The War on Disabled People

Capitalism, Welfare and the Making of a Human Catastrophe

Ellen Clifford

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786996664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Disabilities in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing Award 2021 In 2016, a United Nations report found the UK government culpable for 'grave and systematic violations' of disabled people's rights. Since then, driven by the Tory government's obsessive drive to slash public spending whilst scapegoating the most disadvantaged in society, the situation for disabled people in Britain has continued to deteriorate. Punitive welfare regimes, the removal of essential support and services, and an ideological regime that seeks to deny disability has resulted in a situation described by the UN as a 'human catastrophe'. In this searing account, Ellen Clifford – an activist who has been at the heart of resistance against the war on disabled people – reveals precisely how and why this state of affairs has come about. From spineless political opposition to self-interested disability charities, rightwing ideological myopia to the media demonization of benefits claimants, a shocking picture emerges of how the government of the fifth-richest country in the world has been able to marginalize disabled people with near-impunity. Even so, and despite austerity biting ever deeper, the fightback has begun, with a vibrant movement of disabled activists and their supporters determined to hold the government to account – the slogan 'Nothing About Us Without Us' has never been so apt. As this book so powerfully demonstrates, if Britain is to stand any chance of being a just and equitable society, their battle is one we should all be fighting.

PART I

‘HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT’

The social context for the war on disabled people

Disability is everywhere in history once you begin looking for it, but conspicuously absent in the histories we write. When historians do take note of disability, they usually treat it merely as personal tragedy or an insult to be deplored and a label to be denied, rather than as a cultural construct to be questioned and explored.

Douglas Baynton¹

Prior to 2010, significant progress had been achieved for disabled people since the days of asylums, eugenics and long-stay hospitals, won through resistance from disabled people and our allies. Most notably, disabled people had obtained the right to live in the community instead of being forcibly detained for life, segregated from the rest of society. Legislation against disability discrimination was passed in the 1990s and the New Labour government promised full disability equality by 2025.

Alongside these advances, significant inequalities persisted or even worsened, while the idea that disabled people are of lesser human worth never fully went away. Research commissioned by Leonard Cheshire in 2008 revealed that disabled people were twice more likely to suffer economic hardship than others and more likely to live in poverty than 10 years previously.² The employment gap between disabled and non-disabled people was at 30 percentage points in 2010. Investigations started by the charity Mencap in 2007 exposed institutional discrimination within the NHS against people with learning difficulties, leading to 1,200 avoidable deaths in England every year.³

One of the cases publicised by Mencap was of Martin, a 43-year-old man with learning difficulties and no speech. Martin had a stroke and was sent to hospital. While there, he contracted pneumonia. He had trouble swallowing after the stroke and could not take food or water orally. He was put on a drip but this failed to provide him with adequate nutrition. By the third week, his veins collapsed. By the time the doctors decided that they needed to insert a feeding tube into his stomach, his condition was too poor to withstand surgery. Five days later, Martin died.

This is a manifestation of the same underlying belief about the relative value of disabled people’s lives that underpins hostility towards disabled people.

An inquiry by the Equality and Human Rights Commission into disability hate crime concluded that disability harassment was widespread. The inquiry report Hidden in Plain Sight detailed 10 murders of disabled people, including the case of Brent Martin, a man with learning difficulties attacked for a bet by three people he considered his friends. One of the murderers is reported to have told friends, ‘I am not going down for a muppet,’ a clear reference to Brent’s impairment. In late 2010, Kathryn Stone, CEO of Voice UK, warned of ‘real increases in the most horrendous murders and very, very serious sexual assaults’.⁴ A poll that same year revealed that one-quarter of the public believed that disabled people should be in institutions.⁵

Meanwhile, the Disabled People’s Movement, which had gained advances since its inception in the 1970s, went into decline.

