A Labour Thing to Do

The anthropologist Margaret Mead was just over five feet tall and had to stand on a suitcase to be seen above the lectern when she delivered her 1967 keynote address to the President’s Committee on Employment of the Handicapped (now the Office of Disability Employment Policy) in Washington DC. Mead began her lecture by referring to archaeologists’ observations of a healed fracture in an ancient human skeleton, noting that this is the point in hominid evolution at which ‘we know we are approaching what we regard as true humanity.’ It takes time and respite for bones to heal; a body that lived beyond a break is evidence of people taking on extra burdens to feed and tend those who were ill or disabled.

In a Green Paper published earlier this week, the Labour Party unveiled its plans to cut five billion pounds from the budget for health and disability benefits. The cuts are focused on the component of personal independence payments (PIP) that facilitates daily living. (The ‘mobility’ component, which helps with transport, will remain unchanged.) The standard payment is currently £72.65 per week, and is commonly spent on adaptive living expenses such as buying pre-prepared food, hiring a cleaner, subscribing to screen-reading software and running the heating at a comfortable temperature. It doesn’t come close to easing the financial penalty of being disabled; disability charity Scope estimates that life as a disabled person costs an extra £1010 a month.

From November 2026, applicants will only qualify for daily living support if they score four or more points on a twelve-point difficulty scale in at least one area of daily life. That sounds easy in principle, but requiring assistance to wash and dress your lower body, or needing reminding to prepare a basic meal, only gets you two points, as does being incontinent and unable to clean up accidents safely without supervision. The Resolution Foundation estimates that the cuts could leave as many as 1.2 million people as much as £6300 poorer per year, with the worst effects felt by lower income households.

Describing a disabled constituent who relies on her children for personal care and will no longer qualify for PIP, Colum Eastwood of the SDLP asked Keir Starmer at Prime Minister’s Questions what the point was of voting out the Tories if Labour are going to do this. The health secretary, Wes Streeting, had gleefully remarked a week earlier that since Labour is ‘doing the things [the Tories] only ever talked about’, the public must be asking: ‘What is the point of the Conservative Party?’

It is doubtful if Streeting and his cabinet colleagues have yet grasped the grim significance of this admission, but whichever side they’re playing for, they now have a hat trick when it comes to targeting those most in need of support. They can add ill and disabled people to the half a million pensioners who will be pushed into fuel poverty this year by cuts to the winter fuel allowance, and the half a million children kept in absolute poverty by the government’s refusal to lift the two-child benefit cap.

The Green Paper presents a dispiriting set of statistics by way of justification: the number of people in receipt of health-related benefits has risen by 45 per cent since 2020; 2.8 million people have long-term illnesses or disabilities that prevent them from working; and one in eight young people is not in education, work or training. Solutions are needed, but it’s hard to see how withdrawing the meagre funds which help people to get changed and go to toilet could possibly help.

A person’s degree of disablement is socially constructed; illness is dynamic and responsive to stress and care, mental illness especially so. Withdrawing basic support from people who are not considered sufficiently ill or disabled risks making them more ill or disabled. This government, like the last one, seems unable to put curiosity about causation before its impulse to cruelty. The increased need for health and disability benefits is symptomatic of failures in the NHS, housing, food prices, wages, public transport and other infrastructure, among other things. Ignoring all the root causes and slashing wildly at the last safety net takes a special kind of ineptitude.

If the problem really is the national debt, that ethereal, technical threat whose menace relies on the continual repetition of the word ‘deficit’ by politicians putting on their most serious faces, there are cleverer options. The most obvious is simply to ignore it and win the next election by strengthening public services and seeding solidarity through spending. (Tories will always make jibes across the House about Labour being fiscally irresponsible; you cannot immiserate a nation to stop someone from teasing you in a debating chamber.) Diane Abbott, who has also noted that cutting support for disabled people is ‘not a Labour thing to do’, has proposed a wealth tax: a 2 per cent levy on assets exceeding £10 million could raise £24 billion annually.

Even more compelling is David Renton’s suggestion that we cut the housing benefit bill by imposing a maximum rent. The government pays private landlords £35 billion a year. Capping rent across the board (Renton proposes something around £10,000 a year) would not only save colossal sums of public money but might also reduce the need for PIP, since expensive, inadequate, insecure housing is a key contributor to the rise in mental illness. This is not a politically or legally outlandish proposal: the Rent Act 1977 still applies to 70,000 continuing tenancies formed before 1988, whose landlords are not permitted to charge more than a ‘fair rent’. If Starmer wants a moral mission to close the deficit, he could go after the people who really are leaching off the state by earning passive income from public money. (Though it may not seem like ‘a Labour thing to do’, his party is home to more than half of the 84 MPs who are also landlords.)

Margaret Mead broke her right ankle three times, was for a time a wheelchair user, and eventually relied on a distinctive forked walking stick. Her personal experience may have motivated her involvement with disability advocacy groups from the 1950s onwards and her insistence on the accommodation of all forms of human variance. When asked in a 1959 NBC interview whether medical advancements would mean ‘that we’re going to have more and more people, but of second-rate calibre’, Mead responded: ‘I think we are going to have to widen the range of the people who we treat as human and build our society so they can live in it.’

Her commitment to disability justice might also have helped her to atone for an earlier episode of catastrophically poor judgment. Twenty years before her now fabled lecture on disability, Mead’s friend, the psychologist Erik Erikson, phoned her in the sliver of time between his wife Joan’s giving birth to a baby with Down syndrome and her waking from sedation. Erikson asked Mead, whom he respected greatly, whether he should follow the doctors’ advice and send the infant away to an institution. She approved the abandonment, citing the greater good of the Erikson family, and adding that it would be easier if Joan were prevented from holding the baby. Neil Erikson died aged 21 having spent his short life excluded from his family and broader society.

In her address to the Office of Disability Employment Policy, Mead was probably referring to Shanidar 1, one of at least seven Neanderthals whose remains were excavated in 1953 in a cave in the Zagros mountains, not far from Erbil in the Kurdish region of Iraq. Shanidar 1 had sustained a head injury that left him blind in one eye, and had profound hearing loss from bony spurs occluding his ear canals. His right arm had been amputated just above the wrist, and one of his right metatarsals had broken and healed. Neanderthals had an average lifespan of just under 38 years; it looks like Shanidar 1 reached a normal life expectancy, despite his injuries, disabilities and perhaps the world’s earliest surgery. This would not be possible for a person relying on hunting and foraging in a mountainous region unless his community provided committed, effective, long-term care. That was 45,000 years ago.