Disabled people like me are being ignored by the government just when we need the most help

The prime minister and his Cabinet seems more interested in disenfranchising Britain’s elderly and disabled MPs than supporting millions of people around the country

Britain’s 14m disabled people are suffering and there will be more to come, and not just from Covid-19 - though goodness knows that’s already killed enough of us.

It’s what that venomous little pus-bag of protein and RNA is leaving behind that worries me.

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, a substantial portion of our community is facing a crisis that this country's government is wilfully ignoring. Ten of the sector’s leading charities sought to address the issue by prodding it into action via an anguished plea for help through their umbrella body, the Disability Charity Consortium.

The money they need to pay for services that have never been in higher demand is drying up, which has left disabled Britons sailing up shit creek without a boat or a paddle. Some of the smaller ones may go bust.

The consortium moved only after a determined effort to raise the issue with ministers behind closed doors drew a blank. This shouldn't surprise anyone.

Boris Johnson’s government seems more interested in disenfranchising Britain’s elderly and disabled MPs by demanding they attend the House of Commons to vote rather than doing it remotely when they are supposed to be shielding themselves and/or family members from the pandemic, than it is in paying attention to the plight of the nation’s disabled people.

We are supposed to have a minister for disabled people, who’s job it is to make a noise about this sort of thing. But other than saying Dominic Cummings could have explained his decision to flip off the entire country by busting lockdown a bit quicker, Justin Tomlinson has been all but invisible.

“It feels like the UK’s 14m disabled people, particularly those with physical conditions, are being forgotten and allowed to fall through the cracks,” the Co-Chairs of the Disability Charities Consortium Neil Heslop, CEO of Leonard Cheshire and Mark Hodgkinson, CEO of Scope, said.

Hard words, but apparently not hard enough to generate a response. Perhaps they need to be harder still.

The appalling spectacle of a kilometre long queue of MPs made me sick. Whether they think of it this way or not, they were awaiting the chance to metaphorically kick away the canes of their shielding colleagues, like aggressive drunks pouring out of pubs on a Friday night. That, combined with the tin ear with which the government greeted the consortium announcement, speaks to the fact that few want to listen.

Successive Conservative governments have repeatedly demonstrated that they view disabled people as expendable, an annoying and irritating distraction who need the occasional bone thrown their way to stop voters from getting too upset when the next horror story emerges. At worst I think some see us as sub-human drains on the state.

“What’s that? Another terminal cancer patient has been denied their personal independence payment? You mean we still pay that?," I can imagine it now. That explains why I haven’t been able to enjoy a tax cut recently. Well, I guess we know who can meet the cost of all that extra spending Rishi Sunak’s been indulging in. "Time to turn off the taps, chancellor!".

Rishi’s been earning rave reviews up until now, including from me, because he’s done a better job in the face of the coronavirus than anyone would have expected. He’s been a rare star in a dismal sky. But his miserable failure to address the issues raised by the charities, to even apparently recognise their existence, casts a pall over his record.

The miserable failure to even recognise that disabled people exist, and that the pandemic requires a strategy for addressing our issues, casts a pall on the already shabby record of the government in which he serves.

“There’s a danger of disabled people becoming even more marginalised because of the pandemic,” Kamran Mallick, the CEO of Disability Rights UK said.

True. Trouble is, that’s just the start of it.