Crippled: Austerity and the Demonization of Disabled People: Summary & Key Insights

To understand austerity’s cruelty, one must begin with what came before it. Britain’s post-war welfare state was built on the principle of collective protection. Founded in 1948, the welfare system aimed to ensure that no citizen fell below a basic standard of living. For disabled people, this represented a slow but vital shift—from charity to rights. Successive reforms, such as Disability Living Allowance and personal support programs, expanded inclusion and independence.

But by the early twenty-first century, political narratives began to fray. Economic liberalism and media rhetoric reframed social support as dependency. Disabled people, once recognized as citizens with rights to assistance, were increasingly portrayed as economic burdens. The 2008 global financial crisis gave policymakers the perfect justification. Austerity, they said, was essential to “fix the economy.” But in truth, it fixed political priorities: empowering those with means and silencing those without.

When the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition came to power in 2010, the welfare state was reimagined through an ideological lens. Cuts to public spending were framed as moral necessity. The Department for Work and Pensions rolled out sweeping reforms—the introduction of Employment and Support Allowance, the Work Capability Assessment (WCA), and later, Universal Credit. Each was heralded as a way to promote independence and reduce waste. In practice, they became instruments of exclusion.

I have interviewed individuals who underwent multiple WCA assessments, each designed to prove their incapacity to work—but evaluated using criteria so rigid that people with terminal illnesses were declared “fit for work.” Behind bureaucratic euphemisms like “efficiency” lurked a human toll measured in hunger, homelessness, and premature death. The political discourse shifted: disabled claimants were not neighbors in need but potential fraudsters. Words like “strivers” and “skivers” dominated headlines, setting the stage for stigma to become policy.