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Challenges to planned cuts in disability benefits are gathering momentum, and Wales could be leading the way.
The UK Government’s plans, set out in a green paper earlier this year, would reduce the eligibility criteria for Personal Independence Payments (PIP), the main disability benefit, and restricting PIP would cut money for about 800,000 people, while the sickness-related element of universal credit is also likely to be cut.
However there is growing opposition to these changes.
On Saturday the protest group Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) Swansea is to hold a major demonstration in the city, with a simultaneous protest in Cardiff.
It is also questioning the ‘consultation’ process beforehand, with people due to gather next month outside Cardiff’s main railway station
They declared: “Labour’s public consultation on disability benefit cuts is unfair and misleading”.
The organisation added: “ We have almost zero faith in a consultation process that starts, on day one, by outlining all the areas it will not be consulting on. The most controversial proposals are not even up for discussion. There is one, and only one, in-person consultation event for the whole of Wales. Our MPs are ignoring our letters”.
Meanwhile rebellion is growing both among constituents, and back-bench MPs, with leading political figures being targeted. The Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ local Labour party was to call for her to abandon the controversial proposals.
The Leeds West and Pudsey Constituency Labour Party (CLP), which campaigned to return Ms Reeves to the UK Parliament last year as its MP, had agreed to write to her “as soon as possible” to make clear it does not support the cuts.
Opposition on Ms Reeves’s home patch, and in South Wales, comes as the UK Government faces a major rebellion from its backbenchers over the scheme.
About 100 Labour MPs, more than a quarter of the party’s parliamentary numbers, are reported to have signed a letter urging ministers to scale back the benefit cuts, according to media reports.
Some MPs have expressed resentment at how the leadership is said to be handling opposition to the changes.
One newly elected MP said: “There hasn’t been any real attempt at engagement. It’s been left to backbenchers to hustle for a meeting. They almost see it as a virility test. It’s not helpful politics”.
Relations have been further strained after a highly critical letter published in The Guardian – in which 42 MPs told the Prime Minister that planned disability cuts would be “impossible to support” – did not get a response from Sir Keir Starmer’s office.
The MP added: “You’d think the leadership would say: ‘I’m a bit pissed you went to the papers but let’s talk about what you said.’ No one has made any overtures”.
There is understood to be unrest among newly elected MPs who feel they are being expected to defend policies they were not elected for while not being allowed any input.
One MP said: “Unless the government comes up with the idea, it doesn’t count. It’s a case of the new intake thinking: ‘I haven’t realised I’m irrelevant’”.
Another senior backbencher said: “I strongly think Number 10 see the PLP as a problem to be dealt with. The advisers around Keir think the PLP is an inconvenience…”.
An inconvenient truth may be that all these protests appear to be strengthening, and Wales could be at the forefront…
Details of our Editor (who is himself disabled) Phil Parry’s astonishing decades-long journalistic career (when protests against Government policies were often covered), as he was gripped by the rare and incurable neurological condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in an important book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now.
Tomorrow – why after 41 years in journalism (when he was trained to use simple language, avoiding jargon), Phil now looks on with horror as authoritarian states fund radio and television stations as well as newspapers all over the world, to pump out their ‘anti-colonial’ messages.
