In an astonishingly positive move, the Conservatives decided to let Simon Clarke MP, the newly appointed Minister for Levelling Up, swerve giving an in-person Party Conference address, instead, allowing him to do it over Zoom, as a reasonable adjustment for his agoraphobia.
This, from the party which lets Jacob Rees-Mogg leave sarcastic notes on people’s desks if they are homeworking!
Let’s hope it’s the start of more adaptations for disabled workers who need them.
There is no shame in needing workplace adjustments. A diverse workplace is a healthy workplace. Firms and Government deny themselves the richness of available talent when they come up with nonsense rules such as you have to be at a desk in an office to be seen to perform (the truth is, offices are noisy, distracting places for many, and a home desk isn’t full of Borisesque cheese eating, so much as better, focussed productivity for those who need that).
I’m voice writing this from bed, because I have ME. Would my prose be more polished if I was slumped dribbling over a keyboard on a wooden desk in a crowded office miles from my home, under painful fluorescent lighting? Of course not.
Disabled people have a collective global spending power of £13 trillion. If we’re not allowed to work in the places creating growth, those businesses are missing a very valuable market. If adaptations are not made to allow us into Government and to be a big part of workplace conversations, a fifth of us will be misrepresented. Deep knowledge, reflection and positive change come from having us at the heart of decision making.
Unfortunately, what Simon has been saying elsewhere is that “My big concern in politics is that western Europe is just living in a fool’s paradise whereby we can be ever less productive relative to our peers, and yet still enjoy a very large welfare state…”
Take one spade, and one patio…
Which ties into another less positive move from new Health Minister Therese Coffey, who has decided to bury a white paper on health inequalities which should have been published last spring. During her stint at the DWP, she buried umpteen reports into the deaths of people whose deaths might have been linked to DWP action such as stopping benefits. Now, it seems, she’s taken her shovel over to the Department of Health and Social Care.
Therese likes to remind people that she has herself at times claimed benefits. So once again, it is baffling that she won’t shine a public light on the things which need fixing in the systems for which she is responsible.
The inequalities for disabled people across the board are glaring. You only have to look at the new Glasgow University report which shows a third of a million people died in recent years as a result of austerity or look at the ONS figures to see how bad things are for us.
The first step in putting things right is to recognise, out loud, what is going wrong. Therese needs to use her shovel to dig up the statistics, not keep burying them.
Cutting benefits? Cutting short our lives
The Government has hinted that a way of balancing the books is to reduce the welfare state - as if poorer people can somehow pay for catastrophic cost-of-living rises while it cuts the real-world value of benefits.
Last week, Carolynne told me how her electric bill for her disabled daughter Freya is £6,000 a year. She can only heat her daughter’s room, not the rest of the house, and she feels like she is on the verge of a stroke with all the stress. Last week Liz Truss told a host of local radio stations that the energy cap means households will pay no more than £2,500 each year. Wrong. Fuel bills are at the heart of the crisis, and the woman doesn’t even understand the heart-attack inducing sums involved for nearly every household in the country.
Carolynne and Freya, and the thousands of disabled families like them, are not even on Liz Truss' radar. If Liz puts her hands over her ears, and pretends she can’t hear stories like this, perhaps we’ll all go away. Like we did during Covid, when six in ten of the deaths were those of disabled people ( not that we will hear those stories at the Inquiry ).
Disabled people will die by suicide this winter. Or from an increase in the adverse affects of medical conditions, such as asthma – a fifth of people with asthma have already suffered an attack as a direct consequence of changes they have had to make due to the cost of living crisis. Cutting benefits is, ultimately, cutting short our lives.
Ron’s Place
And breathe for a moment.
Hidden away down a leafy Birkenhead side street is Ron’s Place, an unassuming, run down house which hides a secret: it’s a treasure trove of outsider art.
I first became aware of outsider art many years ago, watching a documentary featuring Jarvis Cocker talking about how it was a passion of his – these singular, often unsung people, furrowing away at their bizarre artistic passions, making mindblowing things that don’t, and won’t, ever fit mainstream ideals.
Turns out the director of this documentary, Martin Wallace, is now one of a team trying to preserve Ron’s Place. Ron endured mental distress and spent periods living on disability benefits. But throughout these times, he was busy transforming his home into something quite extraordinary.
In one room, a frieze of Greek philosophers looks down from above the picture rail. In another, instead of a roaring fire, there is a roaring fireplace – a giant concrete lion’s head, eyes glinting with glass fragments, big enough to swallow a human whole. It mirrors the massive minotaur fireplace in the Greek room.
Another room is decorated in Georgian portraits painted directly onto the plaster. Hello Lord Nelson. Hello Emma Hamilton. The bathroom has giant trout swimming around the walls, and if you look up, you can see the underbellies of frogs and dragonflies. You are underwater.
It’s arguable that this creativity came from the line he walked along his mental health. And it’s certain he would not have been able to have created something so astonishing had he not had the means to survive the worst of times – disability benefits.
As disabled people face more and more cuts and more and more hoops to jump through to prove we are worthy of support, I wonder how many more Rons are out there, struggling, rather than creating and trying to thrive. Ron’s house is a little bit of backstreet magic. If you want to help support it, and turn it into the community resource the team envision, have a look at Ronsplace.co.uk.
This week’s telly
Keep an eye out for Ralph and Katie – the sweet, comedic spin-off from The A Word. And of course, Ellie Simmonds in Strictly, who wowed last week with her waltz.
Anna Morell works for Disability Rights UK – the UK’s leading organisation led by, run by, and working for Disabled people.
It works with Disabled People’s Organisations and Government across the UK to influence regional and national change for better rights, benefits, quality of life and economic opportunities for Disabled people.
