Liam Byrne and James Purnell are lefties? New Labour is a lefty party? Are you joking? They sold out to the neoliberals well over a decade ago.

“I would urge disability campaigners like Sue to engage even more fully on the issue of fraud (I know this is done to an extent).”

You are asking Sue et al. to do what in practice? I simply don’t understand the key recommendation you put forward.

Hopelessly misguided. You are asking the poor, the vulnerable and their campaigners to accept the terminology, the skewed frame of reference, the underpinning prejudice of the right and argue on their terms.
No.
There are times when you have to draw a line, and say that even if the majority discuss things in prejudicial terms, you refuse to acquiesce. Some things are right and just and some are craven capitulation. The tenor of your piece is that for electoral purposes Labour should abandon the slim support it gives at the moment for the beleaguered, and resort to same hackneyed, plain wrong and damaging rhetoric as the Mail. That is almost the definition of unprincipled, and typifies how far wrong Labour has gone and still may go.Winning power on Tory terms and policies simply gives a Tory-esque Government.
Oh, and Purnell is as culpable as IDS in the demonisation of the sick and the disabled.

Very impassioned but sadly misguided. The persecution of the poor and particularly those on benefit is integral to the ethic that drives capitalism and the issues you raise have been running for donkey’s years. . I dont think Sue Marsh is expected to pull herself up by the bootstraps. Frankly, I dont think anyone in government really cares .In the political elite,both Labour and Conservative, there is an indifference,the kind that would happily cut the incomes of the poor whilst at the same time let the multinationals off billions in tax .At the bureaucratic interface there is ignorance and an a certain kind of animosity that happens when the petit bourgeoisie meets the dispossessed. If you can turn this around by campaigning then good luck to you. But somehow I dont think you will.

Emma, these people are evil if they don’t believe in caring for the most vulnerable in our society. They are social Darwinsists (blue labourites too) and if you think that the Aidan Nazi Burley episode is an aberration then please think again. They are moving farther to the right every single day and there will come a time when these people question the right disabled people to live. Rubbish Bob! This could never happen in a civilised European country such as ours could it?

Engage with the debate? The problem is that the Mail et al, by their very nature, can reach a national audience very easily, whereas disability campaigners, not being owners of newspapers or television stations, can not.
Guess who’ll win the debate.

Plus let’s not forget that the newspapers, when banging on about benefit cheats, only occasionally print stories about actual fraudsters, instead preferring ‘people entitled to benefits, but whom the Sun finds unworthy of them, due to them being a bit rough-looking’. Which of course further breeds contempt toward those claiming, which will make putting them in the ovens/sending them to the gladiatorial pits all the more palatable in the future.

“it’s the fault of the left for falling into the trap of playing an eternal and losing defensive game.”

One of the very frustrating things is that the left’s approach to welfare reform has been proven to work…and then was abandoned.

The last Labour government set out to reduce poverty amongst children and pensioners, and between roughly 1999 and 2005 they implemented a range of policies which were staggeringly successful in doing so. For the first time ever, people were less likely to be poor in retirement than at other times in their lives, record numbers of lone parents got into work, and poverty amongst families with children fell substantially. Experts from around the world come to study what we achieved during these years. There was nothing “defensive” about any of this.

The bit which was missing was that this anti-poverty strategy was never applied to working age adults without children (hence levels of poverty rose amongst this group of people throughout Labour’s time in office), and that in around 2005, we lost focus and got increasingly focused on rubbish about the ‘dependency culture’, the fascinating ideas of David Freud and so on.

Liam Byrne’s recent speech which you referred to caused “angst” because it was full of crap ideas which are a pure waste of money such as weekly signing on at the Jobcentre. It is more of the same old, same old, reinforcing the approach which ruins people’s lives and has proven so politically unsuccessful.

I absolutely agree that we should “be talking to experts, health practitioners and patient groups to make assessment work; we should work with charities, employers and claimants to make long term unemployment a thing of the past,” as Emma argues. But this is the exact opposite of “engaging with the narrative” about disability fraud or welfare dependency – designing better services which give unemployed people control over how they receive support won’t reassure people who are worried about “scroungers”, and it is impossible to design a system with a 0% level of fraud.

@ 5 and 7:

“…there will come a time when these people question the right disabled people to live”

“…which will make putting them in the ovens/sending them to the gladiatorial pits all the more palatable in the future.”

Oh dear, Godwin’s law…Perhaps LC should have a strap line saying: ‘Where commentators are never knowingly understated”

“Oh dear, Godwin’s law”

It happens to be true that on every thread about disability and welfare, somewhere along the line one of the right wing sociopaths will come along and claim that the person isn’t really disabled and should get a job, that fraud is endemic throughout the system, or the more general “but we just can’t afford it”.

I have yet to read one of these sociopaths express even the slightest sympathy or concern for the people whose lives are being ruined as a result of the changes they support – at best we’ll have a comment saying the price is worth it to get spending on welfare down. Sue Marsh regularly gets comments claiming that because she blogs she doesn’t need support, and that she is making it up.

“I would urge disability campaigners like Sue to engage even more fully on the issue of fraud.”

I’m not sure how much more they could engage with it. The vast majority of pieces I read challenging the government’s welfare reforms constantly make the point that disability benefit fraud is actually very low. I’ve seen the actual figures reiterated time and time again.

Getting people to actually take notice and listen to that is a different story, and it’s hardly the fault of disability campaigners that the govt, with the help of the tabloid press, has created a very misleading picture of benefit fraud which reaches millions more people than a blog post ever will. Take the Crimestoppers contract for example, recently publicised on the BBC – how can disability campaigners compete with that?

We keep repeating the facts in the face of all this misinformation. But a lot of people don’t want to hear facts, and many aren’t swayed by them because of course everyone ‘knows someone’ who is ‘probably’ fiddling the system. Right now people are pissed off with the recession, they want someone to blame, and the govt is giving them benefit claimants and the disabled as a handy scapegoat.

“It would be a mistake to believe it comes from a place of evil.”

I don’t agree. The people running our country are (one would hope) not stupid. Many of them have been educated at the country’s ‘best’ and most expensive establishments. They know the figures, they know disablity benefit fraud is low, and they are aware that things such as the work capability assessment don’t work effectively. Yet they still happily send press releases exaggerating the problem to the national press, give Crimestoppers a contract to encourage informing (even though by their own admission only one in six calls leads to anything), and fund their own benefit fraud TV ads. They know exactly what they’re doing.

We could ask ourselves, why do they not show ‘tough love’ to the banks? Why do they not feel that letting companies off from tax avoidance ‘infantilises’ them?

I’m not letting Purnell et al off here either. I think they knew what they were doing too. They thought they could stay in power by pandering to prejudices, they were wrong. It’s still the wrong road to take, in opposition.

I would like to see more of an emphasis on compassion, and the point made that many of the people who use the benefits system are the same people that have paid into it. Whether we know it or not we all want to live in a compassionate society, because none of us know if/when we’ll fall on hard times. This is the message Labour ought to give the voters, not one that perpetuates this ‘us and them’, ‘taxpayers vs claimants’ mentality.

” implemented a range of policies which were staggeringly successful in doing so”

I think you exaggerate the success Don. Whilst relative poverty declined following the introduction of tax credits etc, there were – and are – some major problems in the system. Whilst I’m not one of these people who think the entire cause of unemployment is the 90% withdrawl rates, I think it is undeniable that the complexity, bureacracy and high taper rates acted as a perverse incentive for people who relied on benefits payments. Frequently the system takes so long and makes so many mistakes that it is simply far too risky to take a temporary job or retrain.

