Westminster’s assault on welfare will result in Cruel Cymru for the disabled

James Downs Mental Health Campaigner

In recent weeks, Rishi Sunak and other commentators from the political right have painted a picture of life in the UK for the disabled, and specifically the mentally ill.

These are people like me, and possibly you – or at least many people you will know.

According to the Prime Minister, in a recent speech to the Centre For Social Justice, we suffer from a “sicknote culture” – mistaking trivial day to day worries and sadnesses for debilitating clinical anxiety and depression. How silly of us.

Our doctors then sign us off on our whim, so we don’t have to face the responsibilities we want to shirk at any given opportunity. 

Toxic rhetoric

Somewhere in the midst of the toxic rhetoric and stigmatising language that has been so freely used about some of the most vulnerable and underserved people in society, there might be some useful points to be made.

Yes, it is not helpful to be “parked on welfare”, if under different circumstances – where you are able to readily access helpful treatment and can find work that accommodates your health needs – you might find it beneficial to work.

Rishi’s “moral mission” to help people return to work could be, at heart, all about providing compassionate and supportive care for disabled people and supported activities for them to participate meaningfully in society. 

Only, it’s not about that. Of all the many things that could be highlighted about why people have become too unwell to work, or found themselves meeting the legal definition of disabled, it is revealing that the chosen approach is to wield rhetoric that disabled people who rely on benefits perceive to be an assault on their dignity and the little security they may have.

Characterising mental illness as some lesser form of disability, or simply an over-medicalisation of everyday life that involves “subjective and unverifiable claims” is invalidating to the lived experiences of people living with serious mental illness, and insulting to those professionals who do not diagnose schizophrenia or bipolar disorder on the basis of self-report. 

Mental health awareness: unintended consequences 

This is the government that not too long ago was funding mental health awareness programmes to encourage people to think about their difficulties in terms of mental health and illness, and to ask for help.

Perhaps an unintended consequence of that has been people misinterpreting challenges to mental health as diagnosable mental illness, but that’s what access to professionals is for – to diagnose, or not.

Yet access to professionals has not increased in line with the demand to see them, and this leaves many with the additional difficulty of feeling overlooked or not sick enough to access care.

Many people who are seriously unwell and disabled by their conditions may get less care as a result of increased demand and insufficient capacity. 

A failure to take responsibility 

The nuanced conversation around mental health awareness is one worth having, but nuanced is not what we are getting from the government in Westminster.

Nor are we getting any sense of responsibility – for failing to anticipate the increased illness and disability burden that comes with pandemic, lockdown, a cost of living crisis, climate breakdown, child poverty, and rampant inequality.

“People are not three times sicker than when I came into power”, says Rishi, but where is the evidence for this?

The government’s complete failure to understand the realities of serious mental illness is made clear by the Prime Minister, in the same breath, talking about those who “really” need help, in contrast to people struggling with mental illness.

For all the talk about supporting the vulnerable during COVID, and “parity of esteem” between mental and physical health, it’s now clear that the Tories were closet Victorians all along: wow we have the undeserving sick as well as the undeserving poor.

A culture of cruelty 

The so-called “sicknote culture” might be worrying, but the culture that seeks to cut the support that people like myself have needed to afford some kind of dignity for a life with incurable disabilities is truly disturbing.

It also doesn’t make sense, as Personal Independence Payment (PIP) is paid to anyone who qualifies, irrespective of whether or not you are in work. It isn’t exactly easy to get either.

I had to take the DWP to tribunal myself after being owed thousands of pounds in benefits that stopped when my PIP was wrongly taken away – an experience that was profoundly degrading and resulted in admissions to hospital from the impact of the stress on my physical disabilities, and interventions to prevent suicide from the mental health crisis team.

Any disabled person claiming PIP, or unwell person claiming out-of-work benefits, will find Rishi’s description of “the gateway to ill health benefits” completely laughable. 

How do we address increases in disability and illness?

How we can avoid this cruelty involves more than stepping away from using divisive and degrading language about the disabled and mentally ill, or provoking alarm at the prospect of stripping vulnerable people of their financial support – though this would be a good start.

We also need to build a system where people are supported, with compassion, for as long as is needed. 

We need to understand that many disabilities are lifelong, and the extra costs that are involved do not go away when you are lucky enough to find employment that benefits you financially and hopefully in terms of wellbeing, too.

Work is not treatment, or therapy, or the only thing of value that people can participate in.

A kind and compassionate society views investing in providing human dignity and the alleviation of suffering as inherently valuable, too. 

We need a government that will take responsibility for presiding over the managed decline of health services that can no longer provide effective treatment for those who need it, rather than one that blames economic ill health on those who are to be blamed for their own ill health.

We need a government that is serious about creating opportunities for supported work, where suitable, rather than one that talks about a “moral mission” to return people to work but cuts the £100m Work and Health Programme in England and Wales that is designed to do just that. 

A different kind of politics

We know that Rishi Sunak’s government will not do any of this.

So the question is, who will? Maybe we can hope that Labour in Westminster will be different, but Rachel Reeves’ clinging to fiscal rules at any cost often sounds at worst like more of the same, and at best like the possibility of a little more support in the future for people who have been neglected for years already. 

This is not just about money – it’s about the kind of society we want Wales to be.

Do we really want a Cruel Cymru for the disabled as a result of decisions imposed at Westminster?

We don’t have a “sicknote culture” here in Wales, we have sick and disabled people.

We need to share a culture that supports these people, and imagine what other options we have for creating a political system that can sustainably bring a more Compassionate Cymru into being.

James Downs is a mental health campaigner, researcher, psychological therapist and expert by experience in eating disorders.

He lives in Cardiff and can be contacted at @jamesldowns on X and Instagram, or via his website: jamesdowns.co.uk