.

We were too relaxed about that too."

Let's be absolutely clear about this, the head of the Labour Party, the Leader of the Opposition, the supposed voice of social justice, just said that one of the reasons they lost the election is that they didn't put the boot into disabled people hard enough.

He then has the nerve to claim:

"In power after 1997 we did something that few countries managed to do - stem the rising tide of inequality.

We did this by redistributing through the tax and benefit system."

So clearly as disabled people we were wrong to complain about the calculated campaign of demonizing vitriol pouring out of DWP and their sockpuppet hatemongers in the tabloids, the WCA tests carefully designed to exclude many hundreds of thousands of disabled people, the appalling manner in which ATOS were allowed, if not actively encouraged, to enforce those tests; it was all done in the name of equality. Or maybe not.

Maybe the truth is that Labour saw us as convenient whipping boys who could be abused in the name of scoring a few points with the Little-Englanders who love to hate anyone who fails to fit their fairytale of England, maybe the truth is that they still do. No matter what I say, there aren't words to adequately express my contempt for this speech and what it reveals about the disablist thinking at the heart of Labour's leadership that sees us as a convenient pawn to sacrifice in their lust for power.

A Truth No Longer Fit for the BBC

Mark Easton, the BBC's Home Editor, posted a piece on his blog taking apart last week's DWP attack on us. It's a good, solid article with some actual journalism behind it, considerably better than most coverage out of the BBC in the past fortnight, and points out that the truth is something very considerably different to what the DWP's ministers are trying to have us believe.

But then we get to the comment column, which seems to have been lifted from the Daily Heil and is rife with disablist attacks on disabled benefit claimants. Now remember that the BBC is required to take action against disablism as part of its Public Sector Equality Duty, so surely there's something wrong here? Surely every disablist message is in flagrant breach of the house rules? There are also people like me fighting back, but when I posted a piece to show that Mark's article didn't go far enough, that the deliberate distortion of the truth was far greater than even he had assumed, it vanished into the mists of moderation, not just referred to their normal moderators, but booted up the stack to some sort of uber-moderation. And today they've decided it's 'defamatory' and wiped it entirely.

I talked about 'deliberate distortion of the truth' in the preceding paragraph, but the English language has a shorter term for it, we call it lying, and that's the term I used to sum up what Chris Grayling, the DWP, and Labour before them were doing. And that seems to be where the BBC has a problem. It's easy to demonstrate that the DWP press releases deliberately distort the truth and that they reflect Chris Grayling's deliberate attempts to mislead the public, because he's made exactly the same assaults on us verbally, and that means that my statements are no less than the truth and in the public interest, which therefore cannot be defamation. It is in fact exactly the same conclusion reached by Mark Easton's article. But Auntie Beeb is apparently scared to allow the logical conclusion of its own article to be stated aloud, just as it is scared to enforce its own obligation, both moral and legal, to take a stand against disablism.

So here's that truth that is no longer fit for the BBC, unedited and in my own words:

There's the start of a good article here. I say 'the start' because the reality is even more outrageous than Mark paints it and certainly bears little relation to the twisted 'facts' of the DWP's propaganda -- this is the second four day weekend in a row where they've launched an assault on disabled people, you might almost think they were scared of informed debate...

The truth is that I probably became one of those statistics for withdrawn claims last year. I'm disabled with several different spinal injuries and chronic pain syndrome (and maybe some other stuff -- disability is complicated). When I was finally made redundant, after 4 years of fighting to keep my job and taking my ex-employer to an Employment Tribunal for disability discrimination, I tried claiming JSA, but JCP can't cope with you if you're disabled, can't cope with you if you're highly qualified and god help you if you're both. So in the end, after complaints to ministerial level and abject apologies, JCP asked me to move to ESA.

