More vicious tabloid nastiness about disabled people (Daily Fail, of course)

[LeftishBrit]

I'll leave it to Zelo Street to describe it:

http://zelo-street.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/daily-mail-kicks-disabled-again.html

'Note that, in Dacreland, disability benefits are “handed out”, and that disability is in this article lumped in with “taxpayers fork out more than £4million every single year on incapacity benefit for people who are obese ... two thirds of them have been languishing on the sick for more than five years ... sharp rise in the amount paid every year in IB for drug addicts and alcoholics”.



Moreover, in a reprehensibly sloppy piece of journalism, disability benefits is also connected to “it also emerged earlier this week that record numbers were receiving winter fuel payments from the UK despite living abroad”. The article gives every impression of having been put together to make the disabled look undeserving and workshy, but this is just not true.



Almost half of all disabled people of working age – 48% of them – are in work, and so are paying the same work related taxes as all other employees. So let’s desist from painting the disabled as an amorphous mass of shirkers: it’s not only not true, but demeaning and defamatory. And then we can have a look at the source of that headline, which to no surprise at all is not new news.



The source of the figure of 2.4% of GDP paid in disability benefits comes from the OECD statistics for 2010 – it’s two and a half years old – and a little further study suggests that what each country categorises as “disability benefits” may vary. For instance, when you look at sickness benefits, the UK is not third out of 34 countries, but 22nd. Taking both together puts us in seventh place....'



All good points. What Zelo doesn't mention is that the Daily Mail article argues that a lot of people are given 'disability benefits' just for being obese (judging by the number of obese people I know who don't get within a million miles of disability benefit, this is clearly not true); and illustrates it by a caricatured picture of a fat person tucking into a large cake.

Oh, how heartwarming. It's really getting me down. WHY this hatred for disabled people? There has always been prejudice and discrimination of course, but not this level of HATRED.

[AmyDeLune]

1. It's almost as if they are reverting to medieval stereotypes...

Essentially, God is "punishing" the wicked and undeserving by marking them with physical deformities. Dehumanising and devaluing people makes them easier to ignore, exploit, and ultimately to get rid of, sadly.

[tjwmason]

2. The Daily Hate twisting the truth?

Say it ain't so.

The creation of a monolith ('the disabled'), and then consideration of an utterly untypical part of the group is one of their standard tricks; as for interpretation of statistics...there's lies, damned lies, statistics, and statistics in the hands of the Daily Hate.