like to thank the disabled people who agreed to be interviewed for this book. I am deeply aware how exposing and difficult it often was to relay some of the most intimate parts of their lives, and the bravery it took to share that publicly. I thank them for their trust and hope this book does them justice.
In the closing stages of 2015, it emerged the United Nations was quietly carrying out an inquiry into state-level violations of disabled people’s human rights. It was the first of its kind: a secret investigation into the harm a government was allegedly inflicting on its disabled citizens. Initial reports included some distressing accounts from disabled people and their families. The UN insisted on conducting proceedings in private, stating that confidentiality was necessary to ‘protect witnesses’ and to ‘secure the co-operation of the host country’.1
It would be easy to assume that the ‘host country’ in question was an undemocratic regime with a dire record on human rights or perhaps a developing nation without the rich economy needed to provide a social safety net. In fact, it was Britain.
Fast-forward two years to 2017 and the United Nations was releasing an unprecedented judgement: the conditions for disabled people in Britain were tantamount to a ‘human catastrophe’.2 In the succeeding months, the UN declared the British state was failing in its duties towards its disabled citizens in everything from housing and employment to education and social security.3 Somehow, one of the wealthiest nations on earth – and with it, arguably the most pioneering welfare system in the Western world – was now receiving international condemnation for its treatment of disabled people.
I grew up in a Britain that said life was going to be full of promise for disabled people like me. In the 1990s, grim words like ‘crippled’ and ‘retarded’ were no longer part of everyday speech. Disability was still often missing from the media and positions of power but – unlike the many generations before me – I could say I lived in a country where ordinary disabled people were no longer hidden from sight. Moreover, the charity tins that until recently had symbolized the scraps handed out to disabled citizens were now accompanied by rights. These reached from the groundbreaking disability civil rights law of my childhood to the welfare state’s tailor-made benefits and services for disabled people.
In the days after the London Olympics 2012, the Paralympics became the poster child for this sense of optimism. A focus of national pride, the event was not only pitched as a demonstration of what disabled people could achieve when given the chance, but a vehicle for Britain to assert its position as a global leader for disability on the world stage. At the launch of the games, Prime Minister David Cameron claimed he was proud that Britain was ‘a trailblazer for disability rights’.4 In reality, only a few months earlier, Cameron and colleagues had been setting in motion a political agenda that ushered in the unprecedented demolition of Britain’s safety net for disabled people and, in doing so, rolled back hard-won disability rights by decades.
From its election as part of a coalition government in 2010, the British Conservative Party under David Cameron oversaw a programme of cuts not seen since the 1920s. Framed as a necessary response to the global economic crash, it launched what turned out to be Britain’s long-term austerity project: hollowing out ‘welfare’, public services and local council budgets.
While then chancellor George Osborne promised we were ‘all in it together’, in fact it was disabled people who were targeted to take the greatest hit, with tens of billions of pounds being pulled from everything from disability benefits to housing to social care provision.5 The Centre for Welfare Reform calculated in 2013 that disabled people would endure nine times the burden of cuts compared to the average citizen, with people with the most severe disabilities being hit a staggering nineteen times harder.6 A global recession caused by bankers and stoked by right-wing politicians was set to punish paraplegics and cancer patients.
This did not come about by accident but rather was a deliberate attack on disabled people in Britain. In a climate of disenfranchisement, squeezed wages and growing individualism, disabled people became Britain’s new favourite target. Ministers spoke freely about the ‘work-shy’ long-term sick exploiting hard-working taxpayers. Television shows openly mocked working-class sick and disabled families. Newspapers began to eagerly hunt out examples of so-called scrounging disabled people.
The scapegoating of the disabled had become a respectable, mainstream part of British culture. In 2012, the Sun launched a campaign to ‘Beat the Cheat’, even setting up its own national benefit-fraud hotline and calling on ‘patriotic Brits’ to ‘name and shame fiddling scroungers’ in their areas.7 Such editorials were not throwaway fringe reporting but consistently supported by those at the heart of government. When in 2014 the Daily Express listed ‘a rogues gallery of 10 of the most outrageous con artists’ on benefits, then welfare chief Iain Duncan Smith was happy to provide a sound bite for the baiting headline: ‘We’ll root out the benefits cheats who pretend to be ill for money.’8
The message in all of this was simple and effective. It was not a global economic crash that had caused a recession but the so-called bloated welfare bill covering the needs of supposedly disabled people. It was not high private rents, insecure jobs or low wages that was the root of people’s problems but their disabled neighbour living an easy life on benefits.
Demonizing people on the bottom rung of society has been a method of reinforcing the status quo through the ages. This has long particularly been the case during times of economic crisis, where minorities and marginalized groups become scapegoats of those in power. But what was unique about the scapegoating of disabled people post-2010 was that the group now being sacrificed was the very people society had always promised to protect.
Over the past couple of decades, we have got used to politicians describing Britain as a country that has always exuded a sense of fairness and decency. And the treatment of Britain’s disabled citizens is in many ways at the heart of this. We have all heard the phrase ‘the mark of a civilized society is how it treats its most vulnerable citizens’. It is an idiom long-used to articulate Britain’s apparent caring attitude to disabled people. In many ways, providing a ‘safety net’ for citizens struggling with poor health is central to Britain’s very identity of decency and fairness – one that comes with the in-built claim that even in ‘tough economic times’ disabled people would always have a safety net to rely on.
This book will show not only that this is rose-tinted revisionism of Britain’s long-troubled relationship with disability, but also that the austerity era has seen those in power abandon even a pretence of duty to disabled citizens and brutally turn against them. Disabled people – once a source of compassion and care – had become an object of suspicion, demonization and contempt. It was official: under austerity, the one group in society who had been supposedly untouchable was now said to be unaffordable.
As ministers and much of the media spoke of the bloated disability bill, over the course of six years I began to talk daily to the disabled people living behind the rhetoric.
Each was very different: some had left school in their teens, while others had held traditionally middle-class jobs until bad health hit; some were lifelong Labour voters, others had no interest in politics at all; some were born disabled, while others developed mental health problems or chronic illness in later life. But all had something in common: post-2010, each was now living in the sort of hardship they had never imagined possible.
Jimbob was one of them. I first spoke to the sixty-eight-year-old in the freezing winter of 2017, just a few months after the general election had seen the Conservative Party returned to power. Jimbob has chronic lung disease – ‘It’s like trying to breathe through a straw whilst running,’ he told me –
