We are six days away from a General Election. As each day passes by I become more and more convinced that the right-wing blockheads we have in charge are untouchable. No matter how low they sink with their repellent attitudes and behaviours they are still the party most likely to form a majority government after December 12. How is this possible?
We are becoming increasingly like the United States, where currently a racist, bigoted disability-hating sex-offender continues to hold the highest office in the land. Every allegation thrown at the despicable Donald Trump is simply met with a metaphorical thumbed-nose before he goes about his business unflustered. All nay-saying against his administration is fake news as far as he is concerned. The American electorate has now become so obsessed with trying to reverse cultural diversity and with pushing their right-wing white supremacy agenda that they are prepared to tolerate this and more from the person who is supposed to be their ultimate statesman. And as long as we in the UK have Johnson and his vacuous band of planks in control we will veer further in the same direction.
Further evidence of the Tory villainy came to light today when at one hustings event a Conservative party candidate was actually filmed suggesting that disabled workers should be paid less than their able-bodied counterparts. This is an old trope used by the Victorian maggots that are currently in power (has anyone seen Jacob Rees-Mogg lately?). The Conservative party candidate for Hastings and Rye Sally-Ann Heart embellished this vile point of view with an extra nugget of ignorance as she spoke to the people of her constituency at the event. She told them that the reason that disabled people should be paid less was that some of them ‘don’t understand money’.
So now not only is the work we do less valuable than that of our colleagues, it doesn’t really matter anyway because none of us know what to do with the reward we are given for our efforts. They might as well just pay us in chocolate buttons and have done with it. After all, which of us hasn’t gone into a shop to buy something, reached into our pockets for our wallets or purses only to find mysterious bits of paper and shiny pieces of metal that we just cannot for the life of us identify. All we know is that they all have a picture of a pensioner wearing a crown that looks a bit like John McEnroe in a certain light. What are they doing there? Where are the magic beans that we thought we would be able to spend at Marks & Spencers and Tesco? We only came out for a fucking loaf.
Heart tried to justify her comments by suggesting that the idea - which apparently comes from a piece written by Rosa Monckton in September 2017 for Tory toilet roll substitute The Spectator - was that working for lower wages was about the ‘happiness for work’ of disabled people. Staggeringly Monckton has a daughter with Downs Syndrome. I shouldn’t be surprised. I have encountered many parents of disabled people who undersell the abilities of their children. Their instinct is to protect them because they view them as more vulnerable. But that comes from a wider lack of education around disability and the potential of those who are affected by it. The message from Monckton and Heart appears to be that it doesn’t matter if we are paid a pittance, we should just be thankful that we are being given the opportunity to go out and mix with all you normal folk.
I’m not going to argue that working doesn’t enhance your life in ways that are not necessarily financial. When you don’t have a job to go to you can spend large parts of your day sitting around doing nothing much of anything, waiting for everyone you know who does have a job to become free at the weekends. All while watching some of the most awful television ever made. This gets depressing rather quickly. It might be difficult to get out of bed at 7.00am, especially with a kidney function that currently stands at a surgery-prompting 16%, but it is far better than the alternative.
Joining the work force has helped my mental health immeasurably. Yet that alone is not enough to wrench me from my pit every morning. If you took away all or part of my salary, which is fairly modest as it is, then I might start thinking that days on the sofa are a more attractive proposition again. I have On-Demand TV now. The days of Jerry Springer and Homes Under The Hammer are over. The suggestion that anyone, disabled or otherwise, should work a full time job for anything less than the minimum wage is an appalling attitude that belongs in an era centuries before this one. It is exploitation made worse by the fact that they would try to dress it up as a favour for all those poor, disabled folk who don’t get out much. It is terrifying, unforgivable ableism. As much as there may be some people who don’t have a total grasp on the mathematics involved in monetary transactions, it appears that there remain some politicians who don’t have a grasp on common decency and respect.
Let’s humour Heart for a second. There are no doubt some people who don’t understand the full implications of finance and how to handle money, so let’s assume I don’t for a second. Does that mean that I don’t have bills to pay? That I don’t have a mortgage or rent to pay? That I don’t need to buy food, clothes or heating? Heart probably cannot imagine that I have any of these needs. She’s too wrapped up in her own Tory wankerbubble which assumes that disabled people are less valuable souls, there to be pitied or used for what amounts to slave labour. I find it hard to believe that this needs saying, but whether you understand money or not we all have financial responsibilities and requirements. Nobody, not even people that Heart considers of less value than her who may or may not be able to count, can get by without any money.
I wonder – if Heart were to meet with some unimaginably awful accident involving the front of my Vauxhall Astra that left her less mobile but unaffected mentally – would she consider it acceptable that she should either stop working and be paid by the state or else receive a reduced salary for the work she currently does? If that ever happened to her she would find out quickly that everything she previously believed about disability is nonsense. You still have to get on with life the same as anyone else. You don’t get charged less for a Big Mac in McDonalds because you happen to use a wheelchair. Although a man did once give me a pound to buy a burger in the branch in St Helens town centre when I was about 11. But that is another story about how ableism also involves leaning too far the other way and believing that disabled people should be looked after entirely without the need to worry about things like working and making money. That’s also a pretty offensive mentality which does nobody any good.
The problem with Tory ideals on disability, and indeed those of a good number of ignorant dimwits of all political persuasions is that they are held with a deep conviction that life-changing disabilities are things which happen to other people. When it does happen to them they cannot comprehend it for a long while afterwards, and sometimes never really do. There is a cultural obsession with fixing disability instead of learning to accept it. We should be focusing on modifying the world to embrace the differences between people but we are not, still in 2019. Every time an able bodied person gets mangled in some horrible accident the narrative is about how they will walk again and how, if they don’t, they will feel and be treated as if they are less human than they were before. I can attest that unfortunately, unforgivably, they absolutely will be treated differently should something like that happen to them. But that problem does not belong to the person with the disability, it belongs to society.
There is enough ableism in the world without these Tory grubs trying to use it to save money. No doubt they view taking money from disabled workers as a more justifiable means of boosting the coffers than taxing the top 5% of earners a little more, a policy for which Jeremy Corbyn is currently being vilified by the right wing media. Otherwise known as the BBC. Whoever is pedalling it, it is abhorrent ableism and it has to stop. Let’s not be like Trump’s America. Let’s vote these turds out on December 12.
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