So I put in my application and laboured through the massive ESA50 form, taking about 9 hours to complete it, and that for someone with considerable writing skills and the ability to explain themselves concisely and clearly. Then came the ATOS WCA assessment. ATOS had been warned in advance that I needed an adjustable chair to have any hope of getting through the assessment, inability to sit for any time, or stand, or sometimes even lie down without severe pain being at the core of my disability, my inability to work and therefore my entire claim. No chair. So we abandoned the assessment at the cost of a wasted trip and considerable pain. But the pain continued to increase even after I got home and I spent the next week not knowing even what day it was, the months after wandering around in a daze from the doubled level of painkillers. In the meantime ATOS called me in for another assessment, but it was months before I was well enough to catch up with my mail and only on receiving a letter four months later telling me my claim had been cancelled was I able to chase through the system and find that ATOS had told DWP I had failed to attend the WCA, carefully omitting to mention their failure to provide the required reasonable adjustment.

Common sense prevailed, with the definite sense from DWP of 'God, not another ATOS cock-up!', and my claim was reinstated. My second WCA was barely better than the first -- the details can be read on Where's the Benefit -- but the ultimate result was that I was placed in the ESA WRAG as clearly not currently fit for work.

And yet for several months, possibly even to this day depending on how the reinstated claim was handled, I would have been one of those statistics for withdrawn claims, supposed evidence of fraudulent intent. It was only my bullheadedness and refusal to give up that got me through, ATOS threw every obstable in my path, and for many disabled people, physically disabled as well as mental, the sheer stress of a claim, the utter contempt for disabled people visible in inaccessible forms, inaccessible centres and the contemptuous manner of the medical professionals will result in claims being withdrawn by people with every right to be placed in the WRAG or even the Support Group.

On top of the claims withdrawn due to the stress placed on claimants, we then need to add those JSA claimants parked onto ESA for a week or two because they are temporarily unable to look for work due to illness, even if they're expected to recover long before the assessment, and certainly not to pass the assessment if their illness lasts that long. Or people in employment who have exhausted SSP but will soon recover. Or people with genuine claims who unexpectedly improve. Or people made redundant for narrowly specific medical reasons, say being medically unfit to hold a PSV license, who are required to file for ESA rather than JSA, even with a disability so narrow that they are guaranteed to fail the WCA, even though there's a good chance of them finding another job before the assessment and withdrawing their claim.

The numbers of withdrawn claims aren't evidence of people attempting to defraud the system, that's Chris Grayling and the DWP (and Labour before them) deliberately lying in order to mislead you. The numbers of withdrawn claims are in fact evidence of the system working precisely as designed. The evidence for this is readily accessible, on disability sides, charity sites, advocacy sites, but the Tory Rags, and now it seems the BBC as well, can't be bothered to do basic research and just run with Grayling's hate-filled spite.

Mark is an honourable exception (though needs to dig a little deeper), but when did journalists lose the ability to do basic research and turn into government propaganda mouthpieces?

#badd2011 Vulnerability

The government keep banging on about how benefit reforms will still see the "most vulnerable" supported.

But what do they mean by "vulnerable"? Innately I don't think of myself as vulnerable, I'm confident and articulate enough to stand up for myself (metaphorically at least). Despite my brittle bones I've stepped into the middle of a physical fight to break it up on many an occasion because I felt the benefits of doing so outweighed any "vulnerability" on my part. (And for the record it's never resulted in me getting punched. Something about people not wanting to hit a speccy disabled girl.)

But this government, with their cuts and their propaganda, are making me vulnerable.

Is this disablism though? Abso-bleeding-lutely when so many of the cuts and so much of the hate is aimed at us.

I'm vulnerable because I'm facing a future with no income because the DWP keep deciding ill people are allegedly "fit for work". If I end up losing everything how can I go on living? Other disabled people have already killed themselves because they lost their income. I'm not suicidal at the moment, I have no reason to be. But I'm vulnerable to finding myself suicidal in the near future because of the government.

Lets imagine I do get to keep my income replacement benefit (currently IB, soon to be ESA) and housing benefit. I'm still at risk of losing my Disability Living Allowance. DLA is a benefit paid to cover some of the extra costs of being disabled. Without my DLA I won't be able to shop to get food in. I currently have a Motability car, which I will lose if I'm one of the 1 in 5 DLA claimants who'll lose their money. I know some people who don't/can't drive who use their DLA to pay for online supermarket deliveries, without my DLA that'll be out of my price range. So I'm vulnerable to, you know, starvation thanks to the government's disablist cuts.

