Labour's Disability Benefit Cuts

[davidgillon]

Posted this earlier in the comments to the Guardian's live politics feed, pointing out the massive gap in the logic of Labour's disability benefit cuts:

Completely missing from Labour's whining about the difficulty of getting disabled people into work is any discussion of the far cat in the room - the widespread experience by disabled workers of discrimination in the workplace from management (and colleagues, but mostly management). A gag clause means I can't name the national flagship company where a very senior manager engaged in a multi-year campaign to drive me out of the company, to quote him 'your disability is a threat to my schedules' (it wasn't), and where the rest of management closed ranks around him when I challenged him on it through the grievance procedure.

The DWP's Disability Confident campaign asserts it isn't disability discrimination, managers are just 'embarrassed', which goes down about as well with disabled people as you might imagine.

Unless Labour sets about a serious campaign to drive disability discrimination out of the workplace, then the only logical conclusion is that they don't care about getting disabled people into the workplace, just off the benefits bill. And that's disability discrimination as government, as Labour Party, policy

 

Deeply, deeply furious with Starmer over this.

Comments

[hilarita]

Oh yeah. Spitting mad over this. Just Fucking Tax Rich People More!

Cutting disability benefits (even with a mild uplift to basic UC) won't improve shit, for two reasons: one the one you identified (that employers are far too often disablist shits) and two: poorer people have more health problems. Making life harder for poor people, particularly poor people with disabilities just pushes the costs from the DWP to the NHS. It's so self-defeating.

Now actually spending some money on employment support, and also on unfucking employers so they can't pull this shit, might actually help, but that doesn't drive down costs in the short term. And in any case, we could perhaps stop being performatively shit towards people who aren't working and are on working-age benefits, and start Taxing! The! Rich!

[dewline]

Horrific, stupid, cruel...this scheme of Starmer's is all of that. He might as well admit to being co-opted.

[sovay]

FEH.

[davidgillon]

Just Fucking Tax Rich People More!

This!

[hilarita]

I mean, I don't even pay higher rate tax, but I'd gladly pay a penny more in the pound in income tax or national insurance in order to get some more money into the NHS and benefits system.

[davidgillon]

Ostensibly they're putting more money into defence. My only concern with that is I don't think they're putting anything like enough extra into it. But for god's sake, if you need more money from the tax system, go after the people with more than enough, not those who barely have enough to start with.