I daresay most people reading this will know me personally. For those of you who don’t, I have moderate to severe cerebral palsy: I can walk, after a fashion, and talk, after a fashion. Although I have had paid employment before such as the time I worked asa student ambassador for university, as has my fiancee Lyn, it is pretty obvious that it would be difficult if not impossible for either of us to do a regular job. Our claim to disability living allowance is, more or less, clear cut. In that respect we are lucky: I have long known that not all disabilities are as obvious as mine, and not all barriers to work can be classified as a disability.

I am appalled at the bile currently coming from the government and rightwing media labelling all those out of work as feckless or lazy. There are many complex reasons why someone would not have a job, and I can’t pretend I understand them all. They range from education to family circumstances, many of which can be as impairing as a physical disability. Thus to judge someone because they do not have a job, to dismiss them as lazy without even trying to understand their full circumstances and background, is utter folly. Marxist sociology, for instance, posits that one may be impaired due to socioeconomic class: the education system is innately geared to favour those middle class students who use certain kinds of language, and who get support with their work at home. Overtly or covertly, barriers are put up in order to perpetuate the class system, to make sure only certain types of student succeed.

I think it’s even more complex than that, though. Right wingers speak of people taking personal responsibility for their destiny, blinding theirselves to the fact that we all exist in a nexus of interrelated events, each having a bearing on the other. On the most reductive level, personal responsibility is a myth: all we can really do is react to external forces, many of which are oppressive. Of course, I do not completely negate free will or choice, yet nevertheless the nexus exists, and we are all in it. Moreover, it is impossible to map out all it’s ramifications, so to say unemployed people are just lazy may, in some instances, be akin to dismissing a person with a severe disability as just lazy. Again, there may be a thousand unseen factors why someone may not have a job.

This is why what papers like the daily mail are doing is so terrible: it is stigmatising huge swathes of people, encouraging crude stereotyping and discouraging efforts to understand why people behave as they do. Be it because of culture, education, lack of hope or vision, to dismiss an unemployed person as just lazy is, in itself, lazy thinking. There are reasons why people are as they are, but for some it feels much better to just absolve themselves of all responsibility and brand the unemployed idle.