A vignette of modern ‘call-out’ politics, the Hastings incident gone-viral reads like a guide to character assassination, faux-outrage and celebratory sign-off tips from the young reporter who started it all, ‘Pigs they get what pigs deserve. Oink oink you fascist’….
In this election Hastings & Rye is on a knife edge. In 2017 Amber Rudd won by a slender 346 votes. Not surprising then that a packed hustings event last week organised by Hastings Independent Press would see a few hard questions directed at candidates. Nor is it surprising that 2019’s toxic atmosphere would inspire barbed questions offering tantalising opportunities to inflict political damage.
So it was for incoming Conservative candidate Sally-Ann Hart. For this hapless Tory hopeful damage was inflicted in a manner befitting modern politics. Headlines rang out – General election 2019: Tory candidate in disability pay row, Tory candidate says disabled people should be paid less as ‘they don’t understand money’. The revelation that a Tory curmudgeon let slip the fact that they’d like to slash pay for disabled workers needs little corroboration for Tory-haters of course. The online Labour Party satellite Another Angry Voice (AAV) provided the analysis; such views as held by Sally-Ann Hart were the stuff of “eugenicists and the extreme-right. The logical implications are terrible”. With hints of a slippery slide into fascist rule AAV accompanied a video clip from the hustings with “Dyslexic? Somewhere on the autistic spectrum? Episode of depression in your youth? Time off for stress a few years back? Sorry fellah, you’ve been placed in the lower pay band for the ‘cognitively impure’”.
At the hustings Alan Bolwell, political editor at Hastings Independent Press (HIP), asked “Sally, you shared an article on your Facebook page saying that disabled people could work for less than the minimum wage, would you care to defend that?” She replied, “did you read the article?… it was about people with learning difficulties, about them being given the opportunity to work because its to do with the happiness they have about working…” If you watch the video you’ll see that a sizable number in the audience are immediately outraged. “How patronising, how dare you!” shouts a man. The video cuts to Labour candidate Peter Chowney saying (to great applause) “I think its disgraceful that people with physical disabilities or neurodiversity should be paid less than others”.
The offending article (that Alan Bolwell confirmed he had read) was written by the mother of a Downs Syndrome young adult who’s charity Team Domenica has set up a training café in Brighton for people in the same situation as her daughter. The article posits a social problem, “1.4 million people in the UK have a learning disability, yet 1.3 million of them are unemployed” (that’s 6% of adults with learning disabilities in paid employment). This issue isn’t inherently political, nor is it new. I worked with severe learning disabled groups throughout the 90s and the issue was apparent then. Numerous charities exist to provide work-training activity to this cohort often as a part of supported employment programmes. Not far from Hastings Little Gate Farm is one of these charities. On its website a trainee writes “employment is important for health and mind. Having work gives us a quality of life and a sense of purpose. It helps us be more independent. After college you’re left adrift to float in the wind…”
Controversially, the Spectator article in the spotlight proposes a “therapeutic exemption” to the minimum wage that might allow people with severe learning difficulties a ring-fenced way of succeeding in the jobs market. Businesses the size of Tesco participate in supported employment at full pay but evidently others – especially smaller ones – choose not to employ at all.
Whatever we think about ‘therapeutic exemptions’, at the Hastings hustings the predictable targeting of the Tory ‘enemy’ wasn’t about debate. It was modern search and destroy politics exercised with impressive precision; dig around to find something with outrage potential, strip away all nuance, sharpen it to a point and drive it hard into your chosen target. With Labour activists primed to jeer and chant (i-phones ready to video and tweet) you can’t lose. For the public that attended doubtless many were bemused. Nationwide in the press and on social media our eye might catch a headline – What? disabled workers should be paid less? *sigh* another tory candidate exposed…. With 7,000 signatures and climbing, a petition on Change.org calls for Sally-Ann Hart’s removal as a candidate with immediate effect.
In September 2015 Jeremy Corbyn famously declared himself the pioneer of a new kind of politics, one that offered an alternative to the kind of “clubhouse theatrical abuse” which “turned off the public”. Cut to Hastings, December 2019 and the actions of Labour Party activists couldn’t look more opposite. All nuance, debate and objectivity replaced by tribal tactics and fueled by political hatred. But the Labour candidate looked happy enough with it – and a young (presumably off-duty) political editor for Hastings Independent Press gained his first scalp – a fascist pig nicely skewered.
On the plus side many will have felt deeply unsettled by how this important topic was kicked around and looked into it further (to borrow from the old adage: the truth can still get its boots on). A combination of part-time work paid at a rate that retains benefits can also qualify, says the Speccie article, for on the job support from an assistant who accompanies a learning disability employee to work. Not unreasonably, the Little Gate trainee warns that “if it became legal to pay any of us less than minimum wage, it could easily become more difficult for others to get full pay”.
Rather than skewering ‘enemies’ lets debate opposing ideas and discuss solutions (but I guess we’ll have to wait until after the election for any chance of that).
Adrian Hart (no-relation to Sally-Ann Hart) is a writer and activist living in Brighton.
A postscript: Recently added comments underneath the offending article (by Rosa Monkton) serve as a reminder of the kind of nuanced discussion that would doubtless take place in almost any other arena than a hustings such as this one. Rooted in lived experience and devoid of political point-scoring, parents and relatives of young adults with severe learning disabilities provide the food for thought that might easily have halted the knee-jerk condemnation of Sally-Ann Hart.
Here’s one example of a comment added a few days ago:
My sister-in-law has Downs; recently retired, she’s worked all her life as a carer for the elderly. With a lot of effort, she managed to pass the necessary NVQs when they were brought in. She lives independently, manages her day to day finances very well – though needs help with investments from her brother and sister.
Downs is quite variable; all sufferers are affected in their learning ability, but it can range from being somewhat slow to being completely unable to be independent. True of many other conditions, too. And in that lies the problem. Being diagnosed with a learning disability need not mean that the person cannot do a good job of work, and do it to as good a standard as anyone else – so it would clearly be wrong to allow employers to pay all those with learning difficulties less.
But many people with learning difficulties are far slower than any other employee would be. And some would require constant supervision to work at all. And yet virtually all of them who do work are reliable, loyal employees who take massive pride in what they can do, and in earning something. This sub-set of the learning disabled are never going to be commercially viable employees at normal wage levels; some large companies, including Tesco, do take on a number of such employees, and deserve more praise than they tend to get for doing so; but for most companies, it’s unaffordable. Yet it is very good for the people involved, gives them a social life, enables them to feelpart of the community.
Surely the answer could be along the lines of companies who can take on some such severely disabled people being given back through the tax system a proportion of what is paid to them, so that they effectively pay below minimum wage although the employee receives it in full. They would have to take employees who had been designated by the DWP as having too many difficulties to work without support, rather than anyone with a diagnosis of learning problems.