Nigel Farage has publicly argued that many disability and SEND diagnoses are “over‑diagnosed” and create a “class of victims,” but charities and experts say these claims are inaccurate and stigmatising, and comments like this imply that a disability diagnosis, including lifelong congenital or hidden disabilities are just labels that fosters dependency.
Nigel’s statement is extremely incorrect, and he is out of touch with the real world. His framing perpetuates stigma, which undermines disabled people’s credibility and overlooks the truth of what is really going on, and because of this, society is still treating disabled people as an afterthought – way to go, Nigel Farage.
Nigel is a public figure suggesting that your diagnosis is just a ‘label’, and this is not neutral commentary; it reinforces the exact structural dismissal you’ve been fighting. Beware, next he will be suggesting that we euthanise all disabled people like a little mini Hitler.
Having a label or a diagnosis describes the reality of what is wrong with a person; it doesn’t dictate their future, and a diagnosis can explain patterns, needs, risks, or differences, but what it can’t do is tell someone who they will become, what their life will look like, what they are capable of, how they will age or what support they will need or won’t need.
Sadly, people usually project their own fears or stereotypes onto the world. They hear ‘diagnosis’ and visualise decline, limitation, or inevitability because they’re drawing on public misconceptions rather than lived experience.
This is especially true with hidden disabilities because others can’t see them; they think that it’s mild, temporary, just a peculiarity and that you just don’t require any help, and then when you do require help, they treat it as a failure or a surprise rather than a predictable part of your condition.
This is not a diagnosis problem; it’s a societal attitude problem, and having a diagnosis gives a person the language to explain what they’ve always known – access to support, a framework for planning, and a way to advocate for themselves, but when systems are unavailable, underfunded, or dismissive, the diagnosis becomes a burden instead of a bridge, and that’s not because the diagnosis is a life sentence, it’s because the systems around it are failing.
The anxiety that people feel comes from uncertainty, not inevitability.
You have lived most of your life with a congenital condition. You, of course, know your body, its patterns, your limitations, your strengths, but what you can’t anticipate and what understandably concerns you is whether support will exist, whether professionals will listen, whether accessibility will improve or decline, even whether society will value disabled people as they age.
I won’t mince my words because I’m not one for doing that, but I am sick to the back teeth of Nigel Farage and the politics that he represents, but I could vent all day, but it wouldn’t really get me anywhere.
This isn’t about individual wealthy people being ‘bad’. It’s about structural insulation because the higher up you go in class, the less you ever have to face the realities of hidden disability, ADHD as a lived experience, or what support truly looks like on the ground.
Of course, disabilities exist significantly differently depending on your class position.
For people with money, it is usually a manageable inconvenience because everything can be paid for with wealth; there are no barriers. So, when someone from a privileged background says that a disability isn’t real or it’s just a label, what they actually mean is that they’ve never had to see the consequences of it.
They just can’t relate to it because if they forget something, skip a deadline, or struggle with organisation, nothing crumbles. They can buy their way out of friction. Private diagnosis, private support, private schooling, all smoothing the edges, and they are encircled by people like themselves, tiny and filtered.
They do not interact with the systems that punish – benefits, housing, social care, rigid workplaces – these are all invisible to them, and this creates a worldview where disabilities just look like a quirky personality trait, not a structural disadvantage.
I am pointing out a truth that seldom gets said out loud. The people with the most power to change things are the least impacted by the problems, and this is why lived experience matters so much, and we need to push for disabled people’s leadership and structural reform, and that’s why the void feels so wide – because it is!
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 