An example from 2002 : The Welsh Assembly set up a fund to retrain young people long term unemployed in South Wales. They arranged with education providers to take the people on and appropiate courses, with local employers prepared to offer jobs to people at the end of it. They also arranged it so that people wouldn’t lose benefits, as there was time allocated to job search activity. However the DWP officials took a different view, and stopped JSA for all the people who went on the course with no notice. Hence other benefits stopped as well. Cue much anger from the people on the course, from welsh assembly staff having to deal with DWP officials in whitehall who were too thick to realise devolution had happened and who refused to negotiate any compromise at all, and much anger from third sector providers who had spent months arranging the scheme and spent months afterwards dealing with the fallout of people being evicted as they fell into arrears. There is still mistrust to this day of schemes for retraining as a result. People simply won’t take a risk, even if they are told their benefits are safe.

In other respects the DWP staff are frequently taken to tribunals for their decisions which are basicly wrong, and the attitudes of job centre staff are often a matter of luck. The behaviour of the institution over the years means that frankly – even for someone like myself- when the PCS strike I will not support them. (solidarity has to be earned).

There are massive problems with the system, and whilst the right wing solutions are not the answer, neither is a return to the existing system designed by people with no understanding of the real world, and implemented by little hitlers who seem to take pride in making people destitute. ATOS didn’t emerge from a vaccum, and labour really does have to take responsibility.

With respect, you are wrong on a couple of major points

1) The fraud issue. Sue, Kaliya and others are quite vocal on the low incidence of Fraud on IB and DLA. The commenters below the line on threads such as appear on The Gaurdian, contain those that reiterate this, but the frothing trolls, paid astroturfers and wrong headed ignore this

2) Absolving yourself of your leftie guilt. NOPE! Labour not only did this, Labour colluded with Unum, that expletive deleted insurance company, and Atos who wish to take tax-payers money while instituting a US style market in job insurance and healthcare. Anyone on sickness benefit is a malingerer, even Sue, and tat is a system Labour set up and Labour politicians and appointees continue to drive forward.

In England your political home, Labour, is as rightwing as the Orange-bookers or the Tories. In other parts of the Uk the left wing vote can find a home elsewhere, but stickign with a Labour Party that has betrayed its roots is a daft as Liberals sticking with the LibDems with the OrangeBookers on charge

Yes Emma. You’re right. We should be discussing cutting benefits to the disabled so they can never cause another financial global meltdown with their greedy and irresponsible actions ever again:
http://tompride.wordpress.com/2011/12/13/government-responds-to-failures-in-banking-regulation-by-cutting-benefits-for-disabled-kids/

@12 Regarding DWP little Hitlers; I actually worked in the DWP in the DLA/AA section as a casual during summers 2003-5. During each period I encountered an unfortunate number of DM’s (decision makers, executive officer pay grade) who made it their task to deliberately deny and fail people just out of sheer vindictive spite – fuelled and encouraged by the stories they read in the newspapers. One particular DM took great pleasure in failing claims even when the doctor’s evidence was solid, convinced that most doctors were in on a scam. Another would deliberately be on a permanent go-slow, only doing the minimum required number of cases per day, ignoring the growing stack of work filling the shelves behind them.

Meanwhile, what did a nice lady from the fraud department tell me what the number one case of fraud was?
Criminal gangs using the NI details of dead children.

The disconnect between tabloid narrative and reality is frankly massive.

I agree with Paul (comment 2) – what is it exactly that Sue Marsh should be doing when her illness and the withdrawal of DLA makes her day to day life so extremely tough?

I’m politically on the right but don’t see any problem with acknowledging that the system looks to have had a clear failure in her case and that if she can’t get DLA it puts into question the ability of others who are also seriously ill but less so than her to get it. Yes, the issue of fraud needs to be tackled, both to minimise it and to give the public confidence that everything that can reasonably be done to stamp it out is being done. But that doesn’t mean that campaigners for changing the system so that it does not make costly (both for the claimant in living pending an appeal and for the state in defending appeals) mistakes in respect of genuine claimants should switch their focus. Doing so beyond agreeing that fraudsters should be discouraged and punished is unnecessary.

Ultimately if you focus on fraud all you are doing is doing something to distract from the fact that you don’t have a solution for fixing the system to stop genuine claimants losing out – no-one, on left or right wants genuine claimants to lose out. So come up with proposals to prevent this without opening up opportunities for bludgers. The problem is perhaps that the left are wary of talking of genuine claimants because this has too much of an echo to them of the divide between the deserving and underserving poor. Ditch that queasiness instead – be willing to say that some are not deserving so that you can better defend those that ought to be looked after.

We have to face facts here. There are a significant group of people out there who want to see the Welfare State scrapped. Not ‘reformed’ or ‘simplified’, ‘modernised’ or any other euphemism you want. What is more, they will stop at nothing to get their wish, they will lie, cheat, distort facts and then lie some more to convince people to go along with that. The truth is they are winning as the Social Attitudes survey has shown.

I believe this is, in part, down to the black propaganda campaigns that some of the most malevolent people in society. We need to highlight these people and expose them as liars. Letting them of the hook by allowing them to be ‘mistaken’ is pointless, these people are well aware of what they are doing and well aware of the truth as well. The Left and the Centre need to recognise that we cannot be loved by everybody, nor can we win everybody over. There is a group of people who hate us and everything we stand for and everyone we speak up of on behalf and there is nothing we can do about that. We Lefties are cuddly bunch who only really want to be loved, but there are nasty people out there and we shouldn’t really be bothering with scum who do not believe in mental illness.

It is not the fault of the disabled that fraud occurs and no way should we expect disabled people to defend themselves by attempting to scapegoat other people. We do not expect every Muslim to start a job interview with ‘Sorry about 9/11, that was uncalled for’, so we should not expect the disabled to talk about ‘the guy at number twenty six is faking’ Have you ever managed to get a Tory to condemn something another Tory has said? So why should we expect Sue Marsh to grass up someone to strengthen her case? What are we saying? That we will believe you have a serious illness, but only if you supply us the names of three people who are swinging the lead?

Lastly, we are all part of the problem. When was the last time we got into a debate about this and we have let seriously big assumptions go? When was the last time a nutter said something and we let it go because it is not worth the hassle?

So, disability campaigners should move toward Labour, who instigated an era a hatred toward them, have shown little concern for them since, and should fight using the rhetoric of the right-wing press? Fool me once…

These people have moved mountains on their own. What you suggest would provide nothing more than photo opportunities for Labour. No party can be trusted anymore.

It is a commonplace amongst Labour`s own strategists that they are the Party of welafre claimants,minorities immigrants and the Public Sector .
Rather than talking about how much money to throw at this or that charitable cause Labour should shut up and start talking about how to get any hearing whatsoever in the ordinary family home in the South.
On the current trajectory there will be no recognisable Labour in the future in which context baby steps to welfare reform is sad late and irrelevant.
Rather than inventing the usual conspiracy thoeries about the Tax Payers Alliance Labour sould be asking itself why it is inconcievable that any group representing tax payers could be formed whithin the Labour Party. Why not?

Many respondents have put it more eloquently than me; it’s not just Miliband that is a liability for Labour, it’s not recognising the way they opened the door for the tories to embark on their dream to turn the clock back to the 19th century.

