It’s a freezing January morning, and “Cuts Kill” has been written in bloody letters across Regent Street. Disabled activists in wheelchairs have lashed themselves together across the road with thick chains and D-locks, blocking the road.
This is not the vision of human need that the Conservative Party had in mind when it began to extend Labour’s welfare cuts. There is nothing abject or cringing about these disabled people, although many of them have put their health at grave risk to come here today to protest against the Welfare Reform Bill. Provisions in the bill will make disabled people “lose our homes, lose our jobs and lose our care payments”, according to one young woman in a wheelchair who holds up a sign saying: “No more meals on wheels? Eat the Rich!” Tiny Tim this ain’t.
The way we talk about welfare is changing. Debate surrounding the bill has focused largely on whether or not it is moral to allow a tiny minority of families to receive £26,000 or more in state benefits – overlooking how housing benefit, which makes up most of this figure, goes straight into the pockets of private landlords.
Last week during a radio phone-in, I spoke to a woman whose voice shook with rage at the idea that immigrant families might be receiving tens of thousands of pounds in payments when her own benefits are due to be cut. It’s a callous but effective strategy: turn the anger of the working poor against the non-working poorer, diverting attention from the biggest redistribution of wealth to the very rich in a generation.
At the protest, officers from the Metropolitan Police – who have a less-than-spotless record when it comes to dragging peaceful protesters from their wheelchairs – are looking nervous at the prospect of arresting 15 wheelchair users in full view of the national press.
Lee, 32, who has cerebral palsy and receives Disability Living Allowance, is worried about losing his livelihood. “It could happen to anybody,” he says, shifting himself in his chair, which is chained to a line of others across the street. “They don’t realise that, by doing this, it means a lot of people will go into decline and a lot might even lose their lives.”
Hear no evil
Unfortunately the government does realise but it chooses to ignore the evidence. Official consultations on disability benefits advised that forcing the disabled to hunt for non-existent jobs they can’t physically handle in the middle of a recession is no way to “make work pay”. “It’s about saving money, basically,” Lee says.
Lee is wrong on that count. Across Regent Street, UK Uncut activists hold a banner stating “Tax Avoidance £25bn; Welfare Cuts £4.5bn”. There are quicker, easier ways to pay down the deficit than throwing the disabled and mentally ill out of their homes and communities, and this government knows that full well. Instead, the reforms are about changing our political culture to one in which basic compassion no longer plays a part.
Britain is being refashioned into a nation which believes that helping the needy is morally and fiscally unaffordable – and no sum of money saved is worth that shame.
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