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2019 book by Frances Ryan
the pejorative term

Crippled: Austerity and the Demonization of Disabled People is a 2019 book by Frances Ryan about disability in the United Kingdom under the 2010s austerity programme. It explores the effects of welfare cuts, local council cuts, social care cuts, increased taxes for disabled people and means testing for remaining welfare provisions. Between research about the prevalence of each issue, Ryan interviews disabled people affected by the issue. She finds people who have died from having financial support withdrawn, people who cannot afford food, heating or prescriptions, and people unable to wash or get dressed due to removal of social care. Ryan researches into disabled people who live in inaccessible housing, who cannot afford visits to the hospital, who cannot leave violent partners for financial reasons and who rely on young children to look after them. Ryan is a journalist for The Guardian and a wheelchair user herself. In Crippled—her first book, published by Verso—she aimed to let disabled people report their own situations, cover past successes of disability rights activism, and show that hardship faced by disabled people in the UK is the result of political decisions. The book received a nomination for a Bread and Roses Award. It was received positively by critics, who praised its message, the importance of its subject matter, and Ryan's research. The fictional short film Hen Night, released by BBC iPlayer on 2 September 2021, was inspired by the book and created by Ryan and Vici Wreford Sinnott. It features a young disabled trainee teacher during the COVID 19 pandemic as the government withdraws her support.

Frances Ryan is a journalist with a PhD in politics; she writes the weekly column Hardworking Britain for The Guardian. She began writing about disability in 2012. She uses a wheelchair. Additionally, Ryan saw it important to cover past successes of the disability rights movement, to show "hope and autonomy". She also wanted to demonstrate that difficulties faced by disabled people were the results of political choices, and not inevitable. The book was published by Verso in June 2019. Due to a chronic illness, Ryan was unable to travel for a book tour, so she spoke at online events. For a television interview about her book, she declined a producer's suggestion that she be filmed performing tasks around her house, as she did not think this would have been asked were she not disabled.

In 2010, the UK Cameron–Clegg coalition government began an austerity programme that reduced public spending. In the introduction, Ryan comments on its disproportionate effect on disabled people, and the tabloid media's focus on "benefits scroungers" that demonised them. Though Theresa May claimed in 2018 that "austerity is over", her government continued implementing cuts. Ryan gives an example of Jimbob, who is confined to his bedroom for almost all of the day as he can only afford to heat one room of his house. The first chapter—"Poverty"—describes Susan's life in austerity. By 2013, new bedroom tax, council tax and social care bills saw her enter debt for energy bills, so she stopped using heating or her oven. By 2017, she could not afford to leave the house or buy the puréed specialist meals she required with her digestive condition. She was continuing to pay back a payday loan to replace a freezer for medication. Ryan was appointed as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022, due in combination to her authorship of Crippled and her writing for The Guardian.

In The Observer, Yvonne Roberts reviewed Crippled as "an admirably comprehensive charge sheet of the scale of state abuse", praising Ryan's argument that the demonisation of disabled people was designed to distract from the human rights violations they faced. Alex Clark of Financial Times compared it favourably to Darren McGarvey's Poverty Safari, finding it "sobering, but fundamentally necessary" information. Clark was most surprised by how the impact of austerity on disabled people "is so frequently hidden" from those unaffected by it and praised Ryan for her "wide ranging research". Reviewing for The Guardian, Alice O'Keeffe called the book a "blistering polemic" with "a devastating case to make", but suggested that organising the book as a collection of case studies may have "dialled down the polemic and encouraged more empathy". Contrastingly, Learning Disability Wales' policy officer Grace Krause reviewed that Ryan's interleaving of research and personal stories is "devastatingly efficient in giving disabled people themselves a voice while making readers aware of the extent of suffering that has been caused by austerity policies". Krause praised Ryan's "passionate defence of every person's right to live a dignified life" and "rejection of the idea that disabled people should be protected because they are somehow inherently vulnerable". Journal of Social Policys Rebecca Porter similarly praised that Ryan's mixture of case studies and statistics "put a human face on the crisis". Believing the book was "very timely and desperately needed", Porter saw its role as similar to The Disabled State by Deborah Stone, a 1984 book that explored government rhetoric around disability and the welfare state. Porter criticised, however, that the book gives little attention to welfare restrictions like the Work Capability Assessment under Gordon Brown's Labour government. Mike Ervin of The Progressive chose the book as his favourite of 2019, finding that its presentation of British conservatism parallels American conservative policy on disability. The Independent recommended the book in 2021 as one of the "8 best books to read that inspire change this International Women's Day". Joanna Whitehead praised its "rigorous reporting", its "shattering case studies" and its "history of the hard won rights secured by disabled people".

Based on Crippled, Ryan and Vici Wreford Sinnott created a 20 minute short film, Hen Night, for BBC iPlayer. It was released on 2 September 2021. A fictional disabled trainee teacher in her 20s, Jessica, recounts her hasty hen night, scheduled to just precede the first COVID 19 lockdown in the UK. She describes the difficulties she faces as her government support is withdrawn. The short film arose after Wreford Sinnott—the creator of a play about disability and austerity—contacted Ryan after reading Crippled. They wanted to feature a young disabled person who enjoys their life and needs social care to maintain their independence, in order to challenge narratives that disabled people lead unhappy lives and that social care is for older people. Jessica is played by Nicola Chegwin, a disabled actor. The film was commissioned as part of the BBC's Culture in Quarantine series. The Guardian reported that it was "the first ever disabled, women led piece of UK broadcasting".