Amnesty International has condemned the erosion of human rights of disabled people in UK
Dr Simon Duffy recently wrote an outstanding briefing: How the cuts target disabled
people which
shows very clearly how the poorest and most
vulnerable are paying for an economic problem that they did not cause.
Austerity has never had any moral legitimacy, or indeed any other kind of
validity. Osborne’s careful selection of “leading economists” to endorse his
damaging austerity
program meant that he carefully excluded those who presented
valid criticisms of the
centrepiece of Osborne’s strategy: accelerated austerity for purely ideological
ends, (see also Minarchism: the Nightwatchman
State), and it halted the recovery that happened under the
previous Labour Government. Much of the case for austerity also rests on The great debt lie and the myth
of the structural deficit.
The
widespread and relentless use of Tory propaganda in the media has undermined
public support and sympathy for the sick and disabled people of the
UK. Examples
of such propaganda include the ad nauseum use of value-laden terms in political
narratives and the media, such as “benefit cheat”, “dependency”, “entrenched”,
“fraud”, “worklessness”, “addiction”, and more opprobrious examples such as
“scrounger”, “skiver”, “workshy” (see Aktion Arbeitsscheu
Reich and
the origins of this word, it’s now being used very frequently in the media to
describe unemployed and disabled
people.) Several studies show
that compared with the end of the Labour Government, such pejorative
language use has risen dramatically, and Duncan Smith is the most frequent
Parliamentary user of value-laden terminology.
At the AGM on 14th April this year, Amnesty International UK passed a
resolution on the Human Rights of sick and disabled people in the UK. The
resolution was proposed by Rick Burgess and Nancy Farrell of the WOW
petition.
The resolution said:
“This AGM calls for urgent action to halt the abrogation of the human rights
of sick and disabled people by the ruling Coalition government and its
associated corporate contractors.
Calls for Amnesty International UK to urgently work with grassroots human
rights campaigns by and for sick and disabled people, carers and their families.
And to set up a specialist Disability Human Rights network…To protect the human
rights of people with disabilities, ill people and carers to halt this
regressive and lethal assault on our rights.’
The full resolution with supporting information is here.
It’s taken an
organisation with the gravitas and impartiality of Amnesty International to
recognise that the human rights of disabled people in the UK are being attacked
by their own Government, and feels it needs to act in our defence. That is very
encouraging, and perhaps we have reached something of a turning point. I hope
so.
It is my own hope that people will recognise that their prejudice and their
own lack of support and sympathy for the persecuted poor disabled people in the
UK has been fuelled by the insidious propaganda of the Tory-led Coalition to
justify the transfer of wealth from the poorest, and from our publicly funded
welfare and support services, to the very wealthy. Tory ideology is and always
has been about handouts to the very wealthy, funded by the
poor. That recognition ought to generate outrage and disgust,
and a publicly consolidated, conscientious consensus of determination to ensure
that this never happens again.
The years immediately after the Second World War marked a turning point in
the history of human rights, as the world
reeled in horror of the Nazi concentration camps, there came an important
realisation that although fundamental rights should be respected as a matter of
course, without formal protection, human rights concepts are of little use to
those facing persecution.
So in response to the atrocities committed during the War, the International
Community sought to define the rights and freedoms necessary to secure the
dignity and worth of each individual. In 1948 the newly formed United Nations
adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), one of the most
important agreements in world history.
Shortly afterwards another newly formed international body, the Council of
Europe, set about giving effect to the UDHR in a European context. The resulting
European Convention on Human Rights was signed in 1950 and ratified by the
United Kingdom, one of the first countries to do so, in 1951. At the time there
were only ten members of the Council of Europe. Now 47 member countries
subscribe to the European Convention, and in 1998 the Human Rights Act was passed by the
Labour Party in order to “give further effect” to the European Convention in
British law.
The current Government are most certainly outrageous propagandists, on par
with the Nazi Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und
Propaganda, controlling the news media in particular, with the aim of
shaping and controlling public opinions, attitudes and behaviours by a process
of indoctrination, using übertreiben neo-liberalist dogmata to both
create and justify neo-feudal subordination, oppressive hierarchical social
structures and to signify the end of our humanist ideal and practice of shared
citizenship.
We have an authoritarian Government in the UK currently that has scant
regard for our established rights, and wants to see them gone, and they
have systematically shut down all voices of opposition, via the media. An
important question to ask is why.
We must recognise our past and remember our future. We must re-remember the
basic humanist principle: we are all equally precious, each life has
equal worth. A society that isn’t founded on those basic principles of decency,
dignity and mutual respect is untenable and unthinkable.
Further
Reading:
Early day motion 295
With thanks to Robert Livingstone for his great pictures
