In My View: Marsha de Cordova, MP for Battersea

After 14 years in power, the Conservatives have failed the economy and our country. Their legacy is one of stagnation, debt and declining living standards.
Last week’s spring budget represented just the latest missed opportunity for the Government to turn things around.
Described as “incoherent” and “insufficient” by almost all economic commentators, its deficiencies have now been widely picked apart.
However, as usual, one shortcoming has received comparatively little scrutiny: the budget’s impact on disabled people.
Disabled households have enduring outsized impacts from the Conservative’s cost-of-living crisis, paying £625 more than non-disabled ones just to cover essentials according to Scope research.
However, the budget ignored this entirely.
Despite repeated calls from the disabled community – including letters to the Chancellor I wrote myself – no further cost-of-living support was forthcoming. Neither was an essentials guarantee.
Despite promising an energy social tariff to offer more permanent protections from ongoing excessive energy bills, the Chancellor once again reneged on this commitment.
Elsewhere, Hunt reaffirmed his commitment to tougher sanctions and work conditionalities on social security claimants with his sinister statement that “those who can work should”.
But it is difficult to take advice about “duty” from a Government so self-serving that it partied during a pandemic at the expense of disabled people’s lives.
What Hunt’s punitive conditionalities also neglect are the systemic barriers preventing disabled people from accessing work. Recent research published by the All-Party Parliamentary Group I chair on Eye Health and Visual Impairment exposed the shocking state of employer attitudes towards employing blind and partially sighted people, with half of those surveyed found to exclude us in some way.
Once again, this context was ignored.
But perhaps the greatest absence in this awful budget, and the one which will potentially be most disastrous for disabled people were the overarching finances themselves.
It appears that the Tories are planning on cutting taxes today at the expense of vital public services tomorrow. And with certain departmental budgets ringfenced, it is equally clear which of those will suffer. Namely, local services and social care, both of which are particularly integral to the support for disabled people and both of which have already been decimated by over a decade of austerity.
In fact, only next week, the Government are due for their latest trial in an ongoing case brought by the UN for “grave and systematic” violations of the rights of disabled people due to social security cuts and work conditionalities since 2010.
That the Government would double-down on the very disastrous policies which have had such devastating impact on the disabled community, mere days before attending a trial for that very same austerity regime shows how shameless they’ve become.
We need a general election.

Pictured top – Marsha de Cordova, MP for Battersea