Weaponising time in the war on welfare: Slow violence and deaths of disabled people within the UK's social security system

Abstract

In 2014, a long continuing battle began to find out more about Government record-keeping on the deaths of disabled people claiming benefits. Drawing on a timeline of evidence co-produced with disabled people, we analyse how deaths related to the benefits system are an outcome of slow violence, where both the delay between policies and their harmful effects, as well as the more active use of delay tactics, are central to how the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) weaponise time as a strategy to avoid accountability and deny justice. DWP reviews into deaths are an under-researched yet significant focus because they are (supposedly) tools through which the DWP investigates the harms of its own policies, and yet, they are designed and carried out in a way that systemically invisibilise state accountability.

Contesting the service model of ‘care’ in disabling capitalism: a Disability Politics perspective

“…One of the most evident and well-documented spheres of interaction between the two groups in the UK is the necropolitical context of social security. Recent comprehensive research and investigative journalistic work have collated and revealed thousands of examples of welfare-related deaths in the UK, most of whom were of subjects of disablement (Deaths By Welfare, 2022;Mills and Pring, 2023). These deaths are attributed to the 'slow violence' and approach of the bureaucratic system of the UK state's welfare system (Mills and Pring, 2023).…”

“…Recent comprehensive research and investigative journalistic work have collated and revealed thousands of examples of welfare-related deaths in the UK, most of whom were of subjects of disablement (Deaths By Welfare, 2022;Mills and Pring, 2023). These deaths are attributed to the 'slow violence' and approach of the bureaucratic system of the UK state's welfare system (Mills and Pring, 2023). Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to claim that death itself 'has become a part of Britain's benefit system….…”

Critical temporalities in social work after ‘the end of history’

“…State and professional discourses of progress or improvement regularly work through the omission and erasure of ongoing histories of struggle and disagreement, including how popular claims about redistribution and recognition centre colonial temporalities and logics (Rifkin, 2017), and how welfare restructuring 'weaponises time' to delay distributing the material conditions of survival (Mills and Pring, 2023). The necessity to speak of history and temporalities is bound to how conceptualisations of justice can be thinkable, or possible (Derrida, 1994).…”