Same Prejudice, Different Coat

What a cruise ship dining room, a damning report on PIP, and a conversation about ageing have in common — and why it matters for anyone managing people.

I sat down to write this in a genuine quandary. Not because I had nothing to write about — quite the opposite. There was so much going on that I couldn't settle on just one thing. Picking a single storyline felt a bit disappointing, like leaving the other two on the cutting room floor.

Then it struck me: I didn't have to choose. There was a way of combining all three.

Thing one: I've just got back from a cruise around Spain and Portugal. Lovely trip. But it wasn't the sunshine that stuck with me — it was the dining room. Rollators, scooters, powered wheelchairs, and passengers who needed help eating. All of them are just there. Part of the evening. Nobody blinked. Ten years ago, that room would have looked very different and felt a lot less comfortable for the people in it.

Thing two: Stephen Timms' report on PIP, which landed with a thud this month, saying the assessment process actively dehumanises disabled people.

Thing three: a conversation I read in Disability Debrief, where the editor Peter Torres Fremlin talks to Ashton Applewhite, who's spent years taking on ageism — and, crucially, taking it on alongside disablism, not instead of it. Well worth reading in full.

Three separate things. Except once I sat with them, they weren't.

Start with the cruise ship. Something has genuinely shifted — ships, buildings, transport, accessibility isn't a nice-to-have footnote any more. I don't say this often, but it's worth celebrating.

Except it also got me thinking about what accessibility doesn't fix. Applewhite's argument, in her conversation with Torres Fremlin, is that most of what we call fear of ageing isn't really about age at all — it's ableism. Fear of how our minds and bodies might change. We just hang the fear on a birthday instead of naming it properly. And the longer we live, the more different from one another we become. Some 80-year-olds run marathons. Some can't manage the corner shop. Age tells you almost nothing on its own.

She makes a point I hadn't heard put quite that way before: ageism and disablism aren't cousins, they're the same prejudice wearing different coats. Fear the wheelchair, fear the walking stick, fear the wrinkles — it's all fear of a body or mind that doesn't behave the way we've been told it should. And in both cases, that fear — other people's attitudes — is the biggest disabling barrier there is.

Sort out how we see and treat older and disabled people, and you've dealt with most of the difficulty.

Not all of it, though. Somebody's arthritis still hurts, regardless of anyone's attitude. But most of what makes life harder isn't the impairment itself — it's how we're regarded because of it.

I'll be honest about my own experience here. I'm 80 now, and I've got all the kit I need — wheelchair, adaptations, the lot — so most of the environmental barriers are sorted. But the loss of strength, the things I used to do without thinking that I simply can't do any more — that's still hard. No amount of accessible design fixes that. It's real, and it deserves to be treated as real, not brushed aside as something I should just get over.

Now to Timms and PIP. His point is that the assessment reduces a whole, complicated life to a form and a points score. It doesn't ask what this person actually needs — it asks whether they tick enough boxes to qualify. That's a stark, official example of exactly the mindset Applewhite is talking about: judging the category instead of the person.

Here's why a cruise ship and a benefits assessment belong in the same piece. Both are really about who gets seen as an individual and who gets seen as a type. The ship got it right without making a fuss. PIP, on Timms' account, gets it badly wrong.

And that matters if you're reading this as an employer, a manager, or a colleague rather than as a disabled person yourself, because most workplaces run the same risk, just more quietly. Someone's visibly older, or uses a wheelchair, or mentions a health condition — and a snap judgement kicks in about what they can handle. Who gets the stretch project? Who gets managed gently toward the door? Not malice, usually. Just an unexamined assumption that the label tells you the capability. It doesn't. Age and ability barely correlate. Neither is visible disability nor actual capability.

So if PIP's failure is a government system built to assess the label instead of the person, the fix in a workplace is much simpler, and doesn't need a policy review to start on Monday morning: ask, don't assume. Ask what someone needs. Ask what they're capable of. Don't decide it for them based on a wheelchair, a walking stick, or their date of birth.

Making the world accessible is necessary, and we should keep pushing for it. But it's not the finish line. The finish line is when we stop being surprised, or awkward, or quietly relieved it's "not us yet" — and just treat changing bodies and minds as what it means to be human, at any age.

Because it's happening to all of us. It's only ever a question of when.

What does your workplace do, in practice, when someone starts using a stick or mentions a diagnosis? I'd genuinely like to know.