Why I’m scared for our future

You may say what future and you may have a point… Today we saw another government take office this time a fully Tory Tory one and lets be honest not many expected them to gain a outright majority how they managed it is open for debate but they have done and we must face facts. The labour party shouldn’t go without comment in their disgraceful backing of tory austerity they have been a hammered in the polls and rightly rejected yet we are left with the proper tories at least we know what this lot stand for and that is outright destruction of the working class if they get their way. As a disabled person I have been worrying all day what will happen to us come the next 5 years. Chills of dread have flooded me and the horrors of the last 5 years tell me with Tories on their own they can get away with so much more not that the Lib Dems stopped them with any of their brutal cuts but this time it feels we are facing the abyss in terms of our welfare state, our NHS and our public sector services. A total of 12 billion pounds is to be slashed from the welfare bill and this will I tell you now directly will hit the poorest the most vunrable in our society I fear for many of us I really do. A leak last week suggested the following cuts have already been drawn up by the Tories The proposed cuts included: • Limiting support to 2 children in child benefit and child tax credit, so cutting up to £3,500 from a family with three children. • Removing the higher rate child benefit from the first child, an average cut of over £360 for every family with children. • Means testing child benefit – cutting £1,750 for a two child middle income family • Removing child benefit from 16 to 19 year olds – a cut of over £1,000 for parents of a single child. The Conservatives have been under sustained pressure to detail how they will cut £12bn from the welfare budget by 2017-2018, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies think-tank confirmed this week the Tories have so far disclosed only 10% of these cut in the form of a two-year freeze in working age benefits. With further cuts to benefits surely on its way the DWP have wasted no time in outlining plans to slash the access to work scheme a benefit which is close to my heart and helps me every time I go to work. The attacks on this particular benefit already destroy the lie that the Tories are there to help the disabled in to work and in work they just do not care and are taking the axe to this next benefit. How it will affect me long term we will have to see but be sure I will not let any attacks on me working go unheard. In a piece in the independent tonight it is said. http://fw.to/EMNy4cK The DWP has moved further to examine cutting a scheme that helps disabled people into work – just hours after the Conservatives won the election. The fund helps people and employers cover costs of disabilities that might be a barrier to work. The biggest single users of the fund are people who have difficulty seeing and people who have difficulty hearing. A policy document originally quietly announced in March suggests capping the £108m Access to Work fund. An impact assessment of the policy was released on the day the general election results. “[Spending] has risen significantly over the past five years … One of the significant strategic questions we face is how to establish the right balance between the need to support as many disabled people as possible and what it is reasonable to offer individual users,” the assessment says. The first option outlined by civil servants in the document is “to set a cap on the maximum value of support per user”. The party's manifesto boats that "last year alone, 140,000 disabled people found work" but says that "the jobless rate for this group remains too high. "As part of our objective to achieve full employment, we will aim to halve the disability employment gap: we will transform policy, practice and public attitudes, so that hundreds of thousands more disabled people who can and want to be in work find employment," it pledges. The overall spend on Access to Work in 2013/14 was £108m, covering 35,540 people. • An earlier version of this story indicated that the policy had been announced in the hours after the general election result. In fact the impact assessment for the policy was issued in the hours after the general election result, while the policy itself was issued in the run up to the general election in March This is just a glimpse of the tories aims in this next 5 years. Be under no illusion they are coming for you and they will not give a stuff about who you voted for or anything. Its time to organise ourselvesin our communities find common allies and fightback in whichever way we can using any means at our desposable. We may never see the welfare state ever a gain if we do not fightback now. The last 5 years was justa warm up for what is coming next …..