It’s impossible to eliminate fraud without hurting some of the people that benefits are intended to help. It is a moral choice for our society to make whether we accept a bit of fraud or create terrible hardships in our aim for purity.

I was happy to give IDS some credit when he acknowledged the benefit trap for some people such as single parents, and the issue of the high marginal tax rate they face in the low-paid jobs they are most likely to find. Sadly he hasn’t managed to do anything about it yet and the DLA attacks suggest there is no will within DWP to deal fairly or morally with the neediest in our society. Sham on them, and shame on Labour for starting it.

The way things are going my ballot paper is more likely to be spoiled than endorsing any of the choices I’m offered, and I’m a trade unionist and long-term Labour voter.

Wow, Emma, I am going to write a book about this after the bill goes through.

There are lots of campaigners like me, but by now, most know that my passion is political engagement.

I have had great success with the LibDems, but it breaks my heart that STILL Labour don’t really engage with us. Oh, they follow our blogs, they nick a line here and there, but for instance, in 18 months Liam Byrne STILL hasn’t honoured his promise to meet with me.

Meanwhile, they plan their next “suggestion” in a bubble and then wonder why the entire twittersphere headdesks each time.

If you can find a way to make Labour sort this mess out with campaigners like me, then be my guest – I think you would cry if I told you all the ways I’ve tried and been ignored.

The HUGE irony is we have plans that could work, all costed, ideas for employment, businesses are getting interested, AND a strategy for getting Labour out of the huge welfare mess they’ve landed in.

You know what they say “You can lead a horse to water……

@12 Regarding DWP little Hitlers; I actually worked in the DWP in the DLA/AA section as a casual during summers 2003-5. During each period I encountered an unfortunate number of DM’s (decision makers, executive officer pay grade) who made it their task to deliberately deny and fail people just out of sheer vindictive spite – fuelled and encouraged by the stories they read in the newspapers.

I’m not sure how much of it was spite, more a target-driven culture that at one time had advisors benchmarked to stop benefits for ten people (and their dependants) per week, on whatever pretext they could find. That was under Labour.

Sue

I know this is a reserved matter but have you opened up any conversation with the devolved administrations. They might open up another form of engagement with the UK Gov’t

This being the case, I would urge disability campaigners like Sue to engage even more fully on the issue of fraud (I know this is done to an extent). Not because it is as real or prevalent as the Daily Mail believes, but precisely because it is not.

If we can lay the myths firmly to rest, we can stop basing our policies on the demands they create from ordinary people. But until we engage with that narrative head on and change it, we will never lose the term ‘scrounger’

Most of us are trying. We write things like this all the time. Trouble is, the mainstream left just don’t want to hear it.

Every now and then one of us will write a “personal story” piece that gathers a bit of attention; like Sue’s piece this weekend or when I wrote this a couple of weekends ago. But then when we ask people to actually help fight these cuts, all attention and crap-giving goes out the window.

Yesterday I collated in one place all the things people can do this Christmas to fight welfare reform. I spent so much of the day plugging it that I made myself quite ill. It got acted on and shared by tonnes of disability activists, but despite me spending the day asking the mainstream left for help I got zero response. Nothing. People say “oh isn’t it horrific that Sue didn’t get DLA” but when we ask for help to fight the cuts we just get ignored.

So please, you tell me what we can do about dispelling fraud myths when no-one will listen.

Emma says we should engage more on benefit fraud. We’ve done that, people don’t believe us, they won’t even believe DWP statistics because the propaganda against us has been so overwhelming. The propaganda has been so successful even Ed M believes it, when he attacked a disabled benefit claimant in his ‘I met a man’ speech he might as well have been talking about me, Sue or any other disabled person. In fact when Kaliya Franklin challenged him on it at the party conference he defended himself with almost exactly the same words used by Mark Reckless (Tory, Rochester) to say that people are perfectly entitled to be angry with disabled benefit claimants when responding to a piece I had done for South East Today about the rise in disability hate crime as a result of this black propaganda campaign against us.

Emma also suggests we can’t expect Labour to defend us as long as people think we are all frauds, because that might cost them votes. Shouldn’t any party worthy of my vote be out there on the doorsteps telling people that they are being lied to and turned into bigots by an anti-disabled propaganda campaign the like of which has not been seen since 1930′s Germany*? Isn’t there a point at which a party has to stop prostituting itself for votes? Or do disabled people simply not count? If similar campaigns of demonisation were being directed against an ethnic or religious minority, or LGBT voters, wouldn’t Labour have been out there fighting for them? In fact I seem to remember precisely that happening when people attempted the wholesale demonization of Moslems post-911.

*Godwin’s Law is only applicable where the parallel is invalid, if you can find a similar black propaganda campaign against disabled people other that the current one here and that in ’30s Germany then we’d be delighted to hear from you.

Just tried posting this once using html and it didn’t show up. Trying again without. Sorry if there was merely a delay and it ends up appearing twice.

“This being the case, I would urge disability campaigners like Sue to engage even more fully on the issue of fraud (I know this is done to an extent). Not because it is as real or prevalent as the Daily Mail believes, but precisely because it is not.

If we can lay the myths firmly to rest, we can stop basing our policies on the demands they create from ordinary people. But until we engage with that narrative head on and change it, we will never lose the term ‘scrounger’”

Most of us are trying. We write things like http://wheresthebenefit.blogspot.com/2011/12/crimestoppers.html all the time. Trouble is, the mainstream left just don’t want to hear it.

Every now and then one of us will write a “personal story” piece that gathers a bit of attention; like Sue’s piece this weekend or when I wrote http://wheresthebenefit.blogspot.com/2011/12/not-ok-triggerwarning.html a couple of weekends ago. But then when we ask people to actually help fight these cuts, all attention and crap-giving goes out the window.

Yesterday I collated in one place all the things people can do this Christmas to fight welfare reform: http://wheresthebenefit.blogspot.com/2011/12/things-to-do-this-christmas-please-act.html I spent so much of the day plugging it that I made myself quite ill. It got acted on and shared by tonnes of disability activists, but despite me spending the day asking the mainstream left for help I got zero response. Nothing. People say “oh isn’t it horrific that Sue didn’t get DLA” but when we ask for help to fight the cuts we just get ignored.

So please, you tell me what we can do about dispelling fraud myths when no-one will listen.

This isn’t an issue where the left can compromise. The unfortunate fact is that the majority of the electorate are wrong about welfare and the only morally consistent thing we can do is to explain this to them. We know from experience that engaging with right-wing narratives only strengthens those narratives. When you agree to debate on someone else’s terms, you help them and do yourself no favours.

@23 – its certainly the case that on a weekly basis the AMs in Wales (and MSPs I would imagine) stand up and denounce ATOS and benefit cuts, but the assembly doesn’t have the power to do anything beyond asking Carwyn Jones to complain. I’d imagine Alex Salmond has raised it as well, but at least Scottish people have the option in a few years of voting to rid themselves of politicians too frightened of the Daily Mail. There are also backbenchers in westminister pissed off about this, and ATOS have been regularly criticised in committee reports

It really does come down to the cabinet and shadow cabinet being too afraid of Daily Mail readers to do anything about it.

@22 I don’t think a top down directive explains the real visceral joy they got from it. Although it probably does explain how captain “Doctors are all liers” ended up with a promotion.

@21 Sue you should write a book. I’d buy it and read it.

I agree that Labour have been terrible on this issue and are not improving fast enough.

My concern is that we understand why. What environment causes it to be difficult for any politicians to engage honestly and straighforwardly on welfare to the point where they are unable or unwilling to make what seem to you and me as straightforward choices.