Then there's care funding. At the moment I don't get direct payments. I've toyed with the idea of applying but because there's so much paperwork involved it's less work to just struggle with domestic tasks myself and then guzzle painkillers in a House-esque fashion afterwards. As I smash up more joints that balance will change and I'll eventually pass the tipping point where the paperwork will become the easier of the two options. I used to live in one of the few local authorities in the country that provided care packages for people assessed as having less than "substantial" needs. Not any more. It's one of the things that got cut in my local council's budget this year. So if I sustain an injury (likely what with having brittle bones) I'm vulnerable to getting completely stuck and being unable to manage simple things like cooking because the council won't give me any assistance.

Thanks to the propaganda we see daily in papers like the Daily Mail and Express - encouraged by the government with their "scrounger" rhetoric and DWP press releases filled with half truths - I'm now more vulnerable to hate crime and being falsely accused of benefit fraud.

These brutal, unnecessary, unfair and disablist cuts are creating a raft of vulnerable people like me. People who are only vulnerable because of this government's actions.

If they truly cared about protecting us they wouldn't have put us in this position in the first place.

#BADD2011 Integrity, Honesty, Objectivity, Impartiality

Today is Blogging Against Disablism Day, when bloggers around the world get together to blog against the disablism that makes life so unnecessarily difficult for disabled people. Sadly, this year those of us in the UK are operating in a target-rich environment, able to turn our focus on not just individuals and the odd organisation, but media en masse, the Civil Service, politicians, and, most notably, our Prime Minister, David Cameron.

That Cameron’s government is hostile to disabled people is no great revelation, we have been subject to a string of bigoted press releases from the Department of Work and Pensions under his henchman, Chris Grayling, ever since they got into power. The structure of the press releases: data without context, damning headlines that are all too easily shown to be false; even their timing, the last two immediately before four-day weekends to prevent any organised response or reasoned debate, all too readily betray the deliberate intent to smear disabled benefit claimants, and all disabled people alongside them, as feckless scroungers, swinging the lead to avoid working a single real day in their lives. That the Tory Rags should run so eagerly with the ‘story’ isn’t surprising, after all their core readership of Little-Englanders aren’t happy without a minority to hate, but lately even the BBC seems to be falling for the government line. There are scores of analyses out there of the data and the twisted way that the press releases are put together, several of us here on WTB have taken them apart, so have other disabled campaigners, charities, advocacy groups and so on. A journalist wouldn’t even have to exert themselves, the story of the government distorting facts to demonise a minority will put itself together all too readily, but no, Auntie Beeb is reduced to recycling disablist government propaganda, hateful, twisted headlines and all. When did the BBC forget how to do basic research?

Now to a (minute!) degree we can excuse this kind of behaviour from Cameron and Grayling, they’re modern politicians, what the Romans might have considered infames, persons of low moral character, just like pimps and those who ran stables of gladiators, who can’t be expected to aspire to the same standards of behaviour as decent, respectable folk. But Cameron and Grayling aren’t putting out the press releases from the DWP on their own, they are helped in their bigotry by full-time Civil Servants who put together the data, the misleading interpretations, and the twisted headlines for them; who carefully see to it that the Press Releases don’t include the context necessary to understand what the figures really mean and the failures in government policy that they reveal. Civil Servants aren’t supposed to lower themselves to the standards of their ministers, the Civil Service code binds them to a standard of behaviour and restricts their ability to engage in party political behaviour on behalf of their minister, or others, or themselves. That code is summed up in four words: Integrity, Honesty, Objectivity, Impartiality.