Standing up for the disabled and challenging stereotypes

This week I’ve been saddened to hear several blind people I know saying the benefit system needs reforming as too many don’t go out and work and would rather sit at home and sponge off the government. Here I’ll try and challenge these myths and stereotypes and hopefully we can stop others doing the government’s job for them for a change. Firstly I am blind myself having been for 10 years now and have worked whenever I can. I do a part time job for my dads company. It’s no great shakes but its work and I always attend punctually and so on. I don’t believe disabled people are anymore lazy than any other part of the population. I want to dispel the stereotypes of workshy s benefit scroungers that don’t want to do anything to help them if I can. I do receive Disability Living Allowance son to be phased out which I’m increasingly worried about with its replacement PIP Personal Independence payment being tighter and harder for people to claim I do worry for many disabled people out there today going through stressful unnecessary tests. I also claim working tax credits as my pay is so low it needs topping up just for me to get by. Just getting a job is not the magic dream the Tories like to think it is there are many who are on poverty wages and struggling to feed them every week despite having a job. We need to unite with those in and out of work as we all face the same enemy in the capitalist system itself using us for profit making. Challenging the myths and falsehoods put out by the government and our dear media which is set to divide and rule us. If people really wanted to help more people disabled or not into work then why were good jobs like the brave Remploy workers who lost their jobs a few years back at the hands of this Tory government and why do they not extend access to work to those looking for work too. Access to work which is funding and support to disabled people in work which can be made available to those needing “reasonable adjustments” to enable them to do the job. None of this is covered by the employer so there is no additional cost to employing a disabled person which is another myth we must smash. I know many blind and partially sighted people looking for work and am struggling not many wish to remain on benefits and laze about as the government and the media would have you believe. Putting it simply there is just not the jobs out there if you’re disabled or not let’s be frank. Even if a job was there there are so many ways around discrimination laws employers can try it is made even harder by the stereotypes of disabled put out there by the establishment that disabled people are not as hard workers as their non disabled counterparts which is completely rubbish. A recent statement from DPAC a group I’m closely aligned with Disabled People against Cuts writes about the cruel Work capability assessment which the last labour government brought in for anyone thinking labour are any better towards disabled people think again. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jul/29/disabled-not-lazy-stop-hounding “The WCA presumes that there are too many people on disability benefits because disabled people are too lazy or too comfortable living on benefits to work. It is founded in the idea that disabled people need to be harassed and hounded out of their comfortable life into finding work under the threat of loss of benefits. No one is comfortable living on benefits. Disabled people are no more lazy that the rest of the population. The real reason that there are so many people on benefits is that society does not include disabled people. We do not have the same access to education, transport, housing and jobs. Social attitudes ensure that disabled people in the workplace are seen as a problem, rather than an equal opportunity. And there are large numbers of disabled people who simply can not work. Why should they be harassed? Why should they be hounded? Why should they have to live in fear? We know, and this report confirms, that many people have wrongly been found “fit for work” when they can’t work. We also know and the UK courts have confirmed WCA discriminates against claimants with mental health impairments. The Work and Pensions Committee report recommends “improvements” to make the system more workable and less harmful. This is pointless, because it would not make the WCA any less wrong or any more useful” We call once again on Labour to commit to scrapping the WCA and to address the real problems that disabled people on benefits face in society. We call once again on the British Medical Association to send guidance on DWP rules “29 and 35″ which allows doctors to prevent foreseeable harm being done to ‘at risk’ patients. They didn’t improve slavery; they abolished it, because it was wrong. They didn’t amend Apartheid; they ended it because it was wrong The WCA is wrong, and it needs to be abolished Signed Andy Greene, Disabled People against Cuts Annie Howard, Disabled People against Cuts Bob Ellard, Disabled People against Cuts Debbie Jolly, Disabled People against Cuts Denise McKenna, Mental Health Resistance Network Jane Bench, #New Approach Eleanor Firman, Disabled People against Cuts Ellen Clifford, Disabled People against Cuts Gail Ward, Disabled People against Cuts John James McArdle, Black Triangle Campaign Katy Marchant, Disabled People against Cuts Linda Burnip, Disabled People against Cuts Michelle Maher, WOWPetition Nick Dilworth, #NewApproach Pat Onions, Pats Petition Paula Peters, Disabled People against Cuts Rick Burgess, #New Approach Roger Lewis, Disabled People against Cuts Rosemary