Let’s play a game of statement spot the difference. The first:
£300m bill for handouts: Spending on disability benefits for people claiming to have ADHD shoots up 41,000 per cent within a decade
The other proclaims how “the state pays” ‘X’ amount:
a day for a hereditary sick person.
Then, it emphasises that for the same sum:
a healthy family can live for 1 day!
Figured out the distinctions between them yet? Hint: there basically isn’t one.
If anything sets these two captions apart, it’s 80 or so years of lapsing time, and the North Sea. Statement one is a Daily Mail headline from 13 April 2024. The second? It’s from a Nazi Germany propaganda poster stirring up prejudice against disabled people. We left out the currency and sum – 5.50 reichsmarks (RM) – to make the point that without that identifying feature, it might not look out of place splashed across the print pages of a right-wing corporate media newspaper today.
Side-by-side the two statements read eerily, disturbingly similar. There’s an implication in both – hardly subtle – that disabled people are a burden. In particular, both spell out the supposed ‘costs’ to the state and taxpayer of disabled lives. Fine, we’ll concede, there is another difference. The Nazi propaganda directly compares costs to non-disabled people, whereas the Daily Mail headline doesn’t say this in as many words. But, it doesn’t need to; the insinuation is obvious.
Moreover, there’s something else which makes the two disconcertingly alike as well.
The Nazi’s used the propaganda poster’s disgusting rhetoric as the basis for its programme of mass murder of disabled people (and later, other minoritised groups).
In the Daily Mail article’s case, the Tories have, and now Starmer’s Labour government will, weaponise its narrative to unleash another austerity-driven round of benefits cuts and clampdowns on disabled claimants. And we’ll be clear: this will kill people, as it tragically has done too many times before.
It’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day
At the heart of both is a devaluing of disabled people’s lives. By framing disabled communities in these terms, they manufacture consent to punch down further on disabled people’s rights – and ultimately – their right to even exist. In a nutshell, it paves the way for discriminatory policies and actions by the state.
Monday 27 January 2025 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Each year, we mark it to remember all the victims of Nazi Germany’s genocidal eugenics project. And the persecution of disabled people was a central part of this.
So, as assaults on disabled people’s rights continue to ramp up in 2025, this International Holocaust Remembrance Day must serve as a reminder of where this deliberate othering and discrimination can all dangerously lead.
What’s more, remembering the atrocities Nazi Germany committed against disabled citizens starkly highlights some disturbing parallels in the way the UK state and its public institutions treat disabled people today. It turns a mirror on the UK’s fascist eugenicist undercurrents – flourishing beneath the guise of its neoliberal capitalist doctrine. That is, a profit-driven ruling class continues to sideline, suppress, and attack the very fabric of disabled communities’ lives – to sometimes unconscionably deadly consequences.
‘Aktion T4’: the mass murder of disabled people
In 1941 , the head of the Heilpädagogik (therapeutic) ward at the Vienna University Children’s Clinic penned an evaluation of a disabled patient under its care. It read:
Erethic imbecility, probably on a post-encephalitic basis. Salivation, ‘encephalitic’ affects, negativism, considerable language deficit (is now slowly starting to speak), with relatively better comprehension. In the family, the child is without a doubt a hardly bearable burden, especially under their crowded living conditions, and due to her aggressions she endangers the small siblings. Therefore it is understandable that the mother pushes for institutionalization. Spiegelgrund would be the best possibility.
Said ‘child’ was a girl named Elisabeth Schreiber, and she was five years old. The Spiegelgrund institution? A euthanasia facility.
There, from 1940 to1945, the ‘clinic’ murdered 789 disabled children. Spiegelgrund was part of the notorious Nazi mass euthanasia programme of disabled people known as ‘Aktion T4’. From a villa on Tiergartenstrasse – a street in central Berlin – Nazi officials coordinated the massacre of disabled people through lethal injection, starvation, and eventually, in gas chambers. Starting in 1939, the Nazis first murdered children under the age of three living with conditions like Down’s syndrome, and cerebral palsy. Then, they expanded this at the outbreak of the war to:
Adults with disabilities, chronic illnesses, mental health problems and criminals who were not of German origin
The Nazis killed an estimated 250,000 disabled people in these brutal facilities. And as the the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust explains:
The model used for killing disabled people was later applied to the industrialised murder within Nazi concentration and death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau.
This weekend, the Canary’s Nicola Jeffery invoked the haunting and poignant words of German theologian Martin Niemöller’s famous poem ‘First they came’.
At Niemöller’s seminal reading in 1946, he vocalised “Kranke, sogenannte Unheilbare”, meaning “the sick, so-called incurables”. In other words, chronically ill and disabled people. There’s a reason this message resonates so harrowingly now. The same week we’re marking this abhorrent chapter of 20th century history, the UK chancellor Rachel Reeves is gearing up to strip chronically ill and disabled people of vital social security benefits.
