The Making of a Human Catastrophe

The designation once known as the Work-Related Activity Group (WRAG) under the Employment and Support Allowance regime was never just an administrative distinction. It was a moral geography: a liminal territory between the “fit” and the “unfit,” between those whose suffering could be made legible to the state and those whose distress remained suspect. Here lived halfway people — the “not quite” disabled enough, whose pain or difference failed to conform to the bureaucratic imagination of incapacity. For many of these individuals — people with mental distress, cognitive or learning differences, neurodivergence — work was less an attainable horizon than a compulsory horizon. To be classed as “work-related” meant being enrolled in a regime of conditionality, in which one’s very survival was tethered to the performance of recovery. Ellen Clifford’s insight is that this halfway space was not an oversight in policy design but an instrument of governance — a way to reconstitute the disabled subject as both dependent and culpable, both “cared” for and punished.

The origins of resistance to such categorization trace back to the 1970s, when disabled people began to reject the framing of disability as private misfortune. In Berkeley, the Independent Living Movement broke from the paternalism of rehabilitation and charity. Its founders, refusing segregation in dormitories and institutions, declared that they would not be objects of care but agents of their own lives. The movement’s solidarity with the Black Panthers was no accident: both understood that liberation demanded dismantling structures, not merely adjusting attitudes. In Britain, this consciousness crystallized with the formation of the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS). Paul Hunt’s letter to The Guardian calling for a collective response to the oppression of disabled people was an act of defiance against invisibility itself. Through mimeographed newsletters and meetings, UPIAS articulated what became the social model of disability: the claim that disability is not an individual defect but a form of oppression produced by social organization — by material obstacles, by prejudice, by institutions, by exclusion from work and community.

Vic Finkelstein, drawing from his anti-apartheid struggle, saw the connection clearly. Just as Black South Africans were confined to townships, disabled people were confined to homes and hospitals. Both were segregated under the logic of productivity and purity: only the able-bodied and able-minded could be full citizens of the modern capitalist order.

The early victories of this movement — the right to live independently, to work, to be visible — were monumental. Yet Clifford’s account forces us to reckon with the persistence of old power in new forms. The asylum may have closed, but its logic was never dismantled. The community was not the antithesis of the institution; it became its distributed successor. Instead of nurses and orderlies, one meets support workers and case managers. Instead of confinement by walls, confinement by conditionality. The welfare system, restructured under neoliberalism, perfected this inversion. Where the Victorian asylum removed the “unproductive” body from the marketplace, austerity-era welfare inserts that body back into circulation under threat of destitution. The Work Capability Assessment functions as a kind of secular confessional: one must prove one’s incapacity, rehearse one’s deficits, and submit to surveillance — all to be granted the minimum means to live. Those who fail the test are rendered undeserving, suspect, even fraudulent.

Behind this lies a continuity older than neoliberalism: the moral suspicion of dependency. William Beveridge, architect of the postwar welfare state, was himself a eugenicist. He believed that benefits should never dull the “whip of starvation,” lest the poor grow idle. The modern system has merely digitized this whip. The eugenic imagination has survived, rearticulated as fiscal responsibility and personal accountability. Clifford’s historical excavation reveals something fundamental: that the treatment of disabled people has always been a mirror held up to the political economy itself. When capitalism requires growth and labour, those unable to participate become a problem to be managed — through confinement, through assessment, through policy. Each reform claims to humanize, but each new mechanism of inclusion becomes a subtler form of exclusion.

The halfway people remain with us, though their names and classifications change. They are the canaries of a system that cannot bear to look directly at suffering unless it can be converted into productivity. They live in a paradoxical economy of abandonment, care and coercion, where “support” means surveillance, and “empowerment” means compliance. To take Clifford seriously is to recognize that the question of disability cannot be separated from the question of what kind of society we are building.

If independence continues to mean the ability to sell one’s labour, then the disabled person — especially the one whose suffering resists quantification — will always remain halfway, neither inside nor outside, perpetually waiting for recognition from a world that defines value only through work.

LLM