Disconcerted Discursives: Disability in the Coalition's Budget Cuts

I am a disabled person, but I still work full time. I have an "invisible" disability, which is arthritis in my fingers. In my late 20s, people do not see this or even think of it.

But cuts to Access to Work will mean I will find it difficult to work unless I have an employer willing to fund reasonable adjustments (in particular voice recognition software).

This would mean I would be resigned a to dole queue, or left to work in reception or some other menial employment that would make my post graduate status faintly ludicrous.

This is a far bigger issue for disabled people in light of cuts.

But I have yet to find many people who have a disability who are willing to undertake menial work. I have worked in receptions, I would undertake call centre work if I could (but this is tricky with voice recognition software) but I know many, many people who reject these areas of work and prefer to choose benefits.

I do not think that people eating humble pie and undertaking work that does not conform to their sense of entitlement is a bad thing.

They've hijacked the disability movement's rhetoric of the social model and independence as a way of saying a) the proposals will make people more independent (although they won't) and b) if you want to be independent then you can't possibly want to be on benefits.

Largely it is a lack of recognition that disabled people are at a great disadvantage and support is needed to overcome or mitigate some of that.

Parents receive child allowance but they aren't made to justify how every penny of it would be spent, they aren't targetted and shamed as lazy scroungers for taking child benefits.  Yet disabled people are made to jump through so many hoops, justify and evidence absolutely everything in the framework of a system that is designed not to support them but to use any opportunity possible to find reasons not to give support.

In times of austerity, for example, it isn't reasonable for a disabled person to expect to be given funding for a 'luxury' wheelchair.  They need to slim down just as everybody else has to.  

The fact that a chair tailored to the body of a disabled person and to the disabled person's requirements (and those of their carers) is critical for quality of life, and to enable carers to do their job properly without putting themselves or the disabled person at risk of injury, is obviously by the bye.  We're all in this together, don't you know?