Not forgetting the atrocities of the Holocaust doesn’t simply mean to remember the lives lost. It’s a cautionary tale for subsequent generations to recognise fascism and eugenics where it exists in our own society, and resist it in solidarity with each and every group targeted for oppression.
So, here are a number of ways the UK state and its institutions are persecuting chronically ill and disabled people today. Crucially, we’ll highlight how they’re doing so in a dehumanising atmosphere akin to the eugenicist environment that drove Nazi atrocities against disabled people. Needless to say, the outcome could be a not so dissimilar deadly result.
Attacks on learning disabled and neurodivergent people
The ward head who signed away Elisabeth’s life to Spiegelgrund was none other than child psychologist Hans Asperger, the first person to coin autism as a diagnosis. Unsurprisingly, Elisabeth wasn’t the only learning disabled and/or autistic child Asperger sent to Spiegelgrund.
To Asperger, these children were as he described in Elisabeth’s notes, a “hardly bearable burden” to their parents and the state. He openly distinguished between those children he could mould into ‘useful’ members of society, and those he couldn’t. Naturally, the latter had no value to the Nazi regime, since it couldn’t co-opt them in service of its eugenicist and imperial goals.
Over the course of 2024, the UK’s right-wing corporate media has been spouting headlines the likes of:
One million children to receive disability benefits amid surge in autism and ADHD
And:
Disability benefit payments for children with conditions such as ADHD and autism rise by almost 40 per cent since lockdown, figures show
Notably, the Canary recently highlighted that:
Neurodivergence and the connection to disability benefits cropped up across 39 articles within our analysis time-frame all told (13.1%). The Telegraph published just two of these in 2023, while neither the Times nor the Daily Mail linked these in articles before 2024.
As we noted:
the implication in the coverage seems to be that autistic people, and people with ADHD shouldn’t be claiming disability benefits either. Broadly, the articles are also suggesting that many have been wrongly diagnosed, and ergo again, should not be eligible to claim disability-based social support.
Asperger’s value-judgement of disabled patients ‘deservingness’ for state support sits a little too comfortably beside the right-wing establishment’s narratives today.
‘Unemployable’ to ‘economically inactive’ pipeline
The Nazi’s “unemployable” is today’s “economically inactive”.
There were two telling keywords the Nazis used that in effect, signalled a euthanasia warrant for disabled patients. One was: “unemployable”. In short, those that clinicians couldn’t foresee becoming cogs in the Nazi machinery were effectively, expendable.
Sound familiar? It should. The UK corporate media has been pumping out an incessant stream of stories scapegoating disabled benefit claimants. As the Canary recently underscored, these outlets have in fact ramped this up more than 11-fold in 2024, on 2023’s output. Largely, these have fixated over the costs to the UK Treasury of disability benefit claims, and bogus stats showing that hundreds of thousands of disabled people not working, purportedly can and ergo, should be. The Canary has repeatedly debunked the basis for this, not least pointing out that the idea that work is a health outcome is preposterous.
But crucially, the underpinning and shameful implication of this coverage has been all too obvious. That is: disabled people not ‘productively’ generating capital are burdens to society.
Of course, articles espousing this rhetoric haven’t been calling for the state to euthanise disabled people – not directly. However, here’s the thing: these dog-whistles pander to policy-makers’ plans to pull support from disabled people. And both the corporate media and Whitehall know full-well for some – or in fact, many – that will have fatal consequences.
No support, no income, so how can we live?
Take for instance a 20 January 2025 article in the Telegraph originally headlined:
Claims for £69,000-a-year disability benefits scheme surge
The article is all about government spending on the Department for Work and Pensions’ (DWP) Access to Work scheme. As the name suggests, it provides financial support for disabled people in the workplace. Currently though, the scheme has major backlogs, and is enormously failing to support disabled people when they’re already in work. Not to mention also that the onerous and bureaucratic assessment process is a barrier to applicants as well. Clearly, the government needs to properly fund and resource the scheme, among other overhauls to actually make the scheme ITSELF accessible. However, the Telegraph focused on none of this, naturally.
Instead, it homed in on the fact it “can hand claimants nearly £70,000 a year”. It juxtaposed this beside the “spiralling costs” of an increasing claim rate to the Treasury. In other words, the ‘economic burden’ narrative is pretty palpable in this. Yet, this discourse also doesn’t play out in a vacuum either.
On the one hand, the rightwing press and politicians are hell-bent on stripping back disability and income-support benefits. Naturally, all while forcing disabled people into work, even at risk to their health. Then, on the other, it doesn’t want to resource disabled people with the support they need to work, or make employment accessible and fairly-waged either.