If we don’t change the court, we won’t change the game. If the stream remains poisoned we won’t get the horse to drink. But to change the terms of what we’re dealing with, we can’t simply dismiss the people who have concerns as wrong. We need to address those concerns and what causes them.

I hope you know that you and I want the same outcome. I’m just trying to look at how that can possibly be achieved. My thoughts are not on the outcome we both want, but trying to be honest about the difficulty of the path that will get us there.

@24
*Isn’t there a point at which a party has to stop prostituting itself for votes?*

Well precisely.
I was talking to Sunny last night on Twitter, I know its very hard to get points across in 140 characters so I probably didn’t put my case well. But…the gist of his argument seemed to be that the public has shifted rightward so we need to engage within that framework.

My argument is: the facts, figures and true picture has been grossly distorted by the media. Totally fabricated headlines that scream 70% of disabled benefit claimants are cheats stick in the public imagination. Our job IS NOT to say *Ok then, they are all cheats but I’m not, I’m genuine!* Our job is to get across that this is media spin, its lies, its bullshit and it is damaging us.

Labour, or the wider left should not be colluding with this. They should be fighting it. Why should we let the neo-libs of New labour, or the Government set the agenda? We have done nothing wrong. By accident or wonky genes we are sick and disabled and in a supposedly civilised country we ask for a small amount of money to help us survive. We get worse press than criminals, for what, for being ill?

Labour should not allow the lies to frame the basis of the discussion, but they do. And they do it because the travesty of The Welfare reform Bill is their bloody doing. Atos, Unum, James Purnell, Frank Field…The Tories are just carrying on where Labour left off.

DavidG is spot on, if Labour continue to go along with the cheats and scrounger rhetoric they are prostituting themselves for votes. Throwing away (hell, they threw them away ages ago) every principle the party was founded for to get votes from a public that have been lied to.

@ 15

I actually worked in the DWP in the DLA/AA section as a casual during summers 2003-5. During each period I encountered an unfortunate number of DM’s (decision makers, executive officer pay grade) who made it their task to deliberately deny and fail people just out of sheer vindictive spite – …. One particular DM took great pleasure in failing claims even when the doctor’s evidence was solid…

Congratulations. You have, in a nutshell, expressed precisely why those of us on the political Right want to downsize the bureaucratic state.

What puzzles me is why so many people at LC wish to give creeps like that even more power over our lives and then give them gold-plated pensions when they retire.

@flower power

We know what the political right want to do, they want to have a US system where State subsidises private industry in the form of free shelf-stackers, vast payments to the likes of Atos and privatised education, prisons and healthcare, all such successes in the US!

I know “gold plated” is one of your keywords you have to drop in, but honestly, £4,000 pa, my current estimate, doesn’t seem that gold plated to me, though I know you’d rather I got £0

Glad I am off today, only creature that hears my swearing is the dog

“My concern is that we understand why. What environment causes it to be difficult for any politicians to engage honestly and straighforwardly on welfare to the point where they are unable or unwilling to make what seem to you and me as straightforward choices.”

But some politicians do get it, just not the ones who are leading for us on DWP. If our DWP team were Kate Green and Baroness Lister, both members of the Parliamentary Labour Party, then the policies would be (a) different, (b) better, (c) politically more effective.

@22 I don’t think a top down directive explains the real visceral joy they got from it. Although it probably does explain how captain “Doctors are all liers” ended up with a promotion.

So long as benefits are determined by what the government thinks they ‘deserve’ rather than what they need the DWP will remain a coercive institution.

@30 – because we regard welfare as an essential public service, some of the police force are corrupt little hitlers as well – but we wouldn’t suggest abolishing the police.

The answer is major reform, but too often ‘major reform’ has been interpreted by the right as ‘get rid of it’ rather than ‘make it better.

Flowerpower @ 30

Congratulations. You have, in a nutshell, expressed precisely why those of us on the political Right want to downsize the bureaucratic state.

No, that is crap, this bureaucratic State exists precisely to appease the political Right.

It is the Right’s need to ensure the ‘correct’ decisions are being made, not according to any reasonable criteria that we can all understand, but to adhere to Politically Correct goals.

Most of us on the Left want the system to be as simple as possible, with medical doctors outlining symptoms and a reasonable prognosis and you know what? I bet I could tell you who would be likely to be able secure work again, within ten minutes of reading their case notes.

The only real question we would need is:

”Given the current economic conditions, does the above named have an illness or medical condition that would act as a disincentive for any reasonable employer to offer him employment?”

If the answer is that most reasonable employers would refuse to hire someone with a similar disease, then the free market will have spoken and he is not fit for work.

That is not good enough for the Right, lest ‘too many’ people with serious illnesses were spared the humiliation of having to go through dehumanising tests and assessments.

It’s worth noting that the private institutions in the US, like health insurance companies are notoriously bureaucratic & claimant hostile

@ Emma:

“…we can’t simply dismiss the people who have concerns as wrong…”

The problem with this, Emma, is that often people simply *are* wrong (For example, the premise of latest Crimestoppers campaign is a piece of circular logic that illustrates this – “people think that fraud is worse than it is, so we need to respond to those concerns with high-profile campaigns about fraud, therefore reinforcing these misconceptions”).

I for one have been disgusted at the failure of the left/Labour movement to stand up for those who are too unwell to work, and the idea that some kind of false-balance should be struck by the few campaigners who struggle to make their voices heard is insulting.

When talking to people like my Express-reading grandparents I constantly have to remind them that fraud is tiny – for DLA (0.5% fraud) I have taken to saying

‘For every one fraudster we are trying to catch, we treat 199 severely ill or disabled people like criminals – can that be right?’

When put in human terms like that they do get it, but then the daily drip-drip of mainstream poison overwhelms the facts (not to mention the fact that they should both be getting Attendance Allowance, but are to afraid/ashamed to claim for fear of being caught out in some way and going to prison…)

“If we can lay the myths firmly to rest, we can stop basing our policies on the demands they create from ordinary people. But until we engage with that narrative head on and change it, we will never lose the term ‘scrounger’”

This is a downright pathetic statement. So you base your policies on what the braying masses demand, in spite of the fact they are wrong? How about coming up with some policies, explain them and see if people will vote for you.? Novel idea, I know, but it used to be called democracy.

This is a self perpetuating circle. The government puts out misleading press releases about benefit scroungers (which they have been reprimanded for many times) the public gets angry and demands anyone on benefits is shot – (yes, they do.) But you won’t do anything about it because you have to endorse policies the voters want??? Grow a backbone.

How about as Lib Dems you help lay the myths to rest? How do you expect disabled people who have been writing, commenting on these issues since this government and before to get media time.? There has been a media blackout on covering stories like Sue’s. There are thousands of them.

Show some leadership and speak out against what IS evil and the mysths you are supporting all the way to the polling booth.

If we all accept that the public have been lied to. That the amount of fraud is overstated…then to say to the public *There there dears, we know the nasty disabled people are all swinging the lead, cheating you, the hard working taxpayer (TM) out of your money.* *But look at this one, they are genuinely disabled (TM) shouldn’t they get help?*

Then you are treating the public like idiots. Do you think they are all too stupid to understand the truth? We have to patronise them now?

I swear half the so called left are just enablers for the right these days.

Look Emma, maybe a comment thread isn’t the best place for this, but I’ll give it a go.