O’Neil, Carerwatch Roy Bard, Disabled People against Cuts Wayne Blackburn, #NewApproach Another good piece by the excellent Johnny void that runs an excellent blog you should all check out “The shocking story of Jobcentre abuse recently published on Disabled People against Cuts’ (DPAC) website will be all too familiar to many claimants. The post tells the story of a claimant who was called on their mobile phone by a Jobcentre advisor in the middle of a blood transfusion for a life threatening condition. Instead of simply offering to call back, the advisor then began demanding that they immediately attend the Jobcentre for a back to work assessment, despite the claimant having lost six pints of blood due to kidney failure. It is difficult to call for unity between claimants and low paid (and themselves harassed) Jobcentre staff when claimants face open abuse like this. But every job has its share of contemptible bastards and part time Jobcentre staff themselves will soon be facing this brutal regime when Universal Credit is introduced. We will all be benefit scroungers then and this unites Jobcentre staff and claimants with a common cause. This is an opportunity to amplify and escalate the fight against Iain Duncan Smith’s bodged social security reforms and it should be taken by those in and out of work alike. The treatment doled out to the above claimant reveals a dangerous time-bomb at the heart of welfare reform. Without excusing at all the behaviour reported by DPAC, there is really no reason why Jobcentre staff would have any understanding of complex health problems. Jobcentre staff are not health care professionals. Neither are they social workers, mental health specialists, probation officers, substance misuse counsellors or housing officers. Yet Jobcentre staff have been granted unprecedented powers over the lives of so called ‘vulnerable people’. With a stroke of a pen, Jobcentre decision makers can sentence claimants to four weeks unpaid work, or stop vital benefits, whatever their circumstances. In fact there is no reason why Jobcentre staff would ever even know that someone has a drug problem, a mental health condition, a serious health problem or is street homeless. And if they do know, they aren’t trained to deal with it. The situation is even worse on the privatised Work Programme where the ‘black box’ style of provision means welfare to work companies can mandate claimants to almost any activity they see fit with no scrutiny whatsoever. As Jobcentre staff themselves could well testify, even before the huge re-assessment of people on sickness and disability benefits, then many of the small number of long term unemployed people often face complex problems in their lives. It may surprise people to know that if someone hasn’t had job for twenty years, it is usually not because they are lazy. Jobcentres have always dealt with large of numbers unemployed people who were sleeping on the streets, had diagnosed, or undiagnosed mental health conditions, serious problems with drugs or alcohol or a range of factors that meant full time work was a long way away*. Now those people have been joined by hundreds of thousands of claimants formerly on sickness and disability benefits and everyone of whom has been signed off work by their own GP. If a GP can order someone to bed rest only to be over-ridden by a DWP clerk or welfare to work advisor ordering them back to workfare, then what chance do social workers, mental health nurses or probation officers have. From December 3rd last year the DWP gave powers to Work Programme companies and Jobcentres to mandate sick or disabled claimants to workfare for an unspecified period. Workfare sharks like the inaptly named The Conservation Volunteers (@TCVtweets) have said they will provide their own assessment of a claimants ability to carry out the very physical workfare programmes they run**. A conservation charity worker can now force someone to work unpaid even against the advice of the claimant’s doctor. The potential consequences of this are horrific and not just for claimants. With no CRB checks, risk or health and safety assessments on the Mandatory Work Activity scheme – or any interaction with other agencies – then the possible dangers are endless. An alcoholic could be sent to work in a licenced premises for example. Or someone with a history of violence in stressful situations could be sent on workfare to work in a stressful situation. This is something workfare using charity shop managers might like to consider before being tempted by the lure of free labour. It is only a matter of time before this situation leads to a tragedy. And when it does, it will quite likely be a Jobcentre worker who faces the blame. This should be a pressing matter for the PCS Union whose members cannot be expected to have a specialist understanding of the vast array of problems that claimants face. And they should be supported by social workers, probation officers, mental health teams and other social care professionals. As Universal Credit is introduced and benefit conditionality vastly expanded then care plans, child protection measures, resettlement and treatment programmes will be torn up as vulnerable people are subject to the nasty and ever changing whims of ministers at the DWP. *Homelessness, substance misuse and mental health charities also know this incidentally. They have just chosen to remain silent as the magical belief has flourished that if only someone got a job in Tesco then all their other problems would disappear. Some people will sadly never make it in this cruelly competitive capitalist world where people are solely judged by how much they profit they can generate for the rich. ** TCV have changed their statement and there is now no reference to them saying they assess a claimant’s health before they begin a period of workfare. Presumably they now leave it to poverty pimps like A4e to decide. They have said they will not use people on sickness benefits as workfare staff – if they are fibbing and anyone knows of anyone on ESA forced to work at TCV then contact Boycott Workfare: http://www.boycottworkfare.org/?page_id=1703 Follow me on twitter @johnnyvoid

