Ministers warned over fueling hatred and hostility towards disabled people

DisabledGo News Blog reports:

...On the same day that six national disability charities warned that the government’s focus on “fakers and scroungers” was causing disability hate crime, a coalition minister was told his colleagues’ approach risked creating an atmosphere similar to 1930s Nazi Germany.

The Liberal Democrat care services minister Paul Burstow had been addressing a joint meeting of 10 all-party parliamentary groups on the government’s plans for reforming the social care system.

The disabled crossbench peer the Countess of Mar told him that disabled people were facing public hostility, with strangers accosting them in the street and accusing them of faking their impairments.

She said: “I don’t need to remind you what happened in 1930s Germany when disabled people and older people were regarded as a burden on the state. We do not want to sleepwalk into that situation.”

Burstow said he found it “completely abhorrent” that anyone would take the government’s “legitimate discussion about how our welfare systems work” and “translate that to an entitlement to abuse and degrade a person who lives with a disability”.

He added: “I do not accept that we are in conditions that [could repeat] the history of the German state in the 30s and 40s.”

But the disabled Labour peer Baroness [Rosalie] Wilkins said the “vilification that people are getting on the streets” was “causing such damage to people’s lives”, and said Burstow should ask fellow ministers to “make positive statements that disabled people are not scroungers”.

Burstow agreed to put the request to Maria Miller, the minister for disabled people, and her fellow Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) ministers...