The truth is that the disablist press releases began before the Con-Dem government came into power, and that DWP policy has actually remained consistent across two different governments; pushing ESA as the solution to all ills and painting those on IB as deliberate fraudsters outwitting the system with fake disabilities. The reality of ESA’s failure, its harsh descriptors that deliberately and calculatedly fail to account for the reality of many disabilities - to the point that even some the ‘health care practitioners’ who have sold their professional integrity for 30 pieces of silver have complained it is almost impossible for them to score people with cancer or MS as anything other than fit to work, the parody of fairness that is the ATOS-operated WCA, the ludicrous surreality of the access-all-areas ‘imaginary wheelchair’, all are carefully whitewashed out of the picture presented in DWP press-releases. So we have to conclude that there is a cadre of DWP personnel who aren’t just working on these press-releases because they have been told to, but who have actively bought into the ESA and WCA ‘reforms’ and are working to drive them on, no matter who they have to mislead and no matter how many facts they have to twist to do that. And yet these are Civil Servants, subject to the Civil Service Code. Do their actions display Integrity? Well, no, because they’re displaying deliberate deceit. Honesty? No, deliberate falsehoods don’t really count as honest. Objectivity? No, the truth about ESA is there to be seen, but they are busy sweeping that under their subjective carpet, eyes blinded by their own particular interpretation of what is best for the country (and disabled benefit claimants be damned). Impartiality? Well, they are following the same path under two different governments, but that path isn’t one a reasonable person would consider impartial, in fact they might consider it to be very partial indeed. So there we have it, not for DWP civil servants Integrity, Honesty, Objectivity, Impartiality, but Deceit, Falsehood, Subjectivity and Partiality.

No, it’s not good enough and someone needs to sweep out this nest of vipers from the core of disability policy. But, and it’s an awfully big, elephant in the corner kind of but, the Prime Minister, Chris Grayling, the DWP and the media couldn’t get away with this kind of behaviour if they knew that they were operating in a society hostile to disablism. Yet there they go, stabbing us in the back at every chance, actively convincing people that we are legitimate targets for their bigotry. What does that say about our society? What does it say about what is wrong with our society?

Blogging Against Disablism Day

It's the Sixth Annual Blogging Against Disablism Day on Sunday (see here), and we're operating in a target-rich environment given the way the government and Civil Service are behaving at the moment. Several of us here at WTB are hoping to have pieces ready for the day - I'm just lying down to write mine - but BADD is open to participation from all and, like I said, it's a sadly target-rich environment right now. Contributions don't have to be about the political environment, they can be about the way disablism strikes you in your daily life, but the more who contribute, the more we can get the message out that Disablism, whether political or personal, is simply not acceptable. So if you're a blogger, not even necessarily a disabled blogger, and you have seen the disablism out there, then I urge you to consider joining in.

Now Even the BBC is Jumping on the Crip-Bashing Bandwagon

It's bad enough when the Tory Rags lay into us after the latest crip-hating press release from the DWP, but in this article even the BBC seems to be jumping on the bandwagon. Oh, there are a few quotes from charities saying it just isn't good enough, but when someone sets out to deliberately villify people for being disabled, then the BBC is required by its Public Sector Equality Duty to challenge that argument, not repeat it. Even, perhaps especially, when the person setting out to villify disabled people is the Prime Minister.

I've commented on the article itself (comments section at the bottom of the page) saying:

"I am appalled by the tone of this story, which doesn't just pander to, but actively participates in the deliberate demonisation of disabled benefit claimants, in direct contravention to the BBC's Public Sector Equality Duty. I will be following this comment with a formal complaint. As a disabled person with a complex spinal problem I feel directly attacked by this article. I am not a benefit claimant through choice, I spent four years fighting a discriminatory employer to remain in work. My situation has deteriorated to the point even the new system recognises that I am currently unable to work, but the government persists in demonising all disabled benefit claimants. It is bad enough that I find myself attacked on a daily basis in the Tory rags, but to now find that I am being attacked by the BBC is beyond the pale."

I've also filed a formal complaint about the article on the BBC's complaints page:

"Deliberate demonisation of disabled benefit claimants

The article is an uncritical parroting of a DWP press release intended to stigmatise disabled benefit claimants in order to increase public support for changes to the benefit system. The reality for disabled people is a rapidly increasing climate of fear in which, benefit claimants or not, we face attacks in the press and abuse and even physical attack in the street. Under the Public Sector Equality Duty the BBC is required to take action to promote the equality of disabled people, this article instead sets us up as a target for abuse.

