{"id":43177,"date":"2026-11-05T11:54:36","date_gmt":"2026-11-05T11:54:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/?p=43177"},"modified":"2026-11-05T11:54:39","modified_gmt":"2026-11-05T11:54:39","slug":"when-racists-become-disability-activists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2026\/11\/05\/when-racists-become-disability-activists","title":{"rendered":"When racists become disability activists"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I got into disability activism around 2010, just as the Labour government were leaving office and being replaced by the old Conservative-Liberal coalition (or ConDems) who introduced swingeing austerity measures, instigating a hate campaign against disabled people who relied on state support, portraying them in the commercial media as scroungers and insisting that the system was riddled with “fraud and error” and that “benefits culture” was costing the taxpayer dearly as the government sought to pay down the debts run up during the 2008 financial crisis. Throughout the decade, there was a series of scandals involving cruelty and neglect towards disabled people: Winterbourne View, Southern Health, St Andrew’s, the promises to get autistic people out of mental health units that were never kept, the long list of people trapped in such units who should have been in their own homes. Disabled people complained that social care was being cut again and again; their care visits were being cut or were too short to do what was needed, they were told to wear nappies at night or even during the day so that care visits could be cut and money saved. During that time, I noticed that certain people would only latch onto certain disability causes because it suited their prejudices; when they heard stories of blind people with guide dogs being refused cab rides by Asian drivers, they were up in arms, but had nothing to say when a wheelchair user was refused a bus ride because a parent had a buggy in the wheelchair space and refused to move.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This past week, the same phenomenon has raised its head as the government has announced its new immigration policy. The anti-immigrant parties have been gunning for the migrants who came over during the last four years of the Tory government, the so-called Boriswave, many of whom came to do caring jobs once Europeans found the door closed because of Brexit. Twitter was buzzing with claims that foreign care workers were crap, that they were neglectful, that they did not speak English (or if they did, it was “heavily accented English”) and had no rapport with the people they were caring for, and the specific claim that they were failing to do morning calls, leaving people in bed too late and putting them to bed too early, a complaint disabled people have been making for years, was made. It was assumed that this had to be the foreign carers’ fault, rather than because agencies were not recruiting the right staff, or enough staff, or because the government were starving the councils of funds, making adequate social care impossible. None of them were familiar names from the anti-austerity campaign of the early 2010s; did they want to pay more taxes so that we can properly fund social care? I have been friends with lots of people who have experienced the inside of the NHS and people whose loved ones have been in institutions, people who experienced the rougher side of social care; the ethnicity of the carers was never the focus of their complaint and in all of the abuse cases exposed by hidden cameras, the majority if not all the abusers were white, as were the bureaucrats making the decisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

David Goodhart, founder and former editor of Prospect magazine, suggested<\/a> that rather than “spending billions subsidising” poor care, we should “be using the money to incentivise British ppl, who speak the language fluently and understand the culture, to do these jobs”. Rupert Lowe, the leader and sole MP of the Restore Britain splinter party, tweeted to suggest<\/a> that instead of “importing, and then permanently settling, care workers from the third world, many of whom are unable to speak English and lack the necessary qualifications or attitude”, we should “get the millions of healthy Brits on benefits doing that work” by threatening to deny them their benefits. If he had taken an interest in social care or the needs of disabled people over the past 15 years, or even watched any of the documentaries I referred to at the start of this entry, he would have known that carers without the aptitude or attitude have been a problem for decades, many of them white British, and that caring can be a difficult and unpleasant job and getting people to do it that have no desire to be a carer is a recipe for more neglect and cruelty. Would anyone like to be washed and dressed, fed, taken to the toilet, had their private parts wiped or pads changed, by anyone who had been told to do it on pain of losing benefits and would rather be doing anything else? Would anyone want that for a friend or relative? If we want to incentivise people to become carers, we might like to pay carers a bit more, but that would mean we all had to pay a bit more tax, but it would mean better recruitment and retention of carers — people would not fear losing them because they had found a better-paid job elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On a similar note, I saw a tweet accusing foreign students of treating higher education like a hurdle to jump over, a means of securing a passage to a better-paid job and a better home in a first-world country like the UK, rather than how we Brits traditionally think of it, as a place to improve ourselves, broaden our mind and deepen our knowledge. This may be how we traditionally thought of it, but in recent decades the western world has been no exception to the trend towards regarding it just as those foreign students are accused of regarding it. Arts and humanities subjects are increasingly regarded as ‘soft’, useless, luxury courses for pampered middle-class students who will not use what they learned in a job, while STEM degrees are promoted as serious qualifications because they open doors to highly-paid professions, in particular medicine. Universities across the UK have stopped offering<\/a> arts, humanities and foreign language degrees, cutting jobs and closing or merging departments as this perception has taken hold, both in the government and among the general public; this has percolated down to further education too, with some sixth forms and adult education colleges, mine among them, withdrawing things like foreign language qualifications. Over the years it has been the political Right that I have most noticed disparaging so-called soft subjects and the decline of the arts, humanities and foreign languages in British academia has been dramatic during the time of the last Conservative government; yet, now they are championing learning for its own sake, for enlightenment, when there is an excuse to bash foreigners, “third worlders” in particular.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Image source: Speak Media Uganda<\/a>, via Pexels.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I got into disability activism around 2010, just as the Labour government were leaving office and being replaced by the old Conservative-Liberal coalition (or ConDems) who introduced swingeing austerity measures, instigating a hate campaign...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":43179,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New post at Indigo Jo Blogs -- When racists become #disability activists (response to anti-immigrant complaints about poor social care, though only when immigrants are providing it):","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[772,67,3801],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-disability","category-immigration","category-ukip"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-bep","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/nurse-with-young-boy.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43177"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43180,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43177\/revisions\/43180"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}