One of the legacy’s of Britain’s Labour government was the massive rise they oversaw in people becoming disabled. It seems millions of Britain’s who weren’t remotely incapacitated, but wanted to be, were allowed to realise their dreams and become officially disabled.
As Rod Liddle says in the Sunday TImes, with tongue firmly in cheek, “The thing I will miss most about the last Labour government was its commitment to the concept of inclusivity, and especially as regards disabled people. Under Labour, millions of people who aspired to be disabled but found it difficult to, say, lose a leg or blind themselves were given the choice to achieve their goal through an innovation called “incapacity benefit”.
This was democracy in action: if you wished to be disabled, all you had to do was say that you were and your wish was granted. You didn’t even have to hobble around — just write on a form that your back was giving you a bit of gyp, or that you’d been feeling depressed since John Nettles announced he would no longer continue to play the role of Chief Inspector Barnaby in Midsomer Murders.
I suppose you could call it the disabling state — reaching out to people who wished to join the growing, vibrant community of disabled people without actually being disabled at all.”
A study last week discovered that only 9% of people who claimed the £91 per week incapacity benefit were actually incapacitated. Some 91% were perfectly able to go out to work — that would be something like 2.4m people, an extraordinary figure, when you think about it.
The new Liberal-Conservative coalition government is taking a typically elitist approach and insisting that people who claim incapacity benefit should actually be incapacitated somehow, and if they’re not they will either have to switch to the new job-seekers allowance.
The most remarkable figure from the study was that as soon as it was mentioned that there would be medical tests for those claiming incapacity benefit, 37% of claimants suddenly decided that actually, now we come to think of it, we’re not disabled at all, really — and they relinquished their claims. The study concerned itself with a comparatively small sample, but if extended nationwide that would mean almost 900,000 off the incapacity register at a stroke. And onto the unemployment register, of course — a point presumably not lost on Labour.
The true unemployment figure, if you include those 91% of people who are not disabled, could be as much as 5.5m.