I fought for four years against a discriminatory employer to avoid being made redundant because of my disability. I have made every effort possible to remain in work and now to find work, but the reality is that my disability is worsening, not improving and even the new system accepts that I am currently not able to work. Yet I find myself being attacked at every turn by the DWP's campaign and its sycophantic press. My own disability is a complex spinal problem that limits every aspect of my life, yet the DWP reduces that to 'back problems' and a nudge-nudge, wink-wink implication that I'm just swinging the lead, because 'everyone knows' back problems aren't serious. Just because 'everyone knows it' doesn't make it true and the BBC is mandated by its Public Sector Equality Duty to actively challenge the casual discrimination against disabled people implicit in attitudes of this kind.

And what applies to one disability applies to all, and the BBC's acquiescence in the DWP's deliberate disablism is implicit in the article's outright attack on claimants with addictions or obesity. Despite their misuse as diagnostic labels by DWP, addiction and obesity to the degree of being unfit for work are almost universally symptoms of wider psychological or physiological disorders, for instance Prader-Willi Syndrome. To attack a benefit claimant for being addicted or obese is to attack them for being disabled, which is disability related harassment in contravention of the Equality Act. To participate in that harassment calls the legality of the report into direct question and in my opinion the BBC is not simply failing to meet its legal obligation under its Public Sector Equality Duty but actively participating in a hate crime.

It doesn't matter if the Prime Minister is the one to say it, any statement leading to a disabled person feeling harassed or intimidated is disability related harassment and as a disabled person I find his statements offensive and intimidatory and I view the BBC's unquestioned repetition of them in precisely the same light.

My fears and the perception of being attacked by government and media at every step are not simply my own, they are echoed by the vast majority of disabled people I know. We find ourselves increasingly living in a climate of fear engendered by a deliberate demonisation of disabled people by government and DWP and their allies in the right-wing tabloids intended to allow them to gut support for disabled people while convincing the non-disabled population we are nothing but feckless parasites. I and others have been harassed on the street by complete strangers with no idea if we are benefit claimants, simply that we dare to be disabled in public is enough to trigger their xenophobic hatred and abusive claims that we are benefit frauds and faking our disabilities. It is the BBC's responsibility to highlight this behaviour as unacceptable, not serve as its cheerleader. I have given up hope of being treated as an equal in the Tory rags, but I had expected better of the BBC."

I expect they'll just try to write it off, saying that quoting a charity or two gives the article balance, but we all know that isn't the impression casual readers will get, and the difference between the BBC and the Tory Rags is that the BBC is subject to the Public Sector Equality Duty and expected to take a stand against disablism. Or at least that is the way it is supposed to be, sadly the reality now appears to be something else entirely.

If anyone wants to join me in complaining about the article, please feel free to use any or all of the words above.

The Dirty Dozen

As if it wasn’t bad enough that we have to live in fear of the next government attack and of thugs on the streets attacking us as benefit frauds, now big-business is jumping on the bandwagon. The Institute of Directors has put forward 24 "freebie" proposals, which it says would cost the government nothing and would boost private sector growth, with Miles Templeman, the IoD Director General, urging ministers to ‘seize the opportunity’. What the proposals would cost normal people, particularly disabled people, is left unsaid. But digging down into them, the kind of activity where you feel the need to shower afterwards, shows these freebies to be nothing less than a selfish attempt to undermine the welfare state in pursuit of the great god Profit. I’ve picked out the dozen (plus one) proposals with the greatest potential to negatively impact disabled people; so let’s look at exactly what these ‘freebies’ will actually cost us.

The Dirty Dozen (Plus One)

1) The IoD wants to introduce a minimum £500 employee deposit in employment tribunals ‘to deter weak cases’.

