I felt a distinct shudder go through my spine when I first read the headline of this article, and the more I read the worse that shudder became. It is now apparently ‘unsustainable’ for the government to fund disability benefit: due to the cuts, there is going to be a twenty percent reduction in DLA. More and more people are going to be pushed off benefits and into work. This is not helped, of course, by an increasingly vitriolic tabloid press painting most disabled people as workshy scroungers.

They claim, of course, that those who need the most ‘care’ won’t be effected. I guess that means people with severe physical conditions – people like me and Lyn. We both need help with day to day activities – bathing, dressing eating. It occurs to me that, ironically, we are both more suited to work than those who may need less traditional help. I think, with the right adaptations, we could both do jobs – I have been doing a voluntary job at the local school for over a year now, and Lyn has skills as both a musician and webmistress. Yet we are less likely to be forced into work by those with, say, more emotional conditions, whom the authorities will look at, see that they can wash dress, feed themselves and so on and say ”You can do x, y and z. Off benefit and into work you go” without taking other things into consideration. Such ”other things’ may seem small to an assessor with a checklist of criteria and a quota to fill, but may be the difference between life and death to an emotionally fragile person. People with such conditions will be suddenly denied benefit and forced into work, at which point many will see no option but suicide.

I write this with utter serious. These cuts will effect the most vulnerable in society the hardest, and I find the lack of sympathy in the right sickening. The cuts they are implementing, and their lack of tolerance for people they simply dismiss as lazy fakers, utterly disgust me. To describe caring for some of the most vulnerable people as unsustainable caries with it overtones of some of the worst chapters of human history.