Disabled People Give Lead In Fight Against UK Austerity
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- Published on Thursday, 29 September 2016 21:30
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1309 .... September 30, 2016
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Disabled People Give Lead In Fight Against UK Austerity
John Clarke
I recently had the enormous honour of representing the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) at a week of action and international conference, organized from September 4-10 by Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) in the UK. This was another step in building a close working relationship between our two organizations. It was also fascinating and inspiring to see disabled people, not merely participating in the struggle against austerity but actually giving a powerful and decisive lead to the entire movement.
Since 2010, governments in the UK have moved into a cutting edge role in the implementation of the agenda of austerity. Central to this has been a drive to degrade and undermine income support... systems so as to generate a climate of desperation and to force people into low paid, precarious work. A notorious system of ‘benefit sanctions’ has ensured that those forced to seek assistance live in a state of ongoing uncertainty, under constant threat of suspension or outright cut off.
However, a striking feature of the austerity attack in the UK has been an extraordinary and brazen readiness to attack disabled people living in poverty. When the whole edifice of English Poor Law provision was put in place, there was an assumption that those seeking assistance could be divided into the more and the less morally worthy, the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ poor. ‘Able bodied’ and employable people were considered highly suspect and subject to outright abandonment, whereas those who could not be so readily assumed to be the architects of their own misfortune, particularly disabled people, might expect somewhat fewer conditions and scrutiny to be attached to the pittance they were provided. The austerity agenda of the 21st Century, however, has no patience with such sentimentality. It's considered essential that disability, even of the severest kind, should exempt no one from the scramble for the lowest paid and most exploitative jobs.