The IoD has been very vocal about getting rid of what it considers ‘vexatious claims’ – a cynic might suggest that would cover all of them. The particular problem we face as disabled employees is that the disablism running rife through UK management means that we have far more cause than most to take employers to an employment tribunal, lower physical and financial reserves to carry our cases through to completion and much worse employment prospects for finding another job afterwards. Taking an employer to an employment tribunal is already a stressful and disheartening process, and the behaviour of employers during employment claims is itself often vexatious. If we now add the need to find a £500 deposit and the risk of losing that entirely, while faced with a future claiming benefits of less that £100/week, then there is a very real pressure not to proceed, even with a strong case. The IoD seem to have forgotten, or, more likely, don’t care, that justice is only justice when it is justice for all, regardless of personal wealth or personal job title.

2) The IOD wants to allow firms to escape the risk of tribunals when they dismiss someone within the first two years of service.

The Equality Act just made it much more difficult to get rid of disabled people during the recruitment process, but if you dismiss them afterwards….

3) The IOD wants the legal rights to ask for flexible working and time off for training to be removed, in order “to increase productivity”.

Flexibility is particularly important to disabled employees who may find the typical fixed 9 to 5 regime to be particularly difficult and the law as it stands doesn’t give us a right to flexible working, simply to ask for it. The irony here, which the IoD seems oblivious too, is that for many of us flexible working leads to massive productivity increases, not decreases. Just a few minutes flexibility around my own start time often meant the difference between a full morning's work and several hours curled up in pain.

UK employers are notorious for underfunding training, sometime openly considering it cheaper to replace experienced workers with new graduates fresh from college rather than to train their existing staff. Faced with training policies like that, employees can find it essential to undertake professional development in their own time. But as disabled employees we may lack the spoons to do anything more than our normal 9 to 5, our disabilities may make studying in the evening literally impossible, meaning the only opportunities for professional development come through training leave. If the right to ask for that is taken away, then it will specifically disadvantage disabled employees.

4) The IoD wants the government to drop plans to abolish the default retirement age, asking "Why does the government want to make it harder to remove staff who are no longer effective?"

Words to send a shiver down the spine of many of us and with implications that stretch far beyond retirement age, making the IoD’s view of workers as identical, disposable cogs to be sacrificed to the machine perfectly clear. It is far simpler for a manager to claim a disabled worker is ‘no longer effective’, than to treat them as an individual and make the individual reasonable adjustments to allow them to be as effective as anyone else (even when those adjustments are provided for by law).

5) The IoD wants regulation on business slashed and they suggest that “The Government should establish a review of existing civil service practices regarding salary awards, bonuses, annual assessment criteria and broad career promotion structures in the context of their effect on regulatory behaviour.”

So in other words, civil servants would see their careers damaged by introducing regulations aimed at protecting workers, and enhanced by removing them. Someone remind me, is this being proposed by the IoD, or by organised crime? Because managing government policy through blackmail and bribery certainly sounds more like a Mafia plot. Would the DDA and the Equality Act ever have been drafted if the civil servants involved knew that their careers would be permanently damaged as a result?

6) The IoD wants radical reforms to turn Education and Health into key market growth areas for the private sector.

Anyone else see the problem here? Where’s the profit in making schools wheelchair accessible or in providing free medical care to people with chronic conditions. A society’s worth is measured on its ability to care for the minority even at a cost to the majority, not on the profit it generates.

7) The IoD wants Education and Health to shift even further towards genuine consumer power over the coming years – for example education vouchers with topup capability

So the more you earn the better the school (or hospital) you can send your child to. Better hope neither you nor they happen to be disabled…

8) The IoD wants “public services, with companies which can exploit the market potential of Health and Education”

Is ‘exploit’ really a word we want associated with Health and Education?

9) The IoD wants a fast-track planning system for key national projects to boost the construction sector and replace ageing infrastructure, overriding local objections.

And the access needs of disabled people alongside the other local objections?

10) The IOD wants an end to collective bargaining in the NHS and in schools.

