WhatsAaaaap. As much as this week’s shenanigans around the Cabinet Office wanting veto on Covid era WhatsApp messages have put the old Budweiser ad back to the front of my head, the deadly serious point about this is, well, deadly.
Watching several of my mates falling like flies this week, the non-Disabled ones saying they feel like they’ve been ‘hit by a truck’ or feeling ‘like a weak old lady’ and the Disabled ones floored like zombies at the hands of Sean of the Dead for weeks on end, underlying conditions exacerbated, lungs scarred and screwed, fatigue off the scale, I can’t see anything about Covid in the press. It’s gone away because we’re not talking about it.
But it’s still here. A giant, protein spike-covered elephant in the middle of all the rooms. It’s still here, knocking people over, giving them long term energy impairments, and being talked about in court rooms as the Covid Inquiry enters Module 2.
While the headlines are all about the will they won’t they, the deadly serious point is still buried as the quarter of a million people who were lost to Covid. We have literally forgotten that genocidal quantities of people died of Covid. Husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters – loved ones. And that two-thirds of them were Disabled.
We want to know how this happened. We want to know why this happened. We want all of those WhatsApp messages out there because we want to leave no stone unturned in order to make sure that this never happens again.
For a minute at the beginning of the pandemic, we wondered whether the vulnerability people felt as they lost jobs, independence, community, access to shops, healthcare and education would translate into better empathy for Disabled people – because this has been our experience for years. Not three short years – whole lives.
But it didn’t. It hasn’t. We’re back to where we were years ago. Dismissive tropes. Headlines and comment across many media channels are starting to drop subtle thoughts about who we, Disabled people, are into the public conversation, and the thoughts ain’t good: burdens. Scroungers. Liabilities.
Last week, The Telegraph ran an article entitled: ‘Exactly how much of your salary bankrolls the welfare state. Britain isn’t working – calculate what it’s costing you’, ignoring the fact that ‘you’ is also a claimant. That all of us rely on the State at some point – for maternity pay, sick pay, pensions – a whole host of benefits that provide a safety net for when we can’t work. Can’t. Not don’t fancy working, but can’t. It’s what civilised societies do – we look out for ourselves – each other – our whole community. But the Telegraph is sowing those seeds of them and us, scattering them across the meadows left from No Mow May to see what will grow in Let It Bloom June. It has provided a handy tool to let people see how much of their taxes might be funding their friends, relatives, loved ones, aka the scum of society who are out of work on indefinite benefits because they can’t work.
The implications of such ‘journalism’ are clear. These people are undeserving. Taking the p**s. Taking your hard earned cash for themselves. Doesn’t matter how much they paid into the pot. Doesn’t matter that they might be our loved ones. Doesn’t matter that we’re all part of society and most of us are only pre-Disabled. It’s ‘our’ money.
What it ignores is that from cradle to grave, almost none of us could survive without the collective pot. That’s what taxes are. Money to be shared across collective needs for all of society. These narratives that we pay in to take out for ourselves and only ourselves do us a disservice. They insult our intelligence. And they create a them and us mentality that benefits nobody. Because this week, Disabled people might be them. But in a few years, them will be us. Almost nobody leaves this planet non-Disabled.
Back to Covid. My mates in the NHS have told me healthcare is still in waves of overwhelm. People are still dying from Covid. People are still getting long term sick from Covid. Not on the same scales, but still on significant scales. Waiting lists are still being affected. Core care provision is still being affected.
DR UK was represented at the Covid Inquiry this week. The Cabinet Office might be running around with its big black pen, trying to exert authority over what to show us, and what to scribble out thickly, but these words of our lawyers in regard to informal messaging channels being included as formal Inquiry evidence stand: “What were once conversations in the corridors of power, not contained in any minutes or formal records, are now recorded. It is through WhatsApp messages that disabled people know that in November 2020 Matt Hancock allowed the whips to threaten funding for a learning disability hub if the MP for Bury North did not vote with the government on the tier system.
"Instant messaging can show bias that other sources of evidence conceal, and those who reviewed these materials for relevance can themselves be prone to unconscious bias, especially if they do not appreciate certain forms of discrimination in others, or understand the full panoply of issues like the Inquiry will. It would be wrong for a chair to allow any party to redact documents before the Inquiry has seen them, and no reasonably informed person could respect an Inquiry process that allowed that to happen.”
We need to see and hear what people are saying about us. What was said and heard during the pandemic. And what is being said now in the media. Often it isn’t good. But hiding it, pushing it underground, results in even worse outcomes for us.
