DISABLED People Against Cuts (DPAC) organised a lively demonstration near Parliament on Monday, to mark the 25th birthday of the Independent Living Fund, which has enabled disabled people to live independent lives in the community outside of institutions.
With car horns beeping in support, and chanting, ‘Happy Birthday Independent Living Fund’, ‘Free our People – Free our People!’, they marched to the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP).
There, they had birthday cake, a magic show and handed in an enormous birthday card highlighting the hardship being imposed by the government in denying the ILF benefit to new entrants as of 2010, and its plan to cut it all together from 2015.
Eileen Clifford, from the Benefit Justice Campaign, spoke first about the struggle disabled people would face without this fund.
She said: ‘The permanent closure of the ILF signals the ending of disabled people’s right to independent living.
‘This is in clear breach of disabled people’s fundamental human rights.
‘Disabled people will effectively be trapped in their own homes.
‘It is shameful, that in one of the richest countries of the world disabled people should be left to live in this way, and that independence and inclusion should be sold out in favour of inequality and oppression.
‘As we protest here today, the Care Bill is on its way through Parliament.
‘At a time when disabled people are having all the rights and entitlements that they have fought for over 40 years snatched away by greedy millionaire politicians, at a time when we are seeing our people returned to the institutions, and our communities divided and segregated, anything to do with cutting social care support should be controversial.
‘We need legislation for public funding that will make the rights of disabled people a reality.
‘We are further from that than we have been in a very, very long time.
‘So we need to fight back.
‘And when disabled people fight back, the world should be aware that we are used to fighting every day of our lives, to get from one end of it to the other because of the barriers that we have to battle against daily.
‘Disabled people know how to fight back.
‘I would like to take a moment to support to our disabled brothers and sisters in Egypt.
‘Hundreds of disabled education workers in the Shakia province are continuing their sit-in on the steps of the local government department, in a campaign for permanent contracts and for a living wage, despite last week having been brutally attacked by police wielding batons and dragging them from their wheelchairs.
‘The campaigners have told us that messages of support from disabled people in Britain have really encouraged them.
‘They say it’s not just a fight about jobs, they say it’s a fight about dignity, fighting a government who views disability as about bodies that don’t function, not about equality.
‘And the messages DPAC has had from people not able to be here about the importance of ILF show that equality and dignity is also under threat in this country.
‘I’ll read some of those: Samuel Miller says: “I’m a 56-year-old Disabilities Studies Specialist from Montreal, Canada.
‘ “I have been reporting frequently since January 2012, to the secretary of the United Nations Convention on Disabled People on the crisis the UK’s sick and disabled people are suffering under austerity measures, consisting of draconian welfare reforms and shameful means-testing”.
‘Rebecca Young says: “Before ILF I was in a nursing home, neglected and abused, and I wasn’t able to contribute anything to the world. I’m better off dead than living like that.
‘ “Now I don’t just have a life that is worth having, I can make sure that other people do too. I can help a friend take care of her kids, journey toward becoming a parent myself, and keep one more young person out of a life in institutions”.
‘Dennis Lewis says: “ILF is the difference between life and death, freedom and incarceration. Free our people.”
‘Linda Burnett said the ILF allowed her and her son to have some choice over their lives and without it they are planning to kill themselves.
‘Their deaths will leave even more blood on the hands of Ian Duncan Smith and Esther McVey.’
Referring to the fact that the UK Statistics Authority found that Grant Shapps MP, the Conservative Party Chairman, had made misleading statements, Pauline slammed the DWP saying: ‘Every day is different because you never know what your disability is going to do to you.
‘There is no cure for my disability, rheumatoid arthritis; there isn’t a cure for bi-polar, there isn’t a cure for most of our disabilities, so when you say there is a cure, you’re not a doctor, you don’t know what you are talking about.
‘And we are sick and tired of people like you making judgements on us.
‘You don’t see us. Well we are human beings, and we are down here right now.
‘We’re disabled people against cuts.
‘Why don’t you come and meet us on our own terms.
