Your say / Crips Against Cuts
‘The UK government is quietly killing disabled people’
Before I became disabled, I ran a successful business and worked in finance. I was independent, I paid taxes and, like many people, I believed that if I ever became unwell, the system would support me.
I believed that being a contributing member of society meant I would be treated with dignity if I ever needed help.
That illusion shattered when I became ill.
is needed now More than ever
Since becoming disabled, I’ve been fired twice. Not because of poor performance, but because of my disability. I lost my career path, my livelihood and my ability to participate in society in the ways I used too.
One employer decided it was “unreasonable” to permit a five-minute break after I fainted. Instead, they called me a snowflake and fired me.
Before that, I was fired for asking for two weeks off to manage my lifelong depression after the death of my grandmother. They chose to sack me instead.
I’m not sharing this for pity; I’m sharing it because my story is not unique. In fact, it’s dangerously common.
Across the UK, disabled people are being pushed to the margins. Not by accident but by deliberate government policy. One of the most brutal examples is the ongoing attack on Personal Independence Payment (PIP).
PIP was designed to help disabled people manage the additional costs of living – things like transport, mobility aids, home care and personal assistance. In reality, it has become a battlefield where sick and disabled people are forced to prove their suffering over and over again, often to people with no medical training.
Now the government is pushing forward proposals that would further restrict access to this support. It is no exaggeration to say that these policies will lead to more deaths. We know this because similar policies already have.
This is not hyperbole. This is documented history.
Between 2013 and 2018, nearly 8,000 people died within six months of being deemed ineligible for PIP support.
A 2021 BBC investigation identified at least 82 people whose deaths were linked to their benefits being cut or withdrawn.
Even the Department of Work & Pensions has had to carry out over 150 internal reviews after claimants have died following unfair decisions.
Academic research backs this up. A 2015 study by Oxford and Liverpool universities found that the government’s ‘fit to work’ test (used to determine eligibility for disability benefits) was associated with 590 additional suicides, 279,000 cases of mental distress, and 725,000 extra prescriptions for antidepressants between 2010 and 2013.
These numbers are horrifying. And they were not accidents. They were foreseeable, avoidable outcomes of political decisions. These so-called “hard choices” made by successive UK governments have directly led to suffering and death.
You’ve heard of genocide. What the UK government is implementing is known as democide: when a government’s policies, through negligence or intent, cause the deaths of its own citizens.
We associate the term with violent regimes of the past – Stalin’s famine, Hitler’s Aktion T4 program targeting disabled people – but democide can be quiet.
It can look like benefit assessments so invasive that people choose to end their lives rather than face them again. It can look like budget cuts to essential services. It can look like deliberately convoluted bureaucracy that forces people to give up.
Here in Britain, it looks like the systemic neglect and social abandonment of disabled people. And it has looked like this for almost 20 years.
The UK voted for change. Instead, we’ve been handed a Labour government intent on escalating the harmful policies put in place by previous administrations.
Life is going to get much worse for the average person. For the most vulnerable – for people like me – life will become impossible.
The next Crips Against Cuts is taking place on Saturday afternoon in Broadmead – photo: Rob Browne
In April 2025, the government released plans to tighten eligibility criteria for PIP. These restrictions will remove the money that almost three million people rely on to survive. People who are unable to wash, prepare food, or dress without support will lose the money they use to live.
We will lose our blue badges, our carers, our methods of transport, our independence and, inevitably, our lives.
While the government pretends this is about getting us into work, the reality is that we are not even safe at work.
The Equality Act 2010 – supposedly the cornerstone of anti-discrimination law – continues to fail us. While other protected groups have enforceable rights in the workplace, disabled people are granted something far weaker: the right to “reasonable adjustments”.
But that word “reasonable” is a legal grey zone. If an employer decides your adjustment is too costly or inconvenient, they can refuse it.
This loophole leaves disabled workers vulnerable to dismissal in ways no other minority group is.
You can’t fire someone for being Black or gay because it’s inconvenient or expensive. You can’t refuse to hire a woman because she might get pregnant. But you can fire a disabled person if the changes they need are considered “unreasonable”.
In 2021, a survey by Leonard Cheshire found that 24 per cent of employers openly admitted they would be less likely to hire a disabled person due to perceived cost or complexity. That’s nearly one in four. And if that’s what people are willing to admit out loud, imagine how many employers have the same policies but refuse to admit it.
Our government isn’t focused on tackling this systemic discrimination. No; it’s too busy removing rights from other oppressed communities: our trans siblings, our migrant neighbours.
We’re being trained to fear each other, to buy into propaganda that has gripped this country for nearly two decades.
We’re told to fear our communities instead of looking toward those we should fear: the corporations, the ultra-wealthy and the ruling class who have driven this country’s people into poverty and despair.
It is all connected. Whether you are disabled, trans, an underpaid worker or all three, you are being targeted by a system that rewards wealth, health, and conformity, and punishes everyone else.
We must stop treating this as a series of unfortunate policies. It isn’t. It is a coordinated programme of marginalisation. And yes – particularly in the case of disabled people – it is resulting in death.
We voted for change yet, the only change Labour is instigating is the speed at which these policies kill us.
We are told that our lives are too expensive to support. That making space for us in the workplace is too inconvenient. This is not equality. This is abandonment.
And yet, we survive. We resist. We organise. And we speak; not because it’s easy, but because we must. Because hundreds of thousands of us have already died under these policies. And because these changes will kill millions more if we don’t succeed in demanding a U-turn on these cruel proposals.
The truth is, we don’t need more awareness. We need justice. We need policies that reflect the reality of living with disabilities. We need legal protections with teeth. We need a government that values human life over budget lines.
Disabled people are not passive victims. We are organisers, workers, artists, parents, partners. We are full members of society, whether we work a full-time job or not.
What we demand is not charity or pity but our share of power.
And if the government continues down this path of silent cruelty – of policies that punish the poor and push the disabled to death – then let us be the ones to make noise. Let us refuse to die quietly. Let us stand together and say: this is democide, and we will not accept it.
This is an opinion piece by Mac, a member of Crips Against Cuts who are holding their next protest on Saturday in Broadmead from 2pm to 4pm
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Main photo: Rob Browne
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