Disability benefit cuts: open letter to Helena Dollimore

The Labour government has justified its intention to impose swingeing cuts on the benefits for people with disabilities as a “moral duty.” In an open letter to Helena Dollimore, who supports the move, Hastings resident Felicity Laurence predicts the cuts will have a devastating effect on people’s lives and asks our MP to reconsider her position.

I lived in Germany throughout the 1990s when traumatic memories were bubbling up after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989; and I became aware for the first time of the Nazi regime’s special extermination programme codenamed AktionT4. So did millions of German people who hadn’t really known or learned much or anything about this in the decades following the second world war.

AktionT4 was the hideous ‘euthanasia’ programme, begun long before the industrial slaughter of the death camps, and designed to eliminate from the gene pool those who were judged either to be too imperfectly formed, or to be mentally ill.

Throughout Germany, approximately 300,000 people were murdered, including thousands of children, at first by lethal injection and gassing, later by starvation to death.

I was told by  a young journalist that there was still deep shame in Germany – now in the 1990s – about having an ‘impaired’ child; and I saw for myself in the area where I lived how children thus judged— whether their disability was cognitive or physical—were removed from mainstream education and placed out of sight.

It’s nothing new to stigmatise disabled people here in the UK either, and to make their lives wretched. Brutal cuts over many years to the funds they so desperately need, and the ongoing attack on their dignity when they try to access those funds, have already caused many hundreds of suicides (and who knows how many attempted suicides in addition)?

Labour cuts

But now, a Labour government is proposing to cut £5bn from disability benefits, taking so much from people’s lifeline support that hundreds of thousands of people’s lives will be devastated, and even more children than the over four million already living in poverty will enter that state. And more people will die.

The justification for these cuts has been that reducing people’s benefits will encourage them back into work, where they can achieve their real potential as well as take their rightful places in society and the workforce.  But a few days ago, on 20 March, Disability News Service published a shocking report on the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)’s decision to publish figures showing the total cost to the economy of disabled people who cannot work.

The argument that underpinned the T4 programme was that disabled people were an unacceptable drain on resources; now, our Government, via the DWP, seems to be saying exactly the same thing, and in the same kind of language.  They might as well just be saying outright: disabled people are a drain on the economy and a blight on our landscape, worthless unless they can work. The chimera of helping people reach their full potential by entering the workforce (and thus become fully human?) has disappeared like the illusion it is.

Here is the first paragraph of the report:

“ The decision of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to publish figures showing the total cost to the economy of disabled people who cannot work has been described as a ‘chilling’ echo of the ‘useless eaters’ propaganda of 1930s Germany.”

It goes on:

“The figures were included in a report published by DWP alongside Tuesday’s green paper on disability benefits, as the government sought to justify plans for more than £5bn in cuts to out-of-work disability benefits and personal independence payment.

“Although disabled activists stressed they were not comparing DWP or the Labour government with the most extreme actions of Nazi Germany, they warned that the decision to publish the figures provided ‘disturbing echoes’ of the early stages of oppression in the 1930s that later led to the targeted killing of hundreds of thousands of disabled people in Germany.”

Uproar

Every single organisation concerned with disabled and vulnerable people is in uproar about these proposed cuts, backing their objections with a huge array of evidence. The author and journalist Frances Ryan, herself disabled, says in a coruscating Guardian article that these cuts are “rotten with contradictions and cruelty”.

Polly Toynbee, another writer of long standing reputation, also wrote a furious and passionate condemnation – that’s the Toynbee who has been saying over and over (with diminishing credibility): “Don’t worry, I know Starmer seems a bit authoritarian and un-Labour, but once in power he will improve life for the vulnerable and all of us”.

Toynbee began her article thus: “Wrong, badly wrong, and it won’t easily, if ever, be forgotten or forgiven.” When even Ms Toynbee joins in this universally ferocious condemnation of Labour, we know that something is terribly amiss.

However, our own MP Helena Dollimore is committed to supporting almost every Labour policy (she opposed the fast track to devolution offered to East Sussex County Council), including this one. Last week, along with a small group of Labour MPs announcing themselves as the Get Britain Working group, she signed a letter endorsing these cuts and parroting the extraordinary claim that making these draconian cuts is the ‘moral’ thing to do.

“Moral duty”

Referring to the UK’s “crisis in economic activity” caused by so many people being ill and disabled, the letter states: “The economic cost of this is staggering […] but our motivation for tackling this crisis goes far beyond economic necessity. It is a moral duty.”

As we know, some wards of Hastings are among the most deeply deprived in the entire country. These cuts are inevitably going to shatter the lives of innumerable people in her constituency. Energise Sussex Coast (ESC), the organisation operating within her constituency to help people with their energy costs, has stated that seventy-two percent (72%) of the people whom they help have a disability or long-term health issue. ESC too are  ‘horrified by the government’s plans, announced earlier this week, to cut disability benefits by £5bn.’

Questions for Ms Dollimore

1. Will you read, as a matter of urgency, the shocking report linked to above: “DWP figures on total cost of disabled people who cannot work are ‘chilling’ echo of ‘useless eaters’ propaganda”?

2. 120 leading charities – including Scope, Mind, Trussell and Joseph Rowntree Foundation – have written to the Chancellor urging her to safeguard disability benefits from cuts, warning that these cuts would have a “catastrophic impact on disabled people up and down the country”.

Can you explain why your opinion that the cuts are a good thing for the people who will suffer them carries more weight than theirs?

3. Energise Sussex Coast cite the End Fuel Poverty Coalition thus:“Life costs more for disabled people. Disabled people often require more energy for essential needs, from powering medical equipment to heating their homes—cuts to their support will make this even harder. Slashing these benefits would have a catastrophic impact, pushing even more disabled households into poverty.”

Have you taken steps to find out how many disabled households in your constituency will be affected?

4. Have you asked any people who will lose benefits whether they see a moral case for taking money away from them?

If so, how many of them have said: “Yes, I am very glad you are taking away some of my meagre income because that will definitely lead to my getting work and being better off?”

5. How many children are there in Hastings already living in poverty? How will cuts to their parents’ benefits affect these children?

And how many more children will enter poverty once these cuts are actioned?

6. As has been reported, many of your Labour colleagues are appalled by the prospect of these cuts. Clive Lewis, the Labour MP for Norwich South warned of huge “pain and difficulty” for millions of constituents. And he said:

“I would like her [welfare secretary Liz Kendall’s] department to be able to look my constituents in the eye … to tell them this is going to work for them. My constituents, my friends, my family are very angry about this and they do not think this is the kind of action a Labour government takes.”

Have you looked anyone “in the eye” and told them how “this is going to work for them”?

7. There is a parliamentary drop-in on Wednesday 2 April from 2pm to 4pm in Room R, Portcullis House where MPs can learn more from about the extra costs of disability and the effect these cuts are going to have upon them.  You can also find out what you can do to support disabled constituents. You can signal your attendance at publicaffairs@scope.org.uk.

Given that so many of your constituents – children and adults – are facing such a catastrophic battering of their lives, will you be attending this crucial meeting?

8. One of the original 36 MPs who signed the letter supporting the proposed cuts has withdrawn her signature, stating that she shouldn’t have signed it in the first place, and that she will always stand up for disabled people.

Will you, having read more about the predicted effects of the planned cuts and meeting with people affected by them,  follow her example?

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