Hurray! The welcome was almost universal. The disabled would be helped into work, the benefits bill slashed, a James Purnell Jerusalem would spread throughout the crippled land.

Business leaders welcomed it - if the prospective employees are employable. The Conservatives welcomed it; even the Liberal Democrats sort of did. With the predictable exception of the unions, everyone accepts the basic principle that the disabled - whether they have a bad back, depression or epilepsy - should be encouraged to get off incapacity benefit and go to work if they possibly can. Across the media there is agreement: more stick, less carrot, the Daily Mail demanded; higher benefits too, The Guardian said. But the fundamental premise was unquestioned: they should be in work.

Er, where? There is a yawning gap beneath this paper-thin consensus - and it is where all the jobs should be. I read the leading articles yesterday and I thought: I have worked in journalism for almost 20 years and I have never knowingly had a colleague who was registered as disabled. The Guardian stands out in employing a deaf journalist and one or two wheelchair-users. But plenty of jobs on newspapers could be done by somebody unable to hear well, depressed (all those death announcements...) or physically hampered. I checked with colleagues on The Times, The Independent, the Daily Telegraph, the papers most positive about the Purnell proposals: any disabled colleagues out there? Nope. None that anyone could recall. We all cheer the principle, but who is going to put it into practice?

When people demand that the disabled - and I'm talking about the genuinely incapacitated here, not the malingerers - should work, they generally mean that they should do rubbish jobs for rubbish money. Fill the call centres with cripples. Dogsbody jobs for the deaf; boring ones for the blind, they can't see anyway. But where are the decent job offers?

Who wants to take on somebody like Tracey, who posted this on the BBC Ouch website for the disabled on Monday: “I don't mind going to work if the company can supply a darkened room I can use when I get a migraine. An ambulance on standby, just in case my epilepsy lasts longer than 20 minutes (sometimes unconscious and stop breathing because of muscle spasms), three seizures per week. Arthritis in elbow, hip and knee, so can't stand for more than one hour. And brain AVM, which causes tinnitus, and hard of hearing (two hearing aids). Can't wait to see what job I end up with.”

I recommend the Ouch messageboards (www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbouch/). Its contributors unwittingly sum up exactly why so many companies avoid employing the disabled - too many are negative, aggressive, socially excluded and ready to take offence. When they don't work they're depressed; when they are offered a job they complain that they feel patronised. No wonder that if you have claimed incapacity benefit for more than two years, you are more likely to retire or die than get another job. A huge shift in thinking will be needed to break the cycle.

But that shift has to be preceded by some decent job offers. Here's Jo, also on Ouch: “I've been on income support and disability living allowance for the past 13 years, because of clinical depression. It made sense for me to be put on benefits because I was clearly unable to work. What incensed me was the lack of help getting off them. I felt like I had been thrown on the scrap heap at the age of 21. Over the years I have become so conditioned to living a life on benefits I no longer have the desire to work. This doesn't mean I'm lazy. I find staying indoors for almost 24 hours a day, socially excluded, totally soul-destroying. But after 13 years struggling with depression, unemployment and the social stigma that that brings - I'm not about to start scrubbing graffiti off people's walls.”

Well, she might have to, or lose her benefits. She might feel less socially excluded doing it, too. See what I mean about negativity? Yet Jo has a point - few employers are prepared to offer decent jobs to the disabled.

And it's obvious why. They immediately become trapped in official rules that make a disabled person too big a risk for employers outside the public sector. People with a disability are more likely to need time off sick and the longer they have been out of work, the less likely they are to hold down the job.

Let's meet another woman posting on Ouch last week: “Can anyone give me some advice please? I have a full-time job but have been unable to work for the past seven weeks as my condition has flared up again. I have hypermobile joint syndrome and fibromyalgia. I started working in October of last year... In an ideal world, I would like to let my employers ‘off the hook' and resign from my job so that I can recover and look for something more realistic, such as part-time and nearer to my home. However, I am scared that if I resign from the job, my benefits will be stopped or suspended and I am already really struggling for money...”

“Don't do it” is the advice from those who replied: you will lose out if you resign; you need your employer to collude in making you redundant; or you must continue to take all the sick pay you are entitled to, as it makes it easier to claim incapacity benefit - it is “the way the Government likes it”. An essential part of the success of America Works, a private agency that gets people off benefits in the US, is “supported work”, in which it initially keeps workers on its own payroll, not the employers'. We need that here.

Perhaps we should also make private sector employers publish figures, so we know who makes efforts to employ the disabled. But most of all we need a shift in culture and attitude, among the disabled and among those who could employ them: sticks and carrots for everyone. At the moment, the disabled seem to be taking a hell of a lot of stick.

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