Author: Fran Springfield

The recent report from Philip Alston the UN Special Rapporteur makes shameful reading. 

The UK is the fifth richest country in the world,  yet Alston reports; “One fifth of its population (14 million people) live in poverty, and 1.5 million of them experienced destitution in 2017.

Policies of austerity introduced in 2010 continue largely unabated, despite the tragic social consequences. Close to 40 per cent of children are predicted to be living in poverty by 2021. Food banks have proliferated; homelessness and rough sleeping have increased greatly; tens of thousands of poor families must live in accommodation far from their schools, jobs and community networks; life expectancy is falling for certain groups; and the legal aid system has been decimated.”

This is a damming indictment of the political choice of austerity, made by Tory Government. It’s important that Alston has included the destruction of the legal aid system. Without access to justice it’s so much harder for those who are victims of flawed decision making by Tory Ministers to challenge decisions at either Tribunal level or in the Courts.

Alston goes on to say; “The social safety net has been badly damaged by drastic cuts to local authorities’ budgets, which have eliminated many social services, reduced policing services, closed libraries in record numbers, shrunk community and youth centres and sold off public spaces and buildings. The bottom line is that much of the glue that has held British society together since the Second World War has been deliberately removed and replaced with a harsh and uncaring ethos.”

Clear and evidential proof that the hostile environment towards disabled and sick people really does exist.

Alston’s report is very clear about the change in the UK; “British compassion has been replaced by a punitive, mean-spirited and often callous approach apparently designed to impose a rigid order on the lives of those least capable of coping, and elevate the goal of enforcing blind compliance over a genuine concern to improve the well-being of those at the lowest economic levels of British society.

It might seem to some observers that the Department of Work and Pensions has been tasked with designing a digital and sanitized version of the nineteenth century workhouse, made infamous by Charles Dickens, rather than seeking to respond creatively and  compassionately to the real needs of those facing widespread economic insecurity in an age of deep and rapid transformation brought about by automation, zero-hour contracts and rapidly growing inequality.”

Alston writes about the effects of austerity on a number of different groups of people. His evidence is relation to disabled people is unambiguous; “Nearly half of those in poverty – 6.9 million people – are from families in which someone has a disability. Persons with disabilities are more likely to be in poverty and are more likely to be unemployed, in insecure employment or economically inactive. They have also been some of the hardest hit by austerity measures. As a result of changes to benefits and taxes since 2010, some families with disabilities are projected to lose £11,000 on average by 2021–2022, more than 30 per cent of their annual net income. People with disabilities told the Special Rapporteur repeatedly about benefits assessments that were superficial, dismissive, and contradicted the advice of their doctor.”

The Government’s response has been woefully lacking with Theresa May actually having the nerve to “disagree with the report” when she was challenged at PMQs by Margaret Greenwood the Shadow DWP Minister. Amber Rudd the new DWP Minister called the report ‘disappointing’.  Alston has, quite rightly,  accused the Government of “remaining determinedly in a state of denial”.

 Alston makes it very clear that; “Considering the significant resources available in the country and the sustained and widespread cuts to social support, which have resulted in significantly worse outcomes, the policies pursued since 2010 amount to retrogressive measures in clear violation of the country’s human rights obligations.”

 He doesn’t believe Brexit will improve things, saying; “If Brexit proceeds, it is likely to have a major adverse impact on the most vulnerable”.

Alston’s whole report is a blunt and brutal condemnation of the policies of successive Tory governments.

Labour has already promised that it will implement the UN Convention of the Rights of Disabled People. Using the convention as a basis for changing the law and improving the lives of disabled people can’t come soon enough.

Guest Blog by Dr Chris Grover, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University

Britain has endured nearly a decade of austerity that has had a devastating impact upon the income of and disabled people. It is estimated, for example, that the result of benefit and tax changes between 2010 and 2017 by 2020/21 will be that households with a disabled adult andchild will lose £5,500 per annum; households with a disabled child £3,300 per annum and households with a disabled adult £2,400 a year. These figures compare to £1,000 per annum for households with no disabled people. Even before the George Osborne’s 2015 Summer Budget that was structured by a poor lawarian approach to benefits for disabled people, it was estimated that in the five years between 2013/14 and 2017/18 disabled people would collectively lose £28 billion in social security payments.

There is mounting evidence that these cuts to the incomes of disabled people and the ways in which they are being secured, for example, through increased conditionality and demeaning and inaccurate eligibility testing are maiming and killing disabled people. So, for instance, disabled people’s organisations have gathered evidence about deaths related to austerity, for example, Calum’s List and We are Spartacus (see also Remember the Dead).Quantitative evidence suggests that for every 10,000 Employment and Support Allowance Work Capability Assessments, there are an additional six suicides, 2,700 reported cases of ‘mental health problems’ and the prescribing of 7,000 anti-depressant items. Other evidence suggests that a majority (66 percent) of ESA recipients have had thoughts about killing themselves, while nearly a half (43 percent) have attempted to do so. This compare to 22 and 7 percent respectively of people in the general population

Such observations point to the fact that austerity can be understood as a form of structural violence. Johann Galtung argues that violence can be understood as the difference between the potential and the actual, between what is and what could be, and that violence occurs when detrimental impacts are known and avoidable. Structural violence, he argues, is ‘built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances.’ Austerity can be understood as violence because, as the above observations suggest, it widens the gap between what could be and what is for disabled people. It can be undersoodas structural violence because, not only has its effects been known for many years, it is a political choice and, therefore, not inevitable. Austerity is also reproducing unequal life chances. It is, for instance, contributing to increasing poverty, falling living standards, precarious wage-labour and deepening disabilised poverty.

As noted above, austerity is also contributing to the deaths of disabled people. Drawing upon the 19^th century work of Friedrich Engels, this can be described as social murder. Engels’ concern was the effects of industrialisation – low wages and poor working conditions – upon working class people. He argued that because the impacts of such conditions were foreseeable and avoidable they could be understood as social murder:

…when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual…

Given the evidence outlined above, similar arguments can be made about contemporary austerity – that through it the state (rather than bourgeoisie as Engels argued) is killing and maiming disabled people. It is doing this by reducing disabled people’s incomes andsubjecting them to an entitlement-testing regime that is emotionally damaging through the evocation of fear and stress and which is structured by harsher conditionality and, as a consequence, financially more punishing benefit sanctions. 

Engels argues that social murder is an ‘offence… more… of omission than commission.’ While, as the Disabled People Against Cuts recognise, ‘dead people don’t claim’, live people do consume, do provide jobs for other people (e.g. work capability assessors; social workers, ‘carers’ and so on) and they do have macro-economic effects (e.g. putting downward pressure on wage levels through competing for wage-labour). Governments, therefore, arguably have an interest in not deliberately killing and maiming disabled people. However, the treatment of disabled people under austere social security policy in the past decade suggests that, like many other impoverished people, their lives for ‘count for nothing’. The result is an enacting of social violence upon disabled people, the consequence of which for some is social murder.

This presentation was given at; “Social death: the impact of austerity and poverty”, organised by the land and health campaigning group Taxpayers Against Poverty (TAP) on 1st May 2019, Labour Day, at Portcullis House, on the Parliamentary Estate, Westminster. 

Click here for the video for the event and the individual presentations.