(It's
Blogging Against Disablism Day 2015, #BADD2015, so I thought I would look at what's going on during the UK General Election)
It's General Election Season in the UK, which means all the
parties have to put out actual policies of their own, rather than just shout
about how terrible the other parties' supposed policies are. Unfortunately in
at least two cases, arguably three, we're seeing disablism forming either part
of the manifesto, or a prominent part of campaigning. And of course it's the
usual suspects, UKIP and the Tories, with the Lib-Dems tagging along behind.
UKIP's manifesto is actually slightly less scary than last
time, when they talked about putting learning disabled people into 'congregate
communities' (that may well have been code for camps of a rather different kind
- when they later sacked a candidate for openly calling for disabled babies to
be killed, there were scores of UKIPers protesting he had done nothing wrong).
What we get this time is a bunch of crowd pleasing policies that are worded
loosely enough they could go either way - so GPs will replace the hated Work
Capability Assessment in judging if people should be entitled to disability
benefits, but will also be required to issue 'Fit Notes' to the DWP to say that
people are now fit to work. They say they support the UN Convention on Rights
of Persons with Disabilities (or at least Article 19 of it), but simultaneously
want us out of the European Court system that enforces it, and so on. Other
Welfare policies are more openly disturbing, promising a lower cap on benefits,
Child Benefit only for the first two children, and 'cracking down on benefit
fraud' (that would be the benefit fraud that's already smaller than DWP's
internal error rate, and a fraction of the size of the tax evasion at the other
end of the wealth scale).
But then party leader Nigel Farage opens his mouth and the
bile just flows out. During the first televised leaders' debate he alleged there was
a substantial issue with non-Britons coming to the UK to obtain treatment for
HIV. He's said it before, last October for one, and it's a very clever, very
calculated statement designed to appeal to the worst kind of human instincts.
'Health tourism' is a 'threat' UKIP have been pushing, even though actual
evidence shows it isn't a major issue, but it lets them play the 'darn
furriners coming here and stealing our hospitals' card (doubly valuable as
UKIP's leadership is known to be ideologically opposed to the NHS, whereas the
public love it). Specifically focussing in on HIV lets UKIP do two things:
associate 'health tourism' with homosexuality in order to appeal to the
homophobic elements in their core vote (they announced this week they would
bring forward a bill to allow 'Christians' to discriminate against gays), and
associate 'health tourism' with a disease still primarily associated with
sexual transmission and therefore almost universally regarded in society as
somehow 'dirty'. That they're doing this by stigmatising people with a serious
and life-threatening illness clearly matters not one jot to them. It really is
a quite spectacularly amoral piece of political calculation. And in
last night's Question Time
he said it again, this time alleging foreign HIV patients mean UK HIV patients
are not being cared for.
At least the Tories aren't focussing on HIV, but they're
completely up for a piece of fat-shaming as public policy, and with a truly
chilling sting in the tail. Page 28 of their Manifesto states:
“We will
review how best to support those suffering from long term yet treatable
conditions, such as drug or alcohol addiction or obesity, back into work.
People who might benefit from treatment should get the medical help they need
so they can return to work. if they refuse a recommended treatment, we will
review whether their benefits should be reduced.” Health blogger Dr.
Margaret McCartney
pointed out
how carefully
chosen their targets are. Not, for example, people who don't take their blood
pressure medication, or who don't exercise regularly, but drug addicts,
alcoholics, and fat people, all of whom already face considerable stigma. Now
this isn't the first time the Tories have done this, snide attacks on people
with addictions or obesity issues started cropping up fairly early in their government,
from Cameron on down, but this is the first time it has become official party
policy. And there seems to be a deliberate decision to link obesity and
addictive behaviours in order to further worsen the social acceptability of
obesity. Worse, they then decided to compound all that with the threat of
compelled treatment. Compelled treatment is an absolute medical no-no, doctors
are ethically mandated to provide their patients with the information allowing
them to give informed consent to their treatment, but, as soon as you introduce
compulsion, consent goes out the window.
