Crippen Cartoons cartoons at the cutting edge of disability

You may remember back in April of this year I ran a blog article about the DWP hiring more covert surveillance officers to track down disabled people who were fraudulently claiming benefits. At the time the government’s own figures showed that benefit fraud was at its lowest ever at less than 3.5%, much of which could be attributed to DWP error.

Well, having got rid of the Tory’s, we now have a labour government that has decided to continue with the harmful rhetoric that the DWP continue to pump out to a gullible public through the national press. But how did this attack against disabled people start, especially those claiming benefits because they cannot find accessible employment?

You’ll remember the Coalition administration elected in 2010? Well, it was this administration that started to change the public’s perception of disabled people. They vehemently challenged the integrity of the chronically ill and disabled community and routinely accused disability benefit claimants of fraud while failing to produce evidence to support their claims. Their often hostile rhetoric encouraged a 213 percent increase in prosecuted disability hate crimes, with successive administrations disregarded the thousands of deaths directly linked to the Work Capability Assessment (WCA).

And what with recent stats from the Home Office revealing that disability hate crime has risen by 43%. It doesn’t take much of a leap to connect this to the vitriol being pumped out by the DWP.

If you’ve read Mo Stewart’s book you’ll know how the WCA “ … was adopted using a discredited and dangerous biopsychosocial model of assessment to restrict access to long-term disability benefit. Influenced by corporate America since 1992, the UK social policy reforms guaranteed that many of those in greatest need were destined to die when, covertly, killed by the State.”

Sounds a bit dramatic, doesn’t it? “Killed by the state”. But this has exactly what has been happening since Margaret Thatcher started her devotion to neoliberal politics, which is the ideology that supports free market competition with an emphasis on minimal State intervention, would eventually be identified as being at ‘the root of all our problems’ (Monbiot, 2016).

Thatcher’s well-documented insistence that the welfare state was an unacceptable financial burden on the public purse, opened the door to the influence of corporate America with UK social policy reforms and the ‘planned demolition of the UK welfare state’ (Stewart, 2016).

Incidentally, every 30 years confidential Cabinet Papers from past UK governments are released into the public domain. In 2012, the 1982 Cabinet Papers from the first Thatcher administration (1979–83) were released, offering evidence demonstrating the political expectation to eventually demolish the UK welfare state, including the National Health Service (NHS).

It’s all there folks, you just have to dig for it as John Pring, disabled Editor of Disability News Service (DNS) and Mo Stewart, disabled researcher and lead on the Preventable Harm project, have done. Mo writes:

“Thatcher’s social policy right-leaning neoliberal legacy has been continued by every successive administration. This included introducing American corporate influence for the development of UK social policy reforms by the Major administration (1990–97) (Stewart, 2018); the adoption of American social and labour market policies by the Blair administration (1997–2007) (Daguerre, 2004; Daguerre and Taylor-Gooby, 2004); the adoption of the Work Capability Assessment in 2008 to limit access to the new Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) disability benefit by the Brown administration (2007–10) (Gentleman, 2011); and the increased use of sanctions, which removed all income to successfully intimidate disability benefit claimants, and to starve some of them to death (Pring, 2020a), by the Cameron-Clegg Coalition administration (2010–15).”

In the Independent Living review of John Pring’s book they comment that: “As demonstrated in the ‘Department’, a disturbing number of chronically ill disability benefit claimants committed suicide, linked in no small measure to persecution by the DWP, and to the fear instilled by the relentless threat of sanctions that meant the total loss of their only income which guaranteed destitution.”

Description of cartoon for those people using screen reading software

The PM Keir Starmer and a Civil Servant are standing each side of a large Labour Part Press Release statement hung on the wall. It reads ‘Disabled benefits claimants are all work-shy scroungers with most of them fiddling the system and taking your hard earned money!’ On a table in front of them are four other cards. One reads: ‘Benefit fraud at its lowest rate ever’, another reads: ‘PIP fraud at zero!’, the third one reads ‘Disability hate crime up 43%’, and the final card reads: ‘DWP ignores research re 600 suicides linked to WCA’. The civil servant is asking the PM: “But Sir – what about the facts?!” whilst pointing at the cards upon the table. Starmer replies: “Facts – when have they ever played a part in politics?!”