So no social security for the additional expenses of disabled life, OR help to get and be in work. You can only conclude that minus an income, the media-political establishment wants to starve, freeze, sideline disabled people to death.
Tragically, we already know that 2010s Tory-era punitive welfare reforms and cuts did just that to tens of thousands of poor and disabled people.
‘Uneducable’ versus SEND funding shortfalls
The other Nazi keyword? That would be “uneducable”. Think learning disabled and neurodivergent individuals living with cognitive impairments. Needless to say, the Nazis didn’t want to expend any resources ensuring they could live safe, supported, and happy lives.
Meanwhile, in 2025 Tory-wrecked England…The Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) system is on its knees. On 15 January, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee published a dire report on the state of England’s core programme for supporting disabled children in the education system.
As the Canary’s Steve Topple summed up:
Despite a 58% increase in high needs funding over the past decade, the number of children with Education, Health, and Care (EHC) plans has surged by 140%, leading to funding not keeping pace with demand. This disparity has resulted in stagnant outcomes for children, eroding parental confidence in the system.
That is, after more than a decade of the Tory government underfunding the SEND system, provision is failing to meet the needs of an enormous number of disabled children. Crucially, it means many will leave school without having received the necessary support. And it was a deliberate choice to leave the SEND system in such a state of disrepair. Successive Tory governments made the political decision to deny these disabled children this support they needed to thrive in school and beyond.
Better off dead?
Asperger also sent three-year-old Herta Schreiber off to her murder at Spiegelgrund. In her notes, there was a passage paraphrasing her mother’s “tearful” decision that:
if she [Herta] cannot be helped, it would be better if she died. She would not have anything in this world, she would only be ridiculed by others. As the mother of so many other children she would not want that for her, so it would be better if she died.
#BetterOffDead? Chronically ill and disabled activists have been deploying this hashtag in the fight against Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill.
Of course, proponents of the bill have gone to great lengths to imply it doesn’t pose a risk to disabled people. Specifically, this centres round the fact it only currently applies to terminally ill patients with less than six months left to live.
However, the Canary has repeatedly pointed out that there’s a number of problems with this claim.
For one, other countries that have legalised it have ALL eventually expanded it out. Canada is one of the most prominent examples. There, heartbreaking stories have emerged of chronically ill and disabled people turning to the state’s assisted dying programme due to poverty, homelessness, and a lack of quality healthcare.
Already, some MPs have talked about broadening the scope of assisted dying laws. In October, the Telegraph highlighted just such a group working with Humanists UK to expand it to those incurably suffering. Even supposedly progressive Green Party MPs like Sian Berry have indicated their desire to extend it beyond the six months it’s currently set at.
Not to mention that the lobby group Dignity in Dying’s patron AC Grayling – who’s top of the organisation’s webpage we might add – LITERALLY called for the bill to include disabled people. And we quote, said:
If as an act of compassion you wanted to help somebody escape suffering, then why only in the last six months of a terminal illness? Why not for somebody who simply cannot come to terms with being wheelchair bound let us say? Or who is clinically depressed and is never going to be independent of medications for the rest of their lives?
We could go on. But for more about the very real dangers the bill poses to disabled people, you can read the Canary’s extensive coverage on this here.
Now for a quick game of Guess Who? The politician that said:
surely being concerned about being a burden is a legitimate reason
It was Leadbeater herself, because of course it was.
Forced institutionalisation
The jury’s still somewhat out on whether Asperger knew he was sending his patients to be euthanised at Spiegelgrund. Some scholars have taken great pains to paint him as an unsung protector of disabled children against the Nazi regime. Moreover, in the years following the Holocaust, Asperger himself did the same.
However, this doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. For one, Asperger had close professional ties with prominent Nazis in the medical field. This included one Erwin Jekelius – director of Spiegelgrund and main organiser of the T4 programme. Notably, in a role for the city of Vienna, Asperger was a member of Jekelius’s staff.
Meanwhile, his mentor Franz Hamburger – who appointed Asperger to his role – was a “figurehead” in:
the Vienna medical school and had considerable clout within the Nazi medical establishment both in Vienna and—thanks to his position as president of the German Association of Pediatrics—in Germany generally
What’s more, while the Nazis tried to keep its T4 euthanasia programme under wraps, it was widely publicly known. This was to the point where relatives of patients staged protests outside one such psychiatric facility in Vienna. In fact, knowledge of Jekelius’s Spiegelgrund killings was so widespread, that the British Royal Air Force even dropped leaflets about it.
Given this, it seems highly unlikely a medical professional, let alone one with connections to key people coordinating the programme, would have been unaware. However, knowledge of T4 aside, what can be in little doubt is the role Asperger played in the prescription of forced institutionalisation for learning disabled and autistic patients.