To further compound the potential harm, the compulsion will
be implemented by the notoriously disablist Department of Work and Pensions,
the puppet masters behind Atos and now Maximus and the WCA, with their secret
targets and league tables for sanctions against disabled benefit claimants.
When you acknowledge (which much of society unfortunately does not) that much
obesity is a secondary consequence of clearly identifiable medical causes, for
instance drug side effects, mobility restrictions, metabolic disorders and so
on, while drug abuse, alcoholism and other cases of obesity spring from complex
familial, social and medical backgrounds, it becomes clear that this policy is
deliberately designed to target disabled people in a way that makes
non-disabled people positively happy to see it happening. And once this aspect
of compulsion in treatment is established, who is to say where it will stop.
In fact the next phase may already be underway, and it comes
not from the Tories but from the theoretically cuddlier Lib-Dems. Lib-Dem
leader Nick Clegg has himself been heading a pilot programme to introduce
mental health treatment on-site at Job Centre Plus
(the high-street arm of the DWP). It would be hard to think of a worse
combination for medical abuse. JCP are already cutting their numbers of
specialist Disability Employment Advisors, from a starting point of having far
fewer advisors per disabled job seeker than non-disabled, and have been
implementing a massive increase in utterly inappropriate sanctions against
disabled people, such as the learning disabled man sanctioned for being four
minutes late for an interview, never mind that he was unable to tell the time.
(When this incident was raised in a Westminster debate, a Tory MP claimed it
was evidence of failing schools, apparently having no understanding whatsoever
of what a learning disability is). Compound that disablist bias at JCP with the
massive stigma around Mental Health issues and you have a real potential for
inappropriate compulsion and people with MH issues being driven out of the
Benefit system (which may of course be absolutely fine with many of the backers
of this initiative).
Moving down into constituency level disablism, a group of
London-based Tories decided it would be funny to
compare Labour Leader Ed Miliband to a stroke victim on Facebook ,
by drawing on an existing piece of stroke awareness public service
broadcasting, but associating it with images of Miliband deliberately picked to
make him look as grotesque as possible while mocking the way he speaks. The
pages disappeared as soon as people caught onto them, but the unpleasant stench
of disablism lingers. Clearly these Tories thought that having a disability
makes you somehow less, while marking you as unfit to partake in government,
and isn't that a revealing insight into the way they think about us.
Equally revealing was the suggestion from Chamali Fernando,
the Conservative candidate in Cambridge, at a hustings event, that
people who are neurodiverse or have mental health issues could wear wristbands to identify them to police and other 'professional persons' (she's a lawyer, so presumably meant 'people like me'). That people who are
neurodiverse or have MH issues already face even worse stigma than other forms
of disability, and that she was proposing marking them out for the abusers in
society apparently passed her completely by, as did the historical context of
another political party having once implemented a policy of physically marking
disabled people, and emulating the policies of the Nazi Party generally being
considered politically a bad idea. There seems to be an acceptance that she was
being utterly naive rather than malicious, but when sitting Lib-Dem MP Julian
Huppert, alongside her at the event, criticised her for what she said, she sued
him for defamation, which doesn't really suggest she's actually learnt anything
from the incident.
And just to cap everything, David Cameron suggested last
night during Question Time that a life on benefits
is frankly no kind of life at all, which, given he had a profoundly disabled
child who would have faced precisely that if he had survived, seems a
remarkably inappropriate attitude.
So there we have the ways disability is being
portrayed by three of the major parties in the election: by UKIP as somehow
'dirty' and 'gay' and 'stealing our NHS'; by the Tories as a form of benefit
scrounging by drug addicts and their associates, who need the stern hand of
government to set them on track, as a negative that would make someone unfit to
act in government, as needing to be labelled for our own protection and as 'no
kind of life'; and by the Lib-Dems as needing to be pushed towards work by
intervention in possibly the most threatening environment imaginable. In the
end it all comes down to providing yet one more way for the intolerant parts of
society to punish people for being in need.
It's a sad state of affairs when bullying people in need is applauded as
the socially responsible thing to do, and considered fit to grace the manifestos
of not one, but three of our major political parties.
