The UN is damning about the effects of cuts on disabled people. If
Theresa May wants to escape David Cameron’s toxic legacy, here’s her
chance
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/08/un-report-austerity-disability-cuts-theresa-may
 ‘This government has to break with the shameful legacy of the
previous regime, which demonised disabled people in receipt of
benefits.’ A disability benefits protest on Westminster bridge in
September. Photograph: Nick Ansell

​In Theresa May’s first speech as prime minister, she spoke with
feeling about fighting the injustices that poverty and inequality
create – for those with mental health conditions and for those at the
bottom of the heap. She has, since, made much of ending the “age of
austerity” promulgated by her predecessor David Cameron’s government.
So today’s devastating report from the United Nations, describing
austerity policies as amounting to “violations of disabled people’s
rights”, is a direct challenge to May

The UN document provides a sobering end of school report for Cameron’s
leadership. It lays bare the multiple injustices heaped upon disabled
people and their families, detailing the effects of a range of
measures affecting them that have been introduced since 2010. These
include the bedroom tax and cuts to disability benefits and social
care, which, the UN says, have disproportionately impacted on disabled
people. The report says that the overall effect of a punitive regime
has affected the rights of disabled people, so hard won, to live
independently, to seek and stay in work and to be able to live an
ordinary life. It concludes by calling on the government to carry out
a cumulative impact assessment of all the measures, to give some sense
of their effects.

            (Needless to say that in response to the report, certain
newspapers have, true to recent form, sought to demonise the two UN
envoys rather than analyse the findings, with clear parallels to the
monstering of the judges involved in the Brexit judgment.)

The government, for its part, has rejected the report out of hand.
May’s reaction could have been a defining moment, where she positions
herself more clearly in the centre ground, as heir to one-nation
Conservatism. Her rupture with a cruel and unfair regime, under
Cameron, which she has so clearly signalled, would be secured by
reading and responding to the report with both compassion and action.

It is, after all, common knowledge what the effects of disability
benefit reforms have been. John Pring’s outstanding journalism at the
Disability News Service, along with that of other disability
activists, has demonstrated the shameful emergence of benefit-related
deaths. And these deaths have a chilling effect on all disabled people
who no longer feel that they can turn to our wealthy nation state and
expect to be treated fairly and with compassion.





But other effects are equally disturbing. New, stringent eligibility
criteria, for example, mean that Motability (specially adapted) cars
are being withdrawn in ever greater numbers, causing some disabled
people to lose jobs that they loved. Nearly 14,000 people have now
lost their cars due to the new guidelines. The cuts to benefits and
social care budgets have been savage, too, and the result is that many
disabled people have had to rely on family support – and some have
even been forced back into institutional care.


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The government will counter, of course, that it is taking action. Last
month it scrapped repeat assessments for those with severe and
lifelong conditions for the main out-of-work disability benefit,
employment and support allowance (ESA). The assessments, however,
remain in place for other disabled people.

Damian Green, the new work and pensions secretary, has said of the
changes to ESA: “I believe in a welfare state where you have got to be
hard-headed, but you shouldn’t be hard-hearted.” Yet in its recent
work, health and disability green paper the government suggested that
all of those in the ESA support group might be forced to take part in
work activity – although that group is not currently expected to do
so, because it includes those with highest needs and terminal
conditions.

The government will, also, in its defence, point to the relaunch of
its Disability Confident scheme to boost the employment of disabled
people. Time will tell; in truth, the disability employment gap has
widened, rather than reduced, under successive Conservative
governments.


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This government has to break with the shameful legacy of the previous
regime, which demonised disabled people in receipt of benefits, made
life for many a misery, failed to find them work and may well have
driven some towards depression and even suicide. Instead of rejecting
a sensible, sober report from a key international body, it should own
up to the mistakes of the past, consider the report fully, and act on
it.

Disabled people became one of the last government’s favoured whipping
boys. It is time to break with that cruel past.


-- 
Avinash Shahi
Doctoral student at Centre for Law and Governance JNU


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