‘But no, you won’t do that will you.
‘You hide behind TV cameras and make a load of rubbish up.
‘We’re sick of your lies.
‘We know your boss has been found out to be a complete liar.
‘I hope he gets the justice he deserves at the Parliamentary Review for the statistics he made up.
‘Shame on you and your whole department.
‘And we are bearing the brunt of it with hate crime on our streets.
‘I was a victim of hate crime last week on a bus.
‘A person threatened to punch me in the face because I had disabilities.
‘Well I say this to you DWP, you want to try going outside and living in fear everyday, fear of being attacked.
‘Because that’s not funny.
‘And you want to live in fear of not being able to pay your bills, or freezing to death or starving to death.
‘You want to have your medical care cut, because GPs are cutting back.
‘You want to live under councils where they are cutting back on our social care.
‘You want to try and live with what we have to live with every day.
‘How can you say you are qualified.
‘We are the experts by experience, we’ve got living experience.
‘And we are not going anywhere.
‘We are going to keep on fighting until we get you out.
‘We call on Ian Duncan Smith to live on £53 a week. You try and live on that Ian Duncan Smith.
‘We also say: Bedroom Tax – can’t pay won’t pay. Stop the Bedroom Tax’.
Liz Carr said: ‘I’ve come here today to celebrate 25 glorious years of the Independent Living Fund that gives so many disabled people, with quite high levels of assistance needs, all the support they need to live in the community and do the things that other people take for granted.
‘It’s a great fund but sadly in 2015 it’s closing down and we don’t know what is going to happen to the people who receive the money.
‘It looks like no more money will be allowed after 2016 and obviously we are all quite scared.’
Another protester ‘We have to remind ourselves that today sees the beginning of the end of the Disability Living Allowance, in the midst of the Work Capability assessments that go on and on and on, the continuing cuts to social care at a local and individual level which are having a massive impact in our communities and probably the biggest reforms to legal aid we’ve seen in decades, which are going to impact severely on disabled people’s ability to challenge decisions on all of these cuts.
‘And these cuts aren’t an economic necessity, these cuts are an ideological choice.
‘We have money in this country, and we are not using it in a way that makes our society inclusive and accessible.
‘These funds are given to disabled people because the society that we live in is not inclusive and accessible.
‘And rather than build the kind of infrastructure and institutions that are accessible and inclusive to everybody, they pay us off with these funds, and now they are removing them as well.
‘And these funds are our only and pitiful support in a community and a society which, in the main, rejects us.
‘Every time they cut a service or fund we will come back and we will remind them that we are not numbers, that we are not cases that we are actually people who are having to live with these decisions, day in day out.
‘When it comes to it we have to take a risk and we are prepared to fight back and to be heard.
‘And if we are not then you can be absolutely sure we will bring the whole thing crumbling down.’
Wearing a T-shirt printed with disabled prisoners from Hitler’s death camps, Robert Punton said: ‘We need more than birthday candles, we need dynamite.
‘This government is systematically attacking disabled people in a way that no government has done before.
‘They are basically destroying the lives, not only of disabled people, but all marginalised people in society.
‘It’s up to us disabled people to stand up and say this is enough.
‘We are not going to take it any more. It’s about direct action now.
‘It’s about getting out and making our views known to the general public, by stopping traffic.
‘Their inconvenience is nothing compared to the inconvenience and suffering disabled people are going to experience when they are confined and excluded from society.
‘The cut to the people who are on ILF won’t happen until 2015 but there are people who have been applying for it since 2010 and they are being excluded from it.
‘Basically, they have stopped the money for three years now.
‘The trade unions aren’t taking any action at the moment and that’s why protest has come up from the ground, uniting the resistance and everybody working together, particularly disabled people joining trade unions, to say that yes we have differences but it’s the things that we suffer together that unite us.
‘Miliband is a blue in a red suit.
‘The working class in this country is going to have to rise and we are waiting for that flame to be lit.
‘We don’t know what the spark is going to be but we are waiting for it.’
