Sunday Times refuses to apologise for Clarkson column that compared disabled benefit claimants to dogs

The Sunday Times has refused to apologise for a dehumanising column by television presenter and journalist Jeremy Clarkson, in which he compared disabled people who receive benefits to dogs.

Clarkson (pictured) repeatedly suggested that young autistic people, and those with ADHD, should be working rather than receiving benefits.

And he wrote that non-disabled people who worked had a right to feel “resentful” about these benefits.

Clarkson then compared his three dogs to “uber benefits scroungers” because he has to fund their food and care, although he said he did receive “gratitude” in return.

He said this gave him the idea that when the new prime minister raises taxes “to pay for those who are incapacitated by some kind of issue with neurodivergence”, claimants are forced to email a “randomly selected person who is getting up and going to work every day” and thank them with “effusiveness” and “fulsomeness” for their support.

He said this might persuade “some of the young benefits people” that they “don’t have a head-based neurodivergence issue after all and that they’d rather get a job”.

The column is the latest in a series of dehumanising and hostile comment pieces by right-wing journalists that have compared young benefit claimants to “parasites” or suggested that the best way to cut disability benefit claimant numbers was to starve or shoot them.

Clarkson himself has a long, long track record of making disablist comments.

In 2010, the BBC was criticised by Ofcom over a programme in which Clarkson made offensive, disablist comments about people with learning difficulties.

He told viewers of Top Gear that the Ferrari F430 Especial should instead have been called the “430 Speciale Needs” because its “smiling front end” made it “look like a simpleton”.

In 2009, he was forced to apologise for calling the prime minister, Gordon Brown, a “one-eyed Scottish idiot”.

And in 2012, he compared a Japanese car/camper van hybrid to “people with growths on their faces” in another edition of Top Gear.

According to a Guardian report, he appeared to mimic being disabled and slurred his speech in a way that seemed to impersonate Joseph Merrick, the so-called Elephant Man, saying the car looked like something you would not talk to at a party.

Clarkson’s Sunday Times column drew an angry response from disabled people and allies, who accused him of fuelling disability hate.

Many of them pointed out that Clarkson benefited from state support when he was working for the BBC, and that he has received state subsidies for his farm in Oxfordshire, that he had received NHS state-funded care for his cancer and heart treatment, and that many disabled people on benefits live in severe poverty, while many have jobs.

Some of the disabled people who tried to fight back against Clarkson’s comments sparked further waves of disablist hostility.

Asked this week if it stood by Clarkson’s column, and, if so, why, the Sunday Times had not commented by 10am today (Thursday).

Picture by Amazon, from Clarkson’s Farm