Make the bedroom tax unworkable

In similar ways the bedroom tax has been the straw that broke the camels back and a little like the infamous poll tax which saw Margret Thatcher finally defeated this bedroom tax could become David Cameron and the tories very own poll tax. We need to make this tax unworkable with mass resistance and mass civil disobedience needed to defeat this vicious tax. The socialist party says : • No evictions of tenants who fall into rent arrears as a result of austerity cuts. Organise local campaigns to oppose the tax and defend our homes • Stand candidates against councillors who try to evict us. Build a new mass workers' party that draws together workers, young people and activists from workplaces and anti-cuts campaigns, to provide a fighting, political alternative to the pro-cuts parties • Cap rents and build homes. Invest in a major programme of council house building and refurbishment to provide affordable homes for all and decent jobs • End low pay! If workers are paid a genuinely living wage they would not need to claim housing benefit • Fight all the cuts. Trade unions must build for a 24-hour general strike as the next major step in the campaign against austerity • For a socialist alternative to cuts and capitalism with a democratic socialist plan of production based on the interests of the overwhelming majority of people - not the 1% Many of those actively taking part in anti bedroom tax campaigns are mostly those not affected by this tax but want to get involved and lend solidarity all the same. More the better i say. It says everything about the major movement and politicisation that could develop that most of those participating are not affected by the bedroom tax but are acting in solidarity. The rage against the rich and their political representatives is palpable - the sheer injustice of bankers' bailouts and their bonuses, MPs' expenses, pay-day loan sharks, foodbanks, food prices, unemployment. There is also an understanding that those in power will not cease their attacks on the working class and gains of the past such as social housing unless they are forced to. 'Spare room' myth-busting! Myth #1: people have 'spare' bedrooms So-called 'spare' rooms aren't spare at all. The government's criteria mean children and young people are forced to share bedrooms with siblings - up to 16 if they're the same sex. They don't take into account people's disabilities which might mean they occasionally need someone to stay over to help them or to sleep separately from their partner. And if parents are separated, only one is entitled to have a room for their child. Myth #2: the bedroom tax is going to 'encourage people into work' It's hard to encourage people into jobs that don't exist. In some areas there are up to 20 jobseekers for every vacancy. And the government continues to cut more jobs from the public sector. Figures have shown all the schemes they've tried, including their heralded Work Programme, have failed to increase the numbers getting jobs. Besides, many of those affected by the bedroom tax are already in work - 90% of new housing benefit claimants from 2010-2012 have a job but are so poorly paid they are still entitled to support with housing costs - a bailout for stingy, low-paying bosses. Myth #3: the bedroom tax will result in a reduced housing benefit bill The housing benefit bill is so big because of high rents - mainly in the private sector but now social landlords can charge 80% of the market rate too. Private sector rents have increased by 86% in 40 years. The best way to reduce it is to introduce a cap on rents. People have been forced to move to urban areas to look for work, increasing the need for affordable housing. But the amount of social housing being built has fallen at the same time as the existing stock has been sold off. What the government really wants to do is attack the welfare state in every way possible and to force working and middle class people to pay for the bankers' crisis. Myth #4: it's only fair to create parity with the private sector The reduction in housing benefit for a spare room in the private sector hasn't always existed either. And the real problem is that there isn't enough decent housing, and virtually none that is really affordable. People being hit by the bedroom tax have nowhere to move to because of the massive shortage of social housing - mainly as a result of decades of successive governments continuing the sell-off of council housing. Myth #5: the £500 benefit cap is only bringing benefits in line with average wages This figure doesn't include benefits that people in work have to claim, including child benefit and working tax credits. That so many people earn less than £500 is a disgrace, best tackled by increasing the minimum wage, not bringing benefits even further into poverty levels. Those who are fighting this savage attack should stand in elections and join other anti-cuts campaigners in building a new mass party, based on ordinary working class people, to put an alternative to austerity on the agenda.

Benefit cap, will it help people back into work as tories say it will ?

