Rachel reeves Spring Statement Set To Drive More Of Us Further Into Disability Poverty.

By Ruth Kettle-Frisby – Guest Writer and Community Activist

Ruth is passionate about fostering positive change within the local community and regularly contributes insights and stories to The Havering Daily.

Disabled people enrich society and are not responsible for fiscal shortfalls; carers silently and thanklessly hold society together saving the economy £162 billion per year

Rachel Reeves’ Spring Statement is set to drive more of us further into disability poverty. Poverty is political and this Labour Government has made targeted austerity cuts at the most vulnerable among us. 

There is no doubt about it, as the Trussell Trust have reported, hunger and hardship will get worse under Labour austerity. Disabled people will be forced to bear the brunt of ruthless political decisions, which are based on arbitrary government fiscal targets that impoverish the most vulnerable among us. 

Last week, with the proud title: ‘Unpaid carer from Havering’, I spoke up for disabled people and carers in Havering and beyond at the War on Want rally, summarised as follows:

“Nobody asks to be disabled, and yet we are routinely punished and shamed for having the audacity to exist at all. Beholden to the state by default, then thrown under its austerity bus with no culpability for fiscal shortfalls.

Disability benefits are not handouts, they’re human rights to minimal necessities, and yet even as things stand, poverty disproportionately impacts disabled people and families. Basic needs like eating compete not only with heating…but specialist equipment, medicine, adaptations and therapies, which remain unregulated and obscenely expensive. Disability comes with its own inflation, which is self-contained and not dictated by market forces, but rather what manufacturers can get away with.

We are continually dehumanised and framed – both locally and centrally – as hoggers of squeezed budgets while the facts fly in the face of austerity narratives: welfare cuts create hardship and complex unmet needs. This in turn puts pressure on health, social care, education and administrative systems. 

It doesn’t have to be this way; simplifying and streamlining access to robust benefits systems has been shown to aid economic growth, not stunt it. 

We have enough wealth and resources to ensure nobody is homeless or suffering at the bottom of the pile. It is the hoarders of extreme wealth who are the real drain on resources; not disabled people. So, a wealth tax would begin to redistribute wealth – and power – more equitably. 

The truth is, not a single one of us is self-sufficient; we are interdependent social creatures, and it’s time we valued disabled people and carers instead of scapegoating us as fiscal collateral damage. It’s cruel, it’s disablist… and it’s completely unnecessary.”

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