Things have come to a dismal pass for disabled people in Britain. That this country, once seen as a pioneer in the promotion of human rights (admittedly you have to go back to the 1950s and 60s for that, but still) should be the first country to be investigated by the UN for infringing the human rights of disabled people is embarrassing enough.

That there should be so little outcry within Britain about it is even worse.

The background to this is a systematic attack over the last 4 years by Britain’s current coalition government on disabled people. This regime shows every sign of having consciously and quite cynically selected 3 or 4 groups of people – groups that tend not to have a lot of powerful supporters or a strong political voice — to act as targets for its programme of cuts to public funding and support. Disabled people constitute one of these groups. This government’s austerity programme has seen draconian ‘restructuring’ – or dismantling – of the social supports that enable disabled people, and their families, to live anything approaching decent and fulfilling lives. It’s important I think to emphasise that the cuts have affected not just financial support to people so disabled they are unable to work. One of the key schemes (disclaimer: it’s one I’ve benefited from myself) is called Access to Work, which as its name suggests involves government grants towards equipment or other measures that enable a disabled person to be employed. It is generally acknowledged that Access to Work is a financial success story: for every £1 paid out, the government gets back £1.48 in income tax from disabled people kept in work. Despite this, the scheme is under threat; and given that it is such a financial winner, it’s hard not to see this as motivated not by real-life economics, but by the ideological need to keep up a story of disabled people as social burdens.

Worse, in some ways, because less tangible and open to analysis, is the way that the Coalition seems to be building support for its programme by fostering a climate of hostility towards disabled people. Its ongoing rhetoric of rewarding “hardworking families” as opposed to “scroungers and skivers” manages to imply, without actually saying so out loud, that anyone who isn’t in full time employment isn’t hardworking; those who for reasons of health or disability can’t work are lumped in with the “scroungers and skivers” who parasitise the rest of society. In the last week, there has been a flurry of comment about a comment made by Lord Freud, the Conservative Party’s Welfare Minister, who in an admittedly off the cuff response to a question at the Conservative Party conference implied that disabled people were “not worth” the legal minimum wage. I actually do have some sympathy for Lord Freud, since anyone who speaks at public events knows that the likelihood of putting your foot in your mouth is rather high. But what this particular slip reveals is just the background of unchallenged assumptions about disability, and disabled people, and – more abstractly – about things like citizenship, and rights, and belonging, that Britain’s current government holds.

Other commentators have noted that it’s still better to be disabled in Britain than in, say, Russia or Liberia, and that is probably true. But other countries never set themselves up as beacons of human rights, as Britain (historically, at least) has; and other countries haven’t set about what many observers see as the deliberate dismantling of a system that had made considerable progress towards the inclusion of disabled people as full citizens.
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To be accused of a major breach of human rights is no more than this regime deserves.

For more information see:

http://www.spartacusnetwork.org.uk
http://just-fair.co.uk/hub/single/dignity_and_opportunity_for_all/
http://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/news/2014/october/our-response-paying-disabled-people-less-work