Still detaining disabled people
Imagine nearly 4,000 learning disabled and autistic people detained against their will in medical facilities. Medical professionals segregate, seclude, and deploy physical, chemical, and mechanical restraints on close to a fifth of them across more than 7,615 instances. This isn’t a far-flung historical reality – this is what NHS facilities are doing now. Specifically, these are the most up-to-date figures for the month of November 2024 alone.
What’s more, staff’s use of these so-called “restrictive interventions” has only increased. October 2018 is the earliest data available on this. NHS facilities had employed these against 435 (12% of the 3,575) learning disabled and autistic people over 2,700 incidences. That means NHS services have ramped up their use of these nearly three times over.
So, involuntary detention is STILL the state’s answer to learning disabled and autistic people that need support? Meanwhile chemical tranquilisers and physical restraints is the response to their distress? That appalling situation is made no better by the fact that the government and NHS had committed to halving numbers detained by March 2024 – and fell woefully short of this. Crucially, this was on 2015’s numbers. It was in response to multiple shocking media investigations that revealed widespread abuse at certain mental health hospitals.
More cuts and punitive reforms afoot
Naturally, the neoliberal Labour government also has plenty more repressive plans on the way too to make deny disabled people the support they need to live and thrive. So, a quick run down of a year in the life of (some of) the prospective incoming policies disabled people have to worry about:
- So-called ‘reforms’ to the Work Capability Assessment (WCA). The Canary has repeatedly pointed out how disastrous this will be for chronically ill and disabled folks. Despite disabled activist Ellen Clifford’s recent momentous win in a High Court case over this, Labour seems hell-bent on pressing ahead, pending a new obligatory consultation it will undoubtedly ignore.
- Personal Independence Payment ‘reforms’. We’re not wholly sure what Labour has planned for this. However, Starmer, Reeves, and Kendall’s rhetoric on “sickness benefits” in recent months can’t signal anything good there either. If it’s anything to go by, it seems likely Labour will follow through on at least some of the previous Tory government’s dangerous cost-saving plans for this.
- More NHS-DWP integration – including job coaches in different mental health settings.
In less than a month of 2025 alone:
- Labour banging on about barring benefit frauds’ of their driving licenses – bearing in mind that the DWP and media consistently portray disabled people as benefit ‘cheats’. Bearing in mind too that it’s total bullshit, since Personal Independence Payment (PIP) fraud is so small, that the department registered it at ZERO percent. However, it hasn’t stopped them constantly bandying about the idea that claimants are lying about their condition, and playing up supposed “gotcha” moments to prove disabled people aren’t actually that disabled. But bullshit “not disabled enough” stigma aside, it’s easy to see what this was angling for. As the Canary’s Rachel Charlton-Dailey incisively pointed out, it’s a well-timed publicity stunt and smokescreen for its more, shall we say, realistic and genuinely probable plans. Namely, see WCA reforms above. Good bit of (lap)dog-whistling mind you, to tell all its right-wing press pals it’s on board with its brutal benefit scapegoating bonanza. If you don’t think disabled (and poor) people are the targets of its fishing for outrage, think again. You need only look at the government announcement itself, where it slyly slips in a mention of its “overhaul” to disability benefits due to the “spiralling welfare bill”.
- Big Brother bank accounts are back in business, baby! Someone curtail our enthusiasm for that pile of authoritarian dogshite. Labour has been banging on about its plans to spy on benefit claimants bank accounts, in a true-blue tribute act to the former Tory government. Not to mention it wants to give DWP staff powers to seize funds from claimants bank accounts too.
The persecution of disabled people continues today…
Even in isolation, any one of these would be catastrophic for countless chronically ill and disabled people across the UK. Together, the state’s repeated deprivation of the support disabled people need to live, and the persistent violation of their rights, should be understood as indirect eugenics policies.
However, none of this should come as any surprise either. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) has investigated the UK government and DWP on its treatment of disabled people in multiple inquiries. In two separate assessments, seven years apart, it lambasted the UK government for its “grave” and “systemic” violation of disabled people’s human rights.
Little wonder now then that the new Labour government has refused to incorporate the UNCRPD into law.
So on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Canary invites you to remember the lives of chronically ill and disabled people the Nazis abhorrently murdered. However, we also implore you to remember the chronically ill and disabled people that our own state has killed over more than a decade of disgraceful cuts to support, and punitive welfare policies.
Most importantly, all those on the left must recognise the threats and rights violations the current UK Labour government is perpetrating against chronically ill and disabled people RIGHT NOW.
To sum up: this International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the UK state does not care less about dead disabled people.
In the face of all this, our community needs – and deserves – solidarity. For too long, that has been in woefully short supply.
Featured image via the Canary
