As Frances Ryan writes in this blistering polemic, Britain faces fundamental questions about what form of society it wants to be. Will we choose a survival-of-the‑fittest gadget wherein Poverty and disability are dealt with as moral failings deserving of punishment? Or are we organized to face our vulnerability, realize our shared humanity, and rebuild our welfare kingdom?
Ryan, a Guardian columnist, clarifies how some distance we’ve fallen over what she evocatively calls the “precipice of country-wide individual”. In over six chapters, she sets out the numerous methods by which disabled humans have been made to pay since the economic crash. In Poverty, we find out how the cumulative effect of benefit adjustments – cuts to council tax assistance, the bedroom tax, and accelerated sanctions – has driven an estimated 650,000 disabled people into Poverty.
The bankruptcy on Work considers how media elements reviled disabled human beings as fakes and “gain cheats” inside the early years of austerity, laying the basis for a new, punitive device of advantages assessment. By 2016, there have been 3,seven-hundred advantage investigators – five instances as many as look at tax evasion (benefit fraud expenses the taxpayer £1.3bn a yr, at the same time as the tax hole because of unpaid taxes is around £35bn). At the same time, the aid in the area to assist disabled people in Work has become stripped away.
Chapters on Independence and Housing observe how cuts compounded these issues to social care offerings. It is a depressing catalog of penny-pinching: meals on wheels being scrapped; disabled humans being charged for care visits or left by myself and not able to wash or devour; Motability cars were taken away, leaving people housebound; humans being refused wheelchairs and crucial alterations to their houses. One mainly stunning instance is that of Robert, a tetraplegic man housed in a second-floor flat without elevating access; so that it will leave his domestic, his carer has to tug him down the stairs.
In Women and Children, Ryan examines how austerity particularly impacted those organizations. In some tragic cases, the lack of benefits and assistance offerings for disabled moms has brought their kids into care. Hundreds of hundreds of kids had been left looking after their disabled mother and father in the absence of kingdom services. All of this is tougher to task due to cuts to prison resources.