Labour decided that the myth was true. “Maggie massaged the employment figures and there are millions claiming who aren’t sick or disabled”

It was true in 1985, WAY from true by 2005 when they were planning ESA. But you see there were all this big insurance companies saying “Here’s some “evidence” and oh look here’s some more”

Maybe some knew what they were doing (Purnell, Hutton) but I’m fairly sure most did not.

Then, they opened Pandora’s box. The ONLY way to get ESA through (remember the evidence the whole thing is based on is incorrect) was to demonise us, and yes, it was my party that did that and I watched in horror.

(There is a big article due on how playing to the right wing press only re-inforces the very attitudes you want to defeat, I’ll send it to you when it’s published)

Maybe just maybe it was justified in a time of full employment. Then the Tories came in. Oooooh, they know how to crank a good propaganda war they do.

So, Labour spend 3 years (and in fact much more earlier on) telling everyone we’re scroungers and making sure their Murdoch lapdogs get the message across loud and clear.

Then, well blow me down, they are astounded at the amount of people on doorsteps who say it’s “all those scroungers over there that are the problem” So guess what? They flounder around trying to play to that audience inventing ever more ludicrous ways to make people love welfare.

And guess what their answer is??? Yup, payment protection insurance, salary insurance. Exactly which party is this we’re talking about again??? Remind me?

In response to Erchie – Yes, it was our very own brain-the-size-of-a-planet Rhydian Fon-James who ensured that Plaid and the welsh assembly reject teh plans. The Scottish Parliament have just recommended opting out of the welfare reform bill as it is so damaging.

So I’ve managed Plaid, Green, SNP and Lib Dems. Can you imagine how hard a leftie like me has tried with Labour?

Frankly, they disgust me.

A very sensible article. No wonder everybody’s lining up to criticise it.

Cylux @ 6:

“Engage with the debate? The problem is that the Mail et al, by their very nature, can reach a national audience very easily, whereas disability campaigners, not being owners of newspapers or television stations, can not.
Guess who’ll win the debate.”

Groups can and have radically changed public opinion before, despite great opposition from the establishment (just try advocating a return to slavery or to all-male suffrage if you don’t believe me). It may be that, in the case of benefits, the influence of the media is too great, and you can’t succeed. However, you definitely won’t succeed if you don’t even try. At least if you do campaign for a better system of disability benefits, you’ll have a chance of success.

41
For what it’s worth you have my sympathy, I deal with DLA claims for people with mental health problems and who are clearly unable to attend ATOS tests, some are even sectioned and are legally not allowed to go out unaccompanied.
It’s a pity that those businesses who employ people on low rates are not hounded when their employees apply for tax credits, the welfare state was not intended to support able-bodied people who are in work when really it’s a covert way of subsidizing business That’s something else you can thank Labour for.

@ Emma – ‘If we don’t change the court, we won’t change the game. If the stream remains poisoned we won’t get the horse to drink’

What do you suggest? i genuinely don’t see what you are espousing as a best way forwards here?

@35

The problem is that supposedly ‘reasonable’ employers turn entirely unreasonable when asked for even the simplest of reasonable adjustments to allow disabled workers to work. Until we get a government willing to hammer employers on disability discrimination we will see disabled people left on the scrap heap even when we can work.

That neither the current campaign to force disabled people off benefits, nor Labour’s previous one, featured parallel pressure on employers shows that moving us into the workforce wasn’t the point, denying us the support we need was.

David G @ 46

The problem is that supposedly ‘reasonable’ employers turn entirely unreasonable when asked for even the simplest of reasonable adjustments to allow disabled workers to work.

Ah, but that is the idea. If we look at people who are dismissed from employment of fail to get interviews because of they have a given illness then we can automatically sign those people off.

Let us say that you can prove that most employers will refuse to employ people with epilepsy all else being equal, then it is pointless to send epileptic people to countless interviews, assessments, re-views etc, isn’t it?

There is hardly any point wasting taxpayers money on brushing up the interview techniques, if the recipient will never actually get to an interview, is there? What is the point of giving someone a tip top professional CV, which says, left school at sixteen, no qualifications, diagnosed with mental health issues in 1999, not worked a day since. Is there?

@43

We’ve been trying to get our message out for the last year, the media aren’t willing to listen (the Guardian being the honourable exception). The biggest protest march by disabled people in UK history got almost no coverage. We’ve been struggling all year just to get even campaign groups such as 38 Degrees, UKUncut and OccupyLSX to acknowledge the issue. The only progress to date is that in the last few weeks I’ve gotten 38 Degrees to recognise we may be be effectively disenfranchised by their campaign model.

If we can’t access the media and can’t access campaign groups, how do you suggest we get our message out?

David G 47

That neither the current campaign to force disabled people off benefits, nor Labour’s previous one, featured parallel pressure on employers shows that moving us into the workforce wasn’t the point, denying us the support we need was.

Another idea just occured to me. The other week a women won a case on unfair dismisal because she failed to mention her mental health issues and the same types of people who complained about mental health sufferers not working then complained that she shouldn’t have had a job in the first place!

Groups can and have radically changed public opinion before, despite great opposition from the establishment (just try advocating a return to slavery or to all-male suffrage if you don’t believe me). It may be that, in the case of benefits, the influence of the media is too great, and you can’t succeed. However, you definitely won’t succeed if you don’t even try. At least if you do campaign for a better system of disability benefits, you’ll have a chance of success.

There is a massive difference between campaigning on an Issue and “engaging in the debate”, look at the success with Plaid, Green, SNP and the Lib Dems, did they get on board because significantly less people in the UK (or just Wales and Scotland where appropriate) believe the overwhelming majority of people on DLA are scrounging bastards? Doubtful at best. Focused campaigning on the other hand…
Meanwhile Emma is calling for public opinion to be shifted before Labour can feel comfortable getting behind the cause, which demonstrates perfectly where Labour’s principles are. The dustbin. Sometimes instead of bending knee to the mob, you need to tell the mob they’re a bunch of fucking tossers.

Let us say that you can prove that most employers will refuse to employ people with epilepsy all else being equal, then it is pointless to send epileptic people to countless interviews, assessments, re-views etc, isn’t it?

There are very few jobs that can legitimately be denied to someone with epilepsy, and this is a clear case where employers should be prosecuted for discrimination rather than epileptics be written off as unemployable.

The choice isn’t between a right-wing one of punishing people for being sick, or a pseudo-left-wing one of consigning people with disabilities to a life-time of poverty and unemployment, its between the knee-jerk tribalism of those choices on the one-hand, and a practical application of carrot (grants and tax breaks for employers who make reasonable adjustments) and stick (fines and prosecution for those who don’t) to help people into work.

I think the point of the article is correct. A lot of the commenters above believe that the driving force behind reforming the welfare state is intentionally to cause suffering, and driven by pure sadism, portraying those who seek it as Dickensian villains who push crippled children down staircases and cackle satanically. This won’t help win your argument.

I believe majority public opinion is as follows: yes to genuine claimants, yes to a safety net, no to lazy scroungers, and a big no to actual fraudsters.

Leaving aside the public perception of how many claimants are in the latter two categories, surely it is not a capitulation to accept that such things do take place, even if they are less prevalent than perceived?

Of those who disagree with the welfare state in principle, I expect there are some who disagree merely from callousness, but there is a argument that it does more harm than good, that it is counter-productive, because it incentivises all the things that it is supposed to be alleviating. The fear that this would be the case is found in the Beverage Report, so there’s no point covering your ears whenever it’s mentioned.