At first glance this might not seem like something likely to specifically affect disabled employees, but conditions for disabled workers in public bodies do tend to be considerably better than in private sector companies. This is, at least in part, because collective bargaining allows the needs of the few, and disabled employees are almost always ‘the few’, to be considered with the weight of all employees behind them, rather than the small minority of employees for whom they are directly relevant. Establishment of worker rights within the public sector then provides a springboard for extending them into the private sector, where they are desperately needed. Take away collective bargaining in the public sector and you take away any chance of further improving the rights of disabled workers anywhere in the economy, if not outright exposing those rights to a disablist backlash.

And beyond that, strong unions in education and health are likely to get in the way of their agenda of turning schools and hospitals into profit centres, with all the negative consequences for us in that.

11) The IoD wants to focus regional policy and funding on 'winners' not 'losers', the communities likely to yield the greatest ‘return on investment’.

So the communities with the worst problems will get the least help, those same communities that statistics show to have the greatest support needs for disabled people.

12) The IoD wants to end the 50 per cent top rate of Income Tax and slash Corporation tax

They recognise that we’re all in this together, and want no part of it.

13) Perhaps most scarily of all, the IoD want to cut public spending to just 35% of GDP as opposed to current government targets of 40%

Just getting public spending down towards 40% of GDP is causing a terrifying onslaught on the support for disabled people within society, slicing another 12.5% off public sector spending once we get there will condemn the UK’s disabled people to a worse than Third World existence.

It is clear that these so called ‘freebies’ are designed to do nothing less than rip away the heart and soul of our society by turning schools and hospitals into profit centres that they can exploit for every last penny of profit available, while stripping away every fragment of protection and rights that workers have spent the past two centuries fighting for, and in these circumstances it is always disabled people who suffer first and suffer most.

And this new wave of the business community actively seeking to twist government policy against disabled people seems to be spreading, The Australian Business Council has just suggested that disability pensions there should be cut in order to pay for flood damage, because obviously that’s a far more equitable solution than raising taxes. Worse, they’re citing UK policy on disability benefits to justify it, which suggests a somewhat shaky grasp on logic. ‘He did it first’ didn’t work when we were five year olds on the playground, to see it recycled by heads of major companies trying to steer government policy beggars belief.

Absolutely Outrageous!

Or not...

I'm feeling quite sad this week that the general public, and more specifically anti-cuts campaigners, all consider books and trees to be far more important in the grand scheme of things than I - a human being - am.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of libraries and trees. As a child I always had my nose in a book. Always. And that was partly a disability-related thing: I couldn't run around or ride a bike, I spent a lot of time in bed with broken bones. Reading was something I could do and could do well. Very well. I could read books by myself before I started school and had a reading age far advanced of my chronological age.

The library was a huge part of my life. I couldn't possibly own all the books I read, if I did my mum and I would've had no room to move our wheelchairs around because there would just be piles of books everywhere. My local library used to have competitions in the summer holidays to see who could read the most books and it was genuinely gutting that I never won (I suspect the kids who beat me must've cheated and not read the books they claimed to have read).

Libraries don't just loan out books, they also loan CDs and DVDs. In the days before sites like Spotify allowed you to listen to an album before you bought it I'd often get CDs out of the library to try before buying. And obviously as a film geek I've taken hundreds of videos and DVDs out of the library. As a teenager I recall hunting high and low for a film I wanted to see that had been deleted on video and eventually stumbling across it on the World Cinema shelf of Cambridge's Central Library.

At this point it's almost impossible to live a life completely free from the internet. There are people who can't afford to have internet at home, or their computer broke and they can't afford to fix it, and so have to go to the library to access information that people reading this blog can probably find out sat in their pyjamas in their living room. And I think we've all experienced moving house and not being able to get the new broadband set up for a fortnight so we've had to go to the library in the interim period.

Then there's forests. I have to confess wandering around a forest of a Saturday afternoon doesn't hold much allure for me because such spaces are often not the most wheelchair accessible of places. But trees turn carbon dioxide into oxygen and I'm a big, big, fan of breathing. Certainly when I've had allergic reactions which have resulted in asthma attacks I've been quite distressed by not being able to breathe. So yay trees!

