One day, I was fine. The next I opened my eyes to a paramedic asking me how many fingers he was holding up.
The good news was that it wasn’t a brain tumour, but it turned out to be epilepsy – faulty wiring that I never knew I had, could not control, and could theoretically pull my plug out any time it wanted.
A self-absorbed single woman of 31 suddenly had an invisible disability, and had her eyes opened to how easily life can change. You, reading this, could wake up tomorrow to a tingle or ache or accident or disease that will likewise teach you health is finite. And what will you do, if you become one of the 24% of the population that has a disability?
Will you still work? Can you provide for your children? Will you manage the shops, the stairs, the stress? You will probably hope to do all those things, and trust that having paid your taxes all these years there’ll be a state-sponsored cushion. Only, I’m afraid, Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall wants to take half the stuffing away.
The rhetoric is the same as it’s been since Henry VIII closed the monasteries and kicked the sick onto the streets. Out loud, it’s caring and Christian and encouragement to work. Between the lines, these feckless lazy sods should earn their bloody keep.
Liz intends to cut the Personal Independence Payment by 50%, with the implication being that getting up to £9,747 per year is what’s stopping the disabled taking up all those six-figure jobs in the banking industry that would otherwise shower down upon them. The trouble is that PIP is not an out-of-work benefit. It’s the help you get to be IN work. Axing it is like chopping a leg off and telling someone to tango.
If you’ve never been disabled, and you hear that PIP is being cut by half to encourage the disabled to work, you’d probably assume PIP is too generous, too easy, too likely to be spent down the bookies by someone who’s had “a bad back” since 1972. Except it isn’t.
PIP is what it says – a payment to make you independent. It pays for the things you need to make that happen: if you need help washing, or eating, or getting out of bed, for example. If you can’t communicate, or need help getting around. It’s not means-tested, because when you means-test it the poorest who really need it lose out.
Right now, if you cannot wash below the waist, you’ll get PIP. From November next year, you’ll only get PIP if you cannot wash your torso. For some reason, Liz feels that a clean bum is a luxury the disabled can well do without. If you can’t remember to cook a meal without someone reminding you, today you could get help with that. Next year, you’ll need to remember what hunger pangs mean yourself.
If you become disabled before next April, you’ll get £13.85 a day to pay for someone to help. If you become disabled on May 1, you’ll get £7.14 a day. What was insufficient will become farcical, and the 370,000 disabled predicted to lose out will struggle with cleanliness, and nutrition, and they’ll get sicker, quicker.
The Department for Work and Pensions pays millions to firms that offer job coaching for the disabled, and they’re about as useful as a poke in the eye. The idea that people with a chronic health condition would be cheerfully filling the jobs market if only they could be persuaded to write a CV or attend a job interview rather overlooks the fact that some of them cannot write, some of them cannot travel, and that is what PIP was for, you fools.
It is not fair to judge 16million people by one example, and my disability is a non-painful, mostly-manageable one with limited impact. But even those with long-term pain, mobility problems, Parkinson’s, hearing loss, blindness, mental disorders, want to work. They want to have money, for the simple reason that many of them live in grinding poverty or close to it.
There are three reasons they fall out of work, and not one of them is their fault. 1) Employers don’t want them; 2) The healthcare system is making them worse; and 3) The British state dangles carrots for rich people, and saves the stick for the poor.
If you employ a disabled person, you are required by law to make ‘reasonable adjustments’. If you put in a ramp, you can offset it against tax so it’s cost-neutral. But if they have a condition that waxes and wanes – rheumatoid arthritis for example – and they can come in one day, but not the next, you cannot depend on them the same. If you have to let them go, you’ll worry about a discrimination claim. It’s easier, overall, to wish them well and employ the person who won’t cause extra paperwork.
The long wait for NHS treatment allows conditions to worsen. It affects mental health and nutrition, and before you know it everyone’s feeling worse, and more likely to be off work. The tax take drops, disablement rates rise, and it starts to look like the disabled are the cause rather than a symptom of the overall malaise. So they cut the PIP they needed to keep themselves afloat, and they sink. It’s already hard enough to get a job – try doing it when you haven’t washed or eaten.
It’s been 500 years since the Tudor tyrant closed the only hospitals that existed, in the belief they were encouraging sloth and greed. And still no-one in power has figured out what the disabled have needed ever since: for employers to be incentivised for recruiting them. For a National Insurance discount, or a corporation tax rebate, or some sort of favoured status if you hit a quota. Do that, and six-figure jobs in the banking industry WILL start being offered to people who’ve lost a limb to meningitis.
That’s far too sensible for the deaf, dumb, blind and socially-impaired individuals who seem to fill government. So they’ll keep getting £100,000 a year for the political equivalent of smearing excrement on the walls, and will never realise that their lack of ability is what’s dragging the rest of us down.