Violence against the disabled has rocketed – last year’s 41% rise is only part of the story
Victims: These are not disabled victims of hate crime fuelled by the Tories. As recent articles by Life News and the New York Times have stated, the Nazis’ first victims were the disabled too.
How soon they forget.
Today’s announcement that violent hate crime against disabled people has risen by 41 per cent is bad enough, along with the 71 per cent increase in offences with an online element.
But why is no mention made of the fact that disability hate crime rose by a harrowing 213 per cent – it more than tripled – after the Conservatives first came back to office in 2010?
And it is also significant that prosecutions of hate violence against disabled people have been reduced.
Oh – by the way, the increase figures for the last year are from only 25 of the UK’s 43 police forces – only slightly more than half.
So we may conclude that the real number of violent hate crimes against disabled people is far, far higher than stated.
The Leonard Cheshire charity sent requests to all 43 police forces in England and Wales, and the full responses from 25 forces showed there were 5,015 offences of disability hate crime recorded by police in 2018-19 compared to 4,111 the previous year – a rise of 22 per cent.
In 2017-18 the figures showed 1,805 of these offences had involved violence, rising to 2,538 in 2018-19.
Twenty-three of the forces were able to provide data to show how many had involved an online element. There were 201 offences in 2017-18 compared to 344 in 2018-19.
Significantly, the number of cases that resulted in charges or a summons had dropped, the charity said. In 2017-18 there were 330 of these cases were pursued – eight per cent of the total – but this dropped 293 in 2018-19, six per cent of the total.
So: an astronomical increase in hate crimes against people with disabilities, coupled with a reduction in the already-pitiful number of these crimes that lead to criminal prosecutions.
And we don’t even know how many led to a conviction!
It all contributes to my years-old claim that Tory anti-disabled propaganda has fuelled hate crime against disabled people.
As I stated in 2017: “Not only have the Conservatives manipulated the benefit system to force claimants into destitution and death, either by the worsening of their conditions or by despair-fuelled suicide, they have also manipulated the public into helping that agenda with violence.
“And the policy has been so successful that the Tories have expanded it to encompass hatred against people from foreign countries and (now) pensioners.”
In support, I quoted This Site’s long-term friend Mo Stewart in Welfare Weekly, who stated:
“Aided and abetted by banner headlines, DWP Ministers insisted that many claimants of out-of-work disability benefit were ‘inactive’, ‘skiving’, ‘scrounging’ and ‘workshy’.
“Claimants of such benefits were clearly a burden to ‘hard working tax payers’, so these dishonest people must be identified and forced to find work.
“These totally false claims have worked well, with a 213% increase in disability hate crimes during the Coalition government’s term in office.”
The falsehoods certainly seem to have worked on employees of the DWP, whose staff were recently recorded accusing benefit claimants of “faking it”.
The headlines today are almost meaningless. They are there to make you feel bad for a moment. But nothing will be done to stop hate crime against the disabled because it is Tory government policy – as it was in Germany under the Nazis.
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Ian Kershaw and Richard J. Evans are both experts on Hitler. But their views are not identical.
Richard J. Evans, in one of his books, has a somewhat different interpretation from that stated in the BBC series “The Nazis: A Warning from History”.
He says that Hitler had always wanted to act against the disabled but felt unable to do it due to concern about public opinion and that that is why euthanasia did not really start until 1939. It would be easier to do it under cover of war.
I think that sounds right. And the German people did achieve some successes. And so it is possible for us to achieve success on this issue too if we work at it.
It’s not wealth that trickles down from Tory ideology, it’s ideas and attitudes spread deliberately by their bigotry and propaganda. They have deliberately created the ‘hostile environment’ and by extension an hostile society. The old trick of Divide & Rule suits the Tories purposes to deflect blame from themselves and their rich supporters, and a gullible Reactionary section of the public falls for it.