The False Economy of Cutting Disability Benefits

[Celerity]

Financial insecurity destroys lives. Slashing disability benefits isn’t reform—it’s wrongheaded cost-saving.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/the-false-economy-of-cutting-disability-benefits



What keeps you awake at night? For me, these days, however persistent the thoughts spooling in my mind can be, I have to admit that they are not, really, frightening. This is in contrast to my younger days when, living in the USA, anxieties about not having enough money, not being able to manage, knowing there was no safety net, could fill my nights with dread and stomach churning anxiety. I have gone without medical treatment because I couldn’t afford it, shopped for groceries with a calculator checking every item against a tiny budget, juggled the unpaid bills and the increasingly threatening demands for payment. It’s hard to describe the blessedness of financial security to those who have never known precarity, and hard also to keep the horror alive in one’s mind, so blissful is it to be out of that misery.

It isn’t just my own feelings and experience that tell me how vitally important it is, for mental health and wellbeing, to feel financially secure. At the University of York, I convene a Cost of Living Research Group that has demonstrated time and time again, with both quantitative and qualitative methods, the devastating psychological impact of poverty. The statistics are damning – even short-term changes in financial circumstances are mirrored by fluctuations in both anxiety and depression. The stories are heartbreaking – “Freezing, being hungry, no breaks, no let up ever, takes a huge toll on your body…I’m so afraid of what’s coming…”

Now, a supposedly progressive UK Labour government, elected on a manifesto promise to “end sticking plaster politics… and meet the long-term challenges the country faces”, is taking a leaf out of the right-wing playbook, slashing disability benefit payments, because, they say, too many work-shy people ‘lack aspiration’ and too many people are diagnosed with mental illness and then ‘written off’: the implication being that the country is weighed down by a mass of the not-really-mentally-ill, scrounging off the state when they should be out there working.

Never mind that people with mental illness-related benefits are already far more likely to have them removed than someone with a physical illness or disability and that 7 times out of 10, the decision to not grant the benefit turns out to be wrong. Never mind that the process of applying for disability-related social security itself is degrading and stigmatising and the opposite of what might be helpful in supporting someone into recovery and work. Never mind the mind-numbing stressful reality of low-paid, precarious, zero hours work and what the late David Graeber so memorably called ‘bullshit jobs’. Never mind all that, never mind compassion and empathy and fairness and social justice, and all of the other arguments one might make for not imposing financial insecurity on the most vulnerable in society: it is, in the end, quite simply, economically really stupid.

snip

[justaprogressive]

1. K'n'R!

This