So, Rishi Sunak wants sick and disabled people back to work with the age-old diatribe of how benefits have become a ‘lifestyle choice’ for some people. If the Conservatives win the next election they plan to strip benefits from some sick and disabled people if they have failed to get work after a year.

I’ll come back to the persecution of disabled people in a bit but first of all, let’s unpick this madness. There are record numbers of people unable to work due to ill health or disability. This of course has nothing to do with the record numbers of people waiting for treatment in an ideologically underfunded NHS,- stripping back NHS services to breaking point and then suggesting private health care is the way out.

If people weren’t waiting years for mental health referrals, if people weren’t being left to live with chronic pain while they wait for treatments and operations, if there wasn’t a national shortage of a whole range of medicines and medications (nothing to do with Brexit, nothing to see here) maybe there wouldn’t be so many people off sick. But what do I know, I’m just a benefit scrounger.

GPs, it seems, are giving out sick notes willy-nilly. Rock up with an ingrown toenail and you can blag a year off work. It’s our culture, apparently. We have become ‘sick note Britain,’ scared of hard work and suffering. 

I’m no medical expert but the long-term health impacts of the pandemic, health inequalities and the mental/physical toll of living in a cost-of-living crisis, where some people can’t adequately feed themselves or their families, heat their homes or afford safe, clean, non-mould-filled-housing…that’s not the issue,- it’s because we’ve raised a generation of slackers.

Definitely blame young people, ignoring the fact that the biggest group of people claiming sickness benefits are women over 50 in part-time insecure work. The very people most subject to health inequalities.

The consequences of Tory policy and health inequality in our society are shining through for all to see, but let’s pretend it’s about some moral weakness, some lacking in moral fibre that sees people struggling with type 2 diabetes, mental ill-health and chronic pain.

And while we are on about people with no medical training having an opinion, let’s scrap these wishy-washy GPs using all that medical training and expertise to decide if someone is too sick to work – let’s let some rando with no medical training do it.

This has worked so well with disabled benefits in the past. Private companies with profit margins boosted by how many people they turn down for benefits, while sick and disabled people inconveniently die just to prove they have a right to a claim.

In the 90s the Tories set their sights on single parents, scrounging on the state, refusing to work while they were lying about on the sofa eating grapes …oh yeah and single-handedly raising their kids.

In the banking crisis of 2008, the Chancellor George Osborne helpfully pointed out the cause of our economic decline.  Rather than it being bailing out the banks that broke our economy, it was disabled people on benefits that were causing all the fuss.

It was hard to be disabled then. One day, out walking my dogs in my wheelchair a woman spat at me, saying people like me should be ashamed, that her ‘fucking taxes’ were paying for my ‘bastard dogs’ and that people like me should be ‘put away’.

A few months later an old man at a bus stop turned to me, muttering nastily that he’d bet I was one of those ‘taking all the benefits.’

Another man was disgusted when I stood up from my wheelchair to get into my car. Having wasted his pity on me, I was now spitting it back in his face what with being able to stand. He felt empowered to ask if the ‘benefits people know that you can really walk?’

At the same time, I overheard a group of middle-class pensioners (the biggest group of benefit claimants btw) seriously discuss whether people on benefits should have to buy their food in special shops and only be allowed to buy the basics. No luxuries, no chocolate, no Earl Grey Tea for the likes of me.

Apparently, that’d stop them all being fat as well and cut down Type 2 diabetes. When I pointed out they were talking about me, they had the grace to blush, but still suggested that it would be a deterrent to the ‘undeserving poor’.

Sunak’s rhetoric, the chorus of the nasty Tories, empowers people to attack those whose mental health makes them unfit for work. It undoes decades of work challenging stereotypes about mental health, and those that experience it.  It further stigmatises disabled people as somehow wanting something for nothing, scrounging on the state. (Never mind that in the same week as denouncing Sick-note Culture, the Tories quietly cut the very program supporting disabled people into work.)

Words really do matter.  When pushed to the edge people look for someone to blame and this week the sick and disabled are the Tories’ favourite scapegoat.

Am I a little more scared to go out, maybe?

Would I give up a promising well-paid and rewarding career in favour of being sick all the time, forcing my family into poverty,  shutting down my ability to take part in society, to be able to put the heating on without worrying, all for £78 a week – well what do you think?

Disabled people haven’t broken society, but the Tories have.