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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/27/broke-and-disabled-in-tory-britain-the-reality-of-life-on-one-meal-a-day>
"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.
Sandra, 38, has bipolar disorder, on top of multiple physical health problems,
and has long been too sick to work. Mike – himself slowly recovering from
agoraphobia – is needed at home as her full-time carer. A large turntable setup
fills one side of the room. “I was a DJ in another life,” Mike, 40, explains
wistfully.
Heavy steroids for severe asthma have damaged Sandra’s bones and she struggles
to walk to the bottom of the garden, let alone do a nine to five. Like many
disabled families in houses across Britain, the couple have no choice but to
rely solely on benefits – or, to put it another way, the kind of income that
leaves your kitchen cupboards empty.
The front room is filled with sci-fi film memorabilia, collected at a time when
there was still a little money for hobbies; stormtroopers stand in a display
case, topped with a lifesize metallic red helmet and large model spacecraft.
But these days, Mike can’t escape more earthly concerns.
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”. Sandra’s pain and breathing would
only worsen if she became malnourished, so he prioritises her meals. Some of
the few meals they can count on come from a local food pantry – a charitable
scheme that sells donated food close to its sell-by date.
Mike and Sandra are not their real names; they speak to me anonymously, for
painful reasons that go back a few years. As the 2010 coalition government
brought in a wave of welfare reforms in the aftermath of the financial crash,
disabled people like Mike and Sandra were recast as “scroungers” by prominent
politicians and the rightwing press. The then chancellor, George Osborne,
stoked a division between “workers and shirkers”, famously referring in a
set-piece party conference speech to shift workers “leaving home in the dark
hours of the early morning” while glancing resentfully back “at the closed
blinds of their nextdoor neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits”. TV
programmes, from Channel 4’s
Benefits Street to Channel 5’s
Gypsies on
Benefits & Proud, played to this mood, normalising the myth that disabled
benefits claimants were not people in need but fakers trying their luck. In
this climate, suspicion over people’s disabilities and illnesses became the new
normal."
Via Doug Senko.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
