Someone who had read my novel, Eugenica, contacted me to say that what is happening in Britain today in regard to the government’s attacks against disabled people reminded them of that particular book. I found this observation both disappointing and reassuring by equal measure. I was disappointed because Eugenica was written with the intent of portraying disabled people in a very positive way, I was reassured because I had mad the same observation myself and I was glad to know that I was not alone in interpreting recent political events in the same vein.

The government claim that they need to make £5 billion savings from the welfare bill, the cost of which, they admit, is going to fall heaviest on the most vulnerable; in other words, disabled people. The Green Paper, Pathways to Work: Reforming Benefits and Support to Get Britain Working, March 2025, a consultation document setting out the proposals of the reform, was published on 18 March 2025, on the same day that the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) also released a report, The cost of working age ill health and disability that prevents work, that purports to illustrate statistically the cost to the nation’s economy incurred by people of working age not being in employment. This was not a coincidence. The DWP’s report is clearly intended to provide a justification for the proposed changes to the benefit system that the government is seeking, and it does this by representing the situation through concentrating on factors like cost, lost production, and lost tax revenues. It characterises the people who fall within its scope as economically inactive, which is defined by the Office of National Statistics as ‘people not in employment who have not been seeking work within the last 4 weeks and/or are unable to start work within the next 2 weeks’. This a very narrow definition limited to employment only, but it reveals a basic confusion in the government’s representation of the problem. In the green paper, the government focusses on disability benefits, particularly the Personal Independence Payment (PIP), which is not actually linked in anyway to employment, it is a payment intended to help disabled people with the extra costs of living associated with their health conditions. Whether this confusion is deliberate or not is unclear, but it has led some to observe that the negative labels used by the DWP in their report are similar in tone to those used in 1930’s Germany when the disabled were also represented as a drain on society that took everything and returned nothing useful.

Drawing a comparison between the DWP and Aktion T4, the Third Reich’s program of enforced involuntary euthanasia of disabled people, may seem to be something of an alarmist reaction to some perhaps, but as John Pring explains in his article, DWP figures on total cost of disabled people who cannot work are ‘chilling’ echo of ‘useless eaters’ propaganda, the interpretation is not without justification. Aktion T4 used the same correlation between the cost to society of keeping a disabled person alive, housed, and fed, as is to be found in the DWP report with regards to disabled people being ‘economically inactive’; they effectively draw the same conclusions, which is that the cost to society is too great. These are worrying times to be a disabled person in Britain, but perhaps what many non-disabled people do not realise is that one of the main reasons for this is that it is nothing new; the disabled have always been the object of social disapproval. In the early 1990’s British society was confronted by the unsettling protests of disabled people who, from a growing sense of injustice and active discrimination, campaigned effectively to challenge these iniquities. The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 followed, but little else has changed; we now find ourselves being targeted once again by a British government.

“They built a ministry to deal with people like us, Thomas, a whole government ministry. They don’t like us, they don’t want us, and they’re telling the normal people to hate us. You heard what they are saying about us. They say we’re cretins who can’t do anything, feeble-minded idiots who just take and give nothing back. They’re making killing us look like a kindness. They want to kill all of us and it doesn’t matter how old we are or what we can do rather than what we can’t. It won’t end, Thomas.”

Grace Fielding. Eugenica.