The war on the disabled is a choice
It's obvious who should pay.
I am angry. I know many of you are too. From the Labour government’s continued complicity in genocide in Gaza, their demonisation of migrants, trans people, and other vulnerable groups and their committed attack on the poor (and so much more) there is a lot to be angry about.
The battles that we are fighting, split across no end of fronts, can sometimes feel disparate, unconnected or siloed. Of course all of these struggles, whether it’s against poverty, imperialism, transphobia, racism and more, are connected both in the abstract and the material, but it’s easy to forget that in the midst of it. One thing, one single, real, tangible thread that weaves it’s way across each of these battlefronts is the notion of choice.
The attacks Labour are enacting on, for example, poor families with more than two children are a choice. The unwillingness to hold Israel to account for the genocide in Gaza is a choice. The Health Secretary stopping the healthcare of trans people as one of his first major acts in office? A choice.
It’s this that has been going round and round in my head in the last week as the full scale of the horror meted out by Labour under the guise of ‘welfare reform’ has become apparent.
Just after I turned 21, I became extremely ill. After years of mismanagement and trying to just struggle through, I had a series of extremely acute bipolar episodes that saw me hospitalised four times in 6 months. I could barely look after my basic day to day needs, let alone work. I had to be monitored and looked after by friends and family almost minute by minute at points to ensure I didn’t hurt myself. I was very lucky to have them and in the GP that I shared with my mum. She was someone who helped us not only cope, but seek out what meagre support there was available. That support, in the form of Disability Living Allowance (which would go on to be PIP) gave me a tiny bit of financial help. It was, of course, nowhere near enough, but even that small amount of money gave me a little breathing space to get better at dealing with my condition. To build up and out of that terrible place into the person that sits here writing now.
Under the Labour government’s proposals, were I 21 now, and going through the same acute episodes, I would be excluded from being able to access the support that in no small part kept me alive. I am angry about so much of what is happening, but this specifically feels personal.
The removal of vital support to people of all ages is being done, according to the government, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s the need to ‘reform’ the welfare state. To allegedly undo some of the damage wrought by the implementation of Universal Credit, and indeed PIP. An extremely small number of the proposals — like those to remove the need for reassessment to those on the highest levels of entitlement, are good and welcome. Not only is it a waste of everyone’s time, energy and resource to periodically reassess someone who is, for example, paralysed for life, it is inhumane and degrading.
The other driver is fiscal. The need to cover the black hole in the finances left by the Tories that chancellor Rachel Reeves et al continue to bang on about. The cuts, because that is what they are, to support to disabled, sick, vulnerable people in need, are due to save £5 billion.
The cuts will remove support to hundreds of thousands of sick and disabled people. As mentioned above, removal of incapacity benefits for those under the age of 22 on Universal Credit forms one part of the proposals, published in a green paper last week. Other proposals include cuts to Personal Independence Payments, which, again as I already mentioned, where brought in by the coalition government in 2013 to replace Disability Living Allowance.
Personal Independence Payments are benefits for people who are sick or disabled. They are designed to help people with extra needs pay for them. They are not an unemployment benefit. Indeed many people who work also claim PIP.
PIP is split into two components — daily living and mobility. The daily living component is designed to help with every day tasks, whilst the mobility part is for help getting around. Each component is then further split into two levels of entitlement (standard and enhanced), with people qualifying for one or other or neither. For example, someone may qualify for standard daily living support but not need any help with mobility. Or they may qualify for enhanced daily living support, but only standard support for mobility etc etc. The level of support you receive is determined by going through a humiliating and, at points, entirely farcical, assessment. Awards are currently granted in the short, medium or long term.
The proposed cuts, according to the government, will not effect anyone’s mobility entitlement and will focus on those with less severe needs. It puts those being granted the standard daily living rate directly in the firing line.
In 2023/24 the standard daily living rate of PIP was £68.10 per week. The rate currently stands at £72.65 per week. That’s an increase of £4.55 per week or about 6.3%. Over the course of a year that works out at £236.60 extra. It is worth noting that, compared to 2020, the average cost of goods and services for those in the lowest income quintile has gone up by about 29%.
In the last year the number of billionaires in the UK has risen by 4 to a total of 57. In that time the total wealth of all billionaires in the UK increased by £35 million a day, or almost £12.8 billion, to a collective total of £182 billion.
If the UK’s 57 billionaires spent all the wealth they acquired in just the last year at a rate of £1 a second, it would take them 405 years, 10 months, 2 weeks, 4 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 30 seconds. If they’d begun their task in the year that the first enslaved people from Africa landed in Virginia (August 1619), they’d have only just finished.
To put those figures into perspective, if 57 people on standard daily living rate of PIP spent £1 of their (collective) £13,486.20 benefit increase every second it would take them about 3 hours 44 minutes and 46 seconds to spend it all (or roughly one screening of The Brutalist with a (much needed) 10 minute interval).
Of course, there are not just 57 people on PIP. According to government figures there are approximately 3.7 million claimants. About 1.5 million receive the standard daily living rate. Collectively, they saw an increase of about £6,825,000 in their entitlement in the last year. If all 1.5 million claimants undertook the same task (£1 a second for their collective entitlement increase) it would take them about 2.5 months. They’d still be waiting over four centuries for just 57 billionaires to catch up with them.
In many ways these comparisons are a little slapdash. I am fundamentally not comparing like with like above. But that is the point. The choice that the Labour government, and indeed many governments around the world are making right now, is to attack the limited support offered to millions of people to enable them to have even a semi decent standard of living, over going after the very few with eye watering amounts of wealth. These comparisons, for all their shortfalls, expose the fallacy of those choices in their starkest form.
We know there is money in society. You only need look at the quarterly postings of companies like Shell to tell you this. The richest 1% hold more wealth than 70 per cent of Britons. No matter which way you cut it, it’s obvious who should pay.
This week, on Wednesday, chancellor Rachel Reeves will announce billions in cuts, making a choice to do that rather than increase taxes on the wealthiest. The government are making that choice because it is easy. It is politically expedient for them to punch down, instead of going to war with the people who have created and benefited from the rank inequality now embedded in our society — an inequality that is only increasing year on year. The irony being that choosing this political course, one that rehashes the worst excesses of Cameronite policy, is simply holding the door open to the far-right.
We must make it impossible for them to do so. Make sure you’re following the brilliant work of people like Disabled People Against Cuts and Crips Against Cuts to find out how to resist.
Thanks so much for reading. I will be back tomorrow with full protest, demonstration and court support listings for the week (as well as notes for your diary for the coming weeks and months). As ever if you would like your event, protest, fundraiser etc. included here or if you have any tips, press releases or save the dates please do drop me a line!
Hope to see you on the streets soon,
ben x