Dusty Wentworth

  Different governments are using different language, but the machinery underneath is becoming remarkably familiar. In Britain, we are told the disability benefits system must become more “affordable”. In America, work requirements are described as “community engagement”. In Australia, tighter control of the National Disability Insurance Scheme is presented as “securing” it for future generations. Different countries. Different slogans. Much the same machinery. Eligibility is narrowed. Assessments become more frequent. Claimants must provide more evidence. Payments are reduced, capped or frozen. Disabled people are divided between a protected minority considered sufficiently severe and everybody else, who must repeatedly prove that their limitations are real. When the same pattern appears across several countries at roughly the same time, dismissing it as coincidence is inadequate. Calling it a single secret global conspiracy would go beyond the evidence. Pretending that these poli...

I sometimes think Britain’s come full circle — back to the seventies, only this time worse. I was young then, but the memories haven’t faded: petrol queues stretching down the road, power cuts that plunged whole streets into darkness, and my dad getting stopped at Heathrow with a suitcase full of sugar. We’d brought it home from Saudi Arabia, where he was working, because Britain had run short. My gran, who’d lived through the war, treated that sugar like treasure. Rationing made sense to her — she’d seen worse. To the rest of us, it felt like a country running out of everything, including hope. We had strikes, high inflation, and the three-day week. Yet there was still some fundamental faith in the future. People complained, but they worked, they coped. Communities held together. You could still believe Britain would somehow pull through. The Lion Wakes: Pride and Division Then came 1982. Argentina invaded the Falklands, thinking we wouldn’t respond. They misjudged us badl...