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The fashionable thing is to decry the government’s “messaging”. Last week, it was signalling a plan to slash disability benefits. Jo White, the MP for Bassetlaw, was bemoaning the fact that people’s “aspirations are so low”. By the weekend, the health secretary, Wes Streeting, was blaming the numbers of disabled people on an overdiagnosis of mental health conditions. Keir Starmer, however, was rumoured to be considering a U-turn on the cuts – apparently he hadn’t been expecting so much opposition from the cabinet and backbenchers. Why not, one might ask? They are, after all, members of the Labour party. Surely they would be uncomfortable with a plan that sounded exactly, to the letter, as if it had come from the Conservatives?
Fine, it doesn’t look like the most expert job of managing the optics. But it has also left as many as 10 million people sleepless with worry, because the world this government describes bears no relation to the reality they are living in. As of last October, there were 3.6 million personal independence payment (Pip) claimants. Eligibility is stringent. The idea – last floated by Tony Blair, whose transformation into know-nothing golf-club pontificator is still startling after all this time – that we are “medicalising the ups and downs of life”, handing out diagnoses and sickness benefits to people who just feel a bit sad, is fanciful. According to the 2021 census, there are 5.8 million unpaid carers in the UK, 1.2 million of those living in poverty, 400,000 in deep poverty. A report by the Social Metrics Commission found that, of the 14.9 million people living in poverty in the UK in 2021-22, 8.6 million were in families that included a disabled person.
In any one of those families, there will probably be a carer who would love to work, but can’t get the support. They can’t find a job that will work around medical appointments, or school holidays, or the shambolic special educational needs and disabilities provision of many local authorities, or they can’t get a place at a day centre, or get respite, or there simply aren’t enough hours in the day.
Carers UK estimated last year that if every unpaid carer in the country decided to cease caring tomorrow and joined the “productive” economy instead, that would cost the state £184bn a year. In other words, the cost of disability is already being shouldered mainly by disabled people and their loved ones. The state owes these families an enormous debt of gratitude as a baseline. On top of that, it owes them better services, so that those who want to work can do so; it owes them better services anyway, if it wants to count itself modern and humane; and it owes them the basic decency of recognition.
What the government delivers instead is a narrative that sounds bland, but is actually gaslighting on a large scale. It describes a country in which poverty is caused by low aspiration and disability is a choice, by people who simply aren’t robust enough to be well. This country doesn’t exist. It describes a world that can’t afford for people to be chronically ill or disabled, when the opposite is true: we cannot wish away those things.
In offering patchy, unsympathetic, parsimonious support, the state only traps more people in poverty, deprivation which it then performatively ignores. If you are reliant on Pip, it is truly terrifying to witness, but it should terrify all of us, because a government that can front out this kind of denial is one that is not listening, not curious, not realistic and not humane.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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