For disabled people like me, the Tory election win is more like Revenge of the Sith than The Rise of Skywalker

As the latest Star Wars installment returns to cinemas, disabled people are searching for their very own light sabre wielding 'Skywheeler' to save them from five years of a Tory government

The final episode in Star Wars’ Skywalker saga hits screens on Thursday, but a disturbance in the Force was felt in the UK as early as last Friday, following the general election results. The Tory Sith have taken power, the Jar Jar Binks (Jeremy Corbyn) who handed it to them refuses to sod off, and as a disabled Briton it feels as if the storm troopers will soon be on the way. Where’s a Skywalker when you need one? Has Rey gone into hiding?

If only there was a Skywheeler. But if there is one, he or she has been forced into invisibility, as disabled people usually are when there isn’t a Paralympics on the TV for people to indulge their lust for inspiration porn. For those without a shiny piece of metal hanging around their necks, and even for some of the medal winners when they get home, Britain can be a cold and hard place in which to live.

It will, for the next five years, be run by politicians who punch down with knuckle dusters while wearing Union Jack vests. Sadly, it isn’t just our friends who have moved to these shores from Europe or further afield who have found themselves in the cross hairs of one of the Conservative Party’s hostile environment policies.

The Department for Work & Pensions is the epitome of the dark side in the way it operates. We’re told there is a minister for disabled people there and they are supposed to fight for our interests in government. In practice, they seem to spend most of their time trying to find good looking wheelchair users, or blind people with cute Labrador pups to appear in photo calls with them.

One of the most chilling scenes on election night for me was the smugly sinister expression on the face of former work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan-Smith, the cruel architect of the wicked Pip and ESA tests for disability benefits that have left many disabled people destitute, stepping up to the podium having narrowly retained his seat in Chingford. Truly a nightmare made real.

Some people have died as a result of failing those tests. And yet this is a Britain that seems not to care, doesn’t even seem interested. The issues facing disabled Britons barely featured during the election campaign, with one notable exception: The Hastings & Rye hustings event when the Tory mask slipped and the cankered soul of the candidate was graphically revealed.

Sally-Ann Hart argued that people with learning disabilities should be exempted from the minimum wage. “Some people with learning disabilities, they don’t understand about money. It’s about the happiness to work,” she said.

Her tone on the video that got out, was patronising and hectoring. The audience was outraged. Yet, despite already being under investigation by the party for alleged Islamophobia and antisemitism, she not only won but she increased the majority that the outgoing Amber Rudd had enjoyed. That just about says it all.

The only way this changes is, I suppose, if we make Skywheelers of ourselves; we have to build our own light sabres by falling in line with the #CripTheVote campaign so that behaviour like this, like that of Duncan-Smith and the DwP, is punished.

It’s a tough ask, I know. There are people out there trying. The trouble is they face a media largely uninterested in our plight.

It could help if disabled people’s organisations and charities were more aggressive in their opposition to the worst of the government’s policies. Yes, I realise that some have already bared their fangs.

But they need to bite because the storm troopers are now at the door and they’re wearing jack boots. Is there anyone out there willing and prepared to play the role of ally to help get in their way? It doesn’t feel like it.