The Tories new benefit cap comes into affect today in several London Boroughs as a test before it’s rolled out across the whole of the country. e cap, being introduced in four London boroughs – Croydon, Bromley, Haringey and Enfield – will see couples and single parents receive no more than £500 a week in benefits. The limit for single people is £350, although there are some exemptions. National implementation of the cap will begin in July, and the policy is scheduled to come fully into force by the end of September. The cap is being brought in to cut spending and to bring benefits payments into line with average income. The aim is to get people back into work but I highly doubt it will do. If anything it will exasperate the housing crisis and harm those it’s meant to help. There is something that many in the media still do not understand there are just not the jobs out there for people to take. If there was don’t you think they’d take them given the amount of benefits they can get which is as we know now £53 a week which Iain Duncan Smith was challenged to try and live on? He has since shut up on that point. The benefit cap has been hailed as the answer to our so called benefits crisis and both labour and Tories support a benefit cap labour only differ by which cap it is and unsurprisingly they won’t give details on what they’d do. We suspect it’d be very similar to the Tories. In fact it’s not meant to help people at all its designed to set employed against the unemployed and so on. Its set to deepen divisions in communities as the suspicion of who is getting what heightens further due to this cap. The stigma around benefits increases and the government are being aided by their friends in the capitalist press who are playing the strivers and shirkers card hugely to ram home the minority of people frauding the system is lots of people. In fact benefit fraud in the UK is less than 1%. The government says those who rely on benefits should not have incomes above the national median. But things are rarely as simple as suggested by the coalition. Government is making £18bn of social security cuts on the back of a handful of high-profile cases splashed across the tabloids – typically showing large families living in opulent surroundings at taxpayers' expense. These exceptional cases will be dwarfed by the million families losing out. Families will be severely disadvantaged, some almost £400 a week worse off. People desperate to stay in their local area will have to downsize, making households overcrowded, or move into poorer quality accommodation. There will undoubtedly be a knock-on effect on other services, and children will be forced to move schools. Quite clearly we are in the midst of a huge housing crisis with over 5 million now on the housing waiting list with most forced into over crowded private rental accomadation. This is often sub standard and ridiculously expensive. A socialist government would instantly look to unroll a programme of a mass affordable homes building project while looking to cap private rents at an affordable level. We used to have rent capping at a fair rate why is this noteven gettinga echo today in 2013 ? It is due to the fact that all major political partiesnow see no alternative to the market system and have fell back on the market for so long they cannot see further than their nose. The socialist party and formally Militant has always called for rent caps not benefit caps. Buildign new affordable homes is just one part of a solution it is not everything though providing good well paid work for peopl is another. There is no shortage of things we need but for as long as we put up with a system based on profit first and whether something can make profit is the measure of whether something gets done or not we will not get the things we so badly need.

Is there really genuine support for the Tories welfare plans?

We hear in the news that there is mass support for the changes or as it should be being reported cuts to welfare and benefits by the Tories but is this really the case? Controlling the media and the news so what people see and red is a very powerful tool but I am not convince the support for these changes is really there. Much like with the issue over immigration I do think we have to admit there are some genuine concerns about people who do play the system and as socialist we must start from where people are. We must take on the Tories and even labours arguments that our welfare state is bloated as it is not at all its not too expensive. It certainly needs changes i.e. making wages liveable and a living wage capping rents and building new affordable social housing would bring down the housing benifitbill but for now it is something we should look to defend. As I tried to answer in a blogpost a few weeks back we must look to answer workers fears on benefits as with immigration looking to counter the Tories propaganda with our own of clear hard hitting facts. We are in danger of the debate being lost with the right in the ascendancy claiming big examples of people on benefits living a life of riley the reality is simply very different. With 9 out of 10 people on housing benefit in work these could hardly be called scroungers they are simply receiving the money to help pay ridiculously expensive rents in this country. Besides much of what is given on housing benefits goes straight into the pockets of greedy landlords in the private sector. Red Pepper has done some great research and tried to smash many of the benefit myths being put about to distort the issues. Welfare reform is almost inevitably contentious. Answering the question of who should receive how much financial support relies on often competing conceptions of fairness, with rival views about who needs, and who deserves, our help, not to mention the most just and efficient way of providing it. These issues are worth debating – but the current debate is being conducted on shoddy terms. Myths and stereotypes abound. These serve not only to unfairly stigmatise claimants, but to obscure the questions we might want to answer about how best the state can provide support to people who need it. Myth: There is a major problem of ‘families where generations have never worked’ Reality: The academics Paul Gregg and Lindsay MacMillan looked at the Labour Force Survey, the large-scale survey of households from which we get most of our statistics about who’s in work. In households with two or more generations of working age, there were only 0.3 per cent where neither generation had ever worked. In a third of these, the member of the younger generation had been out of work for less than a year. When they looked at