Labour is a party that likes to talk about “tough choices”. And tough choices are what disabled people face now.
We’ve heard so many of them in the Real Britain column in recent weeks. Heat or eat. Eat or meds. Meds or fuel for the car to get to work. Sit in the dark or sit in the cold. Heat the house for your disabled child or pay the mortgage. The ‘choice’ whether or not to buy incontinence pads.
Listen long enough and Labour’s tough choices look pretty pathetic by comparison. Yes, there was evidence yesterday of the weeks of internal battles raging inside the party – and even inside the cabinet – as mitigations were announced.
There were even good ideas in the package of measures – the right to try out jobs without losing benefits and scrapping the humiliating Work Capability Assessment are welcome plans.
But in the end, the government will squeeze support for disabled people by an eye-watering £5 billion. As Labour MP Debbie Abrahams pointed out in the chamber yesterday it is the largest cut in social security support since 2015. It’s also a cut far bigger than the one that led even the shameless Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith to resign in 2016.
So former Chancellor Ed Balls is right – yesterday’s cuts were not a Labour thing to do. After 14 years of austerity, it is crystal clear that disabled people have nothing left to give. After 14 years of the system being brutalised as well as impoverished, the thought of reassessments will terrify millions who already fear the drop of the DWP’s white – once manilla – envelope.
Disabled people have been telling us for months how frightened they are, because they know the consequences of taking £5 billion out of a system that is already failing will be devastating. I know that Labour MPs know that because I have stood with many of their constituents as they fought previous reforms to benefits that have left people destitute.
I’ve seen Labour MPs – some of them now very senior – in tears in their surgeries. And like those Labour MPs, I’ve sat on the sofas of parents who have handed me their disabled son or daughter’s picture in a frame and told me how they starved to death or took their own lives.
Yet, with a devastating sense of deja vu, here we are again. For months, the business lobby has been broadcasting loud and clear against tax rises on the airwaves and across the media it owns. When the books need balancing, the disabled have no lobbyists.
And neither do the millions of poor people across the globe who must pay for our national rearmament with cuts to foreign aid. So, after today, the story about broad shoulders and burdens Labour likes to tell itself at the Conference lectern, must never be invoked again.
Labour stands on a precipice now, and it should look down and experience vertigo. Remembering what it stands for is not just a moral imperative but an electoral one, as its progressive voters have plentiful options – one of which is to sit at home during the May elections.
Even Reform has progressive aspects to its welfare policy – including scrapping the two-child benefit cap. As well as standing alongside working people, the Mirror’s job is to stand up for communities and for those who need support to stand up for themselves. There is still time for the government to remember that until very recently, that was Labour’s mission too.