If you want to win the argument, you are going to have to respond to the cliched woman with ten kids from ten different fathers living in Belgravia at our expense. Rather than defending this cliched paragon of invirtue or countering by asserting that the bankers are worse, it would be better to disassociate from such examples ,which infuriate people who are working, paying taxes and struggling to make ends meet. Public opinion makes a distinction, and a very clear one, between someone like the above and someone who actually deserves support.

@47

Effectively you’re proposing to institutionalize disability discrimination. If we take me as an example, my last job was developing the flight controls for the Eurofighter, but now my disability means I can’t sit at a desk anymore. That doesn’t mean my mind doesn’t work, just that I can’t work quite as effectively as before. Does it really make sense as a country for us to write off my potential, and that of hundred of thousands of other disabled people, simply to enable the disablism of employers?

@52,Trooper Thompson.

The problem with this is, you get into a discussion about who is *genuinely sick/disabled* and lead swingers. The person tells you that they really, really do support genuine cases.

But then…then they start saying their wife has MS and she claims nothing, so those with MS shouldn’t ever claim. Their son is a paranoid schizophrenic who has never taken a day off work…their Aunty is paraplegic and signed herself out of hospital 2 weeks after the accident to get back to work. Then you realise that NO ONE ever fits their arbitrary criteria for what genuine actually is.

I have asked, many times…come on, what is a genuine sickness, what is a genuine disability…I never get an answer.

Of course they always think ME is *made up* so is autism….anything that’s a syndrome (Think they conveniently forget about AIDS)

Often what separates the genuine from the fake is simply whether they like you. *Yeah but you’re different, not like those other scroungers, you DO deserve support*

There is another point, which I think cant be repeated enough…

Being able to do some work, at some point does not easily translate into a *job*

Yes, we do need to encourage employers to take on more disabled people, of course we do…that goes without saying. But reasonably how flexible can we expect them to be?

Yes, we do need to encourage employers to take on more disabled people, of course we do…that goes without saying. But reasonably how flexible can we expect them to be?

Nobody is calling for blind bus drivers or limbless firefighters. In most cases, most disabled people can be acommodated reasonably. Its up to an employer to show why someone with a disability can’t do a job.

If an employer refuses to employ someone with a disability from doing a job they are perfectly capable of, its the employer who is creating a burden for the tax payer.

Trooper Thompson – So, general advice is to clamber my genuine way up off the backs of the only-slightly-less-vulnerable?

Perhaps I should re-direct my energy to pointing over there at those poor sods who lost their jobs. Or maybe that guy over there who’s wife died defined as a “lone parent”. No wait, I could go for the people a bit less disabled than me? Real divide and conquer!!

I think it is quite remarkable that as the financial world crumbles at it’s foundations, drowning in its own greed and corruption, we would even come here and debate which person with next to nothing we ought to kick hardest.

I decline.

@56 Shatterface.

Its very easy for able bodied people to think, right that person is a wheelchair user, ramps, disabled loos etc…bingo! Now they can work. Thats not taking into account what their disability is…

I’m not doing disabled people down here (I am disabled) and I do agree with your general point. Getting disabled people into work is a good thing, encouraging people to employ disabled people is also a good thing.

But we have to accept that some disabled people just cant work. What point is a job if you spend hours and hours every day IN the disabled toilet? Can we expect employers to put beds in the workplace so that if someone is extremely fatigued they can go for a lie down?

What about people on heavy duty meds? Smashed off your tits on Oramorph is usually frowned upon in the workplace…

Shatterface @ 51

There are very few jobs that can legitimately be denied to someone with epilepsy, and this is a clear case where employers should be prosecuted for discrimination rather than epileptics be written off as unemployable.

Whether or not jobs are ‘legitimately’ denied or not is not really relevant. If (say) 80% of employers are actually finding excuses (legitimately or not) not to employ people with epilepsy, then all the fucking about in the World will not make a blind bit of difference.

We are always being told that ‘the market’ is the best test of a given position, then surely IF we test a given illness in the marketplace and the marketplace rejects epileptics, then surely that means that epilepsy is an illness that we can sign of people in all reasonable circumstances?

@57 Sue,

“So, general advice is to clamber my genuine way up off the backs of the only-slightly-less-vulnerable?”

I only mentioned the Daily Mail classic, e.g. http://tinyurl.com/yjtzmpj

If you define such people, however rare they are, as ‘only slightly less vulnerable’, that’s up to you, but it’s cases like that which annoy the public, and undermine support for the welfare state.

David G @ 53

Yes, I get where you are coming from and I do not think we should be writing people of, but we have to look at people’s circumstances in a reasonable fashion. If someone has an illness that means he may be fine for three days a week and then be completely debilitated for another two in a completely random pattern, then we have to be realistic.

If you have a highly developed skill set that employers are willing to take a hit on because you are worth it, then fine, you should not be prevented from work, but if you have a CV that suggests you are suited to work in warehouse or entry level jobs, then, lets be honest, that person is no use to any reasonable employer. If it is about something sensible like setting up a ramp, or a disabled toilet, then there is a case for cocersion.

No reasonable employer should be asked to employ someone who has known medical issues that will impair his attendance and /or performance BUT the corollary should be that someone who the market has deemed unemployable should not be hawked around the local employers, looking for non existent jobs.

Its very easy for able bodied people to think, right that person is a wheelchair user, ramps, disabled loos etc…bingo! Now they can work. Thats not taking into account what their disability is…

I can’t speak for the ‘able-bodied’, because I’m not one of them. Well, at least I’m not ‘able-headed’, because I’m bipolar II. That means I am entirely unsuited to some jobs, while being perfectly capable of most others, given minimum support.

And I am taking into account what specific disability someone has. Lumping together depressives, dyslexics, epileptics, paraplegics and the hearing impaired as generic ‘unemployable’ is doing nobody any favours. Just what percentage of jobs do you think epileptics are incapable of? Are they the same jobs that deaf people are incapable of? How does being in a wheelchair prevent you doing a job that you would be otherwise be sat doing anyway even if you were able-bodied?

Whether or not jobs are ‘legitimately’ denied or not is not really relevant. If (say) 80% of employers are actually finding excuses (legitimately or not) not to employ people with epilepsy, then all the fucking about in the World will not make a blind bit of difference.

And if those same employers where making excuses for not employing women..?

@52

We regularly tell people what the real rates of fraud are, cite the government stats and are told we’re wrong. People tell us to our faces that clearly _we_ are not frauds, but that _everyone_ else is. The truth is that the vast majority of people don’t believe in any disability which doesn’t involve a wheelchair, a missing limb or total blindness and that disbelief primes them to believe we are all frauds because real disability is rarely so simple. 30 years of disability rights campaigning hasn’t managed to change those beliefs, there is no hope that we can change those beliefs at a time when attitudes are so hostile we’ve seen all the progress of the past 3 decades wiped out.

Shatterface @ 56

If an employer refuses to employ someone with a disability from doing a job they are perfectly capable of, its the employer who is creating a burden for the tax payer

Come on, let us be reasonable here. Every day we read about a job somewhere that attracts 600 applications (or whatever). He is not denying someone the chance of a job, all he is doing is picking someone at random (more or less). Any employer is likely to screen out people who he sees as unfit in those circumstances. Forcing the person with Crohn’s disease to fill out an application in those circumstances will not make a blind bit of difference to anything. He is still picking an employee (the same person as above) from a list of 601.

