It's The Sun what's done it!

It doesn't take the nose of a highly skilled fraud investigator to sniff out what looks like an orchestrated campaign to brand us all cheats, says Peter White

So: as predicted in this column, the witch hunt is on. “Disabled sponger filmed felling tree”; “Wheelchair-bound benefits cheat caught jiving”; “Female darts champion too disabled to work”.

The Sun, The Mail, The Express – with a little more circumspect help from some of their broadsheet confrères – have happily jumped on the bandwagon to help Mr. Cameron fulfil his pledge to “declare war on benefit cheats”.

In the summer months I’ve counted around 30 such stories, all with two underlying themes in common: that there’s an accepted evidence that disabled people “as a group” are on the fiddle, and that any indication that a disabled person who is claiming benefit is doing anything other than lie in a darkened room weeping into their pillows, is somehow a fraud!

It’s significant that all the inquiries I’ve made to those policing benefit fraud have always yielded the assurance that cheating based on disability, as compared with other aspects of benefit theft, is tiny! So: if this is not the case, it’s time that governments – and they’ve all done it over the past twenty years – actually produced some hard and fast statistics, instead of goading papers into the kind of lynch law mentality which invites readers to snitch on their neighbours, join anti-fraud blogs, and spew out their small-minded bile at the thought that someone who is disabled may not be living in total, and presumably appropriate, misery.

So: does the fact that these papers have managed to find a few stories of cheating show that it’s rife? Not at all, it shows that they’ve told their reporters to go out and look for them.

There are so many false assumptions in these kinds of campaigns but perhaps the most important is the idea that journalists know what a disability is, and what effect persistent pain or persistent depression can have on your ability to work.

There is a world of difference between trying to maintain a 40-plus hours a week job, plus all the travelling that involves, with having the odd night out! For those of us who remember a time when people with disabilities received no state benefit at all and who also know that the majority of disabled people have to live on well below the national average income, this kneejerk muckraking is deeply offensive!

And to the politicians who allow it to happen with vague calls to arms against unsubstantiated fraud, I would say “put up, or shut up”.