Being disabled under the Tories was bad. With Labour, it’s soul destroying

I’ve been struggling to write this column for a while now. Obviously there’s been the personal reasons and professional reasons – both of which become more and more blurred every day. This is especially true when you’re a disability rights columnist and activist who is juggling editing a book, supporting the disabled community, and mourning the loss of both your grandparents.

There’s also the fact that I’m very aware as someone who focuses on media ableism of the amount of vile rhetoric being pushed out by the government via the corporate media. This itself is having more of a toll on disabled people than the lack of policy announcements is.

For disabled people, the waters are muddy enough

It seems like every day a senior official is telling the papers that we don’t deserve to live, and I’m really ultra-aware that highlighting every instance of that will not only cause further distress to disabled people, but also put a huge strain on my mental health.

In a similar vein, whilst there aren’t any concrete policies out yet I’m really conscious that all of this shit-slinging is on purpose to muddy the waters and turn non-disabled people against us – whilst scaring disabled people into limiting their lives. So, I don’t want to add to the dis-and misinformation that’s being spread.

But I think more than anything the reason I’m really struggling to write at the moment is because I wanted to have hope. I, perhaps naively, wanted to have a glimmer of belief that life would become a tiny bit easier for disabled people once we got the Tories out. I now feel foolish for ever thinking that.

If they wanted to, they would’ve

Labour might’ve only been in power for seven months, but there’s so much they could’ve done in that time that they’ve purposefully delayed.

They could’ve called off the PIP consultation the very first week if they wanted to, but they let it run it’s course. Despite wanting to launch their own consultation in the spring, which will obviously be totally different, they said they would be paying attention to every response. The disability minister, somewhat patronisingly, even praised disabled people for giving them so many responses to read.

Labour could’ve done a manner of things to reassure disabled people that life won’t be harder under their governance, but it’s time to face facts that it will be, it already is.

Because whilst they haven’t given us any concrete plans, they have had plenty of time to tell the media that disabled people on benefits are “taking the mickey”, point out that loads of kids are claiming to have mental health problems now (wonder why), and conveniently reveal that 450,000 more people claimed PIP and DLA last year. And that’s just in the last week or so.

‘It’s only been seven months’, and we’ve got another 5 years of this shit

I know, historically, Labour has always been bad for disabled people (trust me I’ve just written a book about it) but I wanted to hope deep down that nothing could be worse than the last fourteen years of the Tories.

But the Tories were only able to succeed because of the groundwork that Tony Blair had laid down. Now the people who supported Blair’s vile abuse of disabled people are in charge and there’s nobody to oppose them.

It was staggering to watch the Tories get worse and worse and worse over the years. But perhaps that’s also why this has been so soul-crushing, because Labour have been able to do this in such a short space of time.

So many people say ‘give them a chance, it’s only been seven months’. Whereas I can’t believe it’s only been seven months.

If they’ve created this hostile an environment for disabled people in just the first seven months – what do the next five years hold? And how many of us will still be here to tell the tale at the end of it?

Featured image via the Canary