Smokescreen

[davidgillon]

The new Spartacus report, Smokescreen, into the government's Green Paper on Work and Health, is out. I'm listed as a co-author as it incorporates my 'Ticked Off' dissection of Disability Confident, but didn't actually do any work on the main report - which is a monumental, spectacular effort by Caroline Richardson and Stef Benstead.

TLDR: The government want us to see disabled people as the problem in disabled people being unable to work, rather than challenge employers as the actual cause of the Disability Employment Gap.

Executive summary of Work and Health: The beatings will continue until disability employment improves. *Headdesk*

Comments

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, I'm glad this blog entry based on a conversation I had with Scope finally went live yesterday, I tried to address the fact that this isn't a problem that can be fixed by individual disabled people so I think the timing worked out rather well.

[davidgillon]

Good job! The whole problem is a society level issue, not something disabled people can fix, no matter how much you cut their benefits, or sanction them.

[jesse_the_k]

Is the report viewable by us benighted Americans, as well?

I bet I'll learn something tactically useful.

[davidgillon]

Don't know where the link vanished to, but here it is again; https://spartacusnetwork.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/richardsonbenstead-smokescreen-2017.pdf

[jesse_the_k]

I'm just 20 pages in and I'm shaking w rage.

[davidgillon]

Yeah, it's supposed to be about helping us, but you can really look at it as gaslighting the entire disabled population of the UK and trying to convince us it's our fault we're discriminated against.

Any disabled person will tell you we face massive discrimination in recruitment. Even the recruiters openly admit it. Work and Health mentions discrimination precisely twice. One of those is to say disabled people may fear it, without acknowledging they're clearly right to, and the other is a mention of a non-governmental scheme.

[davidgillon]

Well that's weird, I'm pretty sure there was a link there to Smokescreen when I first posted this.

Here it is again: https://spartacusnetwork.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/richardsonbenstead-smokescreen-2017.pdf

And here's a much shorter blog I wrote this evening to publicise it: http://wheresthebenefit.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/piercing-smokescreen.html