If three people apply for a job behind a desk and the wheelchair bound person is excluded purely because (s)he would be a fucking nuisance is simply unacceptable and yes, we should be taking steps against that employer in those circumstances.

@Shatterface, I`ve reiterated many time I do NOT advocate writing people off. I have repeatedly said that getting disabled people into the workplace is a good thing.

I am not for one second suggesting that all disabled people be lumped in together, of course we are all individuals.

BUT this is very telling..*How does being in a wheelchair prevent you doing a job that you would be otherwise be sat doing anyway even if you were able-bodied?*

That is exactly the sort of thing Im talking about!….You arent taking peoples individual condition into account. Ask any wheelchair using person with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome and theyll tell you, the constantly dislocating joints, the constant puking, the being spaced on on meds, the pain (ever dislocated anything? Fancy trying it all over, all day every day?) ….the million other things. Ramps, disabled loos…BRILLIANT but its not the whole picture.

In an ideal world we would all have lovely bosses who let us nip off to put our hips back in the socket, throw up, got to the bathroom for the 20th time that day…have a rest… but its not an ideal world.

62

And if those same employers where making excuses for not employing women..?

Entirely different and you know it.

A wheelchair user with ME has totally different needs to a wheelchair user with Ehlers Danlos, to one with Muscular Dystrophy, to one with Cerebral Palsy….so the whole *but you would be sitting down all day anyway* is really unhelpful.

Most people with bowel disease do not have it as severely as Sue Marsh, so saying *well X works for this person with Crohns* doesn’t help Sue at all.

I want to live in a world where sick and disabled people are valued, and can have careers easily….but that day is a long way off…and in the meantime, sorry but we need to eat and wear clothes.

52
You are correct, Beveridge (as a liberal) did not want to incentivise sloth, indeed the Old Poor Law was not repealed until 1948 and the welfare state was as much a utilitarian concept as the workhouse.
What has happened is the welfare state has become overwhelmed by those claiming benefits which were not part of the original plan, tax credits, housing benefit and council tax relief to name but a few. In the case of the first two, public money is being syphoned into private interests who are the main beneficiaries, not the claimants themselves.
Meanwhile, disabled people (who were factored into the original plan) are being stripped of their benefit entitlement. Yes we need welfare reform, but it should be far more wide-ranging than targetting claiments.

TT @ 60

I only mentioned the Daily Mail

But the Daily Mail classic is not the whole story is it? They go around trawling for these stories, add a bit of spice, make up whole swathes of it and then present the story as the whole picture.

The fact is these types of stories are actually quite rare, most people who use the welfare state on onto it for a short time and come off it after while. That is the real story, for most people it works exactly as it says on the tin. They get a short term boost from it and they move on. That is the real story and one the Daily Mail are loathed to print. Man find work after a few months on the dole does not sell papers but more importantly it doesn’t fit an agenda either.

We have always had losers in society, people at the bottom of the heap, those who fall out of the labour market and out of society in general. We had it ever since we had society. Long before we had welfare states, we had paupers, beggars, outlaws etc. and we should not forget that. Just because we see less absolute poverty on our streets does not mean that the conditions that create such poverty have disappeared

Come on, let us be reasonable here. Every day we read about a job somewhere that attracts 600 applications (or whatever). He is not denying someone the chance of a job, all he is doing is picking someone at random (more or less). Any employer is likely to screen out people who he sees as unfit in those circumstances.

No, if the employer is ‘screening out’ people with disabilities there’s nothing ‘random’ about it. Its discrimination, pure and simple.

Forcing the person with Crohn’s disease to fill out an application in those circumstances will not make a blind bit of difference to anything. He is still picking an employee (the same person as above) from a list of 601.

And this is the problem with trying to have a reasonable discussion with people who’s position is based on dogma: all along I’ve put the onus on employers having to make reasonable adjustments, to be helped and rewarded if they did so, and sanctioned if they do not, and what you’ve ‘read’ is that people with Crohn’s disease should be coerced into taking work they are incapable of.

That is exactly the sort of thing Im talking about!….You arent taking peoples individual condition into account. Ask any wheelchair using person with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome and theyll tell you, the constantly dislocating joints, the constant puking, the being spaced on on meds, the pain (ever dislocated anything? Fancy trying it all over, all day every day?) ….the million other things. Ramps, disabled loos…BRILLIANT but its not the whole picture.

In those cases there are obviously other factors to take into consideration, but to say that employers shouldn’t hire people in wheelchairs because some may be spaced out on meds is ridiculous.

Steveb @ 68

The other thing not factored into the original system is that we would have unemployment built into our economic model.

Right up to about 1981, full employment was a policy that united every Party. That is no longer the case. Unemployment is pretty much endemic now and full employment is no longer a serious goal.

I want to live in a world where sick and disabled people are valued, and can have careers easily….but that day is a long way off…and in the meantime, sorry but we need to eat and wear clothes.

That world’s not going to get any closer so long as the disability is seen as the main barrier to employment, and not the prejudice of the employer.

Shatterface,I didn’t say NO ONE who uses a wheelchair should be employed because some of them might be on strong meds…you do like your straw men.

Im saying far too may people, especially those who are able bodied see a wheelchair and think ramps solve barriers to employment. Its not that simple.

You cant just lump people together without taking into consideration 1)what their individual condition is and 2)How it affects them.

All the wishful thinking in the world wont change the fact that some people need a bit of help to survive.

Some people are ill, even if we got rid of all the prejudice in the world, they still couldn’t do anything in the way of work. Thats just a fact and I’m afraid some people are just going to have to face up to it.

Shatterface @ 70

No, if the employer is ‘screening out’ people with disabilities there’s nothing ‘random’ about it. Its discrimination, pure and simple.

I think you misunderstand my point. If an employer put a job advert up and gets, say 600 replies (I bit high, but I am sure you see what I am driving at) then he is going to eliminate people who he feels are unsuitable. Realistically, in the end, he is going to pick the best candidate from between ten and twenty people. The people with the most relevant experience and skills. No employer is likely to pick someone with an obvious disability that restricts their suitability if there are able bodied people with similar experience. Who in their right mind is going to employ someone with a condition that means that person may need three days of sick at any given time? For example, a person who suffers from migraines? They could look perfectly fit, even up to a bit of body building and perhaps play five aside football twice a week, but when they get a migraine they are fucking useless. During a five a side game they just get off the park and a sub comes on, but what about if they work in a shop? That employer has to make provision for that and no-one would employ that person, if there are twenty or thirty people looking for that job without any obvious problems.

Sure, you could describe that as discrimination if you want, but is it such a big deal? If the job is over subscribed are we really going to sanction that company when unemployment is 2.5 + million? Surely we just give the job to someone else?

And this is the problem with trying to have a reasonable discussion with people who’s position is based on dogma

No, not dogma, just common sense. Why would we need to attempt to force an employer into taking someone on who they believe is not suited to the position?

I do get where you are comming from, BTW. I would love to call the private sector’s bluff on this. We SHOULD be saying to the likes of Tesco et al ‘hey, this person has been passed fit by ATOS therefor you WILL give him a job. and see how popular ATOS and the war on the disabled is after six months, but it ain’t going to happen.

@73 The main problem with stopping employers from being secretive discriminating shits when it comes to employment policy, is in a nation that has had a large labour surplus for nearly three decades, how do you tell when they’re doing it?
The only way I can think of to stop employers just queitly binning applications from either the disabled, Muslims, Blacks, women, gays, travellers, immigrants – is enforced quotas. Which will cause its own little carry on carping circus.