The history of disabled people’s oppression and the immediate background to the situation in 2010 are important for understanding why the Tories targeted disabled people, the full effects of how their policies impacted on disabled people, and how they have been getting away with it. Chapter 1 begins by looking at who disabled people are, a question that any account of disability must start with due to the complexity of disabled people’s oppression. Chapter 2 examines attitudes towards disability and the ‘othering’ of disabled people, which have facilitated the government in pursual of its agenda to make the poorest and most disadvantaged members of society pay for a financial crisis we did not cause. Chapter 3 then provides an overview of the history of disability and of the enduring struggle between oppression and resistance in the years leading up to the election of the Coalition government in 2010.

one | Who are disabled people?

The complexity of disabled people’s oppression is evident in how any discussion of it must necessarily begin with an explanation of who disabled people are. As Roddy Slorach, Senior Disability Advisor at Imperial College London, writes: ‘Disability in contemporary society is a complex and widely misunderstood issue.’¹ We are a significant proportion of the population and rising – recorded numbers of disabled people are growing both for demographic reasons and as people increasingly seek protection against discrimination and impoverishment by identifying under the legal definition of disability. Yet our issues are marginalised within wider society and beset with misconceptions.

The diversity of impairments and the distribution of people with them across the population present a barrier to organising against shared injustice. The complexity is compounded by the fact that many people with impairments do not identify as disabled. The social model, where properly understood and applied, is an immensely useful tool for overcoming impairment differences and for uniting those with unmet needs within collective resistance. It is a far stronger basis for resistance than can be formed with an approach that focuses on the differing experiences of impairment that divide us.

A not insignificant group of people

Disabled people are the world’s largest minority group. Disability under the Equality Act 2010 is defined as: ‘a physical or mental impairment which has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on your ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities’. The World Health Organization (WHO) recorded over 1 billion disabled people worldwide in 2011, making up 15 per cent of the global population. Latest figures put the number of disabled people in the UK at 13.9 million people; 24 per cent of the population reported ‘a disability’ in 2016–17, an increase of 6 per cent since 2007–08.² Despite popular concern with an ageing population, the change came from increases in the percentages of working-age adults and children, while the period saw a decrease in adults of State Pension age reporting a disability.

The number of those affected by disability issues are even greater when we take into consideration the 6.5 million providing informal support for disabled relatives and friends in the UK today. The charity Carers UK reports that every day another 6,000 people become carers and anticipate that by 2037 the figure will have risen to 9 million. As Professor Colin Barnes told Disabled People Against Cuts in 2013, ‘More disabled people are around today than ever before so to suggest that impairment is a minority issue is nonsense’.³

The number of disabled people is rising. The fact that people are living longer and acquiring impairments in older age is just one aspect of this: according to the charity Alzheimer’s Society, there are 850,000 people with dementia in the UK in 2020, with numbers set to rise to 1.6 million by 2040. Other factors include longer life expectancies for babies born with complex needs, increasing numbers of working-age disabled people and skyrocketing levels of mental distress. A response by London Councils in 2017 pointed to a ‘far greater than average growth of adults with learning and physical disabilities, and those with mental health problems’.⁴

Dramatic increases in children and young people experiencing mental distress is a cause for concern. Mental distress (or psychological distress) describes a range of symptoms and experiences of a person’s internal life that are commonly held to be troubling, confusing or out of the ordinary; these can range from anxiety and stress to hearing voices and intrusive thoughts.

A study by researchers from University College London, Imperial College London, Exeter University and the Nuffield Trust, published in 2018, showed a six-fold increase over 20 years in children and young people stating that they have a mental health condition.⁵ Although this can be attributed in part to greater mental health awareness, incidences of self-harm are unquestionably escalating: hospital admissions for self-injury among young women doubled over the two decades to 2018 (NHS data show that girls were admitted to hospital 7,327 times in 1997 compared with 13,463 times in 2017), while a study of over 40,000 self-poisonings among 10- to 24-year-olds found that those involving the five most common substances all increased steadily between 1998 and 2014 in...