Despite my passion for libraries and my need for oxygen-producing trees I'm not sure I'd prioritise books and greenery over human lives. Yet that's what's currently happening in the anti-cuts movement. I want to make it absolutely clear that I do not support the closure of libraries or the sale of the forests. I am not suggesting that we close libraries and sell forests to save benefits. I am opposed to all the government's cuts.¹

Loss of benefits kills people. People like Paul Reekie and Christelle Pardo. A blogger called Aliquant has expressed her plan to kill herself if her transition from IB to ESA doesn't go smoothly. Here on WtB we've had plenty of people express their intention to kill themselves if they lose their benefits. Some of the examples are here and here.

I've written in the past on my own blog about how disabled people are seen as the lowest of the low, and that's still going on. Last week Melanie Phillips wrote a homophobic article in the Daily Mail. There was an outcry. Her name was a trending topic on Twitter and I must've read several hundred "gay agenda" jokes at her expense. As a lesbian I was among the horrified many (though part of me was looking forward to homosexuality becoming mandatory as she promised; I might get laid occasionally...) and shared in the collective outrage.

The following day the Mail published this article full of inaccuracies about the number of Incapacity Benefit claimants found fit for work. The outrage was limited to a tiny handful of disabled people. There were no trending topics and no jokes at the expense of Gerri Peev (the article's author) for being a disablist arse. In fact because there's been such prevalence of these misleading articles a lot of people of an anti-cuts bent probably believed it to be true rather than accepting the reality that it's just designed to incite hatred against disabled people. (In case you're wondering the fraud rate for Incapacity Benefit - according to the DWP's own figures - is 1%. See the table on page 8 of this report.)

The contrast in response to these two articles in the space of two days really made me feel like less of a human being because no-one's willing to speak out against this disablist prejudice. I speak out against racism, plenty of heterosexuals spoke out against Melanie Phillips' homophobia, but where were the non-disabled people speaking out against this disablist bile?

The issue is on my mind today because today there has been a national day of action to save libraries. It's been all over the news and twitter. That we as a culture value books more than disabled people is clear when you contrast today to the day of action against benefits cuts a fortnight ago.

457,500 people signed the save forests petition. Only 4000 and change have signed the save DLA petition. Really puts into perspective how much the general public prefers trees to disabled people.

I realise that most people support causes they understand. The campaign to save libraries will attract high-profile figures like authors because libraries introduce readers to their books. So famous people offer their endorsement to the "save libraries" campaign which has a top down effect; their fans become involved in saving libraries, which means there's enough people campaigning to get the story in the news, which means even more people campaign.

The same goes for forests. Most people off the telly will have enjoyed a walk through some trees with their dog at some point. So they tweet their support for the "save forests" campaign. Their fans then sign petitions and spread the word, which again results in newsworthyness so the campaign spreads like headlice in Downing Street.

Between health problems and discrimination limiting career options there aren't that many famous disabled people to set the snowball rolling down the hill. I explained in this post how we need non-disabled people to stand beside us and why it's important insurance for their own futures to do so. But still non-disabled people choose to prioritise libraries and trees over their fellow human beings whose lives are at risk from benefits cuts.

First They Came - Pastor Martin Niemöller

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialist
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

It'd make me happy beyond anything if this post could be seen as a 'call to arms' (not least because if the anti-benefits-cuts movement gained momentum it might save some lives), so please pass it on. Don't just dismiss me as a moaning scrounger but remember I could be your neighbour, your sister's friend, the customer in your café, the person you smile at on the bus every morning: We are real people being attacked by these cuts with no-one standing up for us.

"A call to arms? What do you expect me to do?" The Broken of Britain always have campaigns on the go that you can participate in from your desk. They've currently got details of several motions you can ask your MP/MSP/AM to sign. Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) are where to look for information on getting out in the streets and protesting. Then there's us: We'll always have news and intelligent comment to keep you informed, and if you follow us on Twitter you'll be kept up to date on all news, petitions, protests and motions around disability benefits issues.

I want some outrage, dammit!

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¹ Retrospectively emboldened for emphasis because people were still accusing me of being in favour of closing libraries and selling forests to save benefits.