| Social benefits | ||
| We have been watching Comic Relief since it began 40 years ago. In those far-off days, if you wanted to make a donation, it meant sending a cheque to the organisers or going to the bank to fill in a bank transfer slip. Later on, it meant ringing them up and providing your credit card details – sometimes to one of the stars of the show(!). Nowadays, more prosaically, you can text a number such as 20 or 40 to them and your account will be debited by £20 or £40. If you want to make a greater donation you can still make a credit card donation but you’ll need to provide your card details not to a person, but to their app. Not quite so appealing. Nevertheless, we want to feel that we’ve done something to alleviate poverty or provide medical care to those who really need it - whether here in the UK or in other poorer countries. Having said that, the total amount raised by Red Nose Day has gone down year on year for many years. The highest amount raised was in 2011 when it was £74 million. This year it was £34 million. But then it’s been going on for so long now that perhaps there’s a lack of novelty: I hesitate to say so, but in the course of the evening, the funniest parts were sketches from old shows. But the evening again showed just how much need exists both in the UK and the world. It is effectively unlimited. We also see this in the number of daytime advertisements on the television (when the advertising rate is lower and the viewing audience is, ahem, older), asking viewers for contributions to so many ‘good causes’. So what should our response be? Should we empty our bank accounts and send the dosh to all those charities? Should we wear hair shirts rather than even Marks & Spencer products? Well, so far I haven’t been tempted to accept that as an imperative. And I think there are reasons for that. Firstly, I don’t feel an obligation to make myself poor so that everyone-else can be less poor - not rich or even well-off, but a tiny bit less poor. My cash won’t achieve very much in the great scheme of things. But then, as I’ve remarked before, there is a second reason. In my childhood, life was not very luxurious. It was even less luxurious during my parents’ childhood. Not just for us, but in society in general. In a well-ordered society, though, in the absence of economic shocks, we see that standards of living tend to increase. Which means that standards of living are dependent on the stage of development of that country and how it is governed, something over which we have no real power. Our attempts at interfering with foreign aid tends to confirm this. We cannot affect in any major way how life will be lived elsewhere. The best we seem to be able to do is nibble at the edges of well-defined health problems in other countries. Providing large amounts of development aid is usually unproductive. Obviously disabled British people featured during the evening, The question of what disadvantage or disability should trigger the receipt state aid, actual taxpayer’s money, however is difficult. The size of the disability benefits bill is now running at £39.1 billion; it will rise to at least £58 billion by the end of the parliament - more than we spend on the army. And this is largely an unintended consequence of a change in the way we have been asked to think of disability. Those coming home injured from the second world war had every right to expect the nation’s support, even if it was somewhat meagre. But the impairments of the disabled in general were not regarded as heroic. They were seen more as personal deficiencies to be borne by them with the help of parents. In the 1980s, however, a new generation of disabled people took to the streets. Taking their cue from the civil rights and feminist movements they highlighted the cruelty and abuse that had been inflicted on many disabled people and the patronising attitude towards them of non-disabled society. They chained themselves to railings and regarded the telethons raising money for disability charities as demeaning. To them the problem was not being disabled, but society’s refusal to recognise that a disabled person was just as ‘normal’ as anyone else. In 1995, the Disability Discrimination Act produced a transition from the “medical” model of disability to the “social” model. The new idea was that what we used to called a disability or a deformity was merely a manifestation of human diversity. It was down to employers, architects, retailers, transport providers and the like to make reasonable adjustment for their needs. The expression ‘differently-abled’ was born. This has though been accompanied by a significant widening of the definition of disability. The number of people who consider themselves disabled has rocketed from about one in 50 of the population to one in four, or around 16 million people. And this means that the cohort eligible for benefits has ballooned from about 600,000 in 1990 to seven million today. And although we are also living longer, those extra years are not necessarily accompanied by good health. In fact, we are more likely to be disabled in our extra years, whether with joint related or neurological problems, including Alzheimer’s. The social model of disability has proved to be very malleable. The post-war idea that social benefits were intended for long-term conditions causing significant limitations has expanded significantly. Since 2005 the courts have added numerous other conditions - including cancer and HIV - to the qualifying list. Until recently, for example, the principal cause of disability among working-age Brits was musculoskeletal problems; today the single most prevalent cause is mental health: 47 per cent of those who declare that they are disabled between the ages of 16 and 65 do so because of a mental health condition, often self-diagnosed. The trend has risen in the past decade; the proportion of the population claiming some form of impairment, whether physical or mental, has risen from 18 per cent to 24 per cent since 2010. Most of that increase has occurred in the past five years and the largest part of the rise is due to claims of mental illness. When Parliament was discussing the 2010 Equality Bill Act, some disabled activists argued strenuously that entitlement to benefits should focus mainly on the most severely disabled. They were particularly concerned about the extension of the definition to incorporate mental and emotional distress of a kind experienced by very many people at some time in their lives. They feared that if payments were spread too widely, then the amount available for benefits for people suffering from chronic, seriously limiting conditions would be diluted. They failed, but they were right in having that fear. And we can see why the current idea that disability should be regarded simply as diversity gives misleading outcomes. If we use current disability thinking then we can also say that someone who is not very intelligent is just an example of that same human diversity. If it means that they cannot earn as much as someone more intelligent, then ought society, by analogy with disability, need to step in to equalise things for them? What if they are not very skilled with their hands and so cannot be as well-paid as a plumber? And what if their position on the scale of normality is that they are lazy? Should we, the more motivated people, offer them monetary assistance? Or should these things, other than at the extremes, be regarded as problems for the individual to resolve? Obviously I’m following the well-worn path of drifting to the right as I get older, but surely, actually to qualify for state aid, other people’s money, there should be the sort of impairment which makes a real and long-lasting difference, one requiring major adaptations to how life can be lived. Or as someone once put it: “to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”. 25 March 2025 Paul Buckingham |
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