‘Disability, Illness and Impairment are the Norms of Human History – Living Through This Labour Government’s Benefits Cuts Is Brutal’

I never thought I’d say it: Thatcher wasn’t this bad. 

Back then, I was young, eager, and full of anarcho-socialism. Naive, even. I didn’t pay attention to the small print of policies – which, I realise with hindsight, were horrific. But our fight was different. 

It was the era before the Disability Discrimination Act, the Equalities Act, and the larger reach of the independent living movement. When local authorities kept disabled people’s organisations going. Campaigning became activism. The Disabled People’s Direct Action Network blocked roads and buses. Some things did change and there was a brief sense of optimism. 

Those classed as ‘severely disabled’ fought hard and agencies such as the Independent Living Fund were established. It wasn’t easy, but there was a sense of progress, of collaboration, and even respect.

Then came the modern Conservative onslaught. Work capability assessments and the creation of us as ‘frauds’ and ‘scroungers’ in the political culture. We were to blame for austerity.

But the current Labour Government’s moral compass is null and void, with its plans to save £5 billion a year by 2030 by tightening the eligibility for the main disability benefit, the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) – which is not means-tested and never has been. 

The responses by those in my network echo the depth of my own horror. 

Many are ripping up their Labour membership cards in disgust, in the knowledge that they assisted Keir Starmer’s election victory. We are almost beyond processing what is happening.

According to the Disabled People Against Cuts group, “current PIP fraud figures are 0% according to the Department for Work and Pension’s ‘Fraud and Error in the Benefits System’ annual report of 2024, so the Government’s crackdown on benefit fraud and its impact is inconsistent with the figures and very low rates of PIP fraud”.

Despite Labour’s headline-grabbing rhetoric of ‘getting disabled people into work’, many are terrified that the very support that gives them a chance of finding, or staying in, work, will now be denied. 

Similar threats exist in terms of the underfunding of accessible transport, independent living, appropriate care support, and the vastly inefficient Access to Work scheme. 

We are, at the very least, being encouraged to believe that no one cares. 

Some non-disabled people continue to claim that disabled people are committing fraud when it comes to their right to a mobility vehicle. That we claim disability benefits because we are unfit for work, then dare to, for one moment, stand up from a wheelchair. Or that we put down our crutches and walk. On it goes. I could keep listing the vilification that this Government is plainly supporting and encouraging. 

It is brutal to live it – and this is under a Labour Government, which I foolishly believed would be socialist. Its punitive decisions, which do nothing but heighten the scapegoating of disabled people once again, are alarming.

We are surely targeted on the assumption that we’re the easiest to hit – alongside the belief, conscious or otherwise, that this is justified.

‘Rinsed blue’ Labour simply doesn’t care, so we find ourselves as not merely the ‘useless eaters’ of the Nazi era, but demonised in new interpretations as the ‘too costly’. 

I’m not a philosopher or social scientist – my life has been forced along a battlefield to fight for rights that are often so basic that it was inevitable that philosophy struck me as irrelevant. Yet recently, activist friends brought to my attention Antonio Gramsci, a (coincidentally disabled) marxist, who is cited as developing the theory of cultural hegemony. 

One aspect of his analysis is particularly resonant: the ways in which capitalist ideas are disseminated and accepted as commonsensical and normal. How often disabled people have this shoved in our faces – along with phrases like ‘you must be sensible’, and ‘you can’t expect’, or ‘we can’t afford’ – while the ultra-rich evade tax and raise their profits to absurd levels.

The new manifestation of the disabled ‘scrounger’ stereotype is underpinned by the self-fulfilling monster of normality: that it is okay to demonise and attack us, to ‘other’ us outside of humanity. 

This approach has gone on for many years with increasing levels of viciousness since the first waves of austerity under David Cameron’s Coalition Government. This is Gramsci’s cultural hegemony at work. Under Labour, there has been another notching up of our oppression – and many of us unwittingly sucked it up.

We must ask ourselves a moral question: is our society pushing the zeitgeist towards the idea of asking who is expendable? It’s all very well if it’s not you and yours – but there’s the rub. Because it is you and yours. Why shouldn’t it eventually be your ill child? Your aging mother? 

Disability, illness, and impairment are the norms of human history. It is people hiding, culling, and corralling other people that creates division and hatred.

I see hope where I always have: within communities, with allies, and from lived experience showing me that the common links of our humanity are worth fighting for – even from the bottom of the very deep pile of oppression.

Penny Pepper is an award-winning author, poet, and disabled activist