@72. Jim: “Right up to about 1981, full employment was a policy that united every Party.”

Bollocks. Before 1981, unemployment was normal — the gap between one job and the next, which is the basis of low unemployment benefits on which you are not expected to live for life. No government or employer seeks 100% employment.

Before 1981, long term unemployment was abnormal — in 1979, the Conservatives used the expression ‘Labour isn’t working’ alongside a contrived dole queue photo in their election propaganda.

Long term unemployment or the prospect of it was universally appalling before 1981. Conservatives bizarrely won an election in 1979 on the proposition that they were best equipped to prevent it. The pre-1983 Thatcher government was terrified about unemployment. Michael Heseltine consequently delivered the laughable National Garden Festival scheme (cf London Olympic Park).

What changed it all was the Miners’ Strike 1984-1985. To make a political point, Margaret Thatcher ended deep coal mining. That might have been acceptable, if the employment and social consequences had been addressed. For the rest of his political career, Heseltine was lumbered with Coalfield Communities, as a ministerial role or mark of failure. He must have wished he was administering garden festivals.

Sadly for the rest of us, Thatcher created the concept that long term unemployment was normal, it was unavoidable. Which is where we are now and from which nobody has an exit route.

@76. Jim: “I think you misunderstand my point. If an employer put a job advert up and gets, say 600 replies (I bit high, but I am sure you see what I am driving at) then he is going to eliminate people who he feels are unsuitable.”

I think it would be unsurprising if a decent white collar job in/adjacent to a big city did not receive 600 applications at the moment.

The initial sift though applicants would be to spot those who were literate (appropriate for the job) and addressed the job description. Only after that, after discarding 500 odd applicants, would anyone look in detail.

The only thing that a recruiter has that can be used to judge you is a recruitment form or CV. Your words to tell them how you can do the job.

[My best wishes to all who have had a shitty job hunting year.]

@76

Jim, it is illegal under the Equality Act to consider disability in a recruitment decision. Your ‘good sense’ is already illegal because it is recognised as discrimination, but employers simply ignore the law because of their contempt for anything they are not actively forced to do.

Charlieman @ 78

Hold on a tick, ‘unemployment’ was normal. People lose a job and get another, that is frictional unemployment. That happens in every economy. Even up to 1979 was that it was taking longer to find work, but the dynamic hadn’t changed, people still expected to find work pretty quickly after they lost a job. Long term unemployment was seen as a failure of Government policy.

Now we get to 1981 when Thatcher then shifted the focus from full employment to merely controlling inflation. Unemployment was no longer used (in political terms) as a measure of failure, unemployment became a tool to achieve a new goal.

David G @ 80

It might be illegal, but we know it goes on and there is no real way to stop it, not at the level we are talking about anyway. If you have a couple of hundred applications for a job, how can you prove it? no government agency is going to sift through every application in the country (that must mount up to several hundred million) and examine for systematic abuse of the law, how can they?

Sure, if you have a job where a few people have the correct skill set, you could look at the people excluded from interviews, but two thousand people applying to work in a call centre? It turns out the able bodied guy, who suffers blackout twice a week didn’t get the job, whereas the guy on crutches with no other issues did. Then what? We take them to court to prove the former was treated unfairly?

Nope, not going to happen, because no one will enforce such a judgement and even if we could, what difference would it make? If we manage to get one guy into work, we can only really do that at the expense of someone else (in a round about way) who will have problems of their own.

With disability we have the ability to soften the edges of unemployment. If someone has an illness that renders them unable to hold a job down, we pull them to the side and give them support. Attempting to drive them into the labour market that neither needs or wants them is just idiotic in my book.

@82

And how will condoning contempt for the law fix it?

Equality needs us to create an environment in which any recruiter who makes a decision based on disability is reported for gross misconduct by their colleagues, just as we hope they would be reported for similar actions based on ethnic, religious or sexual identity. We’ve made real progress fixing those, why should we just give up on disability?

Unfortunately disability discrimination has long been recognised as different from other types, because disabilty is by its nature quite relevant to ability, whereas sexual orientation etc. is not relevant to ability.

The present law is better than before the Equality Act, but if an employer sets conditions for the job such as ‘experienced, reliable’ etc. then it would be very hard for someone recovering from long term mental health problems to claim discrimination if they are immediately screened out. All an employer needs to do is set such criteria and they are more or less bulletproof against anyone needing to take occasional rests or who is slightly unreliable or confused.

The test is whether such criteria are proportionate; at present they would undoubtedly be found to be. I might like to see this changed so that such vague criteria are unlawful but the right-wing and the employers’ lobby will never stomach that.

I have slight autism so despite having a lot of abilities I am never going to be the ‘best candidate’ in any job that selects by interview. The same problem applies, that this is unlikely to be seen as disproportionate in the current political climate.

There was even a case called DLA Piper where it was held that an employer can refuse to employ on grounds of a health problem, but can also avoid a discrimination action by claiming that the health problem is too trivial to count as a disability. This is a farce and shows that little protection is really given *even where* deliberate discrimination can be shown.

Funny Autism should be mentioned. Considering the employment statistics for Autistic people are significantly worse than the average for disabled people and there doesn’t appear to be any proportionate increase in success the more ‘high-functioning’ an individual is: I’d say it has less to do with the ability of the candidates and more to do with employers.

@83 I believe Jim’s point, is that if employers are going to descriminate against people with a condition, either by accident or design, then declaring these people with that condition ‘fit to work’ and cutting off their only real revenue stream, is going to be cruel and achieve nothing more than to destroy their lives.

Readers maybe interested in a current campign of http://saveilf.proboards.com/index.cgi (for more details)

Jim is spot on. My experience over the past year of trying to find work despite having long term health conditions supports the point he’s making.

I have plenty of qualifications and experience but I have been out of work for several years due to my medical conditions. This creates a gap on my CV which immediately makes potential employers suspicious. A lot of application forms say ‘please account for any gaps in employment’, and I am always honest and say that mine is due to ill health. On the accompanying equal opps form I say that I am disabled and I give the names of my medical conditions.

The vast majority of the time I have failed at the application stage, even for jobs which I am overqualified for, jobs where I have met all of the ‘essential’ criteria and most of the ‘desirable’ too.

What am I supposed to do when a potential employer doesn’t offer me an interview? Do I contact them and say I’m suspicious that they have done so because I have health problems? Do I accuse them of discriminating against me? Get a solicitor on the case each time? When I have little money or energy?

No… because employers can do whatever they like at the hiring stage, and even if they were prejudiced against me because of my health history it would not be provable. Schemes like ‘Positive About Disabled People’ (i.e. the two ticks scheme, where you are guaranteed an interview if you are disabled and meet all the essential criteria) are only voluntary, as one (public sector) establishment rather snottily told me after I didn’t get an interview for a job I was perfectly qualified to do.

There will always be a reason why they can say they didn’t select you – ‘other people with more specific experience’, ‘a lot of applications of a high standard’, ‘we promoted an internal candidate’ etc. You will never get to the real reason of ‘we can’t be bothered with you because you have an illness’.

Employers don’t like staff taking days off sick or working from home, and they don’t like forking out money to adapt offices. So when faced with someone who may be a pain in their *rse vs. someone who has no needs at all and who has no pesky gaps in their CV, who they gonna pick?

Be realistic.

To provide the wheelchair assessment to the needy people is also related to the welfare work and so many people are doing this welfare activity.

Disability campaigns are very beneficial and must be organized time to time.