The cuts and removal of our disability benefits amount to a total disregard of human life. Our young people, those of us with mental health issues, unseen disabilities, who need support to bathe and dress the lower half of ourselves, exposed to unrelenting cruelty and inhuman treatment. Thousands upon thousands of us forced unwillingly into the nightmare of the conditionality and enforcement regime of Universal Credit.  Not only will we lose our income, we will be subject to the bedroom tax. Young people banned from receiving support just because of their age. 

All of this while being told we are fraudsters, we are scroungers and skivers, we are taking the mickey. Our mental health no more than a seasonal flu. We are constantly reminded that we are a burden on the state. Forgotten is our humanity, our dignity. Our right to Life our right to live, our right to exist. The threshold for entitlement to PIP is now being used as a weapon to beat us with to determine whether we can work or not, even though PIP is not an out of work benefit. For many of us we depend on PIP to keep us in work to deal with the additional cost of work, while for others unable to work our quality of life is protected.

For years now we have known that the government is guilty of systemic and grave human rights violations against disabled people, particularly in the area of Social Security, according to the findings of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (see its 2016 welfare reform inquiry report and 2024 follow-up report). 

So much so that Disabled People Against the Cuts -- hundreds of us across the United Kingdom in Scotland, England, Wales, and here -- have taken the government to court and won. 

We have the support of international human rights committees and right thinking people across the globe. We have the moral and just argument. Yet the government want to push us into poverty and destitution and add to the list of many people who have already lost their lives to the benefit system. A life of poverty does not remove barriers to work, it creates them. Punishing us for being disabled is not the answer. Protecting life, human life, can never be the wrong decision but subjecting people to inhuman cruelty and the taking of it is.