Future Benefits
image by Dr Donna McCormack
Doing Disability Futures is a project about disability futures, futures created and imagined by disabled people for disabled people. It’s about a creation of worlds through disability, not as adapting to or accommodating of disability, although these are important, but with disability as its starting point.
Our project is, obviously, at odds with the current UK government’s insistence that disabled people’s lives do not matter. How to think, write, research, practice or even live at a time when in every media we may access in the UK it’s clear that disabled people are a burden to the state, the health care system, the social care system and individuals? If one were to follow the logic of these media and this government one could understand disabled people as single-handedly responsible for the collapse of the UK’s national health service. To some these narratives will be new, to many of us we were bombarded with these narratives growing up under the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. Perhaps we might expect differently from a (New?) Labour government, but we know from Tony Blair that many of us don’t matter and certainly shouldn’t expect support from the state.
I speak in many voices and yet only for myself. I am exactly what this government and those who support the prime minister, Keir Starmer, do not want to see and do not want to keep alive. I am a product of the benefit system. I am what happens when you raise children mainly on benefits.
I grew up on a council estate in Toxteth, Liverpool. My dad was unemployed for most of my childhood and my mum worked part time in a factory. I went to state schools, and most of my housing, education and clothing (yes, clothing) were funded by the state. I went to university, unlike most of my 4 siblings, because my fees were covered by my local council, and my local education authority also gave me a grant. It was not enough to survive on, so I worked throughout my undergraduate degree. My PhD was funded by the University of Leeds, and my post-doctoral work was funded by the Universities of Helsinki, Finland and Bergen, Norway.
Throughout most of my life I have been dependent on the NHS. This will not change. I will never not be under the care of the NHS. I won’t get better. Indeed, it’s impossible for many of us to get better. I recently took over one year off sick from work, and for much of this time it wasn’t clear if I would return to work. Sometimes illness gets worse. Interventions are complicated, take time to work, have too many side effects, need to be adjusted and so on. All of this requires time. Starmer is wrong to think that people like me, disabled and sick people, don’t want to work, because we need workplaces that are adaptable, that accept we’re sick, and therefore need extensive accommodations and time off. I have come back to work part time, because I’m too sick to work full time.
Our government has no understanding of how benefits work, and how they help those of us in poverty, disability and illness simply survive – or as many have pointed out, a lot of benefits will not allow you to survive, but to slowly sink in its financial inadequacy. If only governments would see that supporting poor, sick and disabled people creates a beautiful world, not one where everyone is swindling the system, but one where we could flourish as sick, poor and disabled people.
This project is trying to see how disabled futures are thriving already in our present. Benefits must support all, including to name a few: disabled, racialised, sick and poor people. The state would do well to see how those of us raised on benefits are already a part of these worlds, trying to eke out spaces and times where disability is front and centre of how we think and be with each other.
Further information on some of the above topics (which are not affiliated with this projects or any of the collaborators), see:
➔ On mutual aid
➔ Webinars on disability Justice
➔ For an argument Against Abandonment