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Rhetoric such as "we will provide support for genuinely disabled people", which implies that many people claiming benefits are not genuine.  Plenty of that from Cameron, in the consultation documents and so on.

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.

by In Wales (inwales aaat eurotrib.com) on Fri Jan 21st, 2011 at 04:29:52 AM EST
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This is a standard conservative reaction to socio-economic problems: focus on the symptoms, blame the victim. The problem being: the trend in the Bliar years to reduce unemployment numbers by sending people into disability retirement. (I'm sure Jérôme still has the graphs somewhere showing the comparison numbers between the UK and other EU members.) Now the Con-men act as if the phenomenon arose out of the private scheming of the disability-retired masses (rather than employers and policymakers), and as if they'd made a distinction between different people on disability benefits based on the seriousness of their claims, whereas their policies obviously don't.

*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.
by DoDo on Sat Jan 22nd, 2011 at 01:34:09 PM EST
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