Tue 29 Jan 2019 07.00 EST
Last modified on Tue 29 Jan 2019 10.40 EST
Sometimes, Marie goes three days without a meal. The 46-year-old used to get by with her disability living allowance, but as austerity hit and the Conservatives replaced it with personal independence payments (PIP), last year she lost the social security entirely.
Her disabilities haven’t magically disappeared. She walks with crutches due to degenerative joints, but can’t get far. A series of unsuccessful operations mean her knees dislocate each week. Pain is constant, and she has severe depression too.
Marie sits in thermals, a jumper and a dressing gown – she can’t afford the heating. As the temperature drops, she tells me she’ll soon wear a jacket inside, too. On the days she can’t buy proper food, she survives on toast. She cuts her own hair now. This week, her sister had to buy her toilet roll.
Ministers like to dub this “welfare reform” but for Marie, it is profound anxiety. “I’m constantly worrying about money,” she says. “It’s my very first thought after pain in the morning and my last at night.”
I thought of Marie as I watched Tory MP Heidi Allen and independent Frank Field embark on a nationwide “anti-austerity” tour, which started in Leicester last week. “I have absolutely had enough,” Allen said, her eyes reddening. “Unless we blow the lid off it, my lot are not going to listen.” Her intentions may be genuine – Allen was only elected in 2015 after the first wave of cuts came in – but this seeming surprise at the impact of austerity is, at best, naive and, at worse, negligent. The suffering Allen is crying about has not occurred by magic but is caused by policies she consistently voted for.
Cut billions from disability, housing, in-work and child benefits, and deep poverty is the all-too-predictable consequence. Take the disability benefit system. The result of austerity has been a benefit system stacked against the claimant, where disabled people are re-evaluated by outsourced staff with next to no medical training, frequently falsely turned down for benefits, and then forced to battle the lengthy appeals process to get them back. Others, like Marie, are simply left to live in destitution without them.
This month it emerged that the rollout of PIP is costing the public purse £4bn more than ministers estimated, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility. This is the perversity of austerity: ministers have probably spent more trying to remove benefits from disabled people than it would have cost to give them the support they needed.
With the Brexit crunch ahead, Britain is on the brink of significant change. But austerity surely requires just as much soul searching from the political class. Not since the era of Margaret Thatcher have we seen such an all-out assault on our social fabric, nor one that has caused such harm. The impetus on MPs like Allen now is not simply to bring attention to the damage of the last decade but to come to terms with what has brought us here. That requires a recommitment to the welfare state, and an economic redistribution in which those on the bottom rung are granted the dignity of a decent income, home and opportunities. At the very least, politicians must take responsibility for the crisis their policies have created. Tears alone will do little to help the disabled people now going hungry.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jan/29/disabled-people-hungry-thatcher-social-fabric
