Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, we’ll kick your crutches out of here.

Labour’s plan to target the disabled and the long term sick have been widely trailed in advance. The final details are to be announced at the end of this month, but it is expected that those on long term sickness benefits will come under greater pressure to find work or risk their already meagre benefits being cut. The disabled who claim Personal Independence Payment (PIP), which is not tied to the ability to work, will find that their benefits are being frozen for an indeterminate period and new claims and reviews will be carried out according to even narrower criteria than are already in place.

Claiming PIP and undergoing a PIP review are already demoralising, stressful, intrusive and demeaning processes in which you are quite literally forced to explain in detail to an unsympathetic stranger who is predisposed to treat you as a liar the help you need to take a shit. These new cuts will make things even worse.

PIP exists because it’s expensive being disabled. The purpose of the benefit is to help with the extra costs that come with being disabled. I have learned that myself since becoming disabled, for example I can’t use public transport easily and but I can no longer drive. I had an assessment for driving a year or so after my stroke and it was determined that I could not drive even with an adapted car due to issues I have processing visual information in the left of my visual field. I can no longer cook or do basic housework and if it was not for my long suffering husband I would have to rely on paid carers for this. I need daily hot baths to help my poor circulation and ward off muscle cramps and stiffness, leading to higher gas and electric bills. My experience is not unusual for disabled people. These extra costs and their rises due to inflation don’t disappear just because the government decides to freeze PIP and restrict eligibility.

The Disability Rights Organisation reports that according to official documentation, scores of deaths of claimants in the last three years have been linked to persistent, systemic flaws in the way disability and sickness benefits are (mis)managed by the Department for Work and Pensions. These new cuts and changes to the benefits system will make things even worse. People are going to die.

Five Labour MPs from Scotland have signed up to a new Parliamentary Labour pressure group called the “Get Britain Working” group which is enthusiastically cheering on the planned cuts to disability and sickness benefits. A letter addressed to Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall, signed by the new group, talks about changing the benefits system in order to get people back into work and mentions that “We understand that delivering this new social contract requires hard choices to be made”.

Why is it that Labour’s “hard choices” are only ever hard on the poor, the elderly or the disabled? They are never hard on billionaires, the rich, or those who have profited from privatisation.

These “hard choices” apparently include making it harder to qualify for PIP. Do these clowns have any idea of how hard it is to get PIP? I have significant and obvious physical disabilities and very restricted mobility but on my first application for PIP I was told I have no mobility needs.

The roll of shame includes Dunfermline and Dollar MP Graeme Downie, East Renfrewshire’s Blair McDougall, Coatbridge and Bellshill MP Frank McNally, Livingston MP Gregor Poynton and East Kilbride and Strathaven MP Joani Reid. I’m not at all surprised to see Blair Mc Dougall on that list. He was the director of 2014’s Better Together, the author of the original Project Fear, he has made a career out of political coercion, menaces and intimidation.

Where are these mythical employers who are so eager to take on staff with disabilities or chronic illness? Will they employ people who have unpredictable conditions that leave them incapacitated half the week, but who don’t know which days? Will they pay sick leave and allow for hospital stays? Will they pay for any adaptations or support that such new staff may need?

Is the NHS ready for an influx of patients suffering flare ups of severe disease caused by stress from DWP jobsworths who treat claimants like criminals? Are already overstretched and under funded mental health services ready to receive more patients who have attempted suicide because of the emotional and financial stress that these new cuts inflict upon them? Have the bean counters of the Labour party even paused to consider for one minute the human cost of these cuts? The answer is clearly no. Imagine becoming a Labour MP only to spend your political capital punishing pensioners and the disabled.

Do any of the Labour MPs who have signed this letter employ any disabled people as part of their parliamentary or constituency office teams? If not, why not? If the Labour MPs who have signed up to this tone deaf and callous manifesto do not themselves employ disabled staff, where do they get off demanding that other employers recruit disabled people?

Labour has become a party of neo-liberal ghouls who fully subscribe to the Malthusian Conservative doctrine: “Work or starve”.

Anas Sarwar has been predictably quiet about these reported cuts. PIP, the main disability benefit, has been replaced by the Adult Disability Payment in Scotland, which currently pays the same as PIP but which has a radically different and more humane system of assessment and review. However cuts and freezes to PIP in England and Wales will have a knock on effect on the block grant Westminster pays annually to the Scottish Government. This will of course not stop Anas Sarwar from demanding that the Scottish Government mitigate Westminster Labour’s cuts, without saying where the money is going to come from.

To my immense relief, I have now been transferred to the Scottish Adult Disability Payment. Despite a letter from my occupational therapist at my last PIP review stating that my disability and my needs will be life long, I was due to be reassessed for PIP in June this year. I was dreading going through that inhumane and cruel process again. It entails filling in a forty page form with no option to do it online. I am physically unable to hold a pen, so my mobility issues notwithstanding, I would have to get myself to a benefits advice centre so they could fill in the form for me.

The Scottish system involves a much shorter form and I only need to tick a box saying my condition has not improved. My claim will be reviewed in April. This will be checked with the medical professionals I deal with, and all going well my claim will be renewed. I lost a substantial chunk of my right parietal lobe when I had the stroke. It’s not going to grow back. I may be missing a big part of my brain, but I am still capable of more compassion and empathy than these so-called Labour MPs.

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Having abandoned Twitter I will be actively posting on BlueSky from now on. You can find me at https://bsky.app/profile/weegingerdug.bsky.social follow me there and I will generally follow back.

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