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A young Stephen Hawking would never have made it in today’s age of austerity

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What is a fitting tribute to Stephen Hawking? It’s probably not to ask, as John Humphrys unaccountably did, whether the “science community cut him a lot of slack because he was so desperately disabled?” A more insulting idea is hard to imagine: that you spend your life overcoming adversity to get to the top of your field, then the minute you’re dead, someone speculates that you’d never have made it without the adversity.

Instead, the question we should be asking in homage to this extraordinary man is what life would be like today for a 22-year-old, recently arriving at Cambridge for graduate studies, diagnosed with motor neurone disease.

Well, he would have a Personal Independence Payment (PIP) assessment, and – despite the severity of the disease – would have no guarantee of being successful. Of the nearly one million people moving from Disability Living Allowance to PIP, almost half have had their payments downgraded or stopped. There is a very high error rate – 69% of appeals against the decision are successful. PIP, as the journalist Frances Ryan describes, is a “gateway benefit” to other allowances such as the carers one, so had his been refused or delayed he would have been unlikely to be able to continue his studies.


Source :- theguardian
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