Framed: The Demonisation of Disability
- Date
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Thu 8 May 2025
6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
- Venue
- Online
In partnership with MediaNorth
Keir Starmer is planning to unveil more than £6 billion of welfare cuts which will see far tougher tests imposed for a key disability benefit. An article in The Times predicted a “radical overhaul of welfare” that could see hundreds of thousands of disabled and chronically ill people lose their benefits.
Under one option reportedly being considered, the Universal Credit “limited capability for work or work-related activity” category would be abolished, which would require often severely disabled or ill people to make preparations for work. Since the election last July, Labour ministers have been drip-feeding rumoured benefit crackdowns to the right-wing press, from specific plans to remove fraudsters’ driving licences to vague pledges to get huge numbers of people off out-of-work sickness benefits.
Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall has pledged to end “the blame culture” around benefits and promised to move away from “all that talk about strivers versus scroungers and shirkers”, but the reality is that government plans are creating deep concerns. A mental health clinician comments that the relentless media drumbeat about "cracking down" on benefits makes claimants feel like frauds. This event will explain what the government plans are, what impact they will have, and what can be done to challenge and change them.
Rachel Broady is a researcher and lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, and was a journalist for over 30 years. She produced the National Union of Journalists' Guide to Reporting Poverty, and more recently, Reporting Poverty: A Guide for Media Workers, produced in collaboration with Church Action on Poverty, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and others.
James Morrison is the author of two books: Scroungers (2019) and The Left Behind: Reimagining Britain's Socially Excluded (2022) and many articles analysing the toxic anti-welfare rhetoric of recent decades. He is working on a new book, provisionally titled Inactive: Stigma, Unpaid Labour and the Myth of Worklessness. Previously he worked for a decade on local and national newspapers.