longer-term data, they found that only 1 per cent of sons in the families they tracked had never worked by the time they were 29. What’s more, while sons whose fathers had experienced unemployment were more likely to be unemployed, this only applied where there were few jobs in the local labour market. So ‘inter-generational worklessness’ is much more likely to be explained by a lack of jobs than a lack of a ‘work ethic’. Myth: Most benefits spending goes to unemployed people of working age Reality: The largest element of social security expenditure (42 per cent) goes to pensioners. Housing benefit accounts for 20 per cent per cent (and about one fifth of these claimants are in work); 15 per cent goes on children, through child benefit and child tax credit; 8 per cent on disability living allowance, which helps disabled people (both in and out of work) with extra costs; 4 per cent on employment and support allowance to those who cannot work due to sickness or disability; 4 per cent on income support, mainly for single parents, carers and some disabled people; 3 per cent on jobseeker’s allowance; and 2 per cent on carer’s allowance and maternity pay, leaving 3 per cent on other benefits. Myth: Benefit fraud is high and increasing Reality: The latest Department for Work and Pensions estimates show that in 2011/12 just 0.7 per cent of benefit expenditure was overpaid due to fraud, including a 2.8 per cent fraud rate for jobseeker’s allowance and a mere 0.3 per cent for incapacity benefits. Even if we put together fraud with ‘customer error’ – people who are not entitled to benefits but not deliberately defrauding the state – the rate of false claims is 3.4 per cent for JSA and 1.2 per cent for incapacity benefit. The claim that benefit fraud is increasing is similarly false. Because there have been changes in how fraud has been calculated over time, we have to look at combined fraud and ‘customer error’ for JSA and income support. This declined from 9.4 per cent to 4.8 per cent of spending from 1997/98 to 2004/05, and has since stayed roughly flat. Myth: Couples on benefits are better off if they split up Reality: This one has recently been comprehensively disproved by research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, who concluded: ‘The simplest question that can be asked in testing the couple penalty is: does the benefits system provide a different proportion of a family’s daily living needs if they live together and if they live apart? The clear answer from the calculations in this paper is no. The benefits system provides very similar living standards to families living together and apart.’ Research in 2009 for the Department for Work and Pensions looked at whether different benefit systems had any impact on people’s decisions about whether to stay together or not. They concluded that ‘on balance, the reviewed literature shows that there is no consistent and robust evidence to support claims that the welfare system has a significant impact upon family structure’. Myth: The welfare bill has ballooned out of control Reality: The government has repeatedly claimed that welfare expenditure grew unsustainably under Labour. In fact, total expenditure on welfare was 11.6 per cent of GDP in 1996/97; under Labour it averaged 10.7 per cent up to the crash. Afterwards benefits for children and working age adults rose from an average 4.9 per cent of GDP up to 2007/08 to 6 per cent. This is what you would expect during a recession. Myth: Most benefit claims are long term Reality: The government persistently frames benefit claimants as ‘languishing in dependency’. So how much of the benefit caseload is long-term? It depends whether you count people at a single point in time or look at people moving on and off benefits over a period. The numbers paint a completely different picture. For example, in 2008, some 75 per cent of incapacity benefit claimants had been receiving the benefit for more than five years, and only 13 per cent for less than one year. But over the period 2003–8, only 37 per cent were long-term while 38 per cent were on benefit for less than a year. So if you count claimants at just one point in time, as government tends to do, you will overestimate how much of the caseload is long-term – and underestimate how many people move on and off benefits over time. Myth: Social security benefits are too generous Reality: Out of work benefit levels fall well below income standards based on detailed research into what ordinary people think should go into a minimum household budget. Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that while pensioners do in fact receive 100 per cent of what people think they need, a single adult of working age receives 40 per cent of the weekly minimum income standard and a couple with two children receives 62 per cent of the weekly minimum. Myth: Most people who claim disability benefits could be working Reality: There are two main kinds of disability benefits: disability living allowance (to cover the extra costs of disability) and employment and support allowance (income replacement for those not in employment). The most basic misunderstanding is that the latter is only for people who are ‘completely incapable of work’. The welfare reformer Sidney Webb commented in 1914 – in the midst of one of many previous panics about ‘true disability’ – that the only people who could do no work at all were ‘literally unconscious or asleep’. The question is whether suitable jobs exist, and whether these people would be able to get them. Once we understand this, three problems face us. First, just because we’re living longer doesn’t mean we’re in better health; improved medical care means that many people born with impairments or suffering traumatic injuries are able to live longer. Second, jobs are in some ways worse than in the early 1990s: people have to work harder and have less control over their job, which makes it more difficult for people with health problems to stay in work. And while we now have anti-discrimination legislation, this only forces employers to make ‘reasonable’ adjustments; the evidence not only suggests these are often limited, but that employers are less willing to employ disabled people as a result. Finally, many of the people claiming incapacity benefits are people with low employability in areas of few jobs. These are the very employers that are less likely to make adjustments. Some people end up in a situation where they are not fit enough to do the jobs they can get, but can’t get the jobs they can do. Completely incapable of work? Not necessarily. Penalised for their disability by a labour market that has no place for them? Definitely.