Support Ourselves

Martin Kelly writes:

When one sees just how nasty the shower now in charge of our government really are, one has to wonder if there is no group that they would not wish to stick the boot into, no vulnerable people whose heads they wouldn't want to use as trampolines.

As I have written before, I am now only able to hold down a job at all through the good offices of the Disability Discrimination Act. Since the Conservative-Liberal coalition assumed power, I have become fearful for this legislation's future. Originally intended to flood the marketplace with disabled people in yet another neoliberal assault on the wage rate, it has become the means by which many disabled avoid the pauperisation occasioned by claiming Incapacity Benefit.

The DDA might be said to impose a cost on business. That nobody in the UK either starts or operates a legitimate business under duress is, to neoliberal ideologues, neither here nor there; the rights of businesspeople to do business are paramount over any other legal right and, indeed, civil liberty. This mindset finds no contradiction in paradoxes such as elections held by essentially private bodies like trade unions being subject to the greatest scrutiny and legal regulation while our parliamentary and municipal elections would disgrace the curviest banana republic, or over 3,000 new crimes of which the private citizen might become guilty being added to the statute book over a 13 year period while businesses, essentially incorporeal entities whose presence can only ever be detected by their symbols but never their essence, have more liberty bestowed upon them in the form of deregulation (it is to be noted that the coalition has not tackled the diminution of civil liberties with the urgency that the citizens deserve; I guess the new bosses are just like the old bosses). This deliberate inversion of priorities is so perverse, so anti-human, that it is almost Satanic.

Sometimes one wonders what government is for. If it is not there to protect the people, to protect the most vulnerable, what is it for? British governments have historically done really very little protecting of the people. Every single progressive advance has been met with screams of outrage from those among us who despise the idea that they might be beholden to others, or who hate acknowledging that what they have has not been achieved solely by their own efforts. It is this extremely reactionary, antagonistic spirit that has animated government since 1979, and the glee with which one sees the rich now proclaim their radicalism makes one wonder whether the act of joining a British political party is now a surrender to collective sociopathy.

The Disability Discrimination Act is an essential tool in helping some of the most disadvantaged people among us support themselves; support ourselves. It may have started off as ideology, but it has proved its worth. Any government that seeks to repeal it must stand accused of Social Darwinism, and I see nothing in the current government that suggests they wouldn't hesitate to have a go at it if they had half a chance.

Ideology helps you hate. If you hold enough ideology, soon you have no problem hating anyone your ideology dictates is standing in the way of its advance. Our benefits and bus passes, our wheelchairs and mobility aids stand in the way of reducing the size of the British state. That wherever the size of the state has been 'reduced' almost always results in a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich passes without comment. That the 'reduction' in the size of the state often means the privatisation of services into the control of those who previously ran them for public benefit, and which often continue to require public subsidy after privatisation in order to ensure that the myth that the private sector is more efficient than the public can be maintained, passes without comment. The government has declared that tests for Disability Living Allowance will be made tougher. Having recently undergone this ordeal, I can only say that the desire to toughen either the qualifying criteria for that benefit or the testing procedure betrays an extremely cruel caste of mind on the part of those now in power. I hate the relish with which George Osborne rolled the word 'tough' around his mouth as he announced those changes; it was the relish of the bully in front of a victim. This diffidence to the weak and the vulnerable might stem from not knowing anyone who's ever had to claim benefits, but somehow I doubt it; somehow, I think that even if they did, they still just wouldn't care.

When they're done with DLA, they'll come for the bus pass. It's inevitable. We, the lame, the halt, the blind, those who say inappropriate things, need frequent medical interventions and even more frequent chemical ones, cannot allow ourselves to be steamrollered into being rendered static. The bus pass is critical to many disabled people's ability to live independent lives; and that's apparently a good thing, when it means keeping us off the benefit paybill. If the bus pass is discontinued, then the disabled will not merely be condemned to the back of the bus; many won't be on the bus at all.

And when they're done with the bus pass, they'll come for the Disability Discrimination Act, freeing business from the burden of decency. Thrusting the already poor into further poverty is not the action of a caring government, one intent on protecting the people. One had higher hopes for the Liberals (it is astonishing to see how quickly the title of 'Liberal Democrat' seems to have dropped from public usage); but they have so obviously been swayed by the trappings of power, the red boxes and official cars, that one is now entitled to question whether any view they have ever expressed under the leadership of Nick Clegg has ever been sincere. They are a right-wing party now, and do not deserve any well-meaning person's vote.

Those of us who are disabled will have many tough choices to make in the months and years ahead. Sometimes, it seems to be assumed that our lives are not full of them already. I, for one, do not wish to see the cause of rights for the disabled pushed back, nor disabled people squashed even further to the margins of society, because some rich bastard doesn't like paying tax. That's the core of the whole 'problem'. There is no problem with the public finances; we do, however, have a problem with rich people who don't like paying tax. Unless we make our voices heard, by writing to newspapers, by going to MP's surgeries about every move to curtail rights for the disabled including entitlement to benefits, then the rich who don't like paying tax will win. We won't have a richer Britain. We certainly won't have a fairer or better Britain. We will, however, have a Britain in which some people are even richer than they are now while the weakest of us all are pushed into the gutter, horsewhipped into penury by the heir of an Irish baronet.

Bugger that, bugger them and bugger George Osborne. To paraphrase the sacred lowing of one of their sacred cows - 'They will only take my bus pass from me out of my cold, dead hand!'