Welfare reforms have left many disabled people effectively destitute. For them, this isn’t a cost-of-living crisis – it’s a cost-of-staying-alive crisis
In his Buckinghamshire front room, Mike is working out how many meals he has to skip this week to make sure his wife can afford to eat.
As well as caring for Sandra full-time, he helps her disabled son, Andy, in nearby supported living and has also started caring for Sandra’s nan, cooking her dinners, keeping her house clean and doing her shopping. “It feels like a lot of caring for £69 [carer’s allowance] a week,” he admits. To get through it all, and make everything add up, Mike typically has just one meal a day, “whatever is yellow-stickered at Morrisons”.
Spend an hour with Mike and Sandra and phrases like “the squeeze on living standards” and “cost of living” that have dominated politics in recent years sound increasingly like dodgy euphemisms, a muted Westminster-built terminology that can’t come close to describing what is actually happening in Britain today.
In a civilised society, this is where the welfare state would step in – but in recent years, Britain has reduced its safety net to a set of gaping holes. Through a mixture of cuts, squeezes and Kafkaesque tests, it has refashioned a system created to help people in need into an instrument of punishment. Even those with severe disability or serious illness are frequently threatened with having their benefits cut if they don’t comply with work-related “requirements”.
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