Another dip into my search engine heap yielded this question:-
How much of Britain is disabled?
Well, some years ago, a TV programme aimed at the disabled community put the figure at 1 in 4, which I always felt was on the high side but, since becoming increasingly disabled myself, I’ve come to realise that it only feels high because a lot of disabled people are simply invisible. And a lot are housebound, the group in which, increasingly, I find myself. (And 1 in 4, by the way, is the ratio of people severely disabled by ME/CFS in Britain.) Oops – just re-read that and it’s not too clear. What I meant was 1 in 4 people with ME/CFS are severely disabled by it.
The closest I could get to the percentage of the population that’s disabled, is that 1 in 6 suffer from a “Limiting Long-term Illness” that affects what they are able to do on a daily basis. That’s government-speak for “disabled” (the word seems to be deliberately avoided for some reason).
Many disabled people are gainfully employed but 34% men and 41% women have never worked or are long-term unemployed – and quite possibly unemployable, a fact that James Purnell is too dumb to understand.
So, considering the figure is 1 in 6 now (or, at least when the stats were compiled, based on data from the 2001 census), it seems reasonable that it was actually once 1 in 4. Either way, that represents a hell of a lot of people – 1 in 6 is, in fact, 10.3 million, but that was 8 years ago and, if we’re to believe the claimed growth in the numbers said to be claiming disability benefits, then it seems that the population polled for the 2001 census is getting sicker. Or, if you believe that tosser David Freud, a lying bunch of frauds but, then, we in the disabled community know full well who the real liar is.