Mood music out of tune

With the three party leaders apparently singing from the same song-sheet on disability, Peter White wonders whether it’s not time for a radical new solution

Kaliya Franklin tried to ask a pertinent question of the leader at this year’s Labour Party conference. Was Ed Miliband’s apparent unwillingness to mention the word “disabled” in his speeches evidence that the issue had been airbrushed out of party thinking. She didn’t get much of an answer.

Ed, who couldn’t get her name right, told her it was a very good question (the last redoubt for the beleaguered politico) and hemmed and hawed. Kaliya did her best, without a microphone, to help him understand what she meant: that it was clear that disabled people were being hard hit, and stood to be harder hit, by financial policies, but were hearing nothing about this from Mr. Miliband, only anecdotal evidence, gleaned from the neighbours of a man he met on his doorstep, that some disabled people weren’t trying hard enough to go back to work.

It’s reassuring to know that Mr. Miliband gets his information about disability and the capacity to work from a man’s neighbours, clearly all experts on the subject.

This is now the mood music of all the political parties. It was no surprise, then, when David Cameron, asked on the BBC’s Today programme about the “something-for-nothing society” as it related to the banking industry, within seconds mysteriously found himself talking about “workshy scroungers”.

I’m tired of issuing the caveat in this column that I hold no brief for cheats on the system, but anyone who could seriously compare the losses to this country from the mismanagement of the banking industry with the low level of fraud carried out by people on disability benefit has a numeracy problem of epic scale.

As for the LibDems, once a voice of sanity on benefits, they won’t say anything different.

Now, no one likes a smartass, so it’s with some trepidation that I hark back to a radio piece I did about 10 years ago. It suggested that many of the brave, independent voices who led disability lobbying and demonstrating in the 1980s and ’90s had been signed up by the political system – at that time, the all-powerful Labour party, fresh from its clean sweep election win – and that this was something disabled people might live to regret.

I think that time has come! This seems like the moment for the revival of the disability movement, independent not only of political parties but also of the major charities who depend so heavily on government funding and government contracts for their continued survival.

It’s obvious that there is a massive vacuum to